by Frederik
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!”
Bob stared at them, unbelieving. “Tonga pearls,” he echoed. “Imagine—”
Everyone had heard of Tonga pearls—but very few had ever seen one. And here were thirteen of them, enormous and perfect! They were the most precious pearls in the sea—and the most mysterious. For the light that seemed to come from them was no illusion. They actually glowed with a life of their own, a silvery, ghost-like beauty that had never been explained by science. Not even the beds they came from had ever been located. I remembered hearing a submariner talking about them once. “They call them Tonga pearls,” he had said, “because the legend is that they come from the Tonga Trench, six miles down. Nonsense, Jim! Oysters don’t live below five thousand feet—not big ones, anyway. I’ve been on the rim of the Tonga Trench—as far down as ordinary edenite could take me—and there’s nothing there, Jim, nothing but cold water and dead black mud.”
But they came from somewhere, obviously enough—for here were thirteen of them in my hand!
“I’m rich!” crowed Roger Fairfane, half dazed with excitement. “Rich! Each one of them—worth thousands, believe me! And I have thirteen of them!”
“Hold on,” I said sharply. The dazed look faded from his eyes. He blinked, then made a sudden grab for my hand. I snatched it away from him.
“They’re mine!” he roared. “Blast you, Eden, give them to me! I saw them—never mind that cock-and-bull story of Eskow’s! If you won’t give them up, my father’s lawyers will—”
“Hold on,” I said again. “They may not even be real.”
Bob Eskow took a deep breath. “They’re real,” he said. “There’s no mistaking that glow. Well, Roger—my father doesn’t have any lawyers, but I think all three of us found them. And I think all three of us should share.”
“Eskow, you stinking little— “
I stopped Roger quickly, before we all got involved with sea-knives. “Wait! You both forget something—we don’t own these. Now yet, anyhow. Somebody lost them; somebody will probably want them back. Maybe we have some sort of salvage rights, but right now the thing for us to do is to turn the whole thing over to the Commandant. He can decide what to do next. Then, if we decide—”
“Hush!”
It was Bob, stopping me almost in the middle of a word.
He was staring over my shoulder, down the beach; his eyes were narrowed and wary.
He whispered: “I’m afraid you’re right, Jim. Somebody did lose them! And—somebody’s coming to take them back!”
6
The Pearly Eyes
Bob stood pointing toward the sea. The Atlantic lay dark under the thickening dusk, the light of the full moon shimmering on it.
For a moment that was all I saw. Then Bob pointed, and I saw a man wading out of the black water.
Roger said sharply: “Who’s that? One of the cadets?”
“No.” I knew that was impossible.
The same thought had crossed my own mind—a cadet like ourselves, a straggler from the sub-sea marathon. No one else had any business there, of course.
But he was no cadet.
He wore no sub-sea gear—nothing but swim trunks that had an odd, brightly metallic color. He came striding toward us over the wet sand, and the closer he got the stranger he seemed. Something about him was—strange. There was no other word to describe it.
Moonlight is a thief of color; the polarized light steals reds and greens and washes out all the hues but grays. Perhaps it was only that. But his skin seemed much, much too white, pallid, fishbelly white. The way he walked was somehow odd. It was his flipper-shoes, I thought at first—and then as he came closer, I saw that he wore none. Or if there were any, they were much smaller than ours.
And most of all, there was something quite odd about his eyes. They glowed milky white in the moonlight—like cold pearls, with a velvet black dot of pupil in the center.
Quickly I poured the pearls back into the velvet bag and dropped them back cylinder. I screwed the cap back on and the edenite film flickered into bluish light. The stranger stopped a foot away from me. His queer eyes were fixed on the edenite cylinder. I saw that he wore a long sea knife hung from the belt of his trunks.
He said, breathing hard, almost gasping: “Hello. You have—recovered something that I lost, I see.” His voice was oddly harsh and flat. There was no accent, exactly, but he clearly had difficulty with his breathing. That was not surprising, in a man just up out of the water—a long swim can put a hitch in anyone’s breathing—but together with those eyes, that colorless skin, he seemed like someone I’d have preferred to meet in broad daylight, with more people around.
Roger said challengingly: “They’re ours! You’ll have to do better than that if you want the p—”
I stopped him before he could say the word. “If you lost something,” I cut in, “no doubt you can describe it.”
For a moment his face flashed with strange rage in the moonlight. But then he smiled disarmingly, and I noticed that his teeth looked remarkably fine and white.
“Naturally,” he agreed. “Why should I not?” He pointed with a hand that seemed oddly shaped. “But I need not describe my missing property very clearly, since you hold it in your hand. It is that edenite tube.”
“Don’t give to him,” Roger said sharply. “Make him identify himself. Make him prove it’s his.”
The stranger’s clawed hand hesitated near the butt of his sea knife, and the sound of his rasping breath came clear in the. night. Curious that he should seem to be shorter of breath now than when he first came to us! But he was gasping and panting as though he had just completed a twenty-mile swim…
“I can identify myself,” said the stranger. “My name—my name is Joe Trencher.”
“Where are you from?”
“It’s a long way from here,” he said, and paused to get his breath, looking at us. “I come from Kermadec.”
Kermadec! That was where Jason Craken had lived—halfway around the world, four miles under the sea, on a flat-topped sea-mount between New Zealand and the Kermadec Deep. “You’re a long way from home, Mr. Trencher,” I said.
“Too long,” He made a breathless little chuckle. “I’m not used to this dry land! It is not like Kermadec.”
Strange how he calle
d it “Kermadec” instead of “Kermadec Dome,” I thought. But perhaps it was a local question; and, anyway, there were more important things to think about. “Would you mind explaining what you were doing here?”
“Not at all,” he wheezed. “I left Kermadec—” again he called it that—“on a business trip, traveling in my own sea car. You can understand that I am not familiar with these waters. Evidently my sonar gear was defective. At any rate—an hour ago I was cruising on autopilot, toward Sargasso City at five hundred fathoms. The next thing I knew, I was swimming for my life.” He looked at us soberly. “I suppose I ran aground, somewhere down there.” He nodded toward the moonlit sea. “The edenite tube must have floated to the surface. I’ll gladly reward the three of you for helping me recover it, of course. Now, if you’ll hand it over—”
He was reaching for it. I stepped back.
Roger Fairfane came between us. “That isn’t up to you!” he said sharply. “If you own it, we’ll get a reward—from the salvage courts. But you’ll have to prove your title to it!”
“I can do that, certainly,” wheezed the man who called himself Joe Trencher. “But you can see that I have lost everything except the tube itself in the wreck of my sea car. What sort of proof do you want?”
Bob Eskow had been silent and thoughtful, but now he spoke up.
“For one thing,” he said, “you might explain something to us, Mr. Trencher. What happened to your thermo-suit, if you had one?”
“Had one? Of course I had one!” But the stranger was off balance, glowering at us. “I had a thermo-suit and an electrolung—how else could I have survived the crash?”
“Then what did you do with it?”
Trencher convulsed with a sudden fit of coughing. I wondered how much of it was an attempt to cover up. “It—it was defective,” he wheezed at last. “I couldn’t open the face lens after I reached the surface. I—I was suffocating, so I had to cut it loose and abandon it.”
