He got up and walked more slowly, thoughtfully, to the laboratory bench. Absently he poured himself another beaker of the elixir on which he seemed to be absolutely dependent. He looked at it thoughtfully and then set it down, untasted.
Evidently the thought of the secret of the Tonga Trench was as powerful a stimulant to him as the elixir! I began to see how this man had been able to keep going for so long, alone and sick—he was driven by the remorseless compulsion that makes great men…. and maniacs.
“So you see,” he said, “there is a second funnel of life here. The shining weed, with its own energy, that does not need the light of the sun. The little animals that feed off it. The larger ones—the saurians and the amphibians—that live off the small.”
“The saurians,” I broke in, strangely excited. “David said something about—about some sort of danger from them. Is it true?”
“Danger?” The old man stared at his son with a hint of reproof. As though the word had been a trigger that set him off, he picked up the beaker of fluid and swallowed it. “Danger? Ah, David—you cannot fear the saurians! They cannot harm us in the dome!” He turned to me, and once again assumed the tone and attitude of a schoolmaster, lecturing a pupil. “It is a matter of breeding patterns,” he said soberly. “‘The saurians are egg-layers, and their eggs cannot stand the pressures of the bottom of the Trench, where the shining weeds grow. So each year—at the time of the breeding season—they must come up to the top of the sea-mount, to lay their eggs. There is only one way to the caves where, from ages past, they had always laid them—and I built this dome squarely across it!”
He chuckled softly, as though he had done a clever thing. “While they were tamed,” he told me gleefully, “I permitted them to pass. But now—now they shall not enter their caves! This Trench is mine, and I intend to keep it!”
He paused, staring at me.
“I may need help,” he admitted at last. “There are many saurians—But you are here! You and the others, you must help me. I can pay you. I can pay very well, for all the wealth of the Tonga Trench is mine. Tonga pearls! I have found a way to increase the yield—like the old Japanese cultured-pearl fishers, years ago. It cannot be done with ordinary oysters, for the Tonga pearls must have the radioactive nucleus that comes from the shining weed. But I have planted Tonga pearls, Jim Eden, and the first harvest is ready to be gathered!”
He stood up. Bent as he was, he towered over us,
“I offer you a share in a thousand thousand Tonga pearls for your help! You owe me that help anyway, as you know—for your father and your uncle have promised it. What do you say, Jim Eden? Will you help me hold the empire of the Tonga Trench?”
His eyes were growing wilder and wilder.
“Here is what you must do!” he cried. “You must take your subsea cruiser, the Dolphin. You must destroy the ship Joe Trencher is using. The dome’s own armaments will suffice for the saurians—I have a most powerful missile gun mounted high on the dome, well supplied with ammunition, with the latest automatic fire-control built in. Crush Joe Trencher for me—the dome itself will destroy the saurians if they try to come through. Is that agreed, Jim Eden?”
And that was when the bubble burst.
He stood waiting for my answer. He had nearly made me believe that these things were possible, for a moment. He was so absolutely sure of himself, that I forgot, while he was speaking, a few things.
For instance—
The Dolphin was destroyed, blown to atoms.
His missile gun was not working, sabotaged by the amphibians when they turned against him.
David Craken and I stared at each other somberly, while the crazed light faded and died in his father’s eyes.
For Jason Craken’s mind was wandering again. He had fought the sea too long, and taken too much of his own strange potions.
He had conceived a battle scheme—a perfect tactical plan, except that it relied on a gun that would not fire and a ship that had been sunk!
I don’t know what we would have said to him then.
But it turned out that we didn’t have to say anything.
There was a scratching, racing sound of footsteps from outside and the sea-girl, Maeva, burst gasping and frantic into the room.
“David!” she cried raggedly, fighting for breath. “David, they’re coming back! The saurians are attacking again, and there is a subsea ship leading them!” We leaped to our feet.
But even before we got out of the room, a dull explosion rocked the dome.
A sub-sea missile from the Killer! The fight for Tonga Trench had begun!
18
The Fight for Tonga Trench
“Up!” cried Maeva. “Up to the missile-gun turret. Gideon couldn’t fix the fire-control equipment—he’s trying to handle the gun manually!”
We pounded up narrow steel stairs, David flying ahead.
We found Gideon in the turret, his eyes on a complicated panel of wires and resistors, his mind so fixed on his task that he didn’t even look up to see us come in.
“Gideon!” I cried—and then had to stop, holding onto the wall, as another explosion rocked the dome.
They meant business this time!
The turret was tiny and gloomy, and filled with the reek that rose from Jason Craken’s laboratories below. There were tiny windows spotted about it—not much more than portholes, really—and there was little to see through them. All I could make out, through the pale glimmer of the edenite film on the window itself, was the steep curve of the dome beneath us, glowing unsteadily with its own film. The cold blue light from the dome caught two or three jutting points of dark rock.
Beyond that, the darkness of the deep was broken only by the occasional ghostly glimmerings of deep-sea creatures that carried lights of their own.
I glanced at David, startled. “I don’t see anything!”
He nodded. “You wouldn’t, Jim. You need microsonar to see very far under the surface of the sea. That’s what Gideon is working on now, I should judge. This missile gun—it can be worked manually, if its microsonar sights are working. But it’s been fifteen years at least since it was manned—always it was controlled from the fire-control chamber below, you see. And that is wrecked…”
Gideon glanced up abstractedly. He nodded agreement, started to speak, and returned to his work.
It wasn’t hard to see that he was worried.
The missile gun almost filled the turret. It was an ugly, efficient machine of destruction, though the firing tube, what little of it was within its turret, looked oddly slim. The bright-cased missiles racked in the magazine weren’t much larger than my arm.
“Looks old-fashioned to you?” David was reading my mind. “But it’s deadly enough, Jim. One of those shells will destroy a sea-car—the shock neutralizes the edenite film for a tiny fraction of a second. And the sea’s own pressure does the rest. They’re steam jets—athodyds, they’re called; they scoop up water and fire it out behind in the form of steam.”
There was a sudden exclamation from Gideon.
He plucked something out of a kit of spare parts, plugged a new component into the tangle of wires and sub-assemblies.