The question made him look very grave.
He turned away from me, fussing with his brushes and cans of paint. Then he nodded toward the office door.
“Come inside, Jim,” he said heavily. “Tell me what you know about that.”
The offices of Eden Enterprises, Unlimited, consisted of two small bare rooms.
They had been freshly painted, in the same sea-green that was smudged on Gideon’s black face; but the paint was the only thing about them that was fresh. The furni ture was a ramshackle desk and a couple of broken chairs—left by the previous tenants, I guessed, not worth the trouble to haul away. There was only one new item: a heavy steel safe. And on it the name of the firm, Eden Enterprises, Unlimited, had been painted by a hand more professional than Gideon’s.
Gideon sat down and gestured me to the other chair; he listened while I told him about Father Tide’s visit. He said at last: “It’s true that we had a little accident. But we didn’t want the world to know about it. Your uncle minds his own business.”
He leaned forward and scrubbed at a spot of paint on the floor.
“Naturally Father Tide found out about it!” he said abruptly, grinning with obvious admiration. “That man, Jim, he’s always there! Whenever there’s trouble, you’ll find Father Tide—armored in his faith, and in the very best edenite.”
Then he turned grave again. “But he worries me some times, Jim. You say he told you that someone had been causing artificial seaquakes?”
I nodded.
“And he thought that that someone might be your uncle?”
“That’s right, Gideon.”
He shook his head slowly.
“But it can’t be true, Gideon!” I burst out. “Uncle Stewart simply isn’t capable of that sort of thing!”
“Of course not, Jim! But still—”
He got up and began pacing around.
“Jim,” he said, “your uncle isn’t well. We were caught in that quake, all right, back in the Indian Ocean. The sea-car was damaged too badly to fix. We abandoned it. But we spent sixty hours in our survival gear, Jim, before a sub-sea freighter picked up our sonar distress signals. Sixty hours! Even a boy like yourself would take a little time to get over something like that—and your uncle isn’t a boy any more. He hadn’t really recovered.
“But he’s here, in Krakatoa Dome. I left him resting this morning, back at our hotel.”
“I want to see him, Gideon!”
“Of course you do, Jim,” he said warmly. “And you shall. But wait until he comes in.”
He sat down again, frowning worriedly at the freshly painted wall.
“You know your uncle,” he said. “He has spent all of his long life taming the sea. I don’t have to tell you that. He invented edenite—oh, that, and a hundred other things, too; he’s a very great inventor, Jim. And not just a laboratory man. He has climbed the sea-mounts and explored the deeps. He has staked out mining claims on the floor of the sea, and launched floating sea-farms at the surface. And always, no matter what, he has helped others. Why, I can’t count the thousands of sea-prospectors he’s grubstaked! Or the men who came to him with a new invention, or a wild story they wanted to track down—thousands, Jim! There’s no limit to his interest in the sea.”
I couldn’t help glancing at the shabby furniture.
Gideon said quickly: “Oh, I know that your uncle has been in shoal waters lately. Maybe he has been a little too generous. All I know is that he has been paying out a little more than he has been taking in—for a long time, Jim.”
I said quickly: “But what about last night? Didn’t you handle the stock speculations for him? And weren’t there millions of dollars—”
I broke off. Gideon was looking somberly at the floor.
“Your uncle will have to answer that for himself, Jim,” he said in a muffled voice.
I changed the subject.
I knew my uncle; what Gideon said was true. My uncle was always a dreamer. Sometimes the magnificent sweep of his dreams got beyond the dictates of his practical judgment.
“I suppose Uncle Stewart has made mistakes,” I conceded. “I remember, Gideon, one of my instructors back at the Sub-Sea Academy. He used to say that Stewart Eden wasn’t even a scientist—in spite of the fact that he invented edenite! He said that a scientist wouldn’t have done it. A scientist would have known Newton’s Law—that every force had to be balanced by an equal and opposite force—and wouldn’t have bothered with any such crazy scheme as edenite, which doesn’t seem to obey (hat law! I think the instructor was annoyed about the whole thing, because Uncle Stewart was fool enough to go ahead and try it. But it works.”
“It works,” Gideon agreed. “But your uncle has backed a lot of things that haven’t worked.”
“What is he backing now?”
Gideon shook his head. “You know, Jim,” he said softly, “I’d tell you if I could.”
He shrugged. “You know how your uncle carries on his business. He keeps his books in his head. He never wants a signed agreement when he finances a man—a handshake is enough for Stewart Eden; he says that if a man’s honest, a handshake is enough. And if he isn’t honest—why, all the sea-lawyers in the deeps won’t be enough to make a thief turn honest! There are plenty of things your uncle doesn’t tell me, Jim. Not because he’s ashamed of them. But because that’s the way he has always lived.
“And the things that he does tell me—why, Jim, you know he wouldn’t want me repeating them. Not even to you.”
I apologized. There was no way out of it, for Gideon was right. My uncle had given Gideon his trust, and it wasn’t up to me to try to make him break it.
But all the time I was thinking, and not happily.
I was thinking about the promise I had made to Lt Tsuya—the promise that had resulted in his giving me this pass.
What it meant, in a word, was that I had promised to be a spy!
It hadn’t occured to me that it would be my Uncle Stewart that I was spying on, as well as my closest friend, Bob Eskow—but there were the facts.
“Jim, boy!” boomed a voice from behind me.
I turned.
The door was opening—and in came my uncle, Stewart Eden!
10
The Sea-Pulp Parcel
For a second I couldn’t say anything.
The change in my uncle stunned me. His broad shoulders were bent. He had lost weight. His skin had an unhealthy yellow color. His walk was an uncertain shuffle. His blue eyes were dull, and they blinked at me as though he hardly recognized me.
“Uncle Stewart!” I cried.
He gripped my hand with a kind of desperate strength. Then he turned unsteadily to the chair behind his forsaken derelict of a desk and weakly sat down.
He blew his nose and wiped his eyes. “Is something wrong, Jim?” he demanded anxiously. “I thought you were up in Bermuda.”
“I was, Uncle Stewart. We came down here to take a special training course.” I left it at that; security did not allow me to say more. But I had the uneasy feeling that my uncle knew without being told. I said quickly: “How are you Uncle Stewart?”
He sat up abruptly. “I’m better than I look, boy!” he boomed. “I’ve been through rough water. You can see that. But that’s all behind me now!”
I took a deep breath.
“So I’ve heard, Uncle Stewart,” I said. “In fact, I hear you made a million dollars out of the seaquake last night.”
Stewart Eden looked at me for a moment. His eyes were blank; I could not read what he was thinking.
Then he sighed.
“Yes, perhaps I did,” he said, almost indifferently. “There was a profit, and a big one. But I’m not solvent yet, Jim.”