“What in the world are you going to do with that?” I demanded.
He looked up, startled, and out of breath. “We can reach radiolarian, don’t you see? I mean—”
“What?”
He broke off, and some of the absorbed gleam faded from his eyes. “I mean—” he hesitated. “I mean, if a couple of us took it to the surface, we could, well, summon the Fleet. We would be able to—”
He went on, while I stared at him. Bob was acting very queerly, I thought. Could he be going to pieces under the strain of our situation? I was sure he had said something about “radiolarian”—the same sort of jumbled nonsense he was muttering when he woke up after Maeva had rescued us.
But he seemed perfectly all right…
David told him sharply: “Wait, Bob. It’s a pretty idea, but there are two things wrong with it. In the first place, we’re pretty far off the beaten track here—and you have no guarantee that there would be a Fleet vessel anywhere around to receive your message.” Bob opened his mouth to say something; David stopped him. “And even more important—we don’t have that much time. One of those survival kit buoys will haul you up to the surface easily enough, I admit. But it takes at least ten minutes from this far down—even assuming you can hold on while you’re being jerked up at twenty or thirty miles an hour!” He glanced at the microsonar screens worriedly. “We may not even have ten minutes!”
We didn’t.
In fact, we didn’t have ten seconds.
There was a rattle from the intercom that connected with the missile-gun turret high above, and Gideon’s soft voice came to us crying: “Stand by for trouble! They’re coming fast!”
We didn’t need that warning. In our own microsonar screens we could see the saurians streaming toward us—not just two or three this time, but a solid group of a score or more, and the whole monstrous herd following close behind!
We crowded into the lock, the four of us in pressure suits and the sea-girl, Maeva, close beside.
The sea came in around us.
Under that tremendous pressure, it didn’t flow in a stream from the valve. It exploded into a thundering fog that blinded our face plates and tore at our suits like a wild white hurricane.
The thunder stopped at last. We stepped out onto the slope of the sea-mount to face the greater thunder from the rampaging saurians.
Endless minutes! We spread out, the five of us, with suit-lamps and gongs and tiny old explosive grenades David had dug up from somewhere—too small to do much harm, big enough to make a startling noise.
The saurians came down on us in hordes. It seemed like thousands of them, clustered as thick as bees on a field of August clover. It was impossible to believe that we five, with the pathetic substitutes for arms we carried, could do anything to divert that tide of Juggernauts.
But we tried.
We flashed our lights at them, and tossed our grenades. We beat the huge brass gongs David had given us, and the low mellow booming sound echoed and multiplied in the terrible pressure of the Trench.
We terrified the monsters. I think that they would have fled from the field entirely—if it had been only them.
But as we were driving them from one side, so were others from behind. The amphibians! A dozen or more of the saurians carried low-crouched riders, jabbing at them with long, pointed goads, driving them in upon us. And other amphibians swam behind the maddened herd, making nearly as much noise as we, causing nearly as much panic in the beasts.
It seemed to go on forever…
And I began to feel faint and weak. The air was giving out!
I looked about feverishly, fighting to stay conscious. I could see Maeva and David Craken to one side, doggedly leaping and pounding their gongs like mad undersea puppets. Farther down the slope, toward the fringe of shining weed that stopped short of the dome, I saw Laddy Angel dodging the onslaught of a pair of great saurians, leaping up after them and driving them away from the dome. It was hard to see, in the pale blue glow that shone from Jason Craken’s edenite fortress, but—where was Bob?
Look as I might, I couldn’t see him anywhere.
I reeled and nearly fell, even buoyed up by the water.
I must have used up my oxygen even sooner than we had figured. I choked and blinked and tried to focus on the round, blue-lit bulk of the dome—so far away!
I took a step toward it—and another—
It seemed impossibly far away.
20
“The Molluscans Are Ripe!”
Yards short of the dome I toppled and slowly fell, and I had not the strength to stand up again—little though I needed with the buoying water to help.
Everything was queerly blurred, strangely unimportant. I knew my air was bad. I could live a few more minutes—perhaps even a quarter of an hour—but I couldn’t move, for there simply was not air enough left in my tanks to sustain me. It was perfectly obvious. I would lie there, I thought drowsily, lazily, until I fell asleep. And then, after some minutes, I would die, poisoned by the carbon dioxide from my own breath…
Or perhaps, if the edenite shield faltered first as the power ran out, crushed into a shapeless mass by the fury of the deeps.
It was perfectly obvious, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.
Something strange was happening. I raised my head slightly to see better. There was a queer, narrow metal cave, and something moving around in it—something with a bright yellow head and a bright yellow body—
I shook my head violently to clear it and looked again.
The cave became the airlock of the dome.
The queer object with the bright yellow head became Bob Eskow, wearing his pressure suit and carrying—carrying that yellow cylinder he had lugged up from the storerooms, the emergency escape kit.
I thought in a dreamy way how remarkable it was that he should be bothering with something like that. But I didn’t really care. All I felt was an overwhelming laziness—narcosis, from bad air rather than pressure, but narcosis all the same. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
Suddenly Bob was tugging at me.
That didn’t matter either, but he was interfering with my pleasant lazy rest. I pushed at him angrily. I couldn’t make out what he was doing.
Then I saw: He was binding me to the shackles around the yellow-painted rescue buoy. For a moment his helmeted face hung in front of mine, huge and dim. I saw him gesture vehemently with a chopping motion.
I stared at him, irritated and puzzled. Chop? What did he mean?
I glanced behind me, and saw the end of the yellow rescue buoy, where the deadweight was shackled to the flotation unit. The idea was to uncouple the weight and drop it off, then the buoy would surge toward the surface, carrying its rescued passengers with it.
Possibly that was what Bob wanted me to do—knock the weights loose.
Fretfully I pressed the release lever. The weighted end of the cylinder sprang free.
And the flotation unit jerked us toward the surface.
It was fast! It was almost like being fired from a cannon. The shock made me black out for a second, I think. I was conscious of the black rock and the shimmering blue dome falling away beneath us, and then things became very confused. There was a fading gray glow in the water about us, then only darkness. Then I began to see queer bright lights—shining eyes, they seemed, that dived at us from above and dropped rapidly away beneath.
The air was growing rapidly worse.
I could hear myself breathing—great, rapid, panting upheavals, like Maeva after hours of breathing air, like a dying man. I began to have a burning in my lungs. My head ached…great gongs beat and spirals of fire spun and vanished in the dark sea.
And then suddenly, we were at the surface of the sea.