I stared over his shoulder. The little pencil tick he had made showed us well over the slope of the Tonga Trench. There was thirty thousand feet of water from the surface to the muck at the bottom, and we were nearly halfway between. The long, crooked outline of the Tonga and Kermadec Trenches sprawled a thousand miles across the great chart on the bulkhead—went completely off the little chart David was using. We were over the cliffs at the brink of the great, strange furrow itself, heading steeply down.
I caught myself and glanced at the microsonar screen—just barely in time. “Missile! Take evasive action!”
Roger wrestled the conn wheel over and down; the old Dolphin went into a spiraling, descending turn.
Whump.
It was closer than before.
Roger panted something indistinguishable and grabbed the microphone again. “Bob! I’ve got to have more power!”
It was Gideon who answered this time. Even now, his voice was soft and gentle. “I’m afraid we don’t have any more power to give, Roger. The reactor’s overheating now.”
“But I’ve got to have more power!”
Gideon said softly: “There’s something leaking inside the shield. I guess the old conduits were pretty badly corroded—that last missile may have sprung them.” The gentle voice paused for a second. Then it went on: “We’ve been trying to keep it running, but you don’t repair Series K reactors, Roger. It’s hot now. Way past the red line. If it gets any hotter, we’ll have to dump it—or else abandon ship!”
For a while I thought we might make it.
At full power, the old Dolphin was eating up the last few miles to Jason Craken’s sea-mount and the dome. Even the Killer Whale, bigger and newer and faster though she was, gained on us only slowly. They held their fire for long minutes, while the little blob of light that was Craken’s dome took shape in the forward microsonar screen.
Then they opened fire again—a full salvo this time, six missiles opening up like the ribs of a fan as they came toward us.
Roger twisted the Dolphin’s tail, and we swung through violent evolutions.
Whump. Whumpwhump. Whumpwhumpwhump. But they were all short, all exploding astern. Roger grinned crazily. “Maybe we’ll make it! If we can hold out another ten minutes—”
“Missiles!” I cried, interrupting him. Another spreading salvo of bright little flecks leaped out from the pursuing shape in the microsonar screen.
Violent evasive action again…and once again they all exploded astern.
But closer this time, much closer.
They were using up their missies at a prodigious rate. Evidently Joe Trencher wanted to keep us from getting to that dome, at any cost!
The speaker from the engine room rattled and Bob’s voice cried: “Bridge! We’re going to have to cut power in three minutes! The reactor stops are all out. Repeat, we’re going to have to cut power in three minutes!”
“Keep her going as long as you can!” Roger yelled. He slammed the conn wheel hard over, diving us sharply once more. “All hands!” he yelled. “All hands into pressure suits! The next salvo is likely to zero in right on our heads. We’re bound to have hull leaks.” He shook his head and grinned. “They’ll fill us with water, but I’ll get us in, wet or dry!”
In that moment, I had to admire Roger Fairfane. He wasn’t the kind you could like very well—but the Academy doesn’t make many mistakes, and I should have known that if he was a cadet at all, he was bound to have the stuff somewhere.
He caught me looking at him and he must have read the expression on my face, for he grinned. Even in the rush of that moment of wild flight he said: “You never liked me, did you? I don’t blame you, Jim. There hasn’t been much to like! I—” He licked his lips. “I have to admit something, Jim.”
I said gruffly, “You don’t have to admit anything—”
“No, no. I do.” He kept his eyes on the microsonar, his hands on the conn wheel. He said quickly: “My father isn’t a big shot, Jim! He’s an accountant for Trident Lines, that’s all. They let me use the boathouse at the Atlantic Manager’s estate because they were sorry for him. But I’ve always dreamed that some day, somehow—”
He broke off. Then he said somberly: “If I can help open up another important route for Trident, down here to the Tonga Trench, it’ll be a big thing for my father!”
I shook my head silently. It was a funny thing. All these months Bob and I had made fun of Roger, had disliked him—and yet, underneath it all he was a fine, likeable youth!
We all struggled into our pressure suits, keeping the helmets cracked so we could maneuver better. Time enough to seal up when the crashing missiles split our hull open…
And that time was almost at hand.
But first—the blare of a warning horn screamed at us. Red warning lights blazed all over the instrument panel at once, it seemed. The ceiling lights flickered and yellowed as the current from the main engines flipped off and the batteries cut in. The hurtling Dolphin faltered in her mad rush through the sea.
The yell from the engine room told us what we already knew: “Reactor out! We’ve lost our power. Batteries only now!”
Roger looked at me and gave me a half-grin. There was no bluster about him now, no pretense. He checked the instrument panel and made his decision quickly.
He kicked the restraining stops on the conn wheel free, and wrenched it up—far past normal diving angle, to the absolute maximum it would travel. He stood the old Dolphin right on her nose, heading straight down into the abyss below.
Minutes passed. We heard the distant whump of missiles—but far above us now. Even with only battery power to turn the screws, the Dolphin was dropping faster than the missiles could travel, for gravity was pulling at us.
Roger kept his eyes glued to the microsonar and the fathometers. At the last possible moment he pulled back on the conn wheel; the diving vanes brought the ship into a full-G pullout.
He cut the power to the screws.
In a moment there was a slithering, scraping sound from the hull, then a hard thud.
We had come to rest—without arms, without power, with twenty thousand feet of sea water over our heads, at the bottom in the Tonga Trench.
15
Abandon Ship!
We lay on the steep slope of the Tonga Trench, nearly four miles down, waiting for the Killer to finish us off.
Gideon and Bob Eskow came tumbling in from the engine room. “She’s going to blow!” Bob yelled. “We ran the engines too long—the reactor’s too hot. We’ve got to get out of here, Roger!”
Roger Fairfane nodded quietly, remotely. His face was abstracted, as though he were thinking out a classroom problem in sea tactics or navigation.
The microsonar was still working, after a fashion—one more drain on our batteries. I could see the blurred and dimmed image of the Killer on the topside screen. They were cricling far above us. Waiting.
The dead Dolphin lay onimously still, except for a faint pulsing from the circulator-tubes of the reactors. Nuclear reactions make no sound; there was nothing to warn us that an explosion was building a few yards away. Now and then there was an onimous creak of metal, an occasional snap, as though the underpowered edenite armor were yielding, millimeter by millimeter, to the crushing weight of the water above.