Undersea Fleet (17 page)

The windows were the strangest thing in the room. They were wide picture windows, draped and curtained tastefully.

And the view in them was—rolling landscapes!

Outside those windows, four miles down, one saw spruce trees and tall pines, green mountain meadows and grassy foothills, far-off peaks that were white with snow!

I stared at them incredulously. David glanced at me, then half-smiled. “Stereoscapes,” he said carelessly, his eyes roaming about, his mind far away. “They were formy mother. She came from Colorado, and always she longed for the dry land and the mountains of her home…”

Maeva’s voice came imploringly: “David! We must hurry.”

He said, worriedly, “I don’t know what to do, Maeva! I suppose the best thing is for us to fan out and search the dome. But—”

We never heard the end of that sentence.

There was a sudden scratching sound that seemed to permeate the dome. Then a blare of noise, from dozens of concealed loudspeakers.

The mechanical voice of an electric watchman roared: “Attention! Attention! The dome is under attack! Attention, attention! The dome is under attack!”

Roger said in a panicky voice: “David, let’s do something! Forget your father. The amphibians, they’re attacking and—”

But David wasn’t listening to him.

David was staring, across the room, toward a clutter of equipment and gear that nearly filled one corner.

“Dad!” he cried.

We all whirled.

There, in the corner, an old man, wasted and gaunt, was sitting up, propping himself on a cot. He had been out of sight behind the tangled junk that surrounded him.

The warning of the electronic watchman had waked him.

He was sitting up, calm as can be, his eyes remote but friendly, his expression unperturbed. He wore a little beard—once dapper, now scraggly and gray.

“Why, David,” he said. “I’ve been wondering where you were. How nice that you’ve brought some friends to visit us.

We looked at him, and then at each other. The same thought was in all our minds, I could see it in the eyes of David and the sea-girl, reflected on the faces of the others.

Jason Craken’s mind was going.

He beamed at us pleasantly. “Welcome,” he said. “Welcome to you all.”

Once he had been a powerful man. I could see that, from the size of his bones and the lean muscles that he had left. But he was wasted now, and gaunt. His skin hung loose, and it was mottled with a queer greenish stain. His gray hair needed cutting, and the beard was a tangle. There was almost no trace left of the dandy my uncle had described.

He had been sleeping in his laboratory smock—once white, now wrinkled and stained. He glanced down at it and chuckled.

He said ruefully, “I was not expecting guests, as you. can see. I do apologize to you. I dislike greeting my son’s guests in so unkempt an array. But my experiments, gentlemen, my experiments take all too much of my time. One has not enough hours in the day for all the many—”

David stepped over to him. He said gravely, “Father. Why don’t you rest a bit? I’ll show the—the guests around the dome.”

And all this time the robot watchman was howling:
Attention, attention, attention!

David signaled to us and we left the room quietly. In a moment he joined us. “He’ll be all right,” he said. “Now—let’s go to the conn room!”

The conn room was a tiny chamber at the base of the dome, ringed by televisor screens, where a picture of the sea-floor all about the dome was in mosiac patches.

There was nothing in sight.

David nodded worriedly. “Not yet,” he commented. “I thought not. The robot watchman—it is set to warn of approaching sub-sea vessels, but it has a considerable range. They won’t be in sight for a while yet.”

“They?” I demanded.

David shrugged. “I don’t know if there will be more than one. The
Killer Whale,
perhaps—but the amphibians had another sea-car that I know of, the one they took from me. How many besides that I don’t know.”

Gideon said softly, his brow furrowed: “Bad luck, I think. I’d hoped that they would believe we had all gone up with the
Dolphin
when the reactor exploded.”

The sea-girl shook her head. “I told you,” she reminded him, gasping. “We were seen. I—I am sorry, David, that I let them see me, but— “

“Maeva! Don’t apologize. You saved our lives!” David wrung her hand. He looked thoughtfully at the screens, then nodded.

“I’ve got to look after my father,” he said. “Jim, will you come with me? The rest of you—it would be better if you stayed here, kept an eye on the screens.”

Gideon nodded. “Fine,” he agreed, in his gentle voice. “Then—that’s a Mark XIX fire-control director I see there? And a turret gun, I suppose? Yes. Then we can fight them off, if need be, right from here. I’ve handled the Mark XIX before and—”

David interrupted him.

“I don’t think you can do much with this one,” he said.

Gideon looked at him thoughtfully. “And why not?” he asked after a moment.

David said: “It’s broken, Gideon. The amphibians destroyed the circuits when they rebelled against my father. If they do attack—we have no weapons to fight them with.”

We left them behind us, and I must say the heart was out of me. Nothing to fight with! Not even a sea-car to escape in, now!

But Gideon was already at work before we left the fire-control room, stripping down the circuit-junction mains, checking the ruined connections. It was very unlikely that he could repair the gun. But Gideon had done some very unlikely things before.

David’s father was asleep again when we came back to him. David woke him gently.

He rubbed his eyes and blinked at David.

This time there was none of that absent serenity with which he had greeted us before. He seemed to remember what was going on about him—and he seemed to be in despair.

“David,” he said. “David—”

He shook himself and stood up.

He stumbled weakly to a laboratory, filled a little glass beaker out of a bottle of colorless fluid and gulped it down.

He came back to us, smiling and walking more steadily.

“Sit down,” he said, “sit down.” He shoved piles of books off a couple of chairs. “I had given you up, David. It is good to see you.”

David Craken hurried to find another chair for the old man, but he ignored it. He sat down on the edge of the creaking cot and ran his hands through his thinning hair.

David said: “Dad, you’re sick!”

Jason Craken shrugged. “A few unfortunate reactions.” He glanced absently at the strange green blotches on his hands. “I suppose I’ve been my own guinea pig a few times too many. But I’m strong enough, David. Strong enough—as Joe Trencher will find—to take back what belongs to me!”

His eyes were hollowed and bloodshot, yet strangely intense with a light that came from fever—or madness, I thought. He beckoned to us with his gnarled, lean hand.

David said: “Dad—we’re being attacked! Didn’t you know that? The robot warning came ten minutes ago.”

Jason Craken shook his head impatiently. He made a careless gesture, as though he was brushing the attackers away. “There have been many attacks,” he boomed, “but I am still here. And I will stay here while I live. And when I am gone—you shall stay after me, David.”

He stood up, swaying slightly, and walked over to the laboratory bench once more for another beaker of the colorless fluid. Whatever it was, it seemed to put new life into him. He said strongly: “Joe Trencher will learn! I’ll conquer him as we’ve conquered the saurians, David!” He came back and sat beside us, a scarecrow emperor with that rumpled cot for a throne. He turned to me. “Jim Eden,” he said, “I welcome you to Tonga Trench. I never thought I would need the help your uncle promised, so many years ago. But I never thought that Trencher and his people would turn against me!”

He seemed to be both raging with fury and morbidly depressed. “Trencher!” he spat. “I assure you, Jim Eden, that without my help the amphibians would still be living the life of animals! That was how I found them—trapped in their own submerged caves. If I were an egotist, I could say that I created them, and it would be near to the truth. Yet—they are ungrateful! They have turned against me! They and the saurians, I must crush them, show them who is the master—”

He broke off suddenly as his voice reached a crescendo. For a moment he sat there, staring at us wildly.

David went to him, patted him and soothed him, calmed him down. It was hard to tell there, for a moment, which was the parent and which the child.

But one thing I knew.

David Craken’s father was nearly mad!

Yet—he could talk as sanely as anyone in the world, between attacks of his raging obsession.

David quieted him down, and we sat there for what seemed a long time, talking, waiting. Waiting—I hardly hardly knew what we were waiting for.

Queer interlude! The robot watchman had been cut off, its mindless cries of warning no longer battered against our ears. Yet—we were still under attack! There had not yet been a jet missile fired against us, but the robot could not have made a mistake.

There was no doubt about it: Somewhere just outside the range of the microsonars, Joe Trencher and the
Killer Whale
swung, getting ready to batter down the dome we were in.

And we had no weapons.

I knew that Gideon would be racing against time, trying to fit the maimed circuits of the gun controls back into some semblance of order—but it was a long, complex job. It was something a trained crew might take a week to do—and he was one man, working on unfamiliar components!

But somehow, in that room with Jason Craken and his son, I was not afraid.

After a bit he collected himself again and began to talk of my father and my uncle. Astonishing how clearly he recollected every detail of those days, decades ago—and could hardly remember how he had lived in the months he had been alone here, while David and the rest of us were preparing to come to help him!

David whispered to me: “Talk to him about his experiments and discoveries. It—it helps to keep him steady.”

I said obediently: “Tell me about—ah—tell me about those queer plants outside the dome. I’ve been under the sea before this, Mr. Craken, but I’ve never seen anything like them!”

He nodded—it was like an eagle nodding, the fierce face quiet, the eyes hooded. “No one else has either, Jim Eden! The deeps are a funnel—a funnel of life. Everywhere but here. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

I nodded eagerly—even there, with the danger of destruction hanging over us all, I couldn’t help being held by that strange old man. “One of my instructors said that,” I told him. “I remember. He said that life in the ocean is a funnel, filled from the top. Tiny plants grow near the surface, where the sunlight reaches them. They make food for tiny creatures that eat them—and the tiny animal creatures are eaten by larger ones, and so on. But everything depends on the little plants at the surface, making food for the whole sea out of sunlight. Only a few crumbs get down the spout of the funnel, to the depths.”

“Quite true!” boomed the old man. “And here we have another funnel, Jim Eden. But one that is upside down. Those plants—” he looked at me sharply, almost suspciously. “Those plants are the secret of the Tonga Trench, Jim Eden. It is the greatest secret of all, for on them depend all the other wonders of my kingdom of the Trench. They have their own source of energy! It is an atomic process.” He frowned at me thoughtfully. “I—I have not finally succeeded in penetrating all of its secrets,” he confessed. “Believe me, I have tried. But it is a nuclear reaction of some sort—deriving energy, I believe, from the unstable potassium isotope in sea water. But I have not yet been able to get the process to work in a test tube. Not yet. But I will!”

He got up and walked more slowly, thoughtfully, to the laboratory bench. Absently he poured himself another beaker of the elixir on which he seemed to be absolutely dependent. He looked at it thoughtfully and then set it down, untasted.

Evidently the thought of the secret of the Tonga Trench was as powerful a stimulant to him as the elixir! I began to see how this man had been able to keep going for so long, alone and sick—he was driven by the remorseless compulsion that makes great men…. and maniacs.

“So you see,” he said, “there is a second funnel of life here. The shining weed, with its own energy, that does not need the light of the sun. The little animals that feed off it. The larger ones—the saurians and the amphibians—that live off the small.”

“The saurians,” I broke in, strangely excited. “David said something about—about some sort of danger from them. Is it true?”

“Danger?” The old man stared at his son with a hint of reproof. As though the word had been a trigger that set him off, he picked up the beaker of fluid and swallowed it. “Danger? Ah, David—you cannot fear the saurians! They cannot harm us in the dome!” He turned to me, and once again assumed the tone and attitude of a schoolmaster, lecturing a pupil. “It is a matter of breeding patterns,” he said soberly. “‘The saurians are egg-layers, and their eggs cannot stand the pressures of the bottom of the Trench, where the shining weeds grow. So each year—at the time of the breeding season—they must come up to the top of the sea-mount, to lay their eggs. There is only one way to the caves where, from ages past, they had always laid them—and I built this dome squarely across it!”

He chuckled softly, as though he had done a clever thing. “While they were tamed,” he told me gleefully, “I permitted them to pass. But now—now they shall not enter their caves! This Trench is mine, and I intend to keep it!”

He paused, staring at me.

“I may need help,” he admitted at last. “There are many saurians—But you are here! You and the others, you must help me. I can pay you. I can pay very well, for all the wealth of the Tonga Trench is mine. Tonga pearls! I have found a way to increase the yield—like the old Japanese cultured-pearl fishers, years ago. It cannot be done with ordinary oysters, for the Tonga pearls must have the radioactive nucleus that comes from the shining weed. But I have planted Tonga pearls, Jim Eden, and the first harvest is ready to be gathered!”