Evidently it was not only my air which was going bad.
We moved ahead once more—but slower now, and keeping closer together.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw that flicker of movement again.
I looked, expecting to see nothing—
I was terribly, terribly wrong!
What I saw was far from nothing. It had been a faint, furtive glimpse of something huge and menacing.
And when I looked at it straight on, it was still there—huger, more menacing, real and tangible!
It was a saurian, giant and strange, and it was pacing us.
I turned on my suit-lamps, flooded the others with light to attract their attention. I waved frantically toward the monster in the undersea jungle.
And they saw. I could tell from the queer, contorted attitudes in which they stood that they saw.
David Craken made a wild, excited gesture, but I couldn’t understand what he meant. The others, with one accord, leaped forward and scattered. And I was with them—all of us running, leaping, scurrying away in the slow, slow jumps the resistance of the water allowed. We dodged in among the tall, gently wavering stems of the sea-plants, looking for a hiding place.
I could hear my breath rasping inside the helmet, and the world was growing queerly black. There was a pounding in my head and a dull ache; the air was worse now, so bad that I was tempted to stop, to relax, to fall to the ground and rest, sleep, relax…
I forced myself to squirm into the shelter of a clump of brightly glowing bushes. I lay on my back there, breathing raggedly and hard, and noticed without worry, without emotion, that the huge, strange beast was close upon me. Queer, I thought, it is just like David’s painting—even to the rider on its back.
There was something on its back—no, not something, but someone. A person. A—a girl figure, slight and frail, brown-skinned, black-haired, her eyes glowing white as Joe Trencher’s, her blue swimsuit woven of something as luminous as the weed. She was close, so close that I could see her wide-flaring nostrils, see the expression on her face.
It was easy enough to see, for she wore no pressure suit! Here four miles down, she was breathing the water of the Deeps!
But I had no time to study her, for the monster she rode took all my attention. Even in the poisoned calm of my slow suffocation, I knew that here was deadly danger. The enormous head was swaying down toward me, the great supple neck curving like a swan’s. Its open mouth could have swallowed me in a single bite; its teeth seemed long as cavalry sabers.
The blue-gleaming forest turned gray-black and whirled about me.
I could see the detail of overlapping scales on the armored neck of the saurian, the enormous black claws that tipped its great oarlike limbs.
The gigantic head came down through the torn strands of shining weed, and I thought I had come to my last port…
The grayness turned black. The blackness spun and roared around me.
I was unconscious, passed out cold.
16
Hermit of the Tonga Trench
I woke up with the memory of a dream—huge, hideous lizard things, through the sea, with strange mermaids riding their backs and directing them with goads.
Fantastic! But even more fantastic was that I woke up at all!
fantastic swimming I was lying on my back on a canvas cot, in a little metal-walled room. Someone had opened the helmet of my pressure suit, and fresh air was in my lungs!
I struggled up and looked about me.
Roger Fairfane lay on one side of me, Bob Eskow on the other. Both were still unconscious.
There was a pressure port in the wall of the room, and through it I could see a lock, filled with water under pressure. I could see something moving inside the lock—something that looked familiar, but strange at the same time.
It was both strange and familiar! The strange sea-girl, she was there! She had been no dream of oxygen starvation, but real flesh and blood, for now I saw her, pearl-eyed like the strange man named Joe Trencher…but with human worry and warm compassion on her face as she struggled to carry pressure-suited figures into the lock.
One—two—three! There were three of them, weakly stirring.
It was—it had to be—Gideon, Laddy and David. She had saved us all.
And behind her loomed the hulk of something strange and deadly—but she showed no fear. It was the gaping triangular face of the saurian.
As I watched, she turned about with an eel-like wriggle and slapped the monster familiarly on its horny nose. Not a blow in anger—but a caress, almost, as a rider might pat the muzzle of a faithful horse.
It was true, what David had said: The saurians were domesticated. The sea-creatures he called amphibians truly rode them, truly used them as beasts of burden.
The sea-girl left the saurian and swam inside. I saw her at the glowing dials of a control panel.
The great doors swung shut, closing out the huge, inquisitive saurian face. I saw the doors glow suddenly with edenite film.
Pumps began to labor and chug.
Floodlights came on.
In a moment the girl was standing on the wet floor of the lock, trying to tug at the pressure-suited figures of my friends toward the inner gate.
Bob Eskow twisted and turned and cried out sharply: “Diatom! Diatom to radiolarian. The molluscans are—”
He opened his eyes and gazed at me. For a moment he hardly recognized me.
Then he smiled. “I—I thought we were goners, Jim. Are you sure we’re here?”
I slapped his pressure-suited shoulder. “We’re here. This young lady and her friend, the dinosaur—they brought us to Craken’s dome!”
David was already standing, stripping off his pressure suit. He nodded gravely. “Thank Maeva.” He nodded to the girl, standing wide-eyed and silent, watching us. “If Maeva hadn’t come along—But Maeva and I have always been friends.”
The girl spoke. It was queer, hearing human speech from what I still couldn’t help thinking of as a mermaid! But her voice was soft and musical as she said: “Please, David. Don’t waste time. My people know you are here.” She glanced at the lock port anxiously, as though she was expecting it to burst open, with a horde of amphibians or flame-breathing saurians charging through. “As we brought you to the dome, Old Ironsides and I, I saw another saurian with a rider watching us. Let us go to your father—”
David said sharply: “She’s right. Come on!”
We were all of us conscious again. David and Gideon had never really passed out from the lack of oxygen, but they had been so weak that it was nearly the same thing. Without Maeva to help them, and the saurian she called “Old Ironsides” to bear them on its broad, scaly back, they would have been as dead as the rest of us.
Strange girl! Her skin was smooth and brown, her short-cut hair black. The pearly eyes, which on Joe Trencher had seemed empty and grim, on her seemed cool and gentle; they gave her face an expression of sadness, of wistfulness.
I thought that she was beautiful.
She was smiling at David, even in the urgency of that moment. I saw her hands flashing through a series of complicated motions—and realized that she was urging him on, to hurry to his father, in some sign language of the Deep that was more natural to her than speech.
Roger caught David’s shoulder roughly and hauled him aside. He hissed, so that Maeva couldn’t hear: “There aren’t any mermaids! What—what sort of monster is she?”
David said angrily: “Monster? She’s as human as you! She is one of the amphibians—like Joe Trencher, but one we can trust to be on our side. Her ancestors were the Polynesian islanders my father found trapped under the sea.”