“Coach!” cried Roger. “Get him off me, will you? He’s trying to talk me out of a record because he can’t swim me out of it!”
“No, please!” said David. “If the record is so important, I’ll stop too. We’ll leave it a tie. But it isn’t safe for you, Roger. Can’t you see that? It’s different for me. I was born four miles down; pressure isn’t important to me.”
“I want to go through with it,” said Roger doggedly.
And that was the way it was. Coach Blighman made the sea medics double-check both of them this time. Both came up with clear records—no physical reactions at all. Were there mental reactions?—the narcosis of the depths? There was no way to tell, for anyone except David and Roger themselves. And both of them denied it.
The process of descending and trimming ship again seemed to take forever.
Thirteen hundred feet!
We were a quarter of a mile down now. On every square inch of the sturdy edenite hull of our sea-raft a force of more than five hundred pounds were pressing.
And that same force would be squeezing the weak, human flesh of David and Roger as soon as they began their test.
I heard the sea-gates whine open.
David came out—slowly, but sure of himself. After a moment Roger came into sight behind him. They both headed down along the guide line toward the invisible bow superstructure.
But Roger was in trouble.
I saw him veer away from the guide line, toward the starboard rail. He caught himself, jerked convulsively back, then seemed just to drift for a moment. His arms and legs were moving but without co-ordination.
“He’s reacting!” Sea Coach Blighman said sharply. “I was afraid of that! But the tests were all right—”
Behind me the voice of Lieutenant Saxon said crisply: “Call him back!” I hadn’t even seen Saxon come into the control room but I was glad for his presence then.
Blighman nodded abruptly. “You are right. Keep an eye on him—I’ll try to reach him.”
He trotted over to the deep-sea loud-hailer that would send a concentrated cone of vibrations through the water. Near the surface it could be heard by men in skin-diving outfits. But this far down—
Evidently it wasn’t penetrating the enormous pressure of the depths. Perhaps the diaphragm couldn’t even vibrate, with five hundred pounds squeezing at every inch of it. But whatever the cause, Roger didn’t come back. He jerked convulsively and began to swim—steadily, slowly, evenly.
And in the wrong direction.
He was headed straight for the port rail and the depths beyond.
“Emergency crew! Emergency crew!” bellowed Blighman, and cadets in edenite depth armor clanked cumbersomely toward the emergency hatches.
But David Craken turned, looked for Roger, found him—and came back. He swam to overtake him, caught him still within sight of our observation ports.
He seemed to be having difficulties; it looked as though Roger was struggling, but it was hard to see clearly.
But whatever the struggle, David won. They came back, David partly towing Captain Roger Fairfane, into the lock.
Once more we had to wait for the pumps.
When we got inside the gloomy lock, Roger was lying on the wet bench with his goggles off, the mouthpiece hissing away as it hung from his shoulder harness. He looked pale as death; his eyes were bloodshot and glazed.
“Fairfane, are you all right?” rapped the coach.
Roger Fairfane took a deep breath. He said, choking, “He—he slugged me! That jellyfish slugged me!”
David Craken blazed: “Sir, that’s not true! Roger was obviously in difficulty, so I—”
“Never mind, Cracken,” snapped Blighman. “I saw what was happening out there. You may have saved his life. In any case, that’s the end of the tests. Get out of your gear, all of you.”
Roger Fairfane hauled himself erect. “Lieutenant Blighman,” he said formally, controlling his rage, “I protest this! I was attacked by Cadet Craken because he was afraid I’d beat him. I intend to take this up with the cadet court and—”
“Report to sick-bay!” cried Blighman. “Whether you know it or not, you’re reacting to Saxon’s serum or to pressure! Don’t let me hear any more from you now!”
He left. Grudgingly and angrily, but he left.
And once again I thought that was an end to the tests.
And once again I was wrong.
For David Craken, looking weary but determined, said: “Sir, I request permission to complete the thirteen-hundred-foot test.”
“What?” demanded Blighman, for once off balance.
“I request permission to complete the test, sir,” David repeated doggedly. “I didn’t strike Captain Fairfane. It would be fairly simple for me to complete the test. And I request permission to demonstrate it.”
Blighman hesitated, scowling. “Craken, you’re at thirteen hundred feet. That isn’t any child’s game out there.”
“I know, sir. I’m a native of Marinia. I’ve had experience with pressure before.”
Blighman looked him over thoughtfully. Then he nodded abruptly.
“Very well, Craken. Lieutenant Saxon says these tests are important to help establish his serum. I suppose that justifies it. You may complete your dive.”
We went down once more to the control chamber.
The sea-gates opened above us, and I watched David come swimming out into the cold blackness of the water at a quarter of a mile’s depth.
He looked as slow and clumsy as human swimmers always do under the water, but he stroked regularly, evenly, down the glowing guide line until he was out of sight.
We waited for him to return.
We waited for seconds. Then minutes.
He swam down the guide line past the threshold of invisibility. And he never came back.
4
“The Tides Don’t Wait!”
The next day it all seemed like a bad dream. There was no time for dreaming, though. It was Academy Day, and the big inspection and review had us all on the hop.
Over the sea-coral portals of the Administration Building, etched in silver, was the motto of the Academy: The Tides Don’t Wait! The tides don’t wait for anything—not for a lost shipmate, not for tragedy, not for any human affair. David Craken was gone, but the Academy went on.
We fell in, in full-dress sea-scarlet uniforms, on the blindingly white crushed coral of the Ramp. Overhead the bright Bermuda sun shone fiercely out of a sky full of fleecy clouds. The cadet officers snapped their orders, the long files and crews went through the manual of arms and wheeled off in parade formation. As we passed David Craken’s crew I risked a glance. There was not even a gap to mark where he should have been. I saw Eladio Angel, his face strained but expressionless as he stood at stiff attention, waiting for the order to march off; David would have been marching beside him.
But David was—well, the wording of the official notice on our bulletin board was “lost and presumed drowned.”
The band blared into the sub-sea anthem as we wheeled left off the Ramp, boxed the Quadrangle and halted by squads in the center of the square, facing the inspection platform in front of the Ad Building. The sun was murderously hot, though it was not yet noon; but not a man of our class wavered. We stood there while the upperclassmen marched crisply through in their turn; we stood there through the brief address by the Commandant to remind us of the sacredness of the day. We stood there through the exacting man-by-man inspection of the Commandant and his officers, as they strolled down the lines, checking weapons, eagle-eyed for a smudged tunic or tarnished button.
Then it was over and we marched off again by crews, to be dismissed at the end of the Ramp. Bob Eskow and I fell out and began to trot for our quarters—we had just twenty minutes before we were due to fall out again in undress whites for our first class of the day.