We crossed the Equator—and had a little ceremony, like the sailing men of old, initiating the lubbers into the mysteries of Davy Jones. But there was only one lubber among us. Gideon and David Craken had crossed the Equator many times beyond counting—Laddy Angel’s home, after all, was in Peru—and even Bob and I had made the long trip to Marinia one time before.
Roger was our lubber—and, surprisingly, he took the nonsense initiation in good part. Drenched with a ship’s bucket of icy salt water from the pressure lock (for we were running submerged once more, the edenite film glistening quietly on our plates), choking with laughter, he cried: “Have your fun, boys! Once this is over, I’ll be the captain again—and I have a long memory!”
But it was a joke, not a threat—and I found myself liking Roger Fairfane for almost the first time since we had met.
But once the initiation was over, and he had come out of his cabin in dry clothes, he was withdrawn and reserved again.
We put in at a little port on the bulge of Brazil for the stores we had been unable to load in Sargasso Dome. There was money to spare for everything we needed—for everything but one thing. Gideon went ashore and stayed for hours, and came back looking drawn and worried. “Nothing doing,” he reported. “I tried, Jim, believe me I tried. I even went down to the dives along the waterfront and tried to make a contact. But there’s no armament to be had. We’ve got a fighting ship, but we’ve nothing to fight with. And there’s no chance now that we’ll get guns for it.”
David Craken listened and nodded soberly. “It’s all right,” he told us. “I knew we’d have trouble getting guns—the Fleet doesn’t sell its vessels with armaments, and they make it pretty hard for anyone to get them. But my father—he has weapons, in his dome. If we can get there—”
He left it unfinished.
We drove along through waters that began to show the traces of the melted glaciers of Antarctica. A fraction denser, a part of a degree cooler, a few parts less per million of salt—we were nearing the tip of the South American continent.
We slipped through the Straits one dark night, running submerged, feeling our way by sonar and by chart. It was a tricky passage—but there was a Fleet base on Terra del Fuego, and we wanted to avoid attention.
Once we were in the Pacific all of us, by common impulse, leaped for the microsonar to see if our implacable follower had navigated the Straits right after us.
It had.
The tiny blob that sometimes drew close enough to show a three-cornered head and a ropy neck—it was still following, still there.
It was still there as we breasted the Peru Current and struck out into the Pacific itself.
Laddy Angel looked at the sounding instruments with a wry expression. “Cold and fast—it is the Peru Current. Odd, but it causes me to feel almost homesick!”
Roger Fairfane, off duty but lounging around the bridge laughed sharply. “Homesick? For a current in the ocean?”
Laddy drew up his eyebrows. “Ah, you laugh, my captain. But trust me, the Peru Current is indeed Peru. Some years it fails—it is a fickle current, and perhaps it wanders out to sea for a few months, to try if it likes the deep sea better than the land. Those years are bad years for my country. For the Current brings food; the food brings little creatures for the sea-birds to feed upon; the sea-birds make guano and themselves make food for bigger fish. And on these things my country must depend.” He nodded soberly. “Laugh at a current in the ocean if you wish to, but to my country it is life.”
The Dolphin pounded on. Past the longitude of the Galapagos, past strange old Easter Island. We stayed clear of land; actually we were not close to anything but the sea bottom, but each time we passed the longitude of an island or island group, David Craken marked it off with his neat pencil tick, and checked the calendar, and sighed. Time was passing.
And the saurian hung on behind.
Sometimes it seemed as though there were two of them. Sometimes the little blob behind us seemed to be joined by another, smaller. I asked David: “Can it be two sea serpents? Do they travel in pairs?”
He shrugged, but there was an expression of worry in his eyes. “They travel sometimes in huge herds, Jim. But that other thing—I don’t think it is a saurian.”
“What then?”
He shook his head. “If it is what I think,” he said soberly, “we’ll find out soon enough. If not, there is no point in worrying.”
Gideon, head deep in the complex entrails of the old fire-control monitor, looked up from his job of repair. It was a low-priority job, because we had no armament to fire; but Gideon had made it his business to get everything in readiness for the moment when we might reach Jason Craken’s sub-sea dome. If we could ship arms there, we would have the fire-control monitor in working shape to handle them. He had checked everything—from the escape capsule in the keelson to the microsonars at the bridge.
He said softly: “David. We’ve less than a thousand miles to go. Don’t you think it’s time you took us all the way into your confidence?”
“About what?”
“Why, David, about those saurians, as you call them. Jim says you’ve told him something about them, but I must say there are things I don’t understand.”
David hesitated. He had the conn, but there was in truth little for him to do. The Dolphin was cruising at 5500 feet on the robot pilot—the proper level for west-bound traffic in that part of the Pacific. The indicators showed that the edenite pressure system was working perfectly; there was no water sloshing about the bilge, no warning blare of horns to show a hull failure, or fission products leaking from the old engines. We were cruising fast and dry.
David glanced at the microsonar, where the tiny, remorseless pip hung on behind.
Then he took a folded chart from his locker and spread it before us.
All of us gathered around—Gideon and Bob and Laddy and Roger and I. The chart was marked Tonga Trench—a standard Fleet survey chart, but with many details penciled in where the Fleet’s survey ships had left white banks. There was the long, bare furrow of the Trench itself—more than a thousand miles, end to end.
And someone—David or his father, I supposed—had penciled in a cluster of sea-mounts and chasms, with current arrows and soundings.
David placed his finger on one of the sea-mounts.
“There,” he said. “There’s something that many men would give a million dollars to know. That’s where the Tonga pearls come from.”
I heard Roger make a strange, excited gasping sound beside me.
“And there,” David went on, “is the birthplace of the saurians. Great sea reptiles! My father says they are the descendants of the creatures that ruled the seas a hundred million years ago and more. Plesiosaurs, he says. They disappeared from the face of the deep, millions and millions of years before Man came along.
“But not all of them. Down in the Tonga Trench, some of them lived on.”
He folded the chart again jealously, as though he was afraid we would memorize it. “They attacked my father’s sea-car, forty years ago, when he first tried to dive into the Tonga Trench. He beat them off and got away with the first Tonga pearls that ever saw the light of day—but he never forgot them. Since then, he’s been studying them. Trying to domesticate them, even—with the help of the amphibians, partly, and partly by raising some of them from captured eggs. But they aren’t very intelligent, really, and they are very hard to train.
“You’ve heard the old mariners’ stories about sea-serpents? My father says these saurians are behind the stories. Once or twice a century, he says, a young male would be driven out of the herds, and roam about the world, looking for mates. They avoid the surfaces most of the time—the lack of pressure is painful to them—but a few of them have been seen. And they have never been forgotten. Big as whales, scaled, with long necks. They swim with enormous paddle-limbs. They must have terrified the windjammers—they were bigger than some of the ships!”