by Frederik
David quieted him down, and we sat there for what seemed a long time, talking, waiting. Waiting—I hardly hardly knew what we were waiting for.
Queer interlude! The robot watchman had been cut off, its mindless cries of warning no longer battered against our ears. Yet—we were still under attack! There had not yet been a jet missile fired against us, but the robot could not have made a mistake.
There was no doubt about it: Somewhere just outside the range of the microsonars, Joe Trencher and the Killer Whale swung, getting ready to batter down the dome we were in.
And we had no weapons.
I knew that Gideon would be racing against time, trying to fit the maimed circuits of the gun controls back into some semblance of order—but it was a long, complex job. It was something a trained crew might take a week to do—and he was one man, working on unfamiliar components!
But somehow, in that room with Jason Craken and his son, I was not afraid.
After a bit he collected himself again and began to talk of my father and my uncle. Astonishing how clearly he recollected every detail of those days, decades ago—and could hardly remember how he had lived in the months he had been alone here, while David and the rest of us were preparing to come to help him!
David whispered to me: “Talk to him about his experiments and discoveries. It—it helps to keep him steady.”
I said obediently: “Tell me about—ah—tell me about those queer plants outside the dome. I’ve been under the sea before this, Mr. Craken, but I’ve never seen anything like them!”
He nodded—it was like an eagle nodding, the fierce face quiet, the eyes hooded. “No one else has either, Jim Eden! The deeps are a funnel—a funnel of life. Everywhere but here. Do you understand what I mean by that?”
I nodded eagerly—even there, with the danger of destruction hanging over us all, I couldn’t help being held by that strange old man. “One of my instructors said that,” I told him. “I remember. He said that life in the ocean is a funnel, filled from the top. Tiny plants grow near the surface, where the sunlight reaches them. They make food for tiny creatures that eat them—and the tiny animal creatures are eaten by larger ones, and so on. But everything depends on the little plants at the surface, making food for the whole sea out of sunlight. Only a few crumbs get down the spout of the funnel, to the depths.”
“Quite true!” boomed the old man. “And here we have another funnel, Jim Eden. But one that is upside down. Those plants—” he looked at me sharply, almost suspciously. “Those plants are the secret of the Tonga Trench, Jim Eden. It is the greatest secret of all, for on them depend all the other wonders of my kingdom of the Trench. They have their own source of energy! It is an atomic process.” He frowned at me thoughtfully. “I—I have not finally succeeded in penetrating all of its secrets,” he confessed. “Believe me, I have tried. But it is a nuclear reaction of some sort—deriving energy, I believe, from the unstable potassium isotope in sea water. But I have not yet been able to get the process to work in a test tube. Not yet. But I will!”
He got up and walked more slowly, thoughtfully, to the laboratory bench. Absently he poured himself another beaker of the elixir on which he seemed to be absolutely dependent. He looked at it thoughtfully and then set it down, untasted.
Evidently the thought of the secret of the Tonga Trench was as powerful a stimulant to him as the elixir! I began to see how this man had been able to keep going for so long, alone and sick—he was driven by the remorseless compulsion that makes great men…. and maniacs.
“So you see,” he said, “there is a second funnel of life here. The shining weed, with its own energy, that does not need the light of the sun. The little animals that feed off it. The larger ones—the saurians and the amphibians—that live off the small.”
“The saurians,” I broke in, strangely excited. “David said something about—about some sort of danger from them. Is it true?”
“Danger?” The old man stared at his son with a hint of reproof. As though the word had been a trigger that set him off, he picked up the beaker of fluid and swallowed it. “Danger? Ah, David—you cannot fear the saurians! They cannot harm us in the dome!” He turned to me, and once again assumed the tone and attitude of a schoolmaster, lecturing a pupil. “It is a matter of breeding patterns,” he said soberly. “‘The saurians are egg-layers, and their eggs cannot stand the pressures of the bottom of the Trench, where the shining weeds grow. So each year—at the time of the breeding season—they must come up to the top of the sea-mount, to lay their eggs. There is only one way to the caves where, from ages past, they had always laid them—and I built this dome squarely across it!”
He chuckled softly, as though he had done a clever thing. “While they were tamed,” he told me gleefully, “I permitted them to pass. But now—now they shall not enter their caves! This Trench is mine, and I intend to keep it!”
He paused, staring at me.
“I may need help,” he admitted at last. “There are many saurians—But you are here! You and the others, you must help me. I can pay you. I can pay very well, for all the wealth of the Tonga Trench is mine. Tonga pearls! I have found a way to increase the yield—like the old Japanese cultured-pearl fishers, years ago. It cannot be done with ordinary oysters, for the Tonga pearls must have the radioactive nucleus that comes from the shining weed. But I have planted Tonga pearls, Jim Eden, and the first harvest is ready to be gathered!”
He stood up. Bent as he was, he towered over us,
“I offer you a share in a thousand thousand Tonga pearls for your help! You owe me that help anyway, as you know—for your father and your uncle have promised it. What do you say, Jim Eden? Will you help me hold the empire of the Tonga Trench?”
His eyes were growing wilder and wilder.
“Here is what you must do!” he cried. “You must take your subsea cruiser, the Dolphin. You must destroy the ship Joe Trencher is using. The dome’s own armaments will suffice for the saurians—I have a most powerful missile gun mounted high on the dome, well supplied with ammunition, with the latest automatic fire-control built in. Crush Joe Trencher for me—the dome itself will destroy the saurians if they try to come through. Is that agreed, Jim Eden?”
And that was when the bubble burst.
He stood waiting for my answer. He had nearly made me believe that these things were possible, for a moment. He was so absolutely sure of himself, that I forgot, while he was speaking, a few things.
For instance—
The Dolphin was destroyed, blown to atoms.
His missile gun was not working, sabotaged by the amphibians when they turned against him.
David Craken and I stared at each other somberly, while the crazed light faded and died in his father’s eyes.
For Jason Craken’s mind was wandering again. He had fought the sea too long, and taken too much of his own strange potions.
He had conceived a battle scheme—a perfect tactical plan, except that it relied on a gun that would not fire and a ship that had been sunk!
I don’t know what we would have said to him then.
But it turned out that we didn’t have to say anything.
There was a scratching, racing sound of foosteps from outside and the sea-girl, Maeva, burst gasping and frantic into the room.
“David!” she cried raggedly, fighting for breath. “David, they’re coming back! The saurians are attacking again, and there is a subsea ship leading them!” We leaped to our feet.
But even before we got out of the room, a dull explosion rocked the dome.
A sub-sea missile from the Killer! The fight for Tonga Trench had begun!
18
The Fight for Tonga Trench
“Up!” cried Maeva. “Up to the missile-gun turret. Gideon couldn’t fix the fire-control equipment—he’s trying to handle the gun manually!”
We pounded up narrow steel stairs, David flying ahead.
We found Gideon in the turret, his eyes on a complicated panel of
wires and resistors, his mind so fixed on his task that he didn’t even look up to see us come in.
“Gideon!” I cried—and then had to stop, holding onto the wall, as another explosion rocked the dome.
They meant business this time!
The turret was tiny and gloomy, and filled with the reek that rose from Jason Craken’s laboratories below. There were tiny windows spotted about it—not much more than portholes, really—and there was little to see through them. All I could make out, through the pale glimmer of the edenite film on the window itself, was the steep curve of the dome beneath us, glowing unsteadily with its own film. The cold blue light from the dome caught two or three jutting points of dark rock.
Beyond that, the darkness of the deep was broken only by the occasional ghostly glimmerings of deep-sea creatures that carried lights of their own.
I glanced at David, startled. “I don’t see anything!”
He nodded. “You wouldn’t, Jim. You need microsonar to see very far under the surface of the sea. That’s what Gideon is working on now, I should judge. This missile gun—it can be worked manually, if its microsonar sights are working. But it’s been fifteen years at least since it was manned—always it was controlled from the fire-control chamber below, you see. And that is wrecked…”
Gideon glanced up abstractedly. He nodded agreement, started to speak, and returned to his work.
It wasn’t hard to see that he was worried.
The missile gun almost filled the turret. It was an ugly, efficient machine of destruction, though the firing tube, what little of it was within its turret, looked oddly slim. The bright-cased missiles racked in the magazine weren’t much larger than my arm.
“Looks old-fashioned to you?” David was reading my mind. “But it’s deadly enough, Jim. One of those shells will destroy a sea-car—the shock neutralizes the edenite film for a tiny fraction of a second. And the sea’s own pressure does the rest. They’re steam jets—athodyds, they’re called; they scoop up water and fire it out behind in the form of steam.”
There was a sudden exclamation from Gideon.
He plucked something out of a kit of spare parts, plugged a new component into the tangle of wires and sub-assemblies.
“That should do it!” he said softly. And he touched a switch.
We all stood waiting, almost holding our breaths.
There was a distant hum of tiny motors.
The turret shuddered and turned slightly.
The microsonar screen came to life.
“You’ve done it!” David cried.
Gideon nodded. “It works, at any rate.” He patted the slim breech, almost fondly. “Anyway, I think it does. It was the sonar hookup that was the big headache. It serves as the sights for the missile-gun. Without the sonar, it would be like firing blind. Now—I think we can see what we’re doing.”
I stared into the microsonar, fascinated. It was an old, old model—hardly like the bright new screen the Academy had taught me to work with. Everything was reduced and distorted, as though we were looking into the wrong end of a cheap telescope.
But, as I grew used to it, I could pick some details out. I could see the steep slopes of the sea-mount falling away from us. I found the jagged rim of a ravine—the one the saurians used for their breeding trail, no doubt; the same one that Maeva and Old Ironsides had carried us along.
I glanced at the screen, and then again.
There was a whirling pattern of tiny shapes. For a moment I couldn’t make them out. Then I said: “Why, it’s a school of fish. At least that proves the saurians aren’t around, doesn’t it? I mean, they would frighten the fish away and—”
“Fish?” Gideon was staring at me. “What are you talking about?”
I said patiently, “Why, Gideon, don’t you see? If there were saurians, they’d show in the microsonar, wouldn’t they? And that school of fish—”
He looked at me with a puzzled expression, then shrugged.
“Jim,” he said, “look here.” He adjusted the verniers of the microsonar with a delicate touch, bringing into sharp focus. He pointed. “There,” he said. “Right in front of you. Saurians—a couple of hundred of them, I’d guess. They look pretty small, because these old target screens reduce everything—but there they are, just out of range!”
I stared, unbelieving.
What he was pointing at was what I had thought was a school of tiny fish!
They were saurians, all right—hundreds upon hundreds of them. I looked more closely, and I could see another little object among my “fish”—not a saurian this time, dangerous.
I pointed to it. Gideon and David followed my pointing finger.
“That’s right, Jim,” said David. “It’s the Killer Whale. They’re waiting…But they won’t wait much longer.”
They waited exactly five more minutes.
Then all three of us saw the little spurt of light jet out from the Killer’s bright outline and come arrowing in toward us. Another jet missile!
Seconds later, the dull boom of its explosion shook the dome once more.
But even before that, Gideon had leaped into the cradle of the missile-gun. One hand on the trips, the other coaxing the best possible image from the microsonar sights, he wheeled the turret to bring the weapon to bear on the distant shape of the Killer Whale. I saw him press the trips—
There was a staccato rapping, and the slim breech but something infinitely more of the missile-gun leaped a fraction of an inch, half a dozen times, as Gideon fired a salvo of six missiles at the Killer.
The microsonar flared six times as the missiles went off, in a blast of pressure waves.
When the screen cleared—the Killer Whale still hung there, surrounded by its cluster of circling saurians.
Gideon nodded soberly. “Out of range, of course. But we’re at extreme range too. Even with the better weapons they have on the cruiser. At least we can hope to keep them at arm’s length.” He checked the loading bays of the missile-gun. “Jim, David,” he said. “Reload for me, will you? I don’t want to get away from the trigger, in case Trencher and his boys decide to make a, sudden jump.”
We leaped to do as he asked. The stacks of missiles in their neat racks around the turret were none too many for our needs. We filled the bays—the gun’s own automatic loading mechanism would take over from there—and looked worriedly at the dwindling pile of missiles that were left.
“Not too many,” David conceded. “Gideon, will you be all right here alone? Jim and I had best go down to the storeroom for more missiles.”
“I’ll be all right!” Gideon’s smile flashed white. “But don’t take too long. I have a feeling we’re going to need every missile we can get any minute now!”
But the attack didn’t come.
We rounded up a work party, David and I. Bob and Laddy and Roger Fairfane formed teams to haul clips of the slim missiles from the storerooms at the base of the dome, up to the missile turret. Three of them was a load for one man; we made two or three trips apiece.
And still the attack didn’t come.
And then David and Bob came out of the storeroom with only one missile apiece. David’s face was ghastly white.
“They’re gone!” he said tensely. “This is all that is left. The amphibians—when they turned against my father, they cleaned out the armory too, all but a few missiles we’ve found.”
We made a quick count. About seventy-five rounds, no more.
And the missile gun fired in bursts of half a dozen!
We held a quick council of war in the conn room at the base of the dome, near the storage chambers. The screens that ringed it showed a mosiac of the sea-mount and sea-bottom around us.
The Killer Whale still hung there, still threatening, still waiting. At odd intervals they loosed a missile, but none of them had caused any damage; we had come to ignore them. And the saurians still milled about in their racing schools.
David said somberly: “It’s the beginning of their bree
ding season. I suppose for millions of years they’ve been doing it just that way. They go through that strange sort of ritual, down there at the base of the sea-mount, working themselves up. I’ve seen it many times. They go on like that for hours. And then at last, one of them will start up the side of the sea-mount, toward the caves, where they will lay their eggs. And then all the others will follow—”
He closed his eyes. I could imagine what he was seeing in his mind’s eye: A horde of saurians, hundreds strong, streaming up the side of the sea-mount, battering past the dome. And with Joe Trencher in his Killer Whale riding herd on them, driving them against the dome itself, while he pounded it with missiles!
The edenite dome—yes, it was strong, no doubt! But each of those beasts was nearly the size of a whale. Twenty or thirty tons of fiercely driven flesh pounding against the dome would, at the least, shake it. Multiply that by a hundred, two hundred, three hundred—and remember that the edenite film was after all maintained only by the power that came from delicate electronic parts. If for one split fraction of a second the power faltered…
Then in moments the dome would be flat.
And we would be crushed blobs of matter in a tangle of wreckage, as four miles of sea stamped us into the muck.
Bob Eskow mopped his brow and stood up.
He turned to David Craken.
“David,” he said, “that settles it. The missile-gun might stop the saurians—but with only seventy-five rounds for it, and hundreds of the saurians, we might as well not bother. And we’ll never get the Killer Whale with the gun; it isn’t powerful enough, hasn’t got the range. There’s only one thing to do.”
I said: “He’s right, David. It’s up to you. You’ve got to make peace with the amphibians.”
David looked at us strangely.
“Make peace with them!” He laughed sharply. “If I only could! But, don’t you see? My father—he is the one who must make peace. And his mind is—is wandering. You’ve seen it for yourselves. The amphibians aren’t used to the world, you know. They understand the rule of one man, a leader. Joe Trencher is their leader; and Joe once bowed to the rule of my father. I don’t say my father was always right. He was a stern man. Perhaps all along, his mind was a little—well, strained. He’s been through enough to strain anyone! But he was perhaps a little too severe, a little too unyielding. And so Joe Trencher’s people turned against him.
