Undersea Fleet (20 page)

The glow of the edenite film faded from the yellow-painted cylinder. The cap popped off. The plastic raft shot out of it, swelling out with a soft hiss of gas. .. .

Somehow we scrambled aboard. We got our helmets off and lay on our backs, getting back our strength.

The tall Pacific swell lifted us and dropped us, lifted us and dropped us. In the trough between the long, rounded waves we lay between walls of water; on the crest, we were hanging in midair in a plain of rolling black dunes. There were little sounds all around us—the wash of wavelets against the rubber raft, the sounds of the air, our own breathing, the little creaks and rattles the raft itself made.

It was utterly impossible to believe that four miles straight down a frightful battle was raging!

But Bob believed it; he remembered. Before I could get my breath back, before I could demand an explanation, he was up and about.

I lay there on the wet cushion of the raft, staring up at the blazing tropical stars that I had never expected to see again. My lungs and throat were burning still. I forced myself to sit up, to see what Bob was doing.

He was squatting at the end of the tiny raft, fussing over the sealed lockers that contained emergency rations, first aid medical equipment—and a radio-sonar distress transmitter.

It was the transmitter that Bob was frantically fumbling with.

“Bob!” I had to stop and cough. My throat was raw, sore, exhausted. “Bob, what’s this all about? You’ve been acting so strangely—”

“Wait, Jim!”

I said: “I can’t wait! Don’t you realize that the Crakens and the rest of our friends down there may be dying by now? They needed us! Without our help the saurians are bound to break through—

“Please, Jim. Trust me!”

Trust him! Yet there was nothing else I could do. I was cut off from the struggle at the bottom of Tonga Trench now as irrevocably as though it were being fought on the surface of the moon. It had taken perhaps ten minutes for us to get away from it—and it was literally impossible to get back. Even if there had been air for the pressure suit and power to keep its edenite shield going, what could I do? Cut loose and drop free? Yes—and land perhaps miles from the sea-mount where Jason Craken’s besieged dome might even now be crumbling as the deeps pounded in. For I had no way of knowing what sub-sea currents had tossed us about as we came up—and would clutch at me again on the way down.

Trust him. It was a tall order—but somehow, I began to be able to do it.

I growled, “All right,” and cleared my throat. Watching his fingers work so feverishly over the radio-sonar apparatus a thought struck me. I said: “One thing, anyway. When we get back to the Academy—if we ever do—I’ll be able to report to Coach Blighman that you finally qualified…at twenty thousand feet!”

He grinned briefly at me, and returned to the distress transmitter.

It was built to send an automatic SOS signal on distress frequency radio, and simultaneously on sonarphone. The sonarphone would reach any cruising subsea vessels within range—and precious short the range of a sonarphone was, of course. The radio component would transmit the same signal electronically. Of course, with most traffic under the surface of the sea these days, there would be few ships to receive it—but its range was thousands of miles, and somewhere there would be a ship, or a monitoring relay buoy retransmitting via sonarphone to a subsea vessel beneath, to hear—and to act.

I bent closer to see what he was doing.

He was disconnecting the automatic signal tape!

While I watched, he completed his connections and switched on the transmitter. He picked up a tiny microphone on a short cable and began to talk into it.

I stared at him as I heard what he said.

“Diatom to radiolarian, diatom to radiolarian.”

It didn’t mean anything! It was the same garbled gibberish he had mumbled before. I had taken it to be the half-delirium of a mind just waking up from a shock—yet now he was saying it into a transmitter, and it was going out by radio and sonarphone to—to whom?

“Diatom to radiolarian,” he said again, and again. “Diatom to radiolarian! The molluscans are ripe. Repeat, the molluscans are ripe!
Hurry, radiolarian!
”

I sank back, unbelieving, as the little emergency raft bobbed up and down, up and down in the swell.

Below us, our friends were fighting for their lives.

And up here on the surface, where we had fled—my friend Bob Eskow had gone mad as old Jason Craken himself.

But—appearances are deceiving.

I sat there on that wet, flimsy raft, staring at my friend. And finally I began to understand a few things.

Bob looked up at me, almost worriedly.

I said: “Hello, diatom.”

He hesitated for a second, and then grinned. “So you’ve guessed.”

“It took me long enough. But you’re right, I’ve guessed. At least I think I have.” I took a deep breath. “Diatom. That’s your code name, right? You are diatom. And radiolarian—I suppose that’s the code name for the Fleet? You’re what we call an undercover agent, Bob. You’re on a mission. All this time—you’ve been working for the Fleet itself. You came with us not for the fun of it, not to help me pay my family’s debt to the Crakens—but because the Fleet gave you orders. Am I right?”

He nodded silently. “Close enough,” he said after a moment.

It was hard to take in.

But—now that I had the key, things began to fall into place. All those mysterious absences of Bob’s back at the Academy—the hours, the afternoons, when he disappeared and didn’t tell me where he had gone, when I thought he had been practicing for the underwater tests—he had been reporting to Fleet. When he had hesitated before promising secrecy to David Craken—it had been because he had his duty to the Fleet, and couldn’t promise until David so worded it that it didn’t conflict.

And most important of all—when he had seemed to be deserting our friends down there beneath us, at the bottom of the Trench, it was because he had to come up here, to use the radio to report to the Fleet!

I said: “I think I owe you an apology, Bob. To tell the truth, I thought—”

He interrupted me. “It doesn’t matter what you thought, Jim. I’m only sorry I couldn’t tell you the truth before this. But my orders—”

It was my turn to interrupt. “Forget it! But—what happens next?”

He looked sober. “I hope we’re in time! ‘The molluscans are ripe’—that’s our SOS. It means the battle is going on, way down there at the bottom, Jim. The Fleet is supposed to be standing by, monitoring the radio for this signal. Then they’re supposed to come racing up and—”

His voice broke. He said in a different tone: “They’re supposed to come down, pick us up, and take over in the Trench. You see, the Fleet knew something was up here—but they couldn’t interfere, as long as there was no violence. But we’ve cut it pretty fine, Jim. Now that the violence has started—I only hope they get here before it’s too late!”

I started to say, “I wish we could—”

I stopped in the middle of the wish, and forgot what it was I was going to wish for.

Something fast and faintly glowing was brightening the swells beneath us. I pointed. “Look, Bob!”

It was a faint blue shimmer in the black water; it grew brighter, and shaped itself into the long hull of a sub-sea ship, strangely familiar, surfacing close to us.

“They’re here!” I cried. “Bob, they’re here!”

He stared at the gleaming hull, then at me.

He said dazedly, “I should have cut off the sonarphone. They heard me.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “You wanted the Fleet, didn’t you?”

I stopped then, because all at once I knew I was wrong—badly wrong, terribly wrong.

I knew then why that long hull, shimmering blue under the gentle wash of the waves, had seemed familiar. I hardly heard Bob saying:

“That’s not the Fleet. It’s the
Killer Whale!
They heard my message on the sonarphone!”

The amphibians had us aboard their sub-sea cruiser and hatches closed. I don’t think it took more than a minute. We were too startled, too shocked to put up much of a fight.

And there was no point to a fight, not any more. If there was any hope for us anywhere, it was as likely to be aboard the
Killer
as waiting hopelessly on the raft.

The
Killer
stank. The fetid air reeked with the strange, sharp odor of the gleaming plants of the Trench, the aroma I associated with the amphibians. The whole ship was drenched with fog and trickling, condensed moisture. Everything we touched was wet, and clammy, and dappled with rust and mold.

There must have been twenty amphibians aboard the
Killer.
They manhandled us down the gangways, with hardly a word. I don’t know if most of them spoke English or not; when they talked among themselves it was with such a slurring of the consonants and a singing of the vowels that I couldn’t understand them.

But they took us to Joe Trencher.

The pearl-eyed leader of the amphibians was in the conn room, captain of the ship. He was naked to the waist and he had rigged up a spray nozzle on a water coupling that kept him continually drenched with salt water.

He stood scowling at us while he sprayed his fishbelly skin. He looked like some monster from an old legend, but I didn’t miss the fact that he had conned the ship into a steep, circling dive as briskly as any Fleet officer.

“Why do you interfere against us?” he demanded.

I spoke for both of us. “The Crakens are our friends. And the Fleet has jurisdiction over the whole sea bottom.”

He scowled without speaking for a moment. He broke into a fit of coughing and wheezing under his spray.

“I’ve caught a cold,” he muttered accusingly, glowering at us. “I can’t stand this dry air!”

Bob said sharply: “It isn’t dry. In fact, you’re ruining this ship! Don’t you know this moisture will rot it out?”

Trencher said angrily: “It is my ship! Anyway—” he shrugged—”it will last long enough. Already we have defeated the Crakens and once they are gone we shall no longer need this ship.”

I took a deep breath. Defeated the Crakens! I asked: “Are they—are they—”

He finished for me. “Dead, you mean?” He shrugged again. “If they are not, it will be only a short time. They are defeated, do you hear me?” He hurled the spray nozzle away from him as though the mere thought of them had infuriated him. At least there was still some hope, I thought If they could only hold out a little longer…

Trencher was wheezing: “Explain! We saw you flee to the surface, and we heard your message. But I do not understand it! Who is diatom? Who is radiolarian? What do you mean about the molluscans?”

Bob glanced at me, then moved a step toward him.

“I am diatom,” he said. “Radiolarian is my superior officer, Trencher—a commander of the Sub-Sea Fleet! As diatom, I was on a special mission—concerning the Tonga pearls and you and your people. I needed information, and I got it; and my message will bring the whole Fleet here, if necessary, to put down any resistance and take over this entire area!” He sounded absolutely self-assured, absolutely confident. I hardly recognized him!

He went on, with a poise that an admiral might envy: “This is your last chance, Trencher. I advise you to give up. I’m willing to accept your surrender now!”

It was a brave attempt.

But the amphibian leader had courage of his own. For a moment he was shaken; he stood there, blinking and wheezing, with a doubt in his eye. But then he exploded into raucous, gasping laughter. He caught up his spray again and wet himself down, still laughing.

“Ridiculous,” he hissed, wheezing. “You are fantastic, young man. I have you here aboard my ship, and you live only as long as I wish to let you live. And you ask me to surrender!”

Bob said quickly: “It’s your only chance. I—”

“Silence!” Trencher bellowed. He stood there, panting and scowling for a moment, while he made up his mind. “Enough. Perhaps you are a spy—I don’t know. But I heard your message, and I did not hear a reply. Did it reach the Fleet? I think not, my young air-breather. And you will not have another chance, for we are now diving toward the Trench.”

He played the spray nozzle on his face, staring at us through the tiny slits that half-covered his pearly eyes. “You will not see the sky again, young man. I cannot let you live.”

Joe Trencher shrugged and spread his webbed fingers in a gesture that disclaimed responsibility. It was a sentence of death, and both Bob and I knew it.

Yet—even in that moment, I saw something in the amphibian’s cold, pearly eyes that’might almost have been sadness—compassion—regret.

He said heavily: “It is not that I wish to destroy you. It is only that you have left us no choice. We must keep the secret of the Tonga Trench to ourselves, and you wish to tell it to the world. We cannot allow that! We must keep you in the Trench. It is too bad that you cannot breathe salt water—but it is your misfortune, not ours, that this air will not last forever.”

I was sweating, even in the cold and damp, but I tried to reason with him. “You can’t keep your secret, Trencher. The exploration of the sea is moving too fast. If we don’t come back, other men will be here to find the saurians and the shining weed and the Tonga pearls.”

“They may come.” He nodded heavily. “But we can’t let them go back to the surface.”

I demanded: “Why?”

“Because we are different, air-breather!” Trencher blinked, like a sad-faced idol in some queer temple, with Tonga pearls for eyes. “We learned our lesson many generations ago! We are mutations, as Jason Craken calls us—but once we were human. Our ancestors lived on the islands. And when some of us tried to go back, the islanders tried to kill us! They drove us into the sea. We found the Trench—and it is a kind world for us, young man, a world where we can live at peace.

“At peace—as long as we are left alone!”

He was wheezing and panting and struggling for breath—and it seemed to me that part of his distress was in his feelings and his mind. He sounded earnest and tragic. Even though he was saying that, in cold blood, he was going to take our lives—I couldn’t help thinking that I almost understood how he felt.