Roger snapped. “Listen, Jim, there’s no problem here. David isn’t asking you to violate an oath—you haven’t even taken it! Why can’t you just go along and promise?”
David Craken held up his hand. “Wait a minute, Roger.” He turned to me again. “Suppose I ask you,” he said, “to promise to keep this conversation secret as long as it does not conflict with your duty to the Fleet. And to promise if you report anything I say, that you’ll talk it over with me beforehand.”
I thought it over, and that seemed reasonable enough. But before I could speak Bob Eskow stood up. His expression had cleared magically. “Speaking for myself,” he said, “that’s fine. Let’s shake on it all around!”
Solemnly we all clasped hands.
Roger demanded: “Now, where did you get the pearls?”
David grinned suddenly. He said: “Don’t be impatient. Do you know, Roger, I could tell you exactly where they came from. I could pinpoint the location of a subsea chart and give you an exact route to get there. And believe me, it would be useless to you. Worse than useless.” The grin vanished. “You see, Roger,” he went on, “you would never come back alive.”
He leaned back and looked into the flames. “My father is an expert benthologist. A scientist of the deeps. He made his reputation many years ago, before I was born, and under another name. As a benthologist, he went on many sub-sea exploring missions—and on one of them discovered the oyster beds that produce the Tonga pearls.” He paused, and, in a different tone, added: “I wish he never had. The pearls are—dangerous.”
Roger said aggressively: “You’re talking about those silly legends? Rot! Just superstition. There have been stories about gems being unlucky for thousands of years—but the only bad luck is not having them!”
David Craken shook his head. “The Tonga pearls have caused a lot of trouble,” he said. “Perhaps some of it was merely because they were so valuable and so—so lovely. But believe me, there is more to it than that. They caused the death of every man on that expedition except one, my father.”
Bob cut in: “Do you mean they killed each other for the pearls?”
“Oh, no! They were all good men—scientists, explorers, sub-sea experts. But the pearl beds are well guarded. That’s why no one else has ever got back from the Tonga beds to report their location.”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Guarded? Guarded by what?”
David looked at me, frowning doubtfully.
“Jim, you’ve got to remember that most of the ocean is still as strange as another planet. There’s three times as much of the ocean bottom as all the dry land on Earth put together. And it’s harder to explore. We can travel about, we can search with fathometers and microsonar—but what is the extreme range of our search? It’s like trying to map Bermuda from an airplane, during a thunderstorm. We can see patches, we can penetrate through the clouds with radar—but only big, broad outlines come through. There are things under the sea that—that you wouldn’t believe.”
I wanted to interrupt again, to ask him if he meant that terrible saurian head I had seen at the railing of the gym ship—or the mystery of his own disappearance and return—or the strange eyes of the being who called himself Joe Trencher. But something held me silent as he went on.
“The ship was lost,” David said. “My father got away in his diving gear, with the first batch of pearls. I think—I think he should properly have reported what happened to the expedition. But he didn’t.” He frowned, as though trying to apologize for his father. “You see, times were different then. The conquest of the sub-sea world was just beginning. There was no Sub-sea Fleet; piracy was common. He knew that he would lose his right of discovery—might even have lost his life—if the secret of the pearls got out.
“So—he didn’t report.
“He changed his name, to Jason Craken. The Kraken—spelled with a K—is the old name for the fabulous monsters of the deep. It was very appropriate, as you will see. He took the pearls he had managed to save, and sold them, a few at a time, very carefully, in ways that were not entirely legal. But he had no choice, you see.”
David sat up straighter, his eyes beginning to flash, his voice growing stronger. “Then—well, I told you he was an expert benthologist. He invented a new technique—a way of harvesting more pearls, without being killed. Believe me, it wasn’t easy. All these years he has been harvesting the Tonga pearl beds—”
“All alone!” cried Roger Fairfane. He pushed back his chair and leaped up, striding back and forth. “One man harvesting all the Tonga pearls! What an opportunity!”
David looked at him. “An opportunity—more than that, Roger,” he said. “For he was not quite alone. He had—well, call them employees—to protect him and help him harvest the pearls.”
Bob Eskow was standing up. “Wait a minute! I thought you said your uncle was the only man who knew the secret of the Tonga beds.”
David nodded. For a moment he was silent. Then he said:
“The employees were not men.”
“Not men! But—”
“Please, Bob. Let me tell this my way.” Bob shrugged and sat down; David went on. “My father built himself a home near the pearl beds—a sub-sea fort, really armored with edenite. He gathered a lot of pearls. They were fabulously valuable, and they were all his. He built a new identity for himself in the sub-sea cities so that he could sell the pearls. He made a lot of money.”
David’s eyes looked reminiscent and faintly sad. “While my mother was alive, we lived luxuriously. It was a wonderful, fantastic life, half in the undersea cities, half in our own secret dome. But—my mother died. And now everything has changed.”
His voice had a husky catch, and his thin face turned very white. I noticed that his hands were trembling just a little, but he went on.
“Everything has changed. My father is an old man now—and sick, besides. He can’t rule his—his employees the way he used to. His undersea empire is slipping out of his hands. The people he used to trust have turned against him. He has no one else. That’s why we must have help!”
Excitement was shining in Bob’s eyes and Roger’s, and I could feel my own pulse racing. A secret a hidden undersea empire! Tongafortress guarding pearls, glowing like moons in the dark! The challenge of unknown dangers under the sea! It was like a wonderful adventure story, and it was happening to us, here in this little apartment over the empty boathouse!
I said: “David, what kind of help do you need?”
He met my eyes squarely. “Fighting help, Jim! There is danger—my father’s life isn’t worth a scrap of Tonga oyster-shell unless I can bring him help. We need—” he hesitated before saying it—“we need a fighting ship, Jim. An armed subsea cruiser!”
That stopped us all.
We stared at him as though he were a lunatic. I said: “A cruiser? But—but, David, private citizens can’t use a Fleet cruiser! Why not just call on the Fleet? If it’s that serious—”
“No! My father doesn’t want the Fleet!”
We looked at him helplessly.
David grinned tightly. “I’m not crazy. He doesn’t want to give away the location of the pearl beds. He would lose everything he has. And besides—there are the—the creatures in that part of the sea. They would have to be killed if the Fleet comes in. And my father doesn’t want to kill them.”
“Creatures? What creatures?” I asked it, but I think I knew the answer before hand. For I could not forget the enormous scaled head I had seen over the rail of the gym ship.