Sea Coach Blighman strode in, splashing and raging. Even before the sea medics had finished with him, he roared: “Ear plugs! Theres one in every crew! I’ve told you a hundred times—I’ve dinned it in to you, over and over—ear plugs are worse than useless below a fathom! Men, if you can’t take the sea, don’t try to hide behind ear plugs; all they’ll do is let the pressure build up a little more—a very little more—and then they’ll give in, and you’ll have a burst eardrum, and you’ll be out of the Academy! Just like Dorritt, here!”
It was too bad for Dorritt—but it saved us for the moment.
But only for the moment.
We weren’t more than a yard out of the lock when Bob swayed and stumbled.
I caught his arm, trying to keep him on his feet at least until we were out of range of Coach Blighman’s searching eyes. “Bob! Buck up, man! What’s the matter?”
He looked at me with a strange, distant expression; and then without warning his eyes closed and he fell out of my grasp to the floor.
They let me come with him to the sick-bay; they even let me take one end of the stretcher.
He woke up as we set the stretcher down and turned to catch my eye. For a moment I thought he had lost his mind. “Jim? Jim? Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you, Bob. I—”
“You’re so far away!” His eyes were glazed, staring at me. “Is that you, Jim? I can’t see—There’s a green fog, and lightning flashes—Jim, where are you?”
I said, trying to reassure him: “You’re in the sick-bay, Bob. Lieutenant Saxon is right here. We’ll fix you up—”
He closed his eyes as one of the sea medics jabbed him with a needle. It put him to sleep, almost at once. But before he went under I heard him whisper: “Narcosis…I knew I’d never make it.”
Lieutenant Saxon looked at me over his unconscious form. “Sorry, Eden,” he said.
“You mean he’s washed out, sir?”
He nodded. “Pressure sensitive. Sorry, but—You’d better get back to your crew.”
3
Dive for Record!
At seven hundred feet I swam out into blackness.
The powerful sub-sea floodlamps of the gym ship could no more than shadow the gloomy deck. There was no trace of light from the bright sun overhead, and only the dimmest corona, far distant, to mark the bow superstructure.
I felt—dizzy, almost sick.
Was it the pressure, I wondered, or was it my friend Bob Eskow, back in the sick-bay? I had left him and gone back to the trials, but my thoughts stayed with him.
I tried to put him out of my mind, and stroked forward through the gloomy depths toward the faintly glowing bow superstructure, where my number had to be put out.
There were only seventeen of us left—the rest had completed a few dives and been disqualified by the sea-medics from going on, or had disqualified themselves. Or, like Bob Eskow, had cracked up.
Two were left from our original twenty-man crew—myself and one other—and fifteen from all the other crews combined. I recognized David Craken and the boy from Peru, Eladio; there was Cadet Captain Fairfane, glowering fiercely at the two foreign cadets; and a few more.
I left them behind and stroked out. There was no feeling of pressure on me, for the pressure inside my body was fully as great as the pressure without. The chuckling, whispering electrolung on my back supplied gas under pressure, filled my lungs and my bloodstream. Clever chemical filters sucked out every trace of chlorine, nitrogen and carbon-dioxide, so that there was no risk of being poisoned or of “the bends”—that joint-crippling sickness that came after pressure that had killed and maimed so many early divers.
A column of water seven hundred feet tall was squeezing me, but my own body was pushing back; I couldn’t feel the pressure itself. But I felt ancient, weary, exhausted, without knowing why. I was drained of energy. Every stroke of the flippers on my feet, every movement of my arms, seemed to take all the strength in my body. Each time I completed a stroke it seemed utterly impossible that I would find the energy and strength necessary for another. I would be so much easier to let myself drift…
But somehow I found the strength. And somehow, slowly, the greenish corona at the bow grew nearer. Its shape appeared; the fiercely radiant floodlights brightened and took form, and I began to be able to make out the rows of numbers.
Fumblingly I found the button and saw my own number flash and wink out. I turned and wearily, slowly, made my way back along the guide line, into the lock once more.
Nine hundred feet.
Only eleven of us had completed the seven-hundred-foot dive. And the sea medics, with their quick, sure tests, eliminated six out of the eleven. Eladio was one of those to go—Lt. Saxon’s electro-stethoscope had detected the faint stirrings of a heart murmur; he curtly refused the Peruvian permission to go out again.
Five of us left—and two of the five showed unmistakable signs of collapse as soon as the water came pounding in; cadets in armor floundered out of the emergency locks and bore them away while the rest of us remained to feel the whining tingle of the motors opening the sea-gates and see the deeps open to us once more.
“The rest of us.” There were only three now. Myself. And Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane—worn, strained, irritable, tense, but grimly determined. And David Craken, the cadet from Marinia.
There was not even a glow from the superstructure now. I dragged myself through the water, doggedly concentrating on the gleam of the guide line—how dully, how feebly it gleamed under the nine hundred feet!
It seemed as though I were trying to slide through jelly, for hours, making no progress. Suddenly I noticed some-thing ahead—the faint, distant glimmer of lights (the bow floodlights—visible on the surface for a score of miles, but down here for only as many feet!) And outlined against them, some sort of weird, unrecognizable sea beings…
There were two of them. I looked at them incuriously and then somehow I realized what they were: David Craken and Roger Fairfane. They had left the lock a moment before me, they had reached their goals and they were on their way back.
They passed me almost without a glance. I struggled onward wearily; by the time I had found my button and turned out my number, they were out of sight again.
I saw them again halfway back—or so I thought.
And then I realized that it could not be them.
Something was moving in the water near me. I looked more closely, somehow summoning the strength to be curious.
Fish. Dozens of little fish, scurrying through the water, directly across my course along the guide line.
There is nothing strange about seeing fish in the Bermuda waters, not even at nine hundred feet. But these fish seemed—frightened. I stared wearily at them, resting one hand on the guide line while I thought about the strangeness of their being frightened. I glanced back toward where they had come from…
I saw something, something I could not believe.
I could see—very faintly—the line of shadow against a deeper shadow that was the port rail of the gym ship. And traced in blacker shadow still, something hovered over that rail. There was almost no light, but it seemed to have a definite shape, and an unbelievable one.
It looked like—like a head. An enormous head, lifted out of the blackness below the deck. It was longer than a man, and it seemed to be looking at me through tiny, slitted eyes, yawning at me with a whole nightmare of teeth…
I suppose I should have been terrified. But nine hundred feet down, with armor, I didn’t have the strength to feel terror.