He broke off, and they both stopped, staring at Cerberus.The seal still lay in the shallows, his head uplifted on his long neck to stare at the humans. In that position, the transceiver under his neck was plain to see.
“How’d that get turned around?” asked one of the twins,as they both converged on Robby. Their faces were not as friendly as they had been before. “If you think you can—”
He broke off. He and the other twin wheeled about simultaneously. The door behind them was still standing half open.And through that opening came the quiet melody of a voice,softly singing, as it came closer and closer.
And the voice was one that Robby had practically given up hope of ever hearing again. It sang:
“Lilli-bu-ler, ler-o, ler-o,“Lilli-bu-ler, ler-o...”
Escape to the Pack Ice
Just then the song ceased, and the singer appeared in the open doorway.
“Mr. Lillibulero!” cried Robby.
“Ah, there, Robertson,” replied the little man coolly. He was still wearing his Outside Suit, as Robby was, but Mr. Lillibulero had tipped his helmet back and locked it in position out of his way. His gun and knife were missing from his belt, but he did not seem at all disturbed by this fact, or by the guns in the big hands of Harvey and Dick. He came into the room, politely but firmly closing the door behind him.
“Mr. Lillibulero?” echoed either Harvey or Dick now. “That can’t be Lillibulero, the International Police Agent?” He looked at his twin brother.
“Certainly not,” said the other twin. “Lillibulero couldn’t have got in here without our alarms going off.”
“Besides,” said the first, “we shot him down in his flyer.”
“And this fellow’s too small,” said the second.
“And weak,” said the first.
“He couldn’t be Lillibulero, not according to the stories they tell about him,” said the second. “It must be some crazy little man pretending to be Lillibulero. Let’s grab him.”
They both grabbed at Mr. Lillibulero. Robby, who had seen the little man in action against half a dozen Vandals at once, could have told them grabbing him would not work.
The gun-free hands they grabbed with met empty air. Mr.Lillibulero simply was not there when the hands arrived.
Instead he was behind one of the twins, twisting one arm up behind his back.
“Ow!” cried Harvey—or it may have been Dick—dropping the revolver from the hand attached to the twisted arm. Mr. Lillibulero promptly kicked the gun into the pool, where Cerberus bent his neck to look curiously at it under the water.
“OOoof!” grunted Dick—or it may have been Harvey—as his twin brother, shoved forward by Mr. Lillibulero, rammed his head into Dick’s stomach. Dick also dropped his gun. Mr. Lillibulero kicked that gun into the pool too, leapfrogged over the falling Harvey, got a head-and-shoulder hold on Dick,threw Dick against a wall, turned around and, taking his time,knocked Harvey out with a beautiful left hook to the jaw. The twins lay still. Dick against the wall, Harvey in the middle of the floor.
—Or vice versa.
“Mr. Lillibulero!” shouted Robby with joy and excitement, almost ready to take a hand in the battle himself.
“Laddie,” said Mr. Lillibulero, turning to him. “My apologies for y’r being here, and for my not arriving before this moment. But m’duty to some thousands of other lives kept me busy until th’ present second.”
He looked over at Cerberus, where the big seal’s head stuck up out of the pool, watching them.
“There’s no time t’lose,” he said. “We’d best go out through the water lock of yon pool, if I can figure some way to prevent y’r watchdog there from stopping us leaving.”
“But he’s not a watchdog!” said Robby. “I’ve made friends with him. He’s on our side!”
“Indeed?” said Mr. Lillibulero, raising one eyebrow skeptically and bending a hard emerald stare upon Cerberus, a stare the seal returned with perfect calm and composure.
“See?” said Robby. He turned and splashed through the pool to the seal’s side. He put an arm around the thick neck and Cerberus swung his head in friendly fashion against Robby, almost knocking him over.
“Indeed,” said Mr. Lillibulero. His eyebrow came down.“ ’Tis not the sort of happening normally t’be expected. How-ever, I’m not th’ man t’look suspiciously at any help we can get. How can y’be sure, however, these Tropicans canna control the beast and turn him against you?”
“I turned down the controls on his Control Cap,” said Robby.
“Why that?” said Mr. Lillibulero. “Why not remove th’Cap entirely?”
“I thought . . .” said Robby a little uncertainly, “I might be able to get hold of a Control Box. Then I could send him with a message to McMurdo, or someplace.”
“Indeed!” said Mr. Lillibulero. “I may just be able to help you t’acquire such a box. But for now, and if y’ll bring the beast along, we’d best be going.”
With that, he flipped his helmet forward over his head, sealed it tightly against the water pressure, and walked forward into the deep waters of the pool. Robby followed his example, and a second later, they both emerged into the dark Antarctic Sea, with Cerberus following.
Mr. Lillibulero turned right and swam up around the curving side of the Tropican Headquarters Number One. He paused for a moment to let Robby swim up beside him, and put his helmet against Robby’s. Robby saw the little man’s lips move and heard his voice thinly carried through the two touching transparent walls of the helmets. They were talking together the way divers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with their old-fashioned metal helmets had talked together under water, particularly after Augustus Siebe had invented his “close,” or complete, diving dress in 1819.
“If y’ave anything to say to me, Robertson,” said Mr. Lillibulero’s thin, filtered voice, “touch y’r helmet to mine. We canna risk using our suit radios for fear they’ll hear us on their radio circuit inside the ship.”
Robby nodded to show he understood, and followed Mr. Lillibulero as the little man turned and began to swim on again.
They were moving along the length of the Tropican Head-quarters, which Robby could now see had the shape of a big submarine yacht, which was what it undoubtedly had been before Waub anchored it here under the ice and gave it another name. It was shaped somewhat like a supersonic airplane with needle-pointed nose, fat body, stubby tail, and what looked like stubby wings amidships. They were actually stabilizers to keep the yacht from rolling or twisting sideways at high speeds under water.
The difference between this ship and a plane, of course,was that it required a much less powerful engine in proportion to its size. As a result, most of the yacht’s interior was free to be taken up with staterooms or work rooms. The wall-wide windows of these rooms made up most of the sides of the ship. Robby felt as if he were looking into a three-level fishbowl with each level split up into compartments with different fish inside, although in fact this was a people-bowl where the fish were on the outside, reversing the usual procedure.
It was a very large yacht, and Robby was startled and not a little scared to see so many people through the transparent windows. They all wore the same sort of flowered cloth kilt that the twins and Waub had worn. It was hard to believe that they could not see Robby, Mr. Lillibulero, and Cerberus as the three of them swam by the big windows. Actually, the lights inside were too bright for this to happen. It was like looking out a window of a lighted living room at night.Anyone outside can see you perfectly clearly, but all you see is blackness beyond the window pane unless there is a light of some kind outside. This is because your eyes are adjusted to the inside light, while the eyes of anyone outside have adjusted to the darkness there. Robby’s eyes were adjusted to the darkness of the Antarctic waters.
They swam up and forward to the compartments on the top deck at the front of the yacht. And Robby found himself staring. They had just come level with one big room, several times the siz
e of the room in which Robby had been imprisoned.
It had a water lock like most of the other rooms on the yacht, but that was the only usual thing about it. There was no furniture of any kind and the room was crammed with a great crowd of Adeile penguins, many more than there should have been even in a room that size. As they jostled and jammed into each other, their parted beaks showed them to be protesting unhappily about the crowded conditions. Robby was tempted to stop, swim in the water lock, and let them out, but before he could put his helmet against Mr. Lillibulero’s to suggest it, they were past. And the next big room was filled with the rarely seen Ross seals, in equal numbers.
They passed this, too. At the next room, Mr. Lillibulero stopped and turned into the water lock. Robby and Cerberus followed him. The window had been made milky and opaque so they could not see in. Robby was therefore completely surprised by what he saw when they broke the surface of the pool inside.
They had come up in a fairly small room that seemed to be some sort of a storeroom. Piles of equipment filled shelves and the available floor space. But that was not what surprised Robby so much. He found himself face to face with a stack of Control Caps and he recognized them as the ones taken from the Palship X Two. Beside him, he heard Mr. Lillibulero swing back his helmet.
“Take a look, Robertson,” the little man said. “The Control Box y’seek must be on one of the shelves around here.”
Robby put back his own helmet and waded on up out of the pool. He hunted with his eyes quickly up and down the shelves, and finally spotted a cardboard carton that looked like the cartons for the spare Hand-Control Boxes he had seen stored on the Palship. He went quickly to it and tried to break it open, but it was sealed with heavy tapes where the top flaps came together.
“Here, laddie,” said Mr. Lillibulero, pushing Robby gently aside, “let me.”
He took hold of the ends of the flaps and twisted his wrists in opposite directions. The tape popped and split open. Mr. Lillibulero pulled up the flaps. Inside were rows of Control Boxes like the one Robby had seen on the table by Waub’s chair.
Robby opened the upper part of his suit and put a Control Box safely inside at his belt. He turned to speak to Mr. Lillibulero, but the little man, moving with his usual quiet swiftness, had gotten two shelf-lengths away in the interval and was examining a stack of flat black metal boxes, each about the size of a blackboard eraser, but much heavier, to judge from the way Mr. Lillibulero was hefting one in his hand.
“Ah, Robertson,” he said, looking up to see Robby’s eyes fixed on him. “Do y’know what these are?”
Robby shook his head.
“They’re harbor-makers,” said Mr. Lillibulero, “or tunnel-busters, as some construction men call them. This wee box I’m holding could blow up this ship we’re on and the ice above us for a solid mile in each direction.”
He put the flat box back with the others.
“And now,” he said, “we’d best be going before it’s found out y’ave escaped.”
“Shouldn’t we take those boxes and dump them, or something?”
“They’re too heavy to take with us,” said Mr. Lillibulero, “and we dare not dump them with the water perhaps half a mile deep below us. There’s no telling if they could be recovered, and they would remain a danger until they were recovered. We wouldn’t want them all going off down there together two years or so from now because the water had rusted through one and started it off.”
He turned and went toward the pool, putting his helmet back and sealing it in place. Robby followed, sealing his own helmet.
They went back out through the water lock and swam upward until they were above the yacht. Then Robby took hold of Cerberus’s collar and motioned Mr. Lillibulero to do the same. Cerberus looked mistrustfully at the little man when he felt himself grasped by somebody besides Robby, but Robby patted him clumsily through the water, and the big seal seemed reassured.
He began to swim off into the darkness. Soon they were able to see a faint light ahead in the water. A moment later they were between the walls of the crack in the ice sheett hrough which Cerberus had brought Robby earlier. And in the space of a couple of breaths their helmets, together with Cerberus’s head, popped out into the air.
Robby looked questioningly at Mr. Lillibulero. Mr. Lillibulero pointed out and away between the ice walls to the distant sunlit, white tumbled shapes of the pack ice and the dark open water. Robby nodded and urged Cerberus forward.
Slowly, powerfully, Cerberus swam, dragging them behind him, out of the widening water in the crevasse into the free-floating ice and the open water beyond where his own fierce brothers and the killer whales prowled the icy depths for just such food as their human selves.
It was a dread place into which to go forward. But with the Tropicans behind them, they could not go back.
The Time Is Near
Mr. Lillibulero’s plans, it soon began to appear, had to do with getting as close to the open sea as possible. Robby, under the little man’s directions, kept Cerberus at work towing them forward between the floes in the open water, and out toward the edge of the permanent pack ice—that ice that did not melt loose even in the Antarctic summer.
Cerberus obeyed without any sign of resentment. He was,in fact, surprisingly docile for such a naturally independent creature. Secretly, Robby began to think that perhaps it was more than just that he had gotten into the habit of obeying humans. Robby was starting to fear that the clumsy and punishing discipline Waub had used through the Control Cap had affected the big seal’s mind—that, in effect, Cerberus’s spirit had been broken, as they used to say of animals who had been tamed by methods that were too harsh.
If this was so, Cerberus might be little use to them except to tow them through the water. He might, thought Robby,have no courage left and desert them just when they needed him most because he sensed the nearness of a killer whale or some savage bull seal of his own kind.
However, Robby kept this fear to himself. It was not only that he did not want to alarm Mr. Lillibulero before he was sure about Cerberus. It was also that Cerberus had come and put his head on Robby’s feet when Robby had felt at his worst and there had seemed ho hope left. He did not want to betray any weakness or cowardliness in the big seal even if it was true, unless it became absolutely necessary to do so.
They had actually become fast friends, the seal and Robby, in that locked room; and Robby stood by his friends.
Meanwhile, Robby expected that Cerberus by his actions would at least give warning if any carnivore larger than himself was in their neighborhood. Consequently, he felt fairly safe as Cerberus towed them out beyond the ice crack until they seemed to be traveling through a sea filled with icebergs about the size of buildings.
Eventually, they came without any trouble to an area where these floating chunks of ice were widely spread out. Beyond this they approached what looked like a solid barrier of frozen pack ice, but which Robby suspected was merely a floating mass too large to see around.
They searched until they found a sloping edge where Cerberus could climb out of the water, and then hauled themselves up onto this final stretch of ice. Cerberus rolled half-over in the bright Antarctic sunlight, almost as if he were going to take a sun bath. Mr. Lillibulero sat down on the ice and opened his helmet slightly. He signaled to Robby, who did the same.
“How are y’now, Robertson?” he inquired through the opening. “Y’ave not had it easy since I took y’aboard the flyer to carry you to McMurdo.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” answered Robby. “They gave me a room to sleep in and some sandwiches and milk. And soup,”he added, although the soup was hardly worth mentioning,cool as it had been. “Did you get anything to eat?”
“As it happens, I did,” said Mr. Lillibulero. “Yon Waub has a fat man’s appetite. I found a small kitchen connected wi’ his suite of rooms on the yacht, full of fancy eatables and candy. I took some of the candy to eat as I went, it having more energy per pound than most f
oods—though I’ve no sweet tooth, myself.”
“Candy,” said Robby, licking his lips. It had been some little while since the sandwiches, the milk, and the cold soup.“ Do you have some left?”
“I have not,” said Mr. Lillibulero.
“You should have stuffed your pockets while you had the chance,” pointed out Robby.
“I had no time to waste. I was looking,” said Mr. Lillibulero severely, “for you.”
“Oh,” said Robby.
“However,” said Mr. Lillibulero in a softer tone of voice,“I dinna blame y’for asking. After all, it was my fault y’were there.”
“It’s just that I’m still hungry,” explained Robby, apologizing in his turn. “And it wasn’t your fault I was there. I landed on the pack ice all right, but that Director sent Cerberus after me.”
“Ah, but y’would not have been on the ice,” said Mr. Lillibulero, “if I had not suggested to y’r father that y’would be safer at McMurdo. I should have realized the Tropicans knew I was on their trail and that they might attack m’flyer.”
“Oh, well,” said Robby. They sat in silence for a fews econds, both of them thinking about that moment in the flyer before Robby had jumped. A Maccormick’s skua, called the eagle of the Antarctic, screamed suddenly from nearby and swooped close on its four-foot wings to see who these strange-looking friends of a leopard seal could be. The skua had probably been feeding on eggs from the rookeries of the Adglie penguins ashore, unless most of the penguin eggs were already hatched, this late in the Antarctic summer. At any other time Robby would have been interested in watching the fierce, piratical skua or any of the Antarctic flying birds—the clumsy-looking blue-eyed shag, the giant fulmar, the swift Cape pigeon, the little burrowing whale bird, or the even smaller storm petrel. But now he had too much else to concern him.
“What’re we going to do?” he asked.
“That’s the question, indeed,” said Mr. Lillibulero. “Y’said y’might be able to direct the leopard seal.”
Secrets of the Deep Page 14
