I heard Bob Eskow whisper glumly to himself, beside me: “That’s me. That’s my luck!”
I started to say something to encourage him, but Blighman’s hungry eyes were roving toward our end of the formation; I took a brace.
He roared: “Listen—and keep alive! Some men can take pressure and some can not. We hope to separate you today, if there are any among you who can’t take it. If you can’t—watch for these warning signs. First, you may feel a severe headache. Second, you may see flashes of color. Third, you may have what the sea medics call ‘auditory hallucinations’—bells ringing below the sea, that sort of thing.
“If you get any of these signs, get back to the locks at once. We’ll haul you inside and the medics will pull you out of danger.
“But if you ignore these signals…”
He paused, with his cold eyes on Bob Eskow. Bob stood rigidly silent, but I could feel him tensing up.
“Remember,” the coach went on, without finishing his last sentence, “remember, most of you can find berths on the commercial lines if you fail the grade here. We don’t want any dead cadets.”
He looked at his watch.
“That’s about all. Captain Fairfane, dismiss your men!”
Cadet Captain Fairfane came front-and-center, barked out: “Break for breakfast! The ship dives in forty minutes, all crews will fall in for depth shots before putting on gear. Formation dis-MISSED!”
We ate standing and hurried up the ladder, Bob and I. Most of the others were still eating, but Bob and I weren’t that much interested in chow. For one thing, the Academy was testing experimental depth rations with a faintly bilgy taste; for another, we both wanted to see the sun rise over the open sea.
It was still a long way off; the stars were still bright overhead, though the horizon was all edged with color now. We stood almost alone on the long, dark deck. We walked to the side of the ship and held the rail with both hands. At the fantail a tender was unloading two fathometers to measure and check our dives from the deck of the sub-sea raft itself. A working crew was hoisting one of them onto the deck; both of them would be installed there and used, manned by upperclassmen in edenite pressure suits to provide a graphic, permanent record of our qualifications.
The tender chugged away and the working crew began to bolt down the first of the fathometers. Bob and I turned and looked forward, down at the inky water.
He said suddenly: “You’ll make it, Jim. You don’t need any depth shots!”
“So will you.”
He looked at me without speaking. Then he shook his head. “Thanks, Jim. I wish I believed you.” He stared out across the water, his brow wrinkled. It was an old, old story, his fight to conquer the effects of skin-diving. “The raptures of the depths. It’s a pretty name, Jim. But an ugly thing—” He stood up and grinned. “I’ll lick it. I’ve got to!”
I didn’t know what to say; fortunately, I didn’t have to say anything. Another cadet came across the deck toward us. He spoke to us and stood beside me, looking out at the black mirror of the water and the stars that shim-mered in it, colored by the rim of light around the sky. I didn’t recognize him; a first-year man, obviously, but not from our own crew.
“How strange to see,” he said, almost speaking to himself. “Is it always like this?”
Bob and I exchanged looks. A lubber, obviously—from some Indiana town, perhaps, getting his first real look at the sea. I said, a little condescendingly, “We’re used to it. Is this your first experience with deep water?”
“Deep water?” He looked at me with surprise. Then he shook his head. “It isn’t the water I’m talking about. It’s the sky. You can see so far! And the stars, and the sun coming up. Are there always so many stars?”
Bob said curtly, “Usually there are a lot more. Haven’t you ever seen stars before?”
The strange cadet shook his head. There was an odd hush of amazement in his voice. “Very seldom.”
We both stared. Bob muttered, “Who are you?”
“Craken,” he said. “David Craken.” His dark eyes turned to me. “I know you. You’re Jim Eden. Your uncle is Stewart Eden—the inventor of edenite.”
I nodded, a little embarrassed by the eager awe in his voice. I was proud of my uncle’s power-filmed edenite armor, that turns pressure back on itself so that men can reach the floors of the sea; but my uncle had taught me not to boast of it.
“My father used to know your uncle,” David Craken told me quickly. “A long time ago. When they were both trying to solve the problem of the pressure of the Deep—”
He broke off suddenly. I stared at him, a little angrily. Was he trying to tell me that my uncle had had someone else’s help in developing edenite? But it wasn’t so; Stewart would never have hesitated to say so if it were true, and he had never mentioned another man.
I waited for the stranger to explain; but there was no explanation from him, only a sudden, startled gasp.
“What’s the matter?” Bob Eskow demanded.
David Craken was staring out across the water. It was still smooth and as black as a pool of oil, touched with shimmers of color from the coming sun. But something had frightened him.
He pointed. I saw a faint swirl of light and a spreading patch of ripples, several hundred yards from the gym ship, out toward the open sea. Nothing more.
“What was that?” he gasped.
Bob Eskow chortled. “He saw something!” he told me. “I caught a glimpse of it myself—looked like a school of tuna. From the Bermuda Hatchery, I suppose.” He grinned at the other cadet. “What did you think it was, a sea serpent?”
David Craken looked at us without expression.
“Why, yes,” he said. “I thought it might be.”
The way he said it! It was as though it were perfectly possible that there really had been a sea-serpent there, coming up off the banks below the Bermuda shallows. He spoke as though sea-serpents were real and familiar; as one of us might have said, “Why, yes, I thought it might be a shark.”
Bob said harshly: “Cut out the kidding. You don’t mean that. Or—if you did, how did you get into the Academy?”
David Craken glanced at him, then away. For a long moment he leaned forward across the rail, staring toward the spreading ripples. The phosphorescence was gone, and now there was nothing more to see.
He turned to us and shrugged. He smiled faintly. “Perhaps it was a tuna school. I hope so.”
“I’m sure it was!” said Bob. “There aren’t any seaserpents at the Academy. That’s a silly superstition!”
David Craken said, after a moment, “I’m not superstitious, Bob. But believe me, there are things under the sea that—Well, things you might not believe.”
“Son,” Bob said sharply, “I don’t need to be told about the sub-sea Deeps by any lubber! I’ve been there—haven’t we, Jim?”
I nodded. Bob and I had been together through Thetis Dome in far, deep Marinia itself—the nation of underwater dome cities, lying deep beneath the dark Pacific, where both of us had fought and nearly lost against the Sperrys.
“The Sub-Sea Fleet has explored the oceans pretty thoroughly,” Bob went on. “They haven’t turned up any sea-serpents that I know of. Oh, there are strange things, I grant you—but man put those things there! There are tubeways running like subways under the ocean floor, and modern cities under the domes, and sub-sea prospectors roving over the ocean floor; and there aren’t any sea-serpents, because they would have been seen! It’s crazy superstition, and let me tell you, we don’t believe in these superstitions here at the Academy.”