Undersea Fleet (6 page)

The more I thought of it, the more sure I got that that was it.

And the more sure I got, the wronger I—much later—turned out to be.

That was in October.

Weeks passed. I got a curt note on the letterhead of Morgan Wensley, from Kermadec Dome. My letter had been received. It would be forwarded to Mr. Craken. The letter was signed by Morgan Wensley.

Not a word about the disappearance of David Craken. This Morgan Wensley, whoever he was, showed no regret and no interest.

As far as he was concerned, and as far as the Academy was concerned, David Craken might never have existed. David’s name was stricken from the rolls as “lost.” Laddy Angel and I met a few times and talked about him—but what was there to say, after all? And, since we weren’t in the same crew, weren’t even quartered in the same building, the times we met were fewer and fewer.

I almost began to forget David myself—for a while.

To tell the truth, none of us had much time for brooding over the past. Classes, formations, inspections, sports. We were kept busy, minute by minute, and whenever we had an hour’s free time we spent it, Bob Eskow and I, down by the shallows, practicing skin-diving. Bob was fiercely determined that when the big marathon underwater swim came up after the holidays he would be in the best shape he could manage. “Maybe I’ll wash out, Jim,” he told me grimly, sitting and panting on the raft between dives. “But it won’t be because I haven’t done the best I can!” And he was off again with his goggles in place, stretching his breathing limit as far as it would go. I was hard put to keep up with him. At first he could stay down only a matter of seconds. Then a minute, a minute and a half. Then he was making two-minute dives, and two and a half…

From earliest childhood I was a three-minute diver, but that was nearly the limit; and by Christmas holidays Bob was able to pace me second for second.

Without air supply, with only the oxygen in our lungs to keep us going, both of us were going down forty and fifty feet, staying down for as much as three and a half minutes. We worked out a whole elaborate system of trials. We checked out a pair of electrolungs and spent a whole precious Saturday afternoon underwater near the raft, marking distances and depths, setting ourselves goals and targets. Then every succeeding Saturday, in fair weather or foul, we were out there, sometimes in pounding rain and skies so gloomy that we couldn’t see the underwater markers we had left.

But it paid off for Bob.

It showed on him in ways other than increased skill beneath the water. He began to lose weight, to grow leaner and wirier. When Lieutenant Saxon checked him over just before the Christmas holidays he gave Bob a sharp look. “You’re the one who passed out in the diving tests?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And now you want to kill yourself completely, is that it?” the sea medic blazed. “Look at your chart, man! You’ve lost twenty pounds! You’re running on nerve and guts, nothing else. What have you been doing to yourself?”

Bob said mutinously: “Nothing, sir. I’m in good health.”

“I’m the judge of that!” But in the end Saxon passed him, grumbling. Bob was wearing himself down to sea-bottom, but there is no law that says a cadet must pamper himself. And the grinding routine went on. Not only the Saturday-afternoon extra-duty swimming with me, but Bob developed a habit of stealing off by himself at the occasional odd hours between times—just after chapel, or during Visitors’ Hour, or whenever else he could find a moment. I knew how worried he was that he might not pass the marathon-swim. I didn’t question him about these extra times, for I was sure they were spent either in the gym or out doing roadwork to build up his wind.

Of course, I was utterly wrong.

Time passed—months of it. And at last it was spring.

We had almost forgotten David Craken—strange, sad boy from under the sea! It was April and then May, time for the marathon swim.

We boarded the gym ship again just after lunch. It was the first time Bob or I had been aboard her since David was lost. I caught Bob’s eye on the spot where he and David and I had stood against the rail, looking back at the Bermuda shore. He saw me looking at him and smiled faintly. “Poor David,” he said, and that was all.

That was all for him. For me, I was seeing something else at that rail—something large and reptilian, a huge, angular head that had loomed out of the depths.

I had seen it many times since—in dreams. But that first time, had
that
been a dream?

There was no time for dreaming now. No sooner were we well clear of land than Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane called us to fall in in crews, and Sea Coach Blighman put us through an intensive workout, there on the deck of the sub-sea raft being towed through the Bermuda waves by the snub-nosed tugs. We had fifteen minutes of that, then a ten-minute break.

Then we were all ordered below decks. The hatches were sealed, the gym ship trimmed for diving, the signal made to the tugs, and we went to ten fathoms, to continue our voyage underwater. It was ten nautical miles to where we were going; at the nine-knot speed of the towed gym ship, a few minutes over an hour. Ten nautical miles, at 6,000 feet each. Sixty thousand feet. Nearly eleven and a half land miles.

And we would swim those miles back to base, maintaining our ten-fathom depth until we reached the shallows.

Halfway out, we were ordered into swimming gear, flippers, goggles, electrolung and thermo-suits. The suits would slow us down, but we had to have them. At ten fathoms—sixty feet—pressure is not the enemy. Cold is what is dangerous. Yes, cold! Even in Bermuda waters, even in late spring. The temperature of the human body is 98 degrees Fahrenheit and a bit; the temperature of sea water—even there and then—only in the seventies. Put a block of steel the size and temperature of the human body into the Bermuda sea, and in minutes it will cool to the temperature of the water around it. There is a difference between a block of steel and a human body, of course. The difference is this: It doesn’t hurt a block of steel to be cooled to seventy degrees; but at that temperature the body cannot live.

What keeps swimmers alive? Why, the heat their bodies produce, of course; for the body is tenacious of its heat, and keeps pouring calories out to replace the loss. But add to the drain of heat-calories from the cooling of the water the drain of energy-calories of the muscles propelling the swimmer along, and in ten sea miles the body’s outpouring of calories has robbed its reserves past the danger point.

The early surface swimmers—the conquerors of the English Channel, for example—tried to keep out the chill with heavy layers of grease covering every inch of the body but the eyes. Worse than useless! The grease actually helped to dissipate the heat. Oh, some of them made it, all the same. But how many others—even helped by frequent pauses in mid-Channel to drink hot beverages—failed?

There were a hundred and sixty-one of us on the gym ship. And it was the tradition of the Academy that
none
of us should fail.

As we climbed the ladders to the sea-lock I punched Bob’s arm. “You’ll make it!” I whispered.

He grinned at me, but the grin was worried. “I have to!” he said. And then we were in the lock.

The sea-gates irised open.

The gym ship, trimmed and motionless at ten fathoms, disgorged its hundred and sixty-one lungdivers by crews.

Silently, in the filtered green sunlight from above, we went through a five-minute underwater calisthenic warm-up. Then we heard the rumbling, wavering voice of Sea Coach Blighman on the hailer from the control deck. “Crew leaders, attention! At the signal, by crews, shove off!”

There was a ten-second pause, then the shrill, penetrating beep of the signal.

We were off.

Bob and I were in the last crew, commanded by Roger Fairfane. I had made up my mind to one thing: I would not leave Bob alone. Almost at once our regular formation broke up. I could see ten, twenty, perhaps thirty swimmers scattered about me in the water, looking like pale green ghosts stroking along in the space-eating swim the Academy taught us. I found Bob and clung close to him, keeping an eye on him.

He saw me, grinned—or so it seemed, with the goggles and mouthpiece hiding most of his face—and then concentrated his energies on the long swim before us.

The first mile. Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane came in close to us, waving angrily. We were well behind the others and he wanted us to catch up. I shook my head determinedly and pointed to Bob. Roger grimaced furiously, shot ahead, then returned. He stayed sullenly close all through the long swim. As crew officer, it was his duty to keep tabs on stragglers—and we were straggling.

The second mile. Bob kept right on plugging. We weren’t making any speed, but he showed no signs of faltering.

The third mile. The cold was seeping in now; we were all beginning to feel the strain and weariness. All the others were well out of sight by now. Bob paused for a second in his regular, slow kick-and-stroke. He rolled over on his back, stretched—

And did a complete slow loop under water.

Roger and I shot toward him, worried. But he straightened out, grinned at us again—no mistake this time!—and made a victory signal with his hand.

For the first time I realized that the long months of training had paid off, and Bob was going to make it all the way.

We pulled ourselves out into the surf about a mile down the beach from the Academy compound. It was nearly dark by now; the rest of the swimmers must long since have returned.

Weary as we were, Bob and I clasped hands exultantly. Roger, impatiently standing in the shallows waiting for us, snarled something irritable and sharp, but we weren’t listening. Bob had made it!

Roger opened the waterproof pouch at his waist and took out the flare pistol. He pointed it up and out to sea and fired the rocket that announced our safe arrival—necessary, so that the tally-officer would know we were not lost and hopeless, and so send out searching parties. “Come on,” he growled. “We’re halfway off the island and it’s about chow time!”

Bob and I stripped off goggles and mouthpieces and drew deep breaths of the warm, fragrant air. We slid out of our thermo-suits and stood grinning at each other for a moment. “Come on!” Roger cried again. “What are you waiting for?”

We splashed toward him, still grinning. We could see the yellow lights shining in the big resort hotels beyond the Academy compound, and a glow of light in the sky over Hamilton. A full moon was well up on the horizon.

The scarlet all’s-well flare went up from the Academy docks just then—proof that our signal had been the last; everyone had now completed the swim.

Roger yelled furiously: “Wake up, will you? Eskow! Get a move on. You held the whole crew up, you dumb jellyfish, and—”

He broke off suddenly, looking at the water between us.

A wave had washed something past us, up toward the high-water mark on the beach. Something that glowed, faint and blue.

It was a little metal cylinder, no larger than a searation can. The wave broke and retreated, sucking the little cylinder back.

Bob bent down, curious even in his exhausted state, and picked it up.

We all saw it at once. The faint blue glow was the glimmer of edenite!

“Hey, Jim!” he cried. “Something armored! What in the world—?”

We stared at it. Armored with edenite! It had to be something from the deeps—edenite was for highpressure diving, nothing else. I took it from his hand. It was heavy, but not so heavy that it couldn’t float. The glow of the edenite was very pale, here in the atmosphere, but the tiny field-generators inside the cylinder must still be working—I could see the ripple of light shimmer across it as my breath made a pressure change on the cylinder.

And I saw a dark line, where two halves of it joined.

“Let’s open it,” I said. “It must unscrew—here, where the line goes around it.”

Roger splashed toward us. “What have you got there?” he demanded, his swimming fins kicking spray and digging into the coral sand. “Let me see!”

Instinctively hesitated, then letting go.

I handed it back to Bob. He held it toward Roger—but without

Roger grabbed at it. “Give it here!” he rasped. “I saw it first!”

“Now, wait a minute,” Bob said quietly. “I felt it wash against my ankle before you ever saw it. You were too busy calling me a jellyfish to—“

“It’s mine, I say!”

I broke in. “Before we worry too much about it, why don’t we open it up and see what’s inside?”

They both looked at me. Roger shrugged disdainfully. “Very well. But remember that I am your cadet officer. If its contents are of any importance, it will be my duty to take charge of them.”

“Sure,” said Bob, and handed the cylinder to me. I caught the ghost of a wink in his eye, though his expression was otherwise serious.

I gripped the ends of the thing and twisted. It unscrewed more easily than I had expected, and as soon as it began to turn the glimmer of the edenite armor flickered and died. The connection to the tiny generators within it had been broken.

The metal cap came off, and I shook the cylinder upside down over my hand.

The first thing that came out was a thick roll of paper. We looked at it and gasped—that paper was money! A great deal of it, by the feel, rolled up and held with a rubber band. Next came a document of some sort—perhaps a letter—rolled to fit in the cylinder. Tucked inside the letter was a small black velvet bag. I loosened the drawstrings of the bag and peered inside.

I couldn’t help gasping.

“What is it?” Roger rapped impatiently.

I shook my head wordlessly and poured the contents of the bag out into the palm of my hand.

There were thirteen enormous pearls, glimmering like milky edenite in the yellow moonlight.

Thirteen pearls!

They looked as huge and as bright as the moon itself. They were all perfect, all exactly the same size. They seemed to shine with a light of their own in my hand.

“Pearls!” gasped Roger. “Tonga pearls! I’ve—I’ve seen one, once. A long time ago. They’re—priceless!”