He grinned. “These subsea vessels,” he said, “they aren’t just piles of machinery. They live! This one looks like it’s fit for the junkyard and nothing else—but it’s still running, and as long as she’s running, I’ll take my chances in her!”
“That’s good enough for me!” David said promptly.
“I’ll go along with that,” I told them. “How about Laddy and Bob?” “They’re belowdecks already,” Gideon said. “Trying to get the engines turning over. Hear that?”
We all listened.
No, we didn’t hear anything—at least I didn’t. But I could feel something. Down in the soles of my feet, where they touched the rounded upper hump of the Dolphin’s armor, I could feel a faint, low vibration.
The ship was alive! That vibration was the old engines, turning over at last!
Gideon said, “That’s it, Jim. We can push off as soon as they’ll open the sea-gates for us.” He turned to Roger Fairfane. “You’re the only one who hasn’t expressed himself. What about it? You want to come along—or do you think it’s too dangerous?”
Roger scowled nervously. “I—I—” he began.
Then he grinned. “I’m coming!” he told us. “Not only that—but remember our ranks! I’m the senior cadet officer of the whole lot of us—and Gideon and David aren’t even cadets, much less officers. So I’m the captain, remember!”
The captain nearly had a mutiny on his hands in the first five minutes.
But Gideon calmed us down.
“What’s the difference?” he asked us, in his soft, serious voice. “Let him be captain. We’ve got to have one, don’t we? And we’re all pulling together…”
“I don’t know if he is,” grumbled Bob. We were in the old wardroom, stowing our navigation charts away, waiting for the Fleet officer to give us clearance to go through the shiplocks into the open sea. “But—I guess you’re right. He’s the captain, if he wants it that way. I don’t care…”
There was a rattle and blare from abovedecks. We leaped out of the wardroom to listen.
“Ahoy, vessel Dolphin!” a voice came roaring through the loudhailers of the Fleet office. “You are cleared for Lock Baker. Good voyage!”
“Thank you!” cried Roger Fairfane’s voice, through the loudspeakers from the bridge. We heard the rattle of the warning system, and the creaking, moaning sound of the engines dogging down the hatch.
We all ran to our stations—doublemanning them for this first venture into the depths.
My station was at the bridge, by Roger Fairfane’s side. He signaled to Laddy Angel and Bob Eskow, down at the engines, for dead slow speed ahead.
Inch by inch, on the microsonar charts before us, we saw the little green pip that marked the Dolphin crawl in to Lock Baker.
We stopped engines as the nose of the ship nuzzled into the cradle of rope bumpers.
The lock gates closed behind us.
The Dolphin pitched sharply and rolled as high-pressure sea water jetted into the lock from the deep sea outside.
I could hear the whine of the edenite field generator rise a whole octave as it took the force of all that enormous pressure and turned it back upon itself, guarding us against the frightful squeeze.
The hull of the old ship sparkled and coruscated with green fire as the pressure hit it.
The lock door opened before us.
Roger Fairfane rang Dead Slow Ahead on the engine telegraph.
And our ship moved out into the punishing sea.
I suppose it was luck that kept us alive.
Gideon came pounding up from the engine room. “Set course for the surface!” he cried. “She’s an old ship, Roger, and the edenite field isn’t what it should be.
Bring her up boy, bring her up! She’s taking water!” Roger flushed and seemed about to challenge Gideon—after all, Roger was the captain! But there was no arguing with the pressure of the deeps. He flipped the fore and aft diving fanes into full climb, rang Flank Speed on the telegraph.
The old Dolphin twisted and surged ahead.
I raced down the companionways with Gideon to check the leaks.
They weren’t too bad—but any leak is bad, when two miles of water lie over your head. There was just a feather of spray, leaping out where two plates joined and the edenite field didn’t quite fill the gap between. “I can fix them, Jim,” Gideon said, half to himself. “We’ll cruise on the surface, and I’ll strip down the edenite generator and the hull will hold—Only let’s get up topside now!”
It was two miles to go.
But the old Dolphin made it.
We porpoised to the surface—bad seamanship, that was, but we were in a hurry. And then we set course, south by east, for the long, long swing around the Cape into the South Pacific. On the surface we couldn’t make our full rated speed—unlike the old submarines, underwater; the Dolphin was designed to stay its plump, stubby silhouette was for underwater performance, and cruising on the surface was actually harder for it. But we could make pretty good time all the same.
And Gideon set to work at once to strip down the old generators. We could get by with the steel plates that underlay the edenite field—as long as we stayed on the surface. And once Gideon had finished his job, we could get back into the deeps where we belonged. There we would churn off the long miles to Tonga Deep. It was halfway around the world, and a bit more—for the long detour around South America added thousands of miles to our trip. At forty knots—and Gideon promised us forty knots—we would be over Tonga Trench in just about two weeks.
David Craken and I checked our position with a solar fix and laid out our course on the navigator’s charts. “Two weeks,” I said, and he nodded. “Two weeks.” He stared bleakly into space. “I only hope we’re in time—”
“Craken! Eden!”
Roger’s voice came, shrill with excitement, from the bridge. We jumped out of the navigator’s cubbyhole to join him.
“Look at that!” he commanded, pointing to the micro-sonar. “What do you make of it?”
I stared at the screen. There was a tiny blob of light—behind us and well below. At least a hundred fathoms down.
I tried to get a closer scan by narrowing the field. It made the tiny blob a shade brighter, a fraction clearer…
“There it is!” cried Roger Fairfane, and there was an edge of panic in his voice now.
I couldn’t blame him.
For the image in the microsonar was, for a split second, clear and bright.
Then it became a blob again and dwindled; but in that moment I had seen a strange silhouette. A ship?
Maybe. But if it was a ship, it was a queer one. A fantastic one—for it had a strange conning tower, shaped like a great triangular head, on a long, twisting neck!
I turned to David Craken, a question on my lips.
I didn’t have to ask it.
His face was pale as he nodded. “That’s right, Jim,” he said. “It’s a saurian. A—sea serpent. And it’s on our trail.”
13
The Followers of the Deeps
It dogged us endlessly—for hour after unending hour, day after day.
By and by we became used to it, and we could even joke; but it was a joke with a current of worry running close beneath. For there was no doubt that the saurian that followed was in some way closely related to Joe Trencher—to the Killer Whale—and to the amphibian revolt against David Craken’s father.