Undersea Fleet (18 page)

He stood up. Bent as he was, he towered over us,

“I offer you a share in a thousand thousand Tonga pearls for your help! You owe me that help anyway, as you know—for your father and your uncle have promised it. What do you say, Jim Eden? Will you help me hold the empire of the Tonga Trench?”

His eyes were growing wilder and wilder.

“Here is what you must do!” he cried. “You must take your subsea cruiser, the
Dolphin.
You must destroy the ship Joe Trencher is using. The dome’s own armaments will suffice for the saurians—I have a most powerful missile gun mounted high on the dome, well supplied with ammunition, with the latest automatic fire-control built in. Crush Joe Trencher for me—the dome itself will destroy the saurians if they try to come through. Is that agreed, Jim Eden?”

And that was when the bubble burst.

He stood waiting for my answer. He had nearly made me believe that these things were possible, for a moment. He was so absolutely sure of himself, that I forgot, while he was speaking, a few things.

For instance—

The
Dolphin
was destroyed, blown to atoms.

His missile gun was not working, sabotaged by the amphibians when they turned against him.

David Craken and I stared at each other somberly, while the crazed light faded and died in his father’s eyes.

For Jason Craken’s mind was wandering again. He had fought the sea too long, and taken too much of his own strange potions.

He had conceived a battle scheme—a perfect tactical plan, except that it relied on a gun that would not fire and a ship that had been sunk!

I don’t know what we would have said to him then.

But it turned out that we didn’t have to say anything.

There was a scratching, racing sound of foosteps from outside and the sea-girl, Maeva, burst gasping and frantic into the room.

“David!” she cried raggedly, fighting for breath. “David, they’re coming back! The saurians are attacking again, and there is a subsea ship leading them!” We leaped to our feet.

But even before we got out of the room, a dull explosion rocked the dome.

A sub-sea missile from the
Killer!
The fight for Tonga Trench had begun!

“Up!” cried Maeva. “Up to the missile-gun turret. Gideon couldn’t fix the fire-control equipment—he’s trying to handle the gun manually!”

We pounded up narrow steel stairs, David flying ahead.

We found Gideon in the turret, his eyes on a complicated panel of wires and resistors, his mind so fixed on his task that he didn’t even look up to see us come in.

“Gideon!” I cried—and then had to stop, holding onto the wall, as another explosion rocked the dome.

They meant business this time!

The turret was tiny and gloomy, and filled with the reek that rose from Jason Craken’s laboratories below. There were tiny windows spotted about it—not much more than portholes, really—and there was little to see through them. All I could make out, through the pale glimmer of the edenite film on the window itself, was the steep curve of the dome beneath us, glowing unsteadily with its own film. The cold blue light from the dome caught two or three jutting points of dark rock.

Beyond that, the darkness of the deep was broken only by the occasional ghostly glimmerings of deep-sea creatures that carried lights of their own.

I glanced at David, startled. “I don’t see anything!”

He nodded. “You wouldn’t, Jim. You need microsonar to see very far under the surface of the sea. That’s what Gideon is working on now, I should judge. This missile gun—it can be worked manually, if its microsonar sights are working. But it’s been fifteen years at least since it was manned—always it was controlled from the fire-control chamber below, you see. And that is wrecked…”

Gideon glanced up abstractedly. He nodded agreement, started to speak, and returned to his work.

It wasn’t hard to see that he was worried.

The missile gun almost filled the turret. It was an ugly, efficient machine of destruction, though the firing tube, what little of it was within its turret, looked oddly slim. The bright-cased missiles racked in the magazine weren’t much larger than my arm.

“Looks old-fashioned to you?” David was reading my mind. “But it’s deadly enough, Jim. One of those shells will destroy a sea-car—the shock neutralizes the edenite film for a tiny fraction of a second. And the sea’s own pressure does the rest. They’re steam jets—athodyds, they’re called; they scoop up water and fire it out behind in the form of steam.”

There was a sudden exclamation from Gideon.

He plucked something out of a kit of spare parts, plugged a new component into the tangle of wires and sub-assemblies.

“That should do it!” he said softly. And he touched a switch.

We all stood waiting, almost holding our breaths.

There was a distant hum of tiny motors.

The turret shuddered and turned slightly.

The microsonar screen came to life.

“You’ve done it!” David cried.

Gideon nodded. “It works, at any rate.” He patted the slim breech, almost fondly. “Anyway, I think it does. It was the sonar hookup that was the big headache. It serves as the sights for the missile-gun. Without the sonar, it would be like firing blind. Now—I think we can see what we’re doing.”

I stared into the microsonar, fascinated. It was an old, old model—hardly like the bright new screen the Academy had taught me to work with. Everything was reduced and distorted, as though we were looking into the wrong end of a cheap telescope.

But, as I grew used to it, I could pick some details out. I could see the steep slopes of the sea-mount falling away from us. I found the jagged rim of a ravine—the one the saurians used for their breeding trail, no doubt; the same one that Maeva and Old Ironsides had carried us along.

I glanced at the screen, and then again.

There was a whirling pattern of tiny shapes. For a moment I couldn’t make them out. Then I said: “Why, it’s a school of fish. At least that proves the saurians aren’t around, doesn’t it? I mean, they would frighten the fish away and—”

“Fish?” Gideon was staring at me. “What are you talking about?”

I said patiently, “Why, Gideon, don’t you see? If there were saurians, they’d show in the microsonar, wouldn’t they? And that school of fish—”

He looked at me with a puzzled expression, then shrugged.

“Jim,” he said, “look here.” He adjusted the verniers of the microsonar with a delicate touch, bringing into sharp focus. He pointed. “There,” he said. “Right in front of you. Saurians—a couple of hundred of them, I’d guess. They look pretty small, because these old target screens reduce everything—but there they are, just out of range!”

I stared, unbelieving.

What he was pointing at was what I had thought was a school of tiny fish!

They were saurians, all right—hundreds upon hundreds of them. I looked more closely, and I could see another little object among my “fish”—not a saurian this time, dangerous.

I pointed to it. Gideon and David followed my pointing finger.

“That’s right, Jim,” said David. “It’s the
Killer Whale.
They’re waiting…But they won’t wait much longer.”

They waited exactly five more minutes.

Then all three of us saw the little spurt of light jet out from the
Killer’s
bright outline and come arrowing in toward us. Another jet missile!

Seconds later, the dull boom of its explosion shook the dome once more.

But even before that, Gideon had leaped into the cradle of the missile-gun. One hand on the trips, the other coaxing the best possible image from the microsonar sights, he wheeled the turret to bring the weapon to bear on the distant shape of the
Killer Whale.
I saw him press the trips—

There was a staccato rapping, and the slim breech but something infinitely more of the missile-gun leaped a fraction of an inch, half a dozen times, as Gideon fired a salvo of six missiles at the
Killer.

The microsonar flared six times as the missiles went off, in a blast of pressure waves.

When the screen cleared—the
Killer Whale
still hung there, surrounded by its cluster of circling saurians.

Gideon nodded soberly. “Out of range, of course. But we’re at extreme range too. Even with the better weapons they have on the cruiser. At least we can hope to keep them at arm’s length.” He checked the loading bays of the missile-gun. “Jim, David,” he said. “Reload for me, will you? I don’t want to get away from the trigger, in case Trencher and his boys decide to make a, sudden jump.”

We leaped to do as he asked. The stacks of missiles in their neat racks around the turret were none too many for our needs. We filled the bays—the gun’s own automatic loading mechanism would take over from there—and looked worriedly at the dwindling pile of missiles that were left.

“Not too many,” David conceded. “Gideon, will you be all right here alone? Jim and I had best go down to the storeroom for more missiles.”

“I’ll be all right!” Gideon’s smile flashed white. “But don’t take too long. I have a feeling we’re going to need every missile we can get any minute now!”

But the attack didn’t come.

We rounded up a work party, David and I. Bob and Laddy and Roger Fairfane formed teams to haul clips of the slim missiles from the storerooms at the base of the dome, up to the missile turret. Three of them was a load for one man; we made two or three trips apiece.

And still the attack didn’t come.

And then David and Bob came out of the storeroom with only one missile apiece. David’s face was ghastly white.

“They’re gone!” he said tensely. “This is all that is left. The amphibians—when they turned against my father, they cleaned out the armory too, all but a few missiles we’ve found.”

We made a quick count. About seventy-five rounds, no more.

And the missile gun fired in bursts of half a dozen!

We held a quick council of war in the conn room at the base of the dome, near the storage chambers. The screens that ringed it showed a mosiac of the sea-mount and sea-bottom around us.

The
Killer Whale
still hung there, still threatening, still waiting. At odd intervals they loosed a missile, but none of them had caused any damage; we had come to ignore them. And the saurians still milled about in their racing schools.

David said somberly: “It’s the beginning of their breeding season. I suppose for millions of years they’ve been doing it just that way. They go through that strange sort of ritual, down there at the base of the sea-mount, working themselves up. I’ve seen it many times. They go on like that for hours. And then at last, one of them will start up the side of the sea-mount, toward the caves, where they will lay their eggs. And then all the others will follow—”

He closed his eyes. I could imagine what he was seeing in his mind’s eye: A horde of saurians, hundreds strong, streaming up the side of the sea-mount, battering past the dome. And with Joe Trencher in his
Killer Whale
riding herd on them, driving them against the dome itself, while he pounded it with missiles!

The edenite dome—yes, it was strong, no doubt! But each of those beasts was nearly the size of a whale. Twenty or thirty tons of fiercely driven flesh pounding against the dome would, at the least, shake it. Multiply that by a hundred, two hundred, three hundred—and remember that the edenite film was after all maintained only by the power that came from delicate electronic parts. If for one split fraction of a second the power faltered…

Then in moments the dome would be flat.

And we would be crushed blobs of matter in a tangle of wreckage, as four miles of sea stamped us into the muck.

Bob Eskow mopped his brow and stood up.

He turned to David Craken.

“David,” he said, “that settles it. The missile-gun might stop the saurians—but with only seventy-five rounds for it, and hundreds of the saurians, we might as well not bother. And we’ll never get the
Killer Whale
with the gun; it isn’t powerful enough, hasn’t got the range. There’s only one thing to do.”

I said: “He’s right, David. It’s up to you. You’ve got to make peace with the amphibians.”

David looked at us strangely.

“Make peace with them!” He laughed sharply. “If I only could! But, don’t you see? My father—he is the one who must make peace. And his mind is—is wandering. You’ve seen it for yourselves. The amphibians aren’t used to the world, you know. They understand the rule of one man, a leader. Joe Trencher is their leader; and Joe once bowed to the rule of my father. I don’t say my father was always right. He was a stern man. Perhaps all along, his mind was a little—well, strained. He’s been through enough to strain anyone! But he was perhaps a little too severe, a little too unyielding. And so Joe Trencher’s people turned against him.

“But it is my father they still respect, even though they are fighting him. If he would try to make peace—yes, that might work. But he never will. He can’t. His mind simply cannot accept it.”

I said, suddenly struck by a thought: “David! This must have happened before, hasn’t it? I don’t mean the rebellion of the amphibians, but the breeding season of the saurians. What did you do other years, when they made their procession up to the caves in the sea mount? How did you keep them from damaging the dome?”

David shrugged wretchedly. “The amphibians herded them” he said. “We would station a dozen of them outside the dome with floodlights and gongs. Sound carries under water, you know—and the sound of the gongs and the light from the floods would keep them away from the dome. Oh, we had a good many narrow escapes—my father never should have built his dome right here, in their track. But he is a willful man.

“But without the amphibians to help us—with them attacking at the same time—it’s hopeless.”

There was no more time for discussion.

We heard a dull crunch of another jet missile from the
Killer Whale
—and then another, and a third, almost at once.

And simultaneously, the light, staccato rattle of our own turret missile-gun, as Gideon, high above us, fired in return.