Undersea Fleet (19 page)

We all turned to stare at the mosiac of the sea-mount below us.

The herd of saurians were milling purposelessly no longer. Two, three, four of them had started coming up toward us—more were following.

And the glittering hull of the
Killer Whale
was coming in with them, firing as it came.

The dome was thundering and quivering under the almost incessant fire from the
Killer Whale.

Gideon was returning their fire—coolly, desperately…and in the end, hopelessly. But he was managing to keep the saurians in a state of confusion. He had beaten back the first surge of a handful of the enormous beasts. The main herd had milled a bit more, than another batch had made the dash for their breeding trail past the dome. The explosions of our little missile-gun had demoralized and confused them.

There had been a third attempt, and a fourth.

And each time Gideon had managed to rout the monsters. But I had kept a rough count, and I knew what Gideon knew: We were nearly out of missiles. I thought of Gideon, clinging desperately to his missile-gun high above, and felt regret. This wasn’t his fight; I had got myself into it, but I blamed myself for involving Gideon.

But I didn’t have much time for such thoughts, for we were busy.

David had had one desperate idea: We would recharge the little oxygen flasks in our pressure suits, feed as much charge into the batteries as they would take, and try at the last to go out into the deep with the lights and the gongs, to see if we could herd the saurians away from the dome.

The idea was desperation itself—for surely the amphibians, stronger and better-equipped, would be driving the frantic monsters in upon us, and there was little doubt that it was going to be a harrowingly unsafe place to be, out at the base of the dome, under four miles of water, with thirty-ton saurians milling and raving about in frenzy.

But it was the only chance we had.

Jason Craken was mooning about by himself, talking excitedly in gibberish; Gideon and Roger were fully occupied in the turret. It left only Laddy, David, the sea-girl Maeva, and myself to try to get the suits ready for us.

For Bob Eskow was nowhere to be seen.

It took us interminable minutes, while the dome rocked and quivered under our feet. Then David threw down the last oxygen cylinder angrily. “No more gas in the tank!” he cried. “We’ll have to make do with what we have. How do we stand, Laddy?”

Laddy Angel, fitting cylinders into the suits, counted rapidly and shrugged.

“It is not good, my friend David,” he said softly. “There is not much oxygen—”

“I know that! How much?”

Laddy frowned and squinted thoughtfully. “Perhaps—perhaps twenty minutes for each suit. Four suits. We have enough oxygen for four of us to put on suits and go out into the abyss, to try to frighten away your saurians.

Only—” he shrugged. “It is what they teach at the Academy,” he confessed, “but I am not sure it is true here. So many cubic centimeters of oxygen, so many seconds of safe breathing time. But I cannot be sure, David, if the instructors in my classroom were thinking of such a use of breath as we shall be making! We must leap and pound gongs and jump about like cheerleaders at a football game, and I have some doubt that the air that would last twenty minutes of quiet walking about will last as long while we cavort like acrobats.”

David demanded feverishly: “Power?”

That was my department. I had hooked the leyden-type batteries onto the dome’s own power reactor, watched the gauges that recorded the time.

“Not much power,” I admitted. “But if we only have twenty minutes of breathing time, it doesn’t matter. The power will hold the edenite armor on the suits for at least twice that.”

David stood thoughtfully silent for a moment.

Then he shrugged. “Well,” he said, “it’s the best we can do. If it isn’t good enough—”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

He didn’t have to, because we all knew what it meant if we failed.

Lacking oxygen and power, we could be out on the floor of the sea for only a few minutes—so we had to wait there in the conn room until the stampede was raging upon us. We watched the mosaic screens for the sign of the big rush, the rush that Gideon with his missile-gun would not be able to stem.

We didn’t speak much; there wasn’t much left to say.

And I remembered again: Bob Eskow was missing.

Where had he got to? I said: “David—Bob’s been gone a long time. We’ll need him—when we go outside.” David frowned, his eyes intent on the screen. “He was rummaging through the storerooms—looking for more oxygen cylinders, I think, though I told him there weren’t any. Perhaps one of us should look for him.” He turned to the sea-girl, Maeva, who stood silently by, watching us with wide, calm eyes. I envied her! If the saurians blundered through our weak defenses and the dome came pounding down—she at least would live!

And then I remembered Joe Trencher and his blazing anger against everything connected with the Crakens, and I wasn’t so sure that she would live, after all. For surely Joe Trencher would not spare a traitor to the amphibian people, one who took the side of the Crakens against them.

“Maeva,” he told her, “see if you can find him.”

She nodded, gasping for breath, and started soundlessly out of the conn room. But she didn’t have to go far, for as she reached the door Bob appeared on the other side.

We all stared at him. He was lugging a huge, yellow-painted metal cylinder, a foot thick and as long as Bob himself. Black letters were stenciled on the yellow:

DEEP SEA SURVIVAL KIT

Contents: Four-place raft, with emergency survival and signal equipment. Edenite shield tested to twenty thousand feet.

“What in the world are you going to do with that?” I demanded.

He looked up, startled, and out of breath. “We can reach radiolarian, don’t you see? I mean—”

“What?
”

He broke off, and some of the absorbed gleam faded from his eyes. “I mean—” he hesitated. “I mean, if a couple of us took it to the surface, we could, well, summon the Fleet. We would be able to—”

He went on, while I stared at him. Bob was acting very queerly, I thought. Could he be going to pieces under the strain of our situation? I was sure he had said something about “radiolarian”—the same sort of jumbled nonsense he was muttering when he woke up after Maeva had rescued us.

But he
seemed
perfectly all right…

David told him sharply: “Wait, Bob. It’s a pretty idea, but there are two things wrong with it. In the first place, we’re pretty far off the beaten track here—and you have no guarantee that there would be a Fleet vessel anywhere around to receive your message.” Bob opened his mouth to say something; David stopped him. “And even more important—we don’t have that much time. One of those survival kit buoys will haul you up to the surface easily enough, I admit. But it takes at least ten minutes from this far down—even assuming you can hold on while you’re being jerked up at twenty or thirty miles an hour!” He glanced at the microsonar screens worriedly. “We may not even have ten minutes!”

We didn’t.

In fact, we didn’t have ten seconds.

There was a rattle from the intercom that connected with the missile-gun turret high above, and Gideon’s soft voice came to us crying: “Stand by for trouble! They’re coming fast!”

We didn’t need that warning. In our own microsonar screens we could see the saurians streaming toward us—not just two or three this time, but a solid group of a score or more, and the whole monstrous herd following close behind!

We crowded into the lock, the four of us in pressure suits and the sea-girl, Maeva, close beside.

The sea came in around us.

Under that tremendous pressure, it didn’t flow in a stream from the valve. It exploded into a thundering fog that blinded our face plates and tore at our suits like a wild white hurricane.

The thunder stopped at last. We stepped out onto the slope of the sea-mount to face the greater thunder from the rampaging saurians.

Endless minutes! We spread out, the five of us, with suit-lamps and gongs and tiny old explosive grenades David had dug up from somewhere—too small to do much harm, big enough to make a startling noise.

The saurians came down on us in hordes. It seemed like thousands of them, clustered as thick as bees on a field of August clover. It was impossible to believe that we five, with the pathetic substitutes for arms we carried, could do anything to divert that tide of Juggernauts.

But we tried.

We flashed our lights at them, and tossed our grenades. We beat the huge brass gongs David had given us, and the low mellow booming sound echoed and multiplied in the terrible pressure of the Trench.

We terrified the monsters. I think that they would have fled from the field entirely—if it had been only them.

But as we were driving them from one side, so were others from behind. The amphibians! A dozen or more of the saurians carried low-crouched riders, jabbing at them with long, pointed goads, driving them in upon us. And other amphibians swam behind the maddened herd, making nearly as much noise as we, causing nearly as much panic in the beasts.

It seemed to go on forever…

And I began to feel faint and weak. The air was giving out!

I looked about feverishly, fighting to stay conscious. I could see Maeva and David Craken to one side, doggedly leaping and pounding their gongs like mad undersea puppets. Farther down the slope, toward the fringe of shining weed that stopped short of the dome, I saw Laddy Angel dodging the onslaught of a pair of great saurians, leaping up after them and driving them away from the dome. It was hard to see, in the pale blue glow that shone from Jason Craken’s edenite fortress, but—where was Bob?

Look as I might, I couldn’t see him anywhere.

I reeled and nearly fell, even buoyed up by the water.

I must have used up my oxygen even sooner than we had figured. I choked and blinked and tried to focus on the round, blue-lit bulk of the dome—so far away!

I took a step toward it—and another—

It seemed impossibly far away.

Yards short of the dome I toppled and slowly fell, and I had not the strength to stand up again—little though I needed with the buoying water to help.

Everything was queerly blurred, strangely unimportant. I knew my air was bad. I could live a few more minutes—perhaps even a quarter of an hour—but I couldn’t move, for there simply was not air enough left in my tanks to sustain me. It was perfectly obvious. I would lie there, I thought drowsily, lazily, until I fell asleep. And then, after some minutes, I would die, poisoned by the carbon dioxide from my own breath…

Or perhaps, if the edenite shield faltered first as the power ran out, crushed into a shapeless mass by the fury of the deeps.

It was perfectly obvious, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.

Something strange was happening. I raised my head slightly to see better. There was a queer, narrow metal cave, and something moving around in it—something with a bright yellow head and a bright yellow body—

I shook my head violently to clear it and looked again.

The cave became the airlock of the dome.

The queer object with the bright yellow head became Bob Eskow, wearing his pressure suit and carrying—carrying that yellow cylinder he had lugged up from the storerooms, the emergency escape kit.

I thought in a dreamy way how remarkable it was that he should be bothering with something like that. But I didn’t really care. All I felt was an overwhelming laziness—narcosis, from bad air rather than pressure, but narcosis all the same. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

Suddenly Bob was tugging at me.

That didn’t matter either, but he was interfering with my pleasant lazy rest. I pushed at him angrily. I couldn’t make out what he was doing.

Then I saw: He was binding me to the shackles around the yellow-painted rescue buoy. For a moment his helmeted face hung in front of mine, huge and dim. I saw him gesture vehemently with a chopping motion.

I stared at him, irritated and puzzled. Chop? What did he mean?

I glanced behind me, and saw the end of the yellow rescue buoy, where the deadweight was shackled to the flotation unit. The idea was to uncouple the weight and drop it off, then the buoy would surge toward the surface, carrying its rescued passengers with it.

Possibly that was what Bob wanted me to do—knock the weights loose.

Fretfully I pressed the release lever. The weighted end of the cylinder sprang free.

And the flotation unit jerked us toward the surface.

It was fast! It was almost like being fired from a cannon. The shock made me black out for a second, I think. I was conscious of the black rock and the shimmering blue dome falling away beneath us, and then things became very confused. There was a fading gray glow in the water about us, then only darkness. Then I began to see queer bright lights—shining eyes, they seemed, that dived at us from above and dropped rapidly away beneath.

The air was growing rapidly worse.

I could hear myself breathing—great, rapid, panting upheavals, like Maeva after hours of breathing air, like a dying man. I began to have a burning in my lungs. My head ached…great gongs beat and spirals of fire spun and vanished in the dark sea.

And then suddenly, we were at the surface of the sea.

Amazingly, it was night!

Somehow I had not thought of its being night-time above. We cracked our faceplates, clinging to the buoy, and I breathed deeply of cool, damp, night air. I stared at the stars as though I had never seen a night sky before. Amazing!

But what was most amazing was that we were alive.

As the air hit me it was like a dose of the strongest stimulant known to man. I coughed and choked and, if I hadn’t been bound to the buoy, I think I might have dropped free and sunk back into the awesome miles of the Tonga Trench that waited hungrily beneath us.

I heard a sharp, metallic snap: It was Bob, a little better off than I, pulling the lever that opened the emergency escape kit.