Mac was now growling and throwing deep-chested challenges in the direction of the underwater opening in the reef.As Robby and the little man burst onto the barge deck, they both saw what looked like a spurt of water lance up from the waves just beyond the reef. It shot in the direction of Mac for the distance of a foot or so, and then fell back into the sea.
“They’re firing a sonic rifle at him,” said Mr. Lillibulero. Robby realized this was true. The jet from the waves, like a stream from a water pistol, had been the result of someone under the sea shooting in Mac’s direction. The little man sniffed. “It’ll do th’beast small harm.”
That too was true, Robby knew. The sonic rifle, related not only to the toy gun that knocks over a paper target at ten or fifteen feet but to the jet airliner creating a sonic boom by its high, swift flight above the earth, had its limitations. A powerful and effective weapon at up to a hundred yards underwater, it was hardly more dangerous than a popgun in the thinner medium of air, where sound waves have only a third of their water speed. It could not have been Carswell who had fired the rifle at Mac, thought Robby. The red-haired man would have known better.
Up on his crane and teetering precariously, Mac roared defiance. At that, Robby told himself, the young Steller’s sea lion had three hundred pounds of weight and the neck muscles that permitted him to slash with razor teeth almost faster than the eye could follow. He would be a match for any two or three of Carswell’s men at once, if they dared attack him barehanded.
Meanwhile, Mr. Lillibulero was up and down the crane again in a moment. Mac stopped roaring to watch the little man, curiously.
“Th’tug is now anchored just outside the gap in th’reef,” he informed Robby. “Carswell’ll be sending swimmers in through the gap underwater; and those swimmers will be armed with sonic rifles and ready t’use them. So y’must follow m’orders, exactly.”
Robby swallowed. He had not felt especially frightened up until now. Even the sonic gun fired at Mac had seemed more exciting than alarming. But now there was a flat note in Mr. Lillibulero’s voice that made the back of Robby’s neck prickle.Suddenly he felt the coolness of the sea wind blowing against his bare chest and the sun shining on the wave tops with a bright, hard glitter. It reminded him of the gray glitter in the utterly cold eyes of Red Carswell.
“I will,” he said, hastily.
‘‘Then come wi’me.”
The little man led the way to the far end of the barge and pointed down the short ladder leading into the underwater globe of glass that was the observation bubble. Through its transparent bottom, beyond the dark outline of the camera used to film the excavation work, Robby could see the shape of La Floridana resting serenely on its supports.
“Down y’go, Laddie,” commanded Mr. Lillibulero, “and hand up to me one of the phones y’ll find there.”
Robby climbed down the ladder. On top of the camera he saw two hand-phones with a coil of insulated wire between them. He took one and climbed back up to give it to Mr. Lillibulero.
“Y’are,” said the little man, “t’be my spotter, Robertson.” He pointed to the sunken sloop. “I’ll take a position with the rifle behind a gunport there, where th’side of th’ship gives me good cover and protection. And y’are to phone me as y’see them come swimming through the gap in th’reef. Or even if they come over th’reef—though they will not try that at first.”
“Why not?” asked Robby, half ready to argue the point.
“If they come in over th’reef, then once they’re over,”said Mr. Lillibulero, “they’ll be exposed high in the water against th’bare rock. So it’s most likely they will snake in just above th’sea bottom, taking advantage of the cover of coral, rock chunks, and sea fans like th’early American Indian attacking a settlement.”
“I see!” said Robby. “You can’t see them so well from the ship. But I’ll be looking down on them, like a fish overhead!”
“Correct,” the little man replied, calmly. “Now, if I should be hit, y’are to take y’r sea lion and try t’get as far from the barge as possible. I want no nonsense about attempting t’aid me as y’did aboard the tug.” He looked hard at Robby. “If it were another sort of people opposing us, I’d suggest y’let them capture you and you have patience until y’are released. But Carswell is perfectly capable of seeing he leaves no witnesses alive behind him.”
Robby nodded. There did not seem to be anything for him to say.
“I tell y’this, not to frighten you,” said Mr. Lillibulero, dryly, “but because it’s always better t’face the facts. Now, to y’r post, Robertson; and I’ll be getting t’mine.”
A few minutes later, Robby watched the little man swimming downward, through the clear water, paying out the phone line as he went. Robby himself turned and climbed down into the observation bubble to get ready for the excitement.
The chair in the bottom of the bubble was set on gimbals, as was the camera, so that it could film at any angle in the bubble. Robby pushed the camera around behind him and tilted his chair so that he was facing ahead and down toward the gap in the reef. As he did so, the phone beside him buzzed.
Robby picked it up, pressing the “receive” button on the side of it.
“Robertson?” said the voice of Mr. Lillibulero in his ear.“Can y’hear me properly? Over t’you.” Robby pressed the“send” button in and the “receive” button popped out beside it.
“I can hear you fine,” he answered, and then remembered to add, “over.” He pushed the “receive” button once more.
“Excellent! Call me at th’first movement y’see. Over and out.”
Robby laid the phone down on his knees and looked down at the deck of La Floridana. Mr. Lillibulero lay on his stomach there with his legs spread out to make his position firm. The rifle butt was tucked into his shoulder, his elbows were spread, supporting the weapon in both hands and with its stock pressing against his cheek. His right eye looked down the long, thin barrel with the pinhole opening in its muzzle. He was steady as a rock, in the proper prone position taught to marksmen with the rifle. Robby turned his gaze to the opening in the reef.
He had noticed earlier how narrow this opening was. It was only about twenty feet deep and forty feet wide at the top with the sides sloping inward. But the level bottom space was choked with big rock pieces, sea fans, and such behind which attackers could hide. From this floor of the gap, the slope to the area inside the reef where La Floridana lay was also cluttered with hiding places.
On either side of the gap, the jagged rocks of the reef were like small peaks of an underwater mountain range, coming within three or four feet of the surface. Beyond the gap Robby could see only green-blue, watery distance, though he knew the tug was there.
He strained his eyes to try to make out the dark shadow of he tug’s shape, but could see nothing. A flicker of motion in the gap caught his eye, and he stared for a moment without seeing anything and half-thinking it was a fish he had seen. Then, he saw it again.
It had moved for just a moment and then become still. It was the light upper body of a swimmer moving just above the white sand, from behind one rock to the next.
Robby snatched up the phone and pushed the lever to “send.”
“Mr. Lillibulero,” he whispered urgently. “I see one. Over.”
“Where? Over,” came back the little man’s voice as Robby’s thumb shifted the phone lever back to “receive.”
“By the big purple sea fan next to the square rock—over!”said Robby.
A faint streak of white, that was an almost microscopic stream of bubbles, lanced through the underwater from the gunport behind which Mr. Lillibulero lay. A swimmer suddenly tumbled into sight from behind the purple sea fan, and began to flounder back frantically through the gap. He kept the square rock in line between him and La Floridana. One arm trailed limply behind him.
Mr. Lillibulero, Robby saw, was using his rifle at a setting strong enough to paralyze, but too low to kill. It was typical of the lit
tle man to do so.
“You got him! You got him!” cried Robby, forgetting to switch the lever to “send” in his excitement. He corrected this just as he caught sight of more invaders. “Two swimmers, Mr. Lillibulero! One at the right, by the jagged rock, one at the left by the big clump of sea fans!”
Even as Robby spoke, sonic rifles fired from beyond the gap. Robby saw the white streaks of their ultrasonic discharges, streaking toward the sloop to keep Mr. Lillibulero pinned down. At the same time, the two Robby had seen swam quickly forward.
Streaks from Mr. Lillibulero’s gun met them almost as soon as they started to move. They scrambled back through the gap, one with a useless arm, the other kicking with only one leg. The little man was too well protected behind the gunport of the ship for the fire beyond the gap to bother him. And he was too good a marksman to miss at this short range.
Robby dropped the phone from his knees in the excitement and banged his head on the invisible glass wall of the bubble,picking the phone up again. He was too excited to sit still.
Somehow, their fighting to save the sloop had made it seem to grow more valuable in his eyes. It was no longer just the waterlogged hulk that had failed to produce the gold and silver treasure he had dreamed of in the flyer on the way here.It had become something else—something more valuable than treasure, to himself as well as to a host of people like Bob Clanson, his father, Mr. Lillibulero, and even the old man, Millen. Was there, Robby suddenly wondered, an invisible something special? Something which, when added to ordinary things made them more precious than silver, gold, jewels, or all that was ordinarily considered riches or treasure—
“Mr. Lillibulero!” cried Robby, bursting suddenly out of his thoughts as it dawned on him he had been watching movements in the reef opening for some seconds now. “Lookout! Look out! They’re coming through the gap and over the reef on the sides at the same time. Look out! Look over the reef top to your left, there—”
The glass of the observation bubble abruptly rang like a bell, almost deafening Robby. It became covered with millions of tiny bubbles so that Robby could not see, and the glass rang again and again. The swimmers who had come over the top of the reef had discovered Robby. They were firing at the bubble, to keep Robby from spotting for Mr. Lillibulero. And their trick was working.
“I can’t see!” cried Robby desperately into the phone. “Mr. Lillibulero—”
The bubble stopped ringing to the sonic shots, and the bubbles cleared as if they had been wiped away by a large,invisible cloth. Robby saw the two swimmers who had come over the top of the reef struggling to reach a place of safety and noticed that the reef opening was already cleared of other attackers. He sighed with relief and looked at the phone to make sure it was on “receive.” It was, but Mr. Lillibulero had not answered. Robby looked down and saw him lying alertly by the ship’s gunport.
“Mr. Lillibulero,” called Robby, setting the phone button on “send.” “You didn’t get hit, did you—” He broke off.
The little man had made no move to pick up the phone on the deck beside him. Then Robby saw why.
The end of the cord between his phone and Mr. Lillibulero’s dangled in the water just a few feet below the observation bubble. A shot aimed at the bubble had cut it.
What was worse, the little man evidently did not know he no longer had Robby to warn him of an attack. Looking straight ahead toward the gap, he had not seen the broken cord.
And at the same time a sound he had been hearing for some seconds finally claimed Robby’s attention. It was the sound of buzzing coming from the air above the barge. The sound like buzzing made by a ducted fan flyer high in the air above.
The Last Attack
Robby dropped the phone and went up the ladder to the barge deck as fast as he could scramble. His first thought was to dive overside, even without a water lung, to swim down to Mr. Lillibulero and warn him of the broken cord. The next was to drop something heavy over the side of the barge to make the little man look up and see the break for himself. But as Robby burst onto the deck, both notions were swept from his mind by the noise he had heard.
Still a distant dot in the sky, a flyer was coming in for a landing at the archeological site. Friend or foe, there was noway of telling. But, on the sea’s surface in almost the same direction and approaching at hardly less speed, were two graceful, swan-like wings of water lifting at least thirty feet into the air with a black dot between them.
No private skimmer could be throwing water that high. The black dot could only be Coast Guard Rescue Nine, approaching the transmission area of Robby’s rapport cap at an emergency speed of a hundred and forty knots.
Robby whooped, and turned to dive over the side, swim down and beckon Mr. Lillibulero to come up for their rescue.But, before he could take the first step, something clanged against the ladder leading down into the sea on the other side of the barge. And Mac, still perched on the crane, began growling overhead in warning.
Robby turned back. For a moment he saw nothing. Then,as if from nowhere, a huge, wet, black-gloved hand rose into sight and grasped the top rung of the ladder. A second hand followed, and slowly—motion by motion—a towering, black-clad figure streaming water climbed unsteadily onto the barge deck.
One hand of the figure held a small, flat, bright-metal box with a button on it, that gleamed in the sunlight. The other hand went to the glittering face plate that was reflecting sunlight into Robby’s eyes so that he could not see the face behind it. The hand pulled the face plate down. Robby saw.
It was the lined, old face of Millen. And it was ash-gray with exhaustion.
For a second Robby could not understand how Millen could be here. And then he realized the old man must have swum across the reef farther down, while Robby’s observation bubble was being fired on and the bubbles hid his view. Millen had taken advantage of that attack to swim to the barge on his own. Where he had found the strength to do so,probably no one would ever know. Only the old former prospector’s unconquerable, if misguided, courage, could have seen him through.
Now he stumbled heavily toward Robby.
“Out of my way!” he half-shouted in his deep, rattling ancient voice. “Get out of my way!”
“It’s too late!” Robby shouted back. “Look!” he pointed toward the dot and the two lifted silvery wings. “The Coast Guard’s coming. They’ll be here in a minute. You can’t get the ship, now!”
But Millen continued to stumble forward. He did not look in the direction Robby pointed. He held up the metal case he carried and shook it.
“I’ll blow her up!” he boomed hoarsely. “If I can’t have her, no one’s going to! You hear me, lad? Never let a little man beat you—never give up! Go on—always go on.”
“But Mr. Lillibulero’s down there!” Robby cried. “If you blow up the ship, you’ll blow him up, too!” Millen did not seem to hear. His eyes were glazed and strange. He was almost to Robby now, talking more to himself than Robby.
“Don’t give up . . .” he was muttering. “Give up, you’re done for . . .”
Overhead, Mac was growling, roaring, teetering on the verge of a plunge in the violence of his excitement and rage. Robby’s head spun. He saw the giant figure of Millen stumbling toward him. He saw the dot that was the flyer, too faraway to help. He saw the high-lifted spray water wings of the Coast Guard ship, too distant to reach the barge in time. And suddenly, what the old man was about to do came clear and sharp in Robby’s mind.
It was more than blowing up the old wooden hull of a ship that would never sail again anyway. It was ending something that could never be brought into existence again. As in the case of Mr. Lillibulero, who would be destroyed with the ship if Millen got to the other side of the barge, it was putting an end to all that might have been. All the good Mr. Lillibulero might be able to do in the rest of his lifetime, all the knowledge that might be gained in years to come by people who would see and work with La Floridana, would be finished if Millen dropped his explosiv
e on the ship.
As all this became plain to him, Robby sprang forward at the huge but tottery old man, and wrapped his arms and legs around his mighty, but weary and aged, limbs.
For a moment Millen halted, hobbled and came to a standstill. Then, with a sound like a shout caught in his throat, he seemed to reach into himself and find a last spark of the strength that must have belonged to him when he was young. With a single casual effort he freed an arm and jerked Robby loose, tossing him off to one side with a flick of his massive wrist. Robby saw the crane, Mac, and the blue sky whirl wildly before his eyes, and the unyielding steel deck slammed cruelly against the back of his head. Half-stunned, he saw Millen striding heavily toward the far edge of the barge. And far above—mountain-high it seemed above them both—he saw Mac barking and growling, teetering against the cloudless sky with its approaching dot of a flyer.
The flyer would not get there in time to stop Millen and save the sunken ship or Mr. Lillibulero. There was no one to come to the rescue, no one—only Mac, who had never done so before.
“Mac!” cried Robby, desperately, trying to pour all the fear and anguish inside him into his voice and up to Mac on the crane. “Mac—help me! Help me! Mac—”
And Mac, darting his head down to look in the direction of the cries, bellowed suddenly like a sea lion possessed, then hurled himself recklessly downward from the twenty-foot-high tip of the crane to plunge flipper-first to the hard deck below.
“To Follow Knowledge..."
Mr. Lillibulero meanwhile, having driven off the attack that had come at the same time through the gap and over the reeftops, had spared a moment to look about him. Doing so, he discovered the cut phone cord and looking up, saw that the observation bubble was empty. And it was at that moment, his eye attracted by movement near the reef, that the little man looked and saw the last and most massive attack coming from the tug.
Secrets of the Deep Page 26
