“And more than that,” Bob put in, “you need the protection of the Fleet!”
Trencher snorted, and paused to breathe his salt fog again.
“Jason Craken tried to tell us that,” he puffed contemptuously. “He tried to bribe us with the trinkets your civilization has to offer—and when we welcomed him, he tried to turn us to slaves! The gifts he gave us were weapons to conquer us!”
“But Craken is insane, Trencher!” I told him. “Don’t you see that? He has lived here alone so long that his mind is wandering; he needs medical care, attention. He needs to be placed in an institution where he can be helped. He needs a—”
“What he needs,” Trencher wheezed brutally, “is a tomb. For I do not think he is any longer alive.”
He paused again, thoughtfully, and once more it seemed there was a touch of regret in his milky eyes. “We thought he was our friend,” he said, “and perhaps it is true that his mind has deserted him. But it is too late now. There were other men once, too—other men we thought our friends, and we could have trusted them. But it is also too late for that. It is too late for anything now, air-breathers, for as I left the dome to follow you to the surface it could have been only a matter of minutes until it fell.”
I asked, on a sudden impulse: “These other men—what were their names?”
He glanced at me, wheezing, his opaque pearly eyes curious. “Why,” he said, “they were—”
There was an excited, screaming cry from one of the other amphibians. I couldn’t understand a word of it.
But Joe Trencher did! He dived for the microsonar screen the other amphibian had manned.
“The Fleet!” he wheezed, raging. “The Fleet!”
And it was true, for there in the screen were a dozen fat blips—undersea men-of-war, big ones, coming fast!
The Killer Whale went into a steep, twisting dive, and there was a rush and a commotion among its crew. Bob and I were manhandled, hurled aside, out of the way.
I felt the Killer shudder, and knew that jet missiles were streaking out toward the oncoming task force. We were in trouble now, no doubt about it! For if the Fleet won, it would be by blasting the Killer to atoms—and us with it; and if the Fleet, by any miraculous mischance should lose…then Joe Trencher would put us to breathing salt water, when the air ran out!
I said tensely to Bob: “At least they got your message! There’s still some hope!”
He shrugged, eyes fast to the bank of microsonars. We were nearing the bottom of the Trench now. I could pick out the dimly seen shape of the sea-mount, the valleys and cliffs about it. I said, out of a vagrant thought, “I wish—I wish the Fleet hadn’t turned up just then. I had an idea that—”
Bob looked at me “That what?”
I hesitated. “Well—that the men he spoke of were, well, someone we might know. But I couldn’t hear the names—”
“You couldn’t?” Bob asked, while the amphibians milled and shouted around us. “I could. And you’re right, Jim—the men he said he might have been able to trust were the only other men who have ever been down here. Stewart Eden and your father!”
I stared at him.
“Bob! But—but don’t you see? Then there’s a chance! If he would trust them, then perhaps he’ll listen to me! We’ve got to talk to him, stop this slaughter while there’s still some hope—”
“Hope?”
Bob laughed sharply, but not with humor. He gestured at the microsonar screens, where the bottom of the Trench now was etched sharp and bright. “Take a look,” he said in a tight, choked voice. “Take a look, and see what hope there is.”
I looked.
Hope? No—not for the Crakens, at any rate; not for Laddy Angel, or Roger Fairfane, or the man who had saved my life once before, Gideon Park.
There was the sea-mount, standing tall in its valley; and there was the dome Jason Craken had built.
But it no longer stood high above the slope of the sea-mount.
The saurians had done their frightful work.
The edenite shield was down—barely a glimmer from a few scattered edges of raw metal.
And the dome itself—it was smashed flat, crushed, utterly destroyed.
22
“Panic Is the Enemy!”
A dozen blossoming flares flashed in the microsonar screen at once.
It was the Fleet, replying to the Killer’s fire. There was a burst of flares to starboard, a burst to port, a burst above.
Joe Trencher wheezed triumphantly: “Missed us!”
“That was no miss!” I rapped out. “We’re bracketed, Trencher! That was a salvo from the Fleet unit to warn us to halt and cease offensive action—otherwise, the next salvo will be zeroed in on us!”
He choked and rasped: “Be quiet!” And he cried orders to the other amphibians, in the language I could not understand.
The Killer Whale leaped and swung, and darted around behind the wreck of the dome, into the patterned caverns and fissures where the saurians maintained their breeding place. The Killer swooped into a crevice near what had once been the base of the dome itself; in the microsonar screen I could see the looming walls of the crevice closing in behind us and below. I thought I could see things moving back there—big things. Big as saurians…
But at least the Killer was out of sight of the Fleet.
Gently it dropped to the rocky floor of the cut. There was a sharp, incomprehensible order from Trencher, and the whir of the motors, the pulse of the pile-generators, stopped.
We lay there, waiting.
The chorus of ragged breathing from the amphibians grew louder, harsher. No one spoke.
All of us were watching the microsonar screens.
The Fleet was out of sight now—hidden behind the rimrock and the shattered remains of the dome.
The dome itself lay just before us. So short a time before, when Bob and I had raced up to give the warning, it had stood proud and huge, commanding the entrances to the breeding caves of the saurians. Now—wreckage. A few odd bits and pieces of metal stuck jaggedly above the ruin. Here and there there was a section of a chamber, a few square yards of wall, that still seemed to keep a vestige of their original shape. Nothing else.
Joe Trencher had said that what the Crakens needed was a tomb. But this was their tomb, here before us—theirs, and the tomb of Roger and Laddy and my loyal, irreplaceable friend Gideon as well.
Joe Trencher broke into a ragged, violent fit of coughing.
I stared at him, watching closely.
Something was going on behind that broad, contorted face. There were traces of expression, moments of unguarded emotion—unless I missed my guess, the amphibian was beginning to regret what he had done—and to realize that there was no more hope for him than for us.
It was a moment when I might risk speaking.
I walked up to him. He glanced up, but not a man among the amphibians moved to stop me. I tried to read what was behind the glowing, pearly eyes; but it was hopeless.
I said: “Trencher, you said there were two other men you could trust. Were their names both—Eden?”
He scowled fiercely—but, I thought, without heart. “Eden? How do you know their names? Are they enemies too?”
I said: “Because my name is Eden too. One of those men was my father. The other—my uncle.” Trencher scowled in surprise, and hid behind his spray of salt water. I pressed on: “You said you could trust them, Trencher. You were right. My father has passed away, but my uncle still lives—and it was because he helped me that I was able to come here. Won’t you trust me? Let me talk to the Fleet commander on the sonarphone—see if we can work out truce terms?”