“But—but she’s a fish, Craken! She breathes water! It isn’t human!”
David’s face stiffened, and for a moment I thought there might be trouble. He was furious.
But he calmed himself. Struggling for control—evidently this sea-girl meant something to him!—he said: “Come on! Let’s find my father!”
We raced through the dome, along slippery steel hills, past rooms that, in the glimpse we caught as we passed, seemed like ancient chambers from a Sultan’s palace, costly and beautiful and—falling into decay.
Fantastic place! A sub-sea dome is a fearfully expensive thing to construct—expensive not only of money, but of time and materials and human lives. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them scattered across the floors of the sea, true—but very few were those which were owned by a single man.
And to build one, as David Craken’s father had built this, in secrecy, with only the help of a few technicians sworn to silence and the manual labor of the amphibians and the saurians—it was incredible!
I counted five levels below the topmost bulge of the dome—five levels packed with living quarters and recreation areas, with shops and docks and storage space, with a monster nuclear reactor chuckling away as it made the power to run the dome and keep the sea’s might harmlessly away. There were rooms, a dozen of them or more, that looked like laboratories. We crossed through one that was lined with enormous vats, filled with the macerated remains of stalks of the strange, glowing weed that grew in the Trench outside. It was glowing only fitfully, fading almost into extinction here in the atmosphere; and the musty reek that rose from those vats nearly strangled poor Maeva—who was having a bad enough time out of the water anyway—and made the rest of us quicken our steps.
“Dad’s experiments,” David said briefly. “He’s been trying to find the secret of the weed. He’s tried everything—macerated them, dissolved them in acids, treated them with solvents, burned them, centrifuged them. Some day—” He glanced around at the benches of glassware, the bubbling beakers that reeked of acid, the racks of test tubes and distilling apparatus.
“Some day things will be different,” David finished in an altered tone. “But now we have no time for this. Come on!”
We came to the topmost chamber of all.
There was no sign of David’s father.
David said worriedly: “Maeva, I can’t understand it! Where can he be?”
The sea-girl said, in her voice which was soft and liquid and occasionally gasping for breath: “He isn’t well, David. He—he is not of the sea. Perhaps he is asleep.” She touched David gently with her hand—and I saw with a fresh shock that the fingers were ever so slightly webbed. “You must take him up to the surface, David,” she said, panting. “Or else I think he will die.”
“I have to find him first!” David said worriedly. He cast about him, staring. We were in a room—once, it seemed, a luxurious salon. It was walled with books, thousands of them, stacked in shelves to the ceiling—titles of science and philosophy mixed helter-skelter with blood-and-thunder tales of danger and excitement. There were long, high shelves of portfolios of art works—left by David’s mother when she passed away, I supposed, for they were gray with dust.
The room was now cluttered with more of the same tangle of scientific equipment we had seen below, as though the man who owned the dome had no interest left in life but his scientific researches. There were unpacked crates of glassware and reagents, with labels that showed he had bought them in Marinia, consignment tags that were addressed to a hundred fictitious names, none to himself. There was a cobalt “bomb” encased in tons of lead. A new electric autoclave that he had found no space for below. A big hydraulic press that could create experimental pressures a hundred times higher than those in the Deep outside. Test tubes and hypodermic needles and half-emptied bottles that Craken had labeled in hieroglyphics of his own.
The windows were the strangest thing in the room. They were wide picture windows, draped and curtained tastefully.
And the view in them was—rolling landscapes!
Outside those windows, four miles down, one saw spruce trees and tall pines, green mountain meadows and grassy foothills, far-off peaks that were white with snow!
I stared at them incredulously. David glanced at me, then half-smiled. “Stereoscapes,” he said carelessly, his eyes roaming about, his mind far away. “They were for my mother. She came from Colorado, and always she longed for the dry land and the mountains of her home…”
Maeva’s voice came imploringly: “David! We must hurry.”
He said, worriedly, “I don’t know what to do, Maeva! I suppose the best thing is for us to fan out and search the dome. But—”
We never heard the end of that sentence.
There was a sudden scratching sound that seemed to permeate the dome. Then a blare of noise, from dozens of concealed loudspeakers.
The mechanical voice of an electric watchman roared: “Attention! Attention! The dome is under attack! Attention, attention! The dome is under attack!”
Roger said in a panicky voice: “David, let’s do something! Forget your father. The amphibians, they’re attacking and—”
But David wasn’t listening to him.
David was staring, across the room, toward a clutter of equipment and gear that nearly filled one corner.
“Dad!” he cried.
We all whirled.
There, in the corner, an old man, wasted and gaunt, was sitting up, propping himself on a cot. He had been out of sight behind the tangled junk that surrounded him.
The warning of the electronic watchman had waked him.
He was sitting up, calm as can be, his eyes remote but friendly, his expression unperturbed. He wore a little beard—once dapper, now scraggly and gray.
“Why, David,” he said. “I’ve been wondering where you were. How nice that you’ve brought some friends to visit us.
17
Craken of the Sea-Mount
We looked at him, and then at each other. The same thought was in all our minds, I could see it in the eyes of David and the sea-girl, reflected on the faces of the others.
Jason Craken’s mind was going.
He beamed at us pleasantly. “Welcome,” he said. “Welcome to you all.”
Once he had been a powerful man. I could see that, from the size of his bones and the lean muscles that he had left. But he was wasted now, and gaunt. His skin hung loose, and it was mottled with a queer greenish stain. His gray hair needed cutting, and the beard was a tangle. There was almost no trace left of the dandy my uncle had described.
He had been sleeping in his laboratory smock—once white, now wrinkled and stained. He glanced down at it and chuckled.
He said ruefully, “I was not expecting guests, as you. can see. I do apologize to you. I dislike greeting my son’s guests in so unkempt an array. But my experiments, gentlemen, my experiments take all too much of my time. One has not enough hours in the day for all the many—”
David stepped over to him. He said gravely, “Father. Why don’t you rest a bit? I’ll show the—the guests around the dome.”
And all this time the robot watchman was howling: Attention, attention, attention!
David signaled to us and we left the room quietly. In a moment he joined us. “He’ll be all right,” he said. “Now—let’s go to the conn room!”
The conn room was a tiny chamber at the base of the dome, ringed by televisor screens, where a picture of the sea-floor all about the dome was in mosiac patches.
There was nothing in sight.
David nodded worriedly. “Not yet,” he commented. “I thought not. The robot watchman—it is set to warn of approaching sub-sea vessels, but it has a considerable range. They won’t be in sight for a while yet.”