He left me standing there while he walked cautiously across the wide chamber and out of sight. No one else was around; I heard distant voices, but evidently the draining room didn’t require much in the way of workmen.
I didn’t have long to wait. I heard someone coming—fast. It was Gideon. As he drew near he panted, “Come on, Jim. We’ve got to get out of here! Sperry’s got the whole city looking for us—we’ve got to leave fast!”
I followed almost without thinking, back the way we had come, through the back ways and secret passages Gideon knew so well. As we trotted along he filled me in: “Had a friend of mine checking up on what was going on,” he panted. “Trouble, Jim! Sperry’s captive police force—they’re after us. Shoot on sight are the orders!”
“But he can’t!”
“Jim, he can do anything! He’s the mayor—he’s the law in Thetis. You and me, we’re just nobodies. We’ve got to get out of Thetis right away.”
“But where can we go?”
“The ocean, boy! Where else? Where would your uncle go when he was in trouble? The Deeps!”
I said stumblingly, “But surely, Gideon, surely we can go to the officials here and straighten everything out. Sperry can’t tear up the law!”
“He can sure try,” Gideon panted grimly. “Boy, don’t you understand yet? Sperry is the law in Thetis. We’ve got to fight him sooner or later, yes, but not this way. Our word against his—we’d be laughed out of court. You don’t even have a passport, remember! You’d be picked up the minute you walked into a police station—if you lived to get that far!”
I shook my head. I said stubbornly, “What’s the use of trying to get away? We’d get about as far as the gangway of one of Sperry’s liners, and—”
Gideon grinned. “Who said anything about a liner?” he demanded. “Come on!”
He led the way. I followed, doubting—but what else was there to do? Twice we dodged into alleyways as the scarlet uniforms of the sea-police came into sight. It was unlikely that they were looking for us—but we couldn’t take chances.
At last we came to a desolate tangle of grimy tunnels, where the sub-sonic pounding of mighty engines throbbed. It was the main pumping station for Thetis’ drains—the point, perhaps, where I would have been caught in the suction and cast out into the crushing deep if Gideon hadn’t plucked me from the stream.
He said: “Quiet, now. We’re about to break a few laws.”
He led the way through a narrow tunnel to a chamber lit by a single flickering Troyon tube. It was occupied by an elderly man, half asleep, his head bobbing on his breast; the room was lined with what seemed to be racks of diving gear. We paused at the entrance, Gideon silent as a wandering ghost, as he stared thoughtfully at the old man. Then, still silent, he shook his head and drew me back along the passage.
“Can’t take a chance,” he whispered. “The watchman would have the police on us in two minutes; we’ll have to try the other port.”
“To do what?” I demanded.
“To steal a pressure suit, Jim,” he said. “What did you think? We’re going out into the ocean.”
I said, “Gideon, that’s crazy. Where can we go? We can’t get to another city in a pressure suit—we’d be picked up there just as easily as here if we did. Let’s go back to the upper levels and—”
“And turn ourselves right over to Sperry, is that it? Jim, sometimes I wonder what they taught you in the Sub-Sea Academy! Just leave it to me, Jim. We’ll get ourselves a couple of suits, and we’ll sneak out to the farm belt. Chances are we’ll be able to borrow a seacar there; if we do, we’ll head for Seven Dome. Don’t worry about us being picked up in Seven Dome—we’ll take our chances. All clear? Now let’s go get the suits. We can’t get them here, with that watchman; we’ll have to try the other port.”
I thought, hard. “Well,” I said, surrendering, “you know best, I suppose. Why can’t we tie the watchman up, though? There is only one of him and there are two of us; we can—”
“Jim!” Gideon’s expression was exasperated. “That’s the main pump station. Suppose there should be a breakdown after we go, with the watchman tied up? Thetis would be drowned out, boy! Look, do me a favor. Quit thinking. Just come along!”
I came. Glumly.
But it seemed to be working out, I had to admit. The other port was not, for the moment, tended—the watchman was presumably off making his rounds. We found a pair of Edenite pressure suits that fitted us, gave their armor circuits a quick charge, slipped into the exit lock and sealed it.
The water boiled in around us, splashing against the steel baffles like 50-millimeter machine-gun shells against an armor plate. Even the splattering drops were almost violent enough to knock me off my feet; but it was only a few moments until the chamber was filled, pressure up to the outside intensity.
We opened the outer port, and climbed down a metal ladder to the sea floor.
The muck was almost knee deep. Gideon gesticulated—we were too close to Thetis to use our helmet talkers—and I managed to understand that he wanted me to adjust the suit’s buoyancy tanks as he did. By juggling them, we reduced our effective weight to a couple of pounds—enough to keep us from floating off into the miles of empty water overhead, but little enough so that we could walk on top of the mud instead of sinking into it.
We tiptoed along on top of the muck like slow-motion ballet dancers. It was almost like those training periods at the bottom of the shallow Caribbean tidal waters. Secure in the armor my uncle had invented and given to the world, we had no feeling of the crushing pressure outside, no sense of the towering miles of water overhead. Here the muck was absolutely barren, barren and dark. The lights of Thetis behind us gave enough illumination for us to keep in touch with each other—we could not, of course, use helmet lights for fear of being spotted from a port. Once or twice the glimmering lights of a sub-sea liner slipped silently past overhead; other than that the dark was absolute.
For half an hour we flitted across the wasteland before topping a little submarine ridge. We saw ahead the waving streamers of kelp, the lights and structures of the subsea farms that surrounded Thetis.
The “kelp” was only distantly related to the seaweed of the old surface Sargasso, of course. It was a thick-stemmed, avidly growing vegetation that fed on the wastes from Thetis and the glow of floating batteries of Troyon tubes, where no other vegetation had grown since time began. There were many varieties of the seaweed, in every color of the spectrum, in every size from tiny mosslike growths to huge, thick-bodied things that stretched a score of yards into the chill waters. Some were for food, some for fuel; many were for neither of those, but were living osmotic mining machines, capable of extracting pure elements from the sea water around them. These were the most miraculous of all—for they made it possible to har vest the suspended salts of the sea, drawing out the magnesium, iron, gold, silver—all the countless minerals that the deep sea waters held. They were as efficient as natural kelp was at extracting iodine, which so amazed the early chemists; but, of course, they had their limitations. And some few metals—uranium, the most important of them—did not exist in sea water in quantities large enough to matter, so that we were forced to rely on the mines…
At once I was thinking of my uncle Stewart, under a mountain of water at the bottom of Eden Deep, because of Hallam Sperry. The faceplate of my pressure suit misted—
Gideon thumped my back, bringing his headpiece close to mine, and turned his helmet talker on to low power. “See that building?” He pointed to a group of lights half-hidden by the waving kelp. “That’s where they keep the sea-cars. Because this is a sub-sea fleet base as well as one of Sperry’s farms, it’ll be guarded. But stick with me, Jim, and we’ll make it.”