There was an encouraging side to that thought, though. If I did get to the surface, it would also be hard for any sub to get hold of the tank. My broadcaster would then be working, and maybe — just maybe — if it even brought a Board ship into the general neighborhood the pursuers would keep out of sight. On the other hand, it was at least equally likely that they would consider it worth every effort to get hold of me, witnesses or no witnesses, in view of what I had obviously seen down below. But the other hope was worth holding onto for its comfort value. Since I’m a civilized human being, I never thought until later of the possibility that if they couldn’t capture me they might just punch a hole in the tank and let me sink.
Maybe I’d make it. The minutes were passing. It was taking each one a year to do it, but they were passing. Each brought me nearly two hundred feet closer to those storm waves, if they were still there. I hadn’t bothered to check the forecast beyond the time I was scheduled to submerge, and I’d been down quite a few hours. I’m not immune to seasickness by any means, but I rather hoped there would still be enough wave action to give me a good dose of it this time. Maybe it would even make my friend just outside lose his grip on whatever he was holding onto. That was something else to hope for.
But first I’d have to get up to those waves, and there was still half a mile to go. The tapping went on. If I’d been anywhere else on Earth I might have preferred the Chinese water drops by then, but this was no place to be asking for water drops. I tried to shut out the sound and keep my attention on other things, like the pressure gauge — was there a little wiggle in its needle which might be due to the wave action far above — or the question of food. If the waves were there, maybe I’d better put off eating.
I kept moving from one port to another in a hectic but rather useless effort to spot the sub which must be approaching; but it was my passenger who saw it first.
Chapter Six
I knew what had happened when the regular tapping suddenly changed once more to the complex code, but it took me another half minute to spot the approaching light. I didn’t have a very wide angle of view from any one of the ports.
All I could see at first was the light, a solitary spark on a space-dark background, but there could be no doubt what it was. It was just a little below us, well to one side. Its bearing changed as it grew brighter. Apparently it was approaching on a spiral course, holding the sound of the tapping at a constant angle off its bow to let the pilot keep a constant idea of his distance from the source.
Even when it was close I had trouble making it out, for its main spotlight was turned straight on the tank and there was too little diffused radiance to show anything close to it. This apparently bothered my passenger, too, for there was another burst of code tapping as the sub halted thirty yards away, and the light went out. In its place a dozen smaller beams illuminated the whole area, none of them shining directly our way; so I could see the newcomer fairly well.
It was not exactly like any sub I’d seen before, but was similar enough to some of them to give my eyes a handle. It was small, either one or two men, not built for speed, and well equipped with manipulation gear on the outside — regular arm and hand extensions, grapples, bits, probes, and what looked like a water-jet digger. One of my hopes died quickly; there had been a chance that a small sub would not have enough negative buoyancy to drag the tank back down, but this fellow had big, fat lift chambers and must have ballast to match. It was evidently a tug, among other things. If it could get hold of me, it could pull me down, all right; and it was hard to see how it could be kept from getting that hold. All I had to fend it off were the legs.
I wasn’t sure how effective these could be, but I kept my fingers at the panel resolved not to miss anything that looked like a good chance. At least, now that some sort of action was in the offing, I wasn’t dithering as I had been during the minutes before the sub came in sight.
The pilot’s first method was to drift above me and settle down. He must have had a strong streak of showoff in him, since it was hard to imagine a less efficient means of sinking a round object. I thought he’d have his troubles, but my passenger didn’t seem upset, and I have to admit the character knew his boat handling. The swimmer waved him into position, putting me under the sub’s center of buoyancy, and he made contact. My pressure gauge promptly showed that the upward motion had been reversed.
I waited a few seconds in the hope that my hitchhiker would go inside the sub, but he made no motion to, and I finally had to let him see my technique. This was simple enough — simpler than rolling along the sea bottom, since the surface above me was much smoother. Also, I didn’t have to go so far to accomplish something; a very small shift away from his center of gravity gave my tank’s lift a torque that was too much either for his reaction time or his control jets. Since he had enough weight in his tanks to overcome my own lift, he flipped over, and I was on my way up again.
Unfortunately, as I promptly learned, Lester the Limpet was still with me. His tapping started up within seconds of the time I got out from under. His friend evidently took a while to get his machine back into trim — I could understand that; tumbling, with a couple of tons of surplus negative buoyancy thrown in, is a problem for any sub — but he was back all too soon. He was no longer in a mood to show off; he bored straight in, with a grapple extended.
I turned on my outside lights, partly to make things harder for him and partly so that I could see better myself. This was going to be tricky for both of us; he had to find something the mechanical hand could grip, and I had to shift my own body weight so as to turn the tank enough to bring a leg into line for what I had in mind. It was just as well I’d gotten my recent practice on the bottom. At least I knew to a hair where each leg went out, relative to the positions of the ports.
I took him by surprise the first time. He hadn’t considered all the possibilities of those legs — maybe he didn’t even know how many I could use, though they were visible enough from the outside. He matched my upward drift very nicely, though I was able to hamper him a little bit by shifting my weight and changing the frontal presentation of the slightly irregular tank. With relative vertical motion practically zero, he came in slowly with the mechanical hand reaching for some projection or other — I couldn’t tell what he had in mind. I rolled just a little to get a leg in line with the grapple, and when the latter was about two feet from contact I snapped the leg out.
The spring was strong. Remember, it was built to prop the tank in position on a slope even when the ballast was still attached. The engineers who built it could tell you how many pounds of shove it gave. I can’t, but I could feel it. The sub and tank were pushed neatly away from each other. The line of thrust was not exactly through the center of my shell, and I got quite a bit of spin out of it. The sub didn’t. Either the push was better centered on him or he was quicker this time with his control jets.