Undersea Fleet (11 page)

“A heart attack?”

Gideon shook his head. He said in his soft, warm voice: “Nothing so simple, Jim. All the sea-medics say is that your uncle has been under too much pressure. He has lived too deep, too long.”

That was true enough, no doubt of it. I remembered my uncle’s long, exciting life in the Deeps. The time when he had been trapped—just a few months back—in a crippled ship at the bottom of the deepest trench in the southwest Pacific. His recovery had seemed complete, when Gideon and I found him and brought him back—but the human body was not evolved for the life of a deep-sea fish. High pressure and drugs can sometimes have unexpected effects.

“Can I speak to him?”

“Well—the sea-medics say he shouldn’t have too much excitement, Jim. Is it—is it anything I can help with?”

I only paused a second—I knew I could trust Gideon as much as my uncle himself. I began to pour out the whole mixed-up story of the pearly-eyed men and the Tonga pearls and David Craken—

“Craken? Did you say David Craken?”

I stopped, staring at Gideon through the viewscreen. “Why, yes, Gideon. His father’s name is Jason Craken— or that’s what he calls himself.”

“A queer thing! Craken, Jim—that’s the letter that came! The letter your uncle was reading when he had the attack—from Jason Craken!” He hesitated a second.

Then: “Hold on, Jim,” he ordered. “Sink the sea-medics—I’ll wake him up!”

There was a moment’s pause, then a quick shadowy flicker as Gideon transferred the call at his end to an extension in my uncle’s bedroom.

I saw my uncle Stewart sitting, propped up, in a narrow bed. His face looked hollow and thin, but he smiled to see me. Evidently he had been lying there awake, for there was no trace of sleepiness in his manner.

“Jim!” His voice seemed hoarse and weary, but strong. What’s this stuff Gideon is telling me?”

Quickly I told him what I had told Gideon—and more, from the moment I had met David Craken on the gym ship until the actual filling out of the bid for purchase of the
Killer Whale.
“And he said to call you, Uncle Stewart,” I finished. “And—and so I did.”

“I’m glad you did, Jim!” My uncle closed his eyes for a second, thinking, “We’ve got to help him, Jim,” he said at last. “It’s a debt of honor.”

“A debt?” I stared at the viewscreen. “But I didn’t know you ever heard of Jason Craken—”

He nodded. “It’s something I never told you, Jim. Years ago, when your father and I were young. We were exploring the rim of the Tonga Trench—as far down as we could go in the diving gear we had then. We were looking for pearls. Tonga pearls.”

He nodded. “Tonga pearls,” he said again.” Well, we found them. But we couldn’t keep them, Jim, because while your father and I were out in pressure suits—right at the bottom of the safe limit—we were attacked. I—I can’t tell you what attacked us, Jim, because I gave my word. Perhaps the Crakens themselves will tell you sometime. But we were hauled farther and farther down into the deep—far past the rated limits of our armor. It began to fail.”

He paused, remembering that far-off day. Oddly, he smiled. “I thought we were done then, Jim,” he said. “But we were rescued. The man who rescued us was—Jason Craken.

“Jason Craken!” My uncle was sitting up now, and for a moment his voice was strong. “A strange name—for a strange man! He was short-spoken, almost rude, a little odd. He wore a beard. He dressed like a dandy. He had a taste for luxuries, a lavish spender, a generous host. And a very shrewd man, Jim. He sold Tonga pearls—no one else could compete with him, because no one else knew where they came from. It was worth a fortune to him to keep that monopoly secret, Jim.

“And your father and I—we knew the secret. And he saved our lives.

“He risked his own life to save us—and he endangered the secret of the pearls. But he trusted us. We promised never to come back to the Tonga Trench. We gave our word never to say where the pearls came from.

“And if he needs help now, Jim—it’s up to you and me to see that he gets it.”

He frowned. “I—I can’t do much myself, Jim—I’m laid up for a while. I suppose it was the shock of Jason Craken’s letter. But he mentioned that he might need money for a fighting ship, and I’ve been able to raise some. Not a fortune. But—enough, I think. I’ll see that you get it as fast as I can get it to you. Buy the
Killer Whale
for him. Help him any way you can.”

He slumped back against the bed and grinned at me. “That’s all, Jim. Better sign off now—this call must be costing a fortune! But remember—we owe a lot to Jason Craken, because if it hadn’t been for him neither you nor I would be here now.”

And that was all.

I turned, a little shaken, to where David was waiting outside the booth.

“It’s all right, David,” I told him, glancing around the room. “He’s going to help. We’ll get some money from him—enough, he says. And—”

I broke off. “David!” I cried. “Look—over there, where we were filling out the application forms!”

He whirled. He had left the forms on a little desk to come over while I called my uncle. They weje still there—and over them was bending the figure of a man.

Or was it man? For the figure turned and saw us looking at him—saw us with pearly eyes, that contracted and glared. It was the person from the sea who called himself “Joe Trencher”!

He turned and ran—through the door, out into the crowded passages beyond. “Come on!” cried David. “Let’s catch him—maybe he’s still got the pearls!”

We scoured Sargasso City that day—but we never found Joe Trencher.

At the end, David stopped, panting.

“We’ve lost him,” he said. “Once he got out of sight, he was gone.”

“But he’s got to be in the city somewhere! We can search level by level—”

“No.” David shook his head. “He doesn’t have to be in the city, Jim. He—isn’t like you and me, Jim. He might calmly walk into an escape lock and disappear into the sea, and we’d be spending our next month searching in here while he was a hundred miles away.”

“Into the sea? Nearly three miles down? It isn’t humanly possible!”

David only said: “Sign the bid form, Jim. We have to get it in.”

That was all he would say.

We returned to the lieutenant commander’s office. I signed my name to the application form with hardly a glance at it; we put down the minimum bid—fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand dollars! But of course the ship had cost many times that, new.

We barely made it back to the subsea shuttle for the return trip to Bermuda.

We were both quiet, and I suppose thinking the same thoughts. Curious, that Joe Trencher should have been able to find us in Sargasso Dome! It made it almost certain that the sound of motors we had heard in the boat basin was indeed Trencher, or someone close to him, listening in on our discussion. So they knew everything we had planned…

But there was no help for it; we couldn’t change our plans. There simply was nothing else for us to do.

We sat in silence, in the main passenger lounge, for half an hour or so. We were nearly alone. There was a faint whisper of music from the loud speakers, and a few couples on holiday at the far end of the lounge; and that was all. Business was not brisk between Bermuda and Sargasso City at that particular season.

Finally I could stand it no longer.

I burst out: “David! This has gone far enough. Don’t you see, I have to know what we’re up against! Who is this Joe Trencher? What’s his connection with your father and the Tonga pearls?”

David looked at me with troubled eyes.

Then he glanced around the lounge. No one was near by, no one could hear.

He said at last: “All right, Jim. I suppose it’s the best way. I did promise my father—But he’s a sick man, and a long way off. I think I’U have to use my own judgment now.”

“You’ll tell me about Trencher and—and those sea serpents, or whatever they were?”

He nodded.

“Trencher,” he said. “Joe Trencher. He was once my father’s foreman. His most trusted employee—and now he is leading the mutineers.”

“Mutineers against what, David?” I was more than a little exasperated. So many things I didn’t understand—so much mystery that I could not penetrate!

“Mutineers against my father, of course. I told you about my father’s dome—about the undersea empire he built out of the Tonga pearls. Well, it’s slipping out of his hands now. The helpers he used to trust have turned against him. Trencher is only one.”

I couldn’t help wondering once more about that “empire” beneath the sea. It didn’t seem that David’s father could have built it by strictly legal and honest methods—but that was a long time ago, of course…

“It began with the sea serpents,” David was saying. “They have lived in the Tonga Trench, made their lairs in the very sea mount where my father built his dome, for millions of years, Jim. Maybe hundreds of millions. You see reconstructions of beasts like them in the museums, and they go back to a time long, long before there were any humans on earth. They’re unbelievably ancient, and they haven’t changed a bit in all those hundreds of millions of years. Until my father came along. And he—he is trying to do something with them, Jim. Something that’s hard to believe. He’s trying to train them as horses and dogs are trained—to help him, to work for him. He’s trying to domesticate saurians that date back to the age of dinosaurs!”

I stared at him, hardly believing. I remembered that giant, dimly seen head that loomed over the rail of the gym ship. Domesticate
that?
It would be as easy to teach a rattlesnake to carry a newspaper!

But he was still talking.

“Naturally, Dad couldn’t do it alone,” he said. “But he had help—a curious kind of help, almost as unbelievable as the sea serpents themselves.

“Joe Trencher. And a few hundred others like him. Not very many—but enough. Without them my father couldn’t have got to first base with the saurians. Trencher’s people were a great help.”

“They’re ugly enough looking, if Trencher is any sample,” I told him. “Those white, pearly eyes—that pale skin. The funny way they breathe. They don’t even seem human!”

David nodded calmly. “They aren’t,” he said. “Not any more, at any rate. They’re descended from humans—Polynesians, somehow trapped in a subsidence of land. You’ve heard of the sea-mounts of the Pacific?”

We nodded, all of us. Those flat-topped submarine mountains, planed level by wave action—yet far below the surface, below any waves.

“Once they were islands,” David went on. “And Trencher’s ancestors lived on one of them. I suppose they were divers—so far back, it is impossible to tell. But they had Polynesian names, so it couldn’t have been too far back. Trencher’s own father’s name was Tencha—and Trencher took the new name on a whim of Dad’s. Trencher. A being from the Tonga Trench.

“And when their island submerged, they somehow managed to live. They reverted to the past, the far-distant past when every living thing lived in the water.”

“You mean—” I hesitated, fumbling for words, hardly able to believe I was hearing right. “You mean Joe Trencher is some sort of—of merman?”

“Dad calls them ‘amphibians.’ They are mutations. Their lungs are changed to work like gills. They’re more at home in the water now, actually, than they are on dry land.”

I nodded, remembered all too clearly the panting, wheezing difficulty Joe Trencher had had with breathing air. I began to understand it now.

Trencher used to be my friend,” said David somberly. When I was at home, I used to put on a lung and dive with him—not down in the Trench, but at a thousand feet or so. I watched him training the—the creatures. He showed me things on the floor of the sea that the Fleet has never seen.

“But then he changed. Dad blames himself. He says the mutation made the amphibians somehow temperamentally unstable, and then, as they learned something about the outside world—they—changed. But whatever it was, now he hates Dad—and all humans. He’s the one who kidnapped me from the gym ship. He’d been waiting for his chance—do you remember how many strange little things had been happening, pieces of equipment mysteriously missing, that sort of thing? That was Joe Trencher.

“He turned up, down there at thirteen hundred feet. I—I didn’t suspect anything, Jim. I was glad to see him. But I didn’t know what had been happening back in my father’s dome. I don’t know what Trencher did to me—clubbed me, I suppose. I woke up in his sea car, on the way back to Tonga Trench.

“He threatened to kill me, you see. I was his hostage. He used me to threaten my father. But my father’s a stubborn man. He has ruled his subsea empire a long time, and he didn’t give in.”

“Then how did you get away?”

For the first time, David Craken smiled.

“Maeva,” he said. “Maeva—my friend. She’s just an amphibian girl, but she was loyal. I’d known her since we were both very small. We grew up together. We both watched Joe Trenchor breaking the saurians. Then Maeva and I would go exploring, after—me in my edenite suit, she breathing the water itself. We’d go through the caves in the seamount. I suppose it was dangerous, in a way—those caves belonged to the saurians; they laid their eggs there, and raised their young. We were careful not to go near them in the summer, of course—that’s the breeding season. And there is another mystery—for there are no seasons under the sea. But the saurians remembered…

It was dangerous.

“But not as dangerous as what Maeva did for me two months ago.

“She found me in Joe Trencher’s sea car. She brought the edenite cylinder from my father, along with a message. And she helped me get away in the sea car.

“Trencher followed—naturally. I don’t know if he suspected her or not. I hope not.” David’s face looked pinched and drawn as he said it.

“Anyway,” he went on, “Joe Trencher followed me—not in a sea car, but swimming free, and riding one of the saurians. They can make a fabulous rate of speed in the open sea—they kept right after me. And then they caught me.”

David looked up.

“And the rest you know,” he said. “Now—it’s up to all of us. And we don’t have much time.”

We didn’t have much time.