There was a long moment of silence, except for the wheezing and choking of the amphibians.
Then Joe Trencher put away his salt spray and looked at me. He said bleakly: “Too late!”
And he gestured at the microsonar screen, where the wreckage of Jason Craken’s dome lay strewn before us.
Too late.
We all looked, and I knew what he meant. Certainly it was too late for anyone who was crushed in those ruins, under the weight of the sea. And in another sense, it was too late for Joe Trencher and his people—for they had certainly put themselves outside the pale of human law by causing those deaths.
But—something was out of key, in those ruins. Something didn’t quite jibe.
I looked, and looked again.
One section of the ruins was intact. And—it glowed with the foxfire of a working edenite shield.
And from it was coming an irregular twinkling light. It was faint, reflected from some halfhidden viewport; but it was no illusion. It was there, blinking in a complicated code.
Complicated? Yes—for it was the code of the Sub-Sea Fleet; it was a distress call!
They were still alive!
Somehow, they had managed to get into one section of the dome where a functioning edenite shield had survived the destruction of the rest of the structure!
I said to Joe Trencher: “This is your chance, Trencher. They’re still alive in there—now you can make your decision. Will you surrender to the Fleet?”
He hesitated.
I think he was about to agree.
But two things happened just then, that made his agreement to give up and submit to the laws of the Sub-Sea Fleet an academic matter.
There was a white rain of explosions patterning all over the microsonar screens—more than a dozen of them. The Fleet was moving in to destroy us!
And in the rear screen that peered down into the crevice in which we lay, something stirred and quivered and came racing toward us, huge and fast. One of the saurians was attacking!
That was a moment when time stopped.
We stood frozen, all of us, like chess pieces on a board, waiting for a player to make a move. Joe Trencher stared at the screen in a paralysis of indecision, and his amphibians waited on his signal. Bob and I—we watched. We watched, while the bright exploding fury of the Fleet’s missiles churned the deeps into cream around us and the Killer Whale shook and quivered under the force of the surrounding explosions. We watched, while the giant, hurtling figure of the saurian came arrowing in upon us—closer and closer, looming huge and frightful in the sonar screen.
Frightful—and not alone! For on its back was a slim figure, bent low along the monstrous back, driving it forward with an elephant-goad.
It was the sea-girl, Maeva!
Joe Trencher’s hand hovered over the firing control of his jet-missile gun.
I could not understand why he didn’t shoot.
One of the amphibians screamed something in a shrill, furious voice at Trencher—but Trencher only stared at the screen, his opaque pearly eyes filled with some emotion I could not read.
Crunch.
The speeding, raging figure of the saurian disappeared from the screen—and a moment later, the Killer Whale shook and vibrated as the plunging beast rammed us.
We all tumbled across the deck—it was that heavy a blow that the rampaging saurian had dealt the Killer. In the screen I caught a glimpse of the saurian bouncing away, wildly struggling to regain its balance, beating the water with its clumsy-seeming oars of limbs. It had been hurt—but it was still going, and its rider, the sea-girl, still had kept her seat. It had been hurt—but so were we.
The Troyon tube lights flickered, dimmed, and brightened again. Ominous warning! For if the power went—our edenite shield would go as well.
The amphibians were silent no longer. There was a chattering and screaming from them like a cage of maddened monkeys. One of them was scrambling across the tilted deck toward the missile-gun controls. Joe Trencher picked himself up and made a dive for the other amphibian. But Trencher was groggy, slow—he had been hurt; the other pearly eyed man turned to face him; they struggled for a second, and Trencher went flying.
The amphibian at the gun spun the controls as, in the screen, Maeva and her strange mount came plunging in for another attack.
There was scarcely time to think, in that moment of wild strife and confusion. But—Bob and I were cadets of the Sub-Sea Academy and we had learned, what generations of cadets before us had learned so well, that there is always time to think. “Panic is the enemy!” That motto is dinned into us, from the moment we arrive as lubbers until Graduation Day.
Never panic.
Think—then act!
I whispered to Bob: “It’s time for us to take a hand!”
Trencher and the other amphibian were locked in a struggle over the controls of the missile-gun; one shot had been fired, and it seemed Trencher was trying to prevent another. The remaining amphibians, half a dozen of them or more, were milling about in a state of confusion.
We hit them full amidships, with everything we had. It was a fierce, bloody struggle for a moment. But they were confused and we were not; we knew what we had to do. Some of them wore sidearms; we hit them first, and got their guns before the others could come to their senses.
And the fight was over almost before it got started. Bob and I had the guns.
We were masters of the Killer Whale!
We stood there, breathing hard, guns drawn and leveled.
Joe Trencher cast one bright, maddened look at the microsonar screen and came toward us.
“Hold it!” I yelled. “I’ll—“
“No, no!” he cried. He skidded to a halt, gestured at the screen. “I want—I only want to go out there. To help Maeva! Don’t you see?”
I risked a glance at the screen.
It was true—she needed help. That one wild shot from the missile gun had struck her mount, Old Ironsides. It was beating the water to froth—aimlessly, agonizedly. The girl herself was gone from its back—stunned by the gun, perhaps, if not worse. Even as we watched, the monster began to weaken. It turned slowly over and over, beginning to sink…
Bob whispered: “It may be a trick! Can we trust him?”
I looked at Joe Trencher, and I made my decision. “Go ahead!” I ordered. “See if you can help her—we owe her that!”
The opaque eyes glanced at me for only a second; then Joe Trencher flashed past me, toward the lock.
He paused, while the inner door of the lock was opening. He gasped: “You’ve won, air-breather.” He hesitated. “I—I’m glad you won.”
And then he was gone. In a moment we heard the thud of water coming into the lock.
I ordered: “Bob! Get on the sonarphone to the Fleet. Tell them to hold their fire. It’s all over—we’ve won!”
And that was the end of the adventure of the Tonga Trench.
We found our friends, in that little sealed cubicle that was all that was left of Jason Craken’s castle beneath the sea. They were battered and weary—but they were alive. The sea-medics of the Fleet came in and took charge of them. It was easy enough to heal the bruises and scars of Gideon and Roger and Laddy and David Craken. When it came to old Jason, the medics could do little. It was not the flesh that was sick, it was the mind. They took him away as gently as they could.
He didn’t object. In his clouded brain, he was still the emperor of the Tonga Trench, and they were his subjects.
Maeva came to see us off. She held David’s hand and turned to me. “Thank you,” she said, “for giving Joe Trencher his chance to save me. If he hadn’t come to get me—”