I nodded.
“Now you see,” I told them. “The watchmen’s been turned off—somehow. It isn’t working. Wires cut, I suppose.”
Roger looked at me worriedly.
“So—so those motors we thought we heard down below—”
I nodded. “It wasn’t imagination,” I said. “They were real. They disconnected the watchman and came in. And every word we said, they overheard.”
9
Sargasso Dome
Eastward and down. Our destination was Sargasso City.
Neither Bob nor Roger Fairfane could get a pass; it was up to David and me to go to Sargasso City and look over the Killer Whale. We argued for a long time whether it was safe for David to come along—if a cadet should see him and recognize him, there would be questions asked! But it seemed that there should be two of us, and that left us no choice.
We booked passage from Hamilton on the regular sub-sea shuttle to Sargasso City, a hundred and fifty miles east of Bermuda and more than two miles straight down. In the short time before our subsea ship left I found a phone booth and placed a long-distance call to my uncle Stewart in far-off Thetis Dome.
There was no answer.
I told the operator: “Please, it’s very important. Can you keep trying?”
“Certainly, sir!” She was all professional competence. “Give me your number, please. I’ll call you back.”
I thought rapidly. That was impossible, of course—I wouldn’t be there for more than a few more minutes. Yet I didn’t want to have my uncle phone me at the Academy, since there was the chance that someone might overhear. I said: “Keep trying, operator. I’ll call you from Sargasso Dome in—” I glanced at my watch—“about two hours.”
David was gesticulating frantically from outside the booth. I hung up and the two of us raced down the long gloomy shed that was the Pan-Carib Line’s dock. We just reached the ship as the gangways were about to come down.
I couldn’t help feeling a little worried for no good reason—naturally, my uncle had plenty to do with his time! There was nothing much to worry about if he wasn’t at home at any particular moment. Still, it was halfway around the world and rather late at night in Thetis Dome; I felt a nagging doubt in the back of my mind that everything was well with him…
But the joy of cruising the deeps again put it out of my mind in a matter of moments.
We slid away from Hamilton port on the surface. As soon as we were safely past the shallows of the shelf we dived cleanly beneath the waves and leveled on course for Sargasso Dome.
The little shuttle vessel was a midget beside the giant Pacific liners in which I had traveled to Thetis Dome long before, but it was two hundred feet long for all of that. Because it was small, discipline was free and easy, and David and I were able to roam the crew spaces and the enginerooms without much trouble. It made the time pass quickly. At seventy knots the entire voyage took a little less than two hours; the time was gone before we knew it.
We disembarked at Sargasso City through edenite coupler tubes and immediately looked for a phone booth.
I poured coins into it, and got the same operator once more by dialing her code number.
There was still no answer.
I left the call in, and David and I asked directions to the Fleet basin where the surplus ships lay idle, waiting to be sold at public auction.
The Killer Whale lay side by side with the old Dolphin in the graving docks at the bottom of Sargasso Dome.
Neither was particularly big—they’d both been small enough to fit in the ship lock that let them into the city from the cold deeps outside. But the Dolphin seemed like a skiff next to the Killer Whale. We didn’t waste time looking at her; we quickly boarded the Killer through the main hatch and examined her from stem to stern.
David looked up at me, his eyes glistening. “She’s a beauty,” he whispered.
I nodded. The Killer Whale was one of the last Class-K subsea cruisers built. There was nothing wrong with her, nothing at all, except that in the past ten years there had been so many improvements in subsea weapons—requiring different mounts, different design from stem to stern—that the Fleet had condemned every vessel more than a decade old. The process of conversion was nearly complete, and only a few old-timers like the Dolphin and the Killer Whale still remained to be replaced.
There were crew quarters for sixteen men. “We’ll rattle around in her,” I told David. “But we can handle her. One of us on the engines and one at the controls; we can split up and take twelve-hour shifts. She’ll run like a dream, you’ll see.”
He put his hand on the master’s wheel as though he were touching a holy object. “She’s a beauty,” he said again. “Well, let’s go up and see about putting in a bid.”
That took a little bit of the spell off the moment for both of us. Putting in a bid—but what did we have to bid with? Unless my uncle Stewart could help—and he was very far from being a rich man—we couldn’t raise the price of the little escape capsule the Whale carried in her bilges, much less the cost of the whole cruiser.
In the office of the lieutenant-commander in charge of disposing of the two vessels we were informed that the rock-bottom bid that would be accepted was fifty thousand dollars. The officer looked us over and grinned. “Pretty expensive to buy out of your allowances, boys,” he said. “Why don’t you settle for something a little smaller—say, a toy sailboat?”
For the first time in my life I regretted wearing the dress scarlet uniform of an Academy cadet—in civilian clothes, I would have felt a lot freer to tell him what I thought! David stepped in front of me to avert the explosion.
“How do we go about putting in a bid?” he asked.
The officer lost a little of his amused look. “Why,” the said, “if you’re serious about this, all you have to do is take one of these application forms and fill it in. Put down your name and address and the amount you’re prepared to bid. You’ll have to post a bond of one-third of the amount you’re bidding before the bids are opened, otherwise your bid won’t even be considered. That’s all there is to it.”
“May I have a form for the Killer Whale then, sir?”
The lieutenant commander looked at him, then shrugged. “Killer, eh?” he said, scrabbling through the pile of forms on his desk. “You’re smart there, anyway. The Dolphin’s nothing but a heap of rust. I ought to know—I served in her myself, as an ensign. But what in the world do you want a cruiser for, young man—even if you had the money to pay for it?”
David coughed. “I—I want it for my father,” he said, and quickly took the forms from the officer’s hand.
We retired to the outer office, clutching the forms. It was a big, public room, full of people, some of whom looked at us curiously. We found a corner where we could go over the papers.
I looked over David’s shoulder. The forms were headed Application for Purchase of Surplus Subsea Vessel, and on the first page was a space where the names of the Killer Whale and the Dolphin had been filled in for us. David promptly put a big check mark next to the Killer Whale. He filled in my name and address and hesitated over the space marked: Amount offered.
I stopped him.
“Hold on a second,” I said. “Let me try calling my uncle again. There’s phone booth right across the room.”