“They?” I demanded.
David shrugged. “I don’t know if there will be more than one. The Killer Whale, perhaps—but the amphibians had another sea-car that I know of, the one they took from me. How many besides that I don’t know.”
Gideon said softly, his brow furrowed: “Bad luck, I think. I’d hoped that they would believe we had all gone up with the Dolphin when the reactor exploded.”
The sea-girl shook her head. “I told you,” she reminded him, gasping. “We were seen. I—I am sorry, David, that I let them see me, but— “
“Maeva! Don’t apologize. You saved our lives!” David wrung her hand. He looked thoughtfully at the screens, then nodded.
“I’ve got to look after my father,” he said. “Jim, will you come with me? The rest of you—it would be better if you stayed here, kept an eye on the screens.”
Gideon nodded. “Fine,” he agreed, in his gentle voice. “Then—that’s a Mark XIX fire-control director I see there? And a turret gun, I suppose? Yes. Then we can fight them off, if need be, right from here. I’ve handled the Mark XIX before and—”
David interrupted him.
“I don’t think you can do much with this one,” he said.
Gideon looked at him thoughtfully. “And why not?” he asked after a moment.
David said: “It’s broken, Gideon. The amphibians destroyed the circuits when they rebelled against my father. If they do attack—we have no weapons to fight them with.”
We left them behind us, and I must say the heart was out of me. Nothing to fight with! Not even a sea-car to escape in, now!
But Gideon was already at work before we left the fire-control room, stripping down the circuit-junction mains, checking the ruined connections. It was very unlikely that he could repair the gun. But Gideon had done some very unlikely things before.
David’s father was asleep again when we came back to him. David woke him gently.
He rubbed his eyes and blinked at David.
This time there was none of that absent serenity with which he had greeted us before. He seemed to remember what was going on about him—and he seemed to be in despair.
“David,” he said. “David—”
He shook himself and stood up.
He stumbled weakly to a laboratory, filled a little glass beaker out of a bottle of colorless fluid and gulped it down.
He came back to us, smiling and walking more steadily.
“Sit down,” he said, “sit down.” He shoved piles of books off a couple of chairs. “I had given you up, David. It is good to see you.”
David Craken hurried to find another chair for the old man, but he ignored it. He sat down on the edge of the creaking cot and ran his hands through his thinning hair.
David said: “Dad, you’re sick!”
Jason Craken shrugged. “A few unfortunate reactions.” He glanced absently at the strange green blotches on his hands. “I suppose I’ve been my own guinea pig a few times too many. But I’m strong enough, David. Strong enough—as Joe Trencher will find—to take back what belongs to me!”
His eyes were hollowed and bloodshot, yet strangely intense with a light that came from fever—or madness, I thought. He beckoned to us with his gnarled, lean hand.
David said: “Dad—we’re being attacked! Didn’t you know that? The robot warning came ten minutes ago.”
Jason Craken shook his head impatiently. He made a careless gesture, as though he was brushing the attackers away. “There have been many attacks,” he boomed, “but I am still here. And I will stay here while I live. And when I am gone—you shall stay after me, David.”
He stood up, swaying slightly, and walked over to the laboratory bench once more for another beaker of the colorless fluid. Whatever it was, it seemed to put new life into him. He said strongly: “Joe Trencher will learn! I’ll conquer him as we’ve conquered the saurians, David!” He came back and sat beside us, a scarecrow emperor with that rumpled cot for a throne. He turned to me. “Jim Eden,” he said, “I welcome you to Tonga Trench. I never thought I would need the help your uncle promised, so many years ago. But I never thought that Trencher and his people would turn against me!”
He seemed to be both raging with fury and morbidly depressed. “Trencher!” he spat. “I assure you, Jim Eden, that without my help the amphibians would still be living the life of animals! That was how I found them—trapped in their own submerged caves. If I were an egotist, I could say that I created them, and it would be near to the truth. Yet—they are ungrateful! They have turned against me! They and the saurians, I must crush them, show them who is the master—”
He broke off suddenly as his voice reached a crescendo. For a moment he sat there, staring at us wildly.
David went to him, patted him and soothed him, calmed him down. It was hard to tell there, for a moment, which was the parent and which the child.
But one thing I knew.
David Craken’s father was nearly mad!
Yet—he could talk as sanely as anyone in the world, between attacks of his raging obsession.
David quieted him down, and we sat there for what seemed a long time, talking, waiting. Waiting—I hardly hardly knew what we were waiting for.
Queer interlude! The robot watchman had been cut off, its mindless cries of warning no longer battered against our ears. Yet—we were still under attack! There had not yet been a jet missile fired against us, but the robot could not have made a mistake.
There was no doubt about it: Somewhere just outside the range of the microsonars, Joe Trencher and the Killer Whale swung, getting ready to batter down the dome we were in.
And we had no weapons.
I knew that Gideon would be racing against time, trying to fit the maimed circuits of the gun controls back into some semblance of order—but it was a long, complex job. It was something a trained crew might take a week to do—and he was one man, working on unfamiliar components!
But somehow, in that room with Jason Craken and his son, I was not afraid.
After a bit he collected himself again and began to talk of my father and my uncle. Astonishing how clearly he recollected every detail of those days, decades ago—and could hardly remember how he had lived in the months he had been alone here, while David and the rest of us were preparing to come to help him!
David whispered to me: “Talk to him about his experiments and discoveries. It—it helps to keep him steady.”
I said obediently: “Tell me about—ah—tell me about those queer plants outside the dome. I’ve been under the sea before this, Mr. Craken, but I’ve never seen anything like them!”
He nodded—it was like an eagle nodding, the fierce face quiet, the eyes hooded. “No one else has either, Jim Eden! The deeps are a funnel—a funnel of life. Everywhere but here. Do you understand what I mean by that?”
I nodded eagerly—even there, with the danger of destruction hanging over us all, I couldn’t help being held by that strange old man. “One of my instructors said that,” I told him. “I remember. He said that life in the ocean is a funnel, filled from the top. Tiny plants grow near the surface, where the sunlight reaches them. They make food for tiny creatures that eat them—and the tiny animal creatures are eaten by larger ones, and so on. But everything depends on the little plants at the surface, making food for the whole sea out of sunlight. Only a few crumbs get down the spout of the funnel, to the depths.”
“Quite true!” boomed the old man. “And here we have another funnel, Jim Eden. But one that is upside down. Those plants—” he looked at me sharply, almost suspiciously. “Those plants are the secret of the Tonga Trench, Jim Eden. It is the greatest secret of all, for on them depend all the other wonders of my kingdom of the Trench. They have their own source of energy! It is an atomic process.” He frowned at me thoughtfully. “I—I have not finally succeeded in penetrating all of its secrets,” he confessed. “Believe me, I have tried. But it is a nuclear reaction of some sort—deriving energy, I believe, from the unstable potassium isotope in sea water. But I have not yet been able to get the process to work in a test tube. Not yet. But I will!”