It was touch and go. The noise grew from merely deafening to utterly overpowering as the tortured drill elements began to lose some of their cutting power and beat raggedly against the naked rock. What lights we had were so few and faint that each of us was only a shadow; I turned to speak to Bob, and found that it was Lt. Tsuya beside me; Gideon’s face and Harley Danthorpe’s were indistinguishable in the gloom. The heat grew and beat on us as Gideon, desperate at last, cut the air-conditioning units out of circulation to conserve power for the drills and the armor.
Minutes passed.
Our instruments showed that we should by now be at the very brink of Station K, almost where the MOLE had erupted hours before. But the instruments were liars; one set contradicted another. Only the inertial-guidance deadreckoner could be trusted at all, and the power to drive it was growing weaker and weaker, and thus its accuracy dwindled—
And then the drill elements screeched and spun freely in the nose.
“We’re out of rock!” shouted Gideon joyfully, and each one of us yelled in plain relief. Out of the rock! Then our mission was accomplished! We were—
We were far too quick! For abruptly there was a sudden shattering clink of metal. Gideon’s face tightened; his eyes turned dark and worried.
“Our armor,” he said briefly. “It’s cracked.” He glanced at the instruments.
Then he turned and faced us.
“We’ve come out into water,” he said tonelessly. “The thermal shock has cracked the armor. The water is cold, and the armor was plenty hot.” He hesitated. “But that’s not the worst,” he said.
“The instruments are right. We’re exactly where we aimed.
“We’re in Station K—and Station K is flooded.”
We stared at each other for a second—but there wasn’t time to think about what that meant. Station K flooded!
My uncle—Dr. Koyetsu—what had become of them? If the station was gone—why, then, perhaps the whole dome was gone! Perhaps all of our efforts were in vain; the dome shaken open and crushed flat…
But there wasn’t time. No, not a single second.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” rasped Lt. Tsuya urgently. “If our armor’s gone—”
He didn’t have to finish.
If our armor was gone, we were naked to the might of the sea. For a time the edenite force-film would hold; but it depended on a carefully designed metal hull beneath it; without that smooth and precision-engineered metal capsule on which to cling, the film of force could not be maintained forever—might go at any second!
And the instant it went—
Three miles of water would stamp us out like insects under a maul.
“Give me a hand!” demanded Gideon urgently. “We’ve got to find an airbubble somewhere in the rock—heaven knows where! But if the dome is gone—”
And there too, he didn’t have to finish. For MOLE was too heavy, too worn, Jo become a sea-car again; it would never float, not with what feeble thrust remained in its engines. We could only bore blindly through whatever solid mass we could still penetrate, hoping to find air somewhere. It was the tiniest of hopes. But it was all we had.
And, in a matter of minutes, even that was denied us.
For the old MOLE had suffered one shock too many.
The heat made us dizzy and weak; the screaming, pounding thunder of the drills, unbalanced and wild, was plain torture to our ears. We couldn’t manage the stubby emergency levers, not with what strength we had left.
Lt. Tsuya was the first to go. I saw him slip, stagger and fall spread-armed to the floor; and for a moment I wondered dizzily what he was doing.
And then I realized—the heat; the air that was now choked with our own exhaled breath, heavy with the chemical reeks of the damaged machinery. He had passed out. It was simply beyond human strength to take more.
Harley Danthorpe fell away from his post at the emergency levers. I staggered dizzily toward them, tripped over something, paused foolishly to look—and wondered what Bob Eskow was doing, sound asleep on the deck. “Get up, Bob!” I cried impatiently. “What’s the matter with you?”
And then I heard Gideon’s voice. “Jim!” he called, agonized. “Come help me—I can’t hold it…
His voice trailed off.
I lurched toward him, each step harder than the one before. The MOLE did a looping turn, and abruptly I was on the deck myself. Was it the MOLE that had turned, or I? I didn’t know…
But it didn’t matter.
I was outstretched on the hot, hard metal deck. I knew it was important for me to get up—to do something—to control the ship in its wild, undirected flight…
But strength was not there. The last of the lights went out. I was unconscious.
20
Father Tide’s Foundlings
A small-sized Santa Claus in clerical black was saying urgently: “Jim! Jim, boy. Here, take a bit of this for me.”
And something acrid and burning was being forced into my mouth.
I sat up, gasping and choking, and looked into the dear, sea-blue eyes of Father Tide.
“Wha—What—”
“Don’t try to talk, boy,” Father Tide said comfortably, in his clear, warm voice. His face was smiling, the seacoral cheeks creased with lines of good humor. “You’re all right, Jim. You’re in my sea-car. We’re on our way back to Krakatoa!”
“Krakatoa?” And then it all came flooding back to me. “But Krakatoa is flooded out, Father Tide! We’ve been there. Water in the quake station, no sign of life!”
He frowned worriedly. But at last he said: “We’ll go back, Jim. Perhaps there may be survivors…” But he could not meet my eye.
I stood up. I was in the forward compartment of a sea-car, Father Tide’s own sea-car, there was no doubt of that. For every inch of hull wall was lined with his seismological equipment; microseismographs, core samplers, sound-ranging apparatus, everything. This was the little ship in which Father Tide had roamed the world, studying the secret habits of the quake faults, gathering knowledge without which Dr. Koyetsu’s principles could never have been developed. I had heard much of this sea-car, and now I was in it.
And I was not alone!
Gideon Park bent over me, his broad black face gleaming with a smile like a sunburst. “Jim, you’re all right! We were worried. The rest of us came to an hour ago, but you’re a stubborn case, boy!”
“Rest of us?” I demanded.
Gideon nodded. “All of us,” he said solemnly. “Father Tide was cruising the area—we were just over the epicenter, you see—and he detected the vibrations of the MOLE. The steering mechanism had failed once and for all, but the ortholytic drills were still going—pointed straight up, churning the sea-bottom sludge, with all of us laid out flat inside it. But Father Tide got us out.” He nodded grimly. “He’s quite a man. This little sea-car was loaded gunnels-awash with equipment and refugees already. You should see the aft compartments! But that didn’t stop him. He took us aboard…”
Gideon turned away.
“So we’re safe, Jim,” he said. “But as for the others back in Krakatoa Dome—your uncle and Doctor Koyetsu, for two…”
He didn’t finish.
There wasn’t any need to finish.
But everything else was triumph! In our hearts we grieved for my uncle and the fine people of Krakatoa Dome; but if they had perished, at least we had the consolation of knowing that they would be the last, the secrets of the seismic forces that threatened destruction had been mastered, with Dr. Koyetsu’s technique the danger was gone. We worked like demons, all of us, in that little instrument-lined cabin—analyzing the readings Father Tide had made, converting his soundings into plotting measurements, drawing our graphs and charts. And—