Undersea Fleet (14 page)

For the image in the microsonar was, for a split second, clear and bright.

Then it became a blob again and dwindled; but in that moment I had seen a strange silhouette. A ship?

Maybe. But if it was a ship, it was a queer one. A fantastic one—for it had a strange conning tower, shaped like a great triangular head, on a long, twisting neck!

I turned to David Craken, a question on my lips.

I didn’t have to ask it.

His face was pale as he nodded. “That’s right, Jim,” he said. “It’s a saurian. A—sea serpent. And it’s on our trail.”

It dogged us endlessly—for hour after unending hour, day after day.

By and by we became used to it, and we could even joke; but it was a joke with a current of worry running close beneath. For there was no doubt that the saurian that followed was in some way closely related to Joe Trencher—to the
Killer Whale
—and to the amphibian revolt against David Craken’s father.

We crossed the Equator—and had a little ceremony, like the sailing men of old, initiating the lubbers into the mysteries of Davy Jones. But there was only one lubber among us. Gideon and David Craken had crossed the Equator many times beyond counting—Laddy Angel’s home, after all, was in Peru—and even Bob and I had made the long trip to Marinia one time before.

Roger was our lubber—and, surprisingly, he took the nonsense initiation in good part. Drenched with a ship’s bucket of icy salt water from the pressure lock (for we were running submerged once more, the edenite film glistening quietly on our plates), choking with laughter, he cried: “Have your fun, boys! Once this is over, I’ll be the captain again—and I have a long memory!”

But it was a joke, not a threat—and I found myself liking Roger Fairfane for almost the first time since we had met.

But once the initiation was over, and he had come out of his cabin in dry clothes, he was withdrawn and reserved again.

We put in at a little port on the bulge of Brazil for the stores we had been unable to load in Sargasso Dome. There was money to spare for everything we needed—for everything but one thing. Gideon went ashore and stayed for hours, and came back looking drawn and worried. “Nothing doing,” he reported. “I tried, Jim, believe me I tried. I even went down to the dives along the waterfront and tried to make a contact. But there’s no armament to be had. We’ve got a fighting ship, but we’ve nothing to fight with. And there’s no chance now that we’ll get guns for it.”

David Craken listened and nodded soberly. “It’s all right,” he told us. “I knew we’d have trouble getting guns—the Fleet doesn’t sell its vessels with armaments, and they make it pretty hard for anyone to get them. But my father—he has weapons, in his dome. If we can get there—”

He left it unfinished.

We drove along through waters that began to show the traces of the melted glaciers of Antarctica. A fraction denser, a part of a degree cooler, a few parts less per million of salt—we were nearing the tip of the South American continent.

We slipped through the Straits one dark night, running submerged, feeling our way by sonar and by chart. It was a tricky passage—but there was a Fleet base on Terra del Fuego, and we wanted to avoid attention.

Once we were in the Pacific all of us, by common impulse, leaped for the microsonar to see if our implacable follower had navigated the Straits right after us.

It had.

The tiny blob that sometimes drew close enough to show a three-cornered head and a ropy neck—it was still following, still there.

It was still there as we breasted the Peru Current and struck out into the Pacific itself.

Laddy Angel looked at the sounding instruments with a wry expression. “Cold and fast—it is the Peru Current. Odd, but it causes me to feel almost homesick!”

Roger Fairfane, off duty but lounging around the bridge laughed sharply. “Homesick? For a current in the ocean?”

Laddy drew up his eyebrows. “Ah, you laugh, my captain. But trust me, the Peru Current is indeed Peru. Some years it fails—it is a fickle current, and perhaps it wanders out to sea for a few months, to try if it likes the deep sea better than the land. Those years are bad years for my country. For the Current brings food; the food brings little creatures for the sea-birds to feed upon; the sea-birds make guano and themselves make food for bigger fish. And on these things my country must depend.” He nodded soberly. “Laugh at a current in the ocean if you wish to
,
but to my country it is life.”

The
Dolphin
pounded on. Past the longitude of the Galapagos, past strange old Easter Island. We stayed clear of land; actually we were not close to anything but the sea bottom, but each time we passed the longitude of an island or island group, David Craken marked it off with his neat pencil tick, and checked the calendar, and sighed. Time was passing.

And the saurian hung on behind.

Sometimes it seemed as though there were two of them. Sometimes the little blob behind us seemed to be joined by another, smaller. I asked David: “Can it be two sea serpents? Do they travel in pairs?”

He shrugged, but there was an expression of worry in his eyes. “They travel sometimes in huge herds, Jim. But that other thing—I don’t think it is a saurian.”

“What then?”

He shook his head. “If it is what I think,” he said soberly, “we’ll find out soon enough. If not, there is no point in worrying.”

Gideon, head deep in the complex entrails of the old fire-control monitor, looked up from his job of repair. It was a low-priority job, because we had no armament to fire; but Gideon had made it his business to get everything in readiness for the moment when we might reach Jason Craken’s sub-sea dome. If we could ship arms there, we would have the fire-control monitor in working shape to handle them. He had checked everything—from the escape capsule in the keelson to the microsonars at the bridge.

He said softly: “David. We’ve less than a thousand miles to go. Don’t you think it’s time you took us all the way into your confidence?”

“About what?”

“Why, David, about those saurians, as you call them. Jim says you’ve told him something about them, but I must say there are things I don’t understand.”

David hesitated. He had the conn, but there was in truth little for him to do. The
Dolphin
was cruising at 5500 feet on the robot pilot—the proper level for west-bound traffic in that part of the Pacific. The indicators showed that the edenite pressure system was working perfectly; there was no water sloshing about the bilge, no warning blare of horns to show a hull failure, or fission products leaking from the old engines. We were cruising fast and dry.

David glanced at the microsonar, where the tiny, remorseless pip hung on behind.

Then he took a folded chart from his locker and spread it before us.

All of us gathered around—Gideon and Bob and Laddy and Roger and I. The chart was marked
Tonga Trench
—a standard Fleet survey chart, but with many details penciled in where the Fleet’s survey ships had left white banks. There was the long, bare furrow of the Trench itself—more than a thousand miles, end to end.

And someone—David or his father, I supposed—had penciled in a cluster of sea-mounts and chasms, with current arrows and soundings.

David placed his finger on one of the sea-mounts.

“There,” he said. “There’s something that many men would give a million dollars to know. That’s where the Tonga pearls come from.”

I heard Roger make a strange, excited gasping sound beside me.

“And there,” David went on, “is the birthplace of the saurians. Great sea reptiles! My father says they are the descendants of the creatures that ruled the seas a hundred million years ago and more. Plesiosaurs, he says. They disappeared from the face of the deep, millions and millions of years before Man came along.

“But not all of them. Down in the Tonga Trench, some of them lived on.”

He folded the chart again jealously, as though he was afraid we would memorize it. “They attacked my father’s sea-car, forty years ago, when he first tried to dive into the Tonga Trench. He beat them off and got away with the first Tonga pearls that ever saw the light of day—but he never forgot them. Since then, he’s been studying them. Trying to domesticate them, even—with the help of the amphibians, partly, and partly by raising some of them from captured eggs. But they aren’t very intelligent, really, and they are very hard to train.

“You’ve heard the old mariners’ stories about sea-serpents? My father says these saurians are behind the stories. Once or twice a century, he says, a young male would be driven out of the herds, and roam about the world, looking for mates. They avoid the surfaces most of the time—the lack of pressure is painful to them—but a few of them have been seen. And they have never been forgotten. Big as whales, scaled, with long necks. They swim with enormous paddle-limbs. They must have terrified the windjammers—they were bigger than some of the ships!”

Bob Eskow frowned. “I’ve heard of the Plesiosaurs,” he said. “They’re descended from reptiles that once lived on dry land—like all the big sea saurians. And that thing that’s following us, is that one of them?”

David nodded. “One of the tamed ones. The amphibians work them. Joe Trencher is using them in his rebellion against my father.”

The
Dolphin
pounded on, through the deep, dark seas.

David Craken looked up finally from his charts. His face was clouded. He said “We’re a long way off the main sea routes. It’s been a long time since we passed a sonar beacon for a fix. But—I think we are…here.”

His finger stabbed a tiny penciled cross on the chart.

The Tonga Trench!

His expression cleared and he grinned at Roger. “Captain Fairfane,” he reported formally, “I have a course correction for you. Azimuth, steady on two twenty-five He grinned down!”

Gideon said soberly: “Just a few more hours then, David. Are we in time?”

David Craken shrugged. “I hope so. I think so.”

He looked at the sonarscope, where the tiny little blob that was the pursuing saurian hung on. He said: “You see, it is almost July—and July is the month of breeding for them. My father—he’s a willful man, Gideon. He chose to build his dome on a little mound on the slope of a sea-mount, and he must have known long before the work was finished that it was a bad place. Because it is there that the saurians go to lay their eggs. They come up out of the degrees. Elevation, negative five degrees.” and translated. “Straight ahead and Trench—Dad says it is a pattern of behavior that dates back hundreds of millions of years, perhaps to the time when they still went to the beaches on dry land, as turtles sometimes do today.

“Anyway—Dad’s dome is directly in their path.” David shook his head broodingly. “While he was well, while he had the amphibians to help him—he managed to fight them off, and I believe he enjoyed it. But now he’s sick, and alone, and the amphibians are bound to try something at the same time…”

He glanced again at the scope of the microsonar.

“Gideon!” he cried. “Jim!”

We clustered around, staring.

There was another blob of light there once more—the featured little speck that was the saurian, and the other tiny one that hung around it.

But it was larger than ever before.

Even as we watched it grew larger and larger.

Gideon said, frowning, “Something’s coming mighty fast. Another saurian? But it’s faster than the other one has ever gone. It’s gaining on us as though we were floating still…”

David’s face was drained of color.

He said lifelessly: “It isn’t a saurian, Gideon.”

Roger and Laddy and Bob were talking, all at once. I elbowed my way past them to get to the rangmg dials of the microsonar. The little blips grew fuzzy, then sharper, then fuzzy once more. I cried: “Please! Give me room!”

I turned again to the dials and gently coaxed the images back. They grew brighter, sharper…

“You’re right, David!” Gideon’s voice was soft and worried behind me. “That’s no saurian!”

It was a sea-car—a big one. Bigger than ours.

I cracked the range dial a hairs-breadth.

The image leaped into clear focus.

The shape in the microsonar was the sleek and deadly outline of the
Killer Whale!

The ship was the
Killer,
no question about it.

It was headed straight for us. Roger looked around at the rest of us, his face pale. “Well what about it?” he demanded. “What can they do? They’ve no armament,have they? The Fleet must have stripped the
Killer
just as they did the
Dolphin—
”

“Don’t count on it,” David said quietly. “Remember, Trencher’s at home under the water. They’ve been delayed for something—they must have put the saurian to following us, while they were doing something. Doing what? I don’t know, Roger. But I could make a guess, and my guess would be that they’ve been stripping sunken ships somewhere, taking armament off them…I don’t know, I admit. But if you think they can’t hurt us, Roger, I’m afraid you’re living in a fool’s paradise.”

Roger said harshly: “Eden! Give them a hail on the sonarphone! Ask them what they want.”

“Aye-aye, sir!” I started the sonarphone pulsing and beamed a message at the ship behind us.
“Dolphin to Killer Whale. Dolphin to Killer Whaler

No answer.

I tried again:
“Dolphin to Killer Whale!
Come in,
Killer Whale.
”

Silence, while we waited. The sonarphone picked up and amplified the noises of the ship behind us, the half-musical whine of her atomic turbines, the soft hissing of the water sliding past her edenite armor.

But there was no answer.

Roger glared at me and shouldered past. He picked up the sonarphone mike himself.
“Killer Whale!
” he cried. “This is the
Dolphin,
Roger Fairfane commanding. I demand you answer—”

I stopped listening abruptly.

I had glanced at the microsonar screen. Against the dark field that was black sea water, I saw a bright little fleck dart away from the bright silhouette of the
Killer.