“The courts are Hallam Sperry,” said Gideon.
Bob nodded slowly. “So you tell me,” he said. “But—”
A tiny bell was ringing, and it stopped that conversation right there. I jumped back to the controls. “We’re over the gridpoint!” I cried. “If our computations were right—my uncle’s sea-car is right below us!”
I cleared the auto-pilot with a swift touch of the keys and took over manual control. I hesitated, looking over my shoulder at Bob Eskow.
He nodded reluctantly. “We’re this far,” he said. “Go ahead, Jim. If your uncle’s ship is down there—well, that answers a lot of questions. But Jim—don’t forget that I messaged Thetis. A Sea Patrol car should be right on our tails!”
Gideon chuckled softly. “They’ll have a sweet job following where we’re going, boy,” he said. “This is Eden Deep—seven and a half miles straight down. Drop her, Jim!”
I nodded and touched the controls. The buoyancy tanks began to fill as the tiny pumps droned and spurted seawater into them. I set course for a wide circle, gently eased over the diving vanes.
The clinometer showed three degrees dive, then five; then, carefully, I slipped the vanes to the full fifteen-degree crash dive position and opened up the propeller motors…
And our little sea-car began clawing downward into Eden Deep.
Already we were close to the bottom limits of most sea-cars, even with standard Edenite armor. Nearly four miles of water towered over us; the pressure would have smashed steel, squeezed quartz like putty. As we went down and down, four and a quarter miles, and four and a half, I saw something that I never had seen before. At first I thought it was a trick of eyestrain—a faint glimmering twinkle of light on the walls of the cabin. But I saw it again, flickering like witch-fire, and it grew stronger, and I realized that it was the sparkling glow of the Edenite armor, showing on the inside of the hull, giving a faint notion of the enormous forces pressing against it, pressures that could destroy any metal and penetrate even the mighty strength of ordinary Edenite…
Still we sank down.
At cruising speed we swept in a broad descending spiral, a thousand feet a minute. We were at five miles, then six, and the witch-fires on the inside of the hull were sparkling bright.
Brand Sperry was staring at them, his face a rigid mask. Gideon looked at him, then glanced at me warningly; Sperry was in an ecstasy of terror.
For that matter, there were strange tinglings along my own spine. I had never been this deep before—only three men had, or at least only three living men had reached it. Two were certainly dead—one instantly, in the fraction of a second after his suit failed; the other more lingeringly, under Hallam Sperry’s brainpump. The third was my uncle, the inventor of the flickering force armor that was all that kept the water out…and he had done it, I reminded myself, in the ship he had built after constructing this first pilot model…
What improvements had he found it necessary to make? There was no way to know—no way to guess whether this armor was going to hold.
Even Edenite armor cannot accept the giant pressure of six miles of water without showing signs of strain. It was only a faint metallic ping, the sound of straining metal under any circumstances, so tiny that under normal circumstances none of us would even have heard it—but it brought all of us straight up, eyes wide, faces taut, waiting for the hammering rush of the torrent.
It didn’t come; it had been only a noise and nothing more. But it cracked Brand Sperry. He cried desperately, “Stop! Eden—stop this! Take us back up—you’re killing us!” He glared at me wildly; I opened my mouth to answer—but he was springing at me. I half dodged away.
But Gideon was there before me. As Brand Sperry scrambled past him Gideon brought up his fist and caught him right behind the ear; Sperry went over without a sound, sprawled on the deck, unconscious.
The three of us stared at him wordlessly.
At last Gideon cleared his throat. “Boy,” he rumbled, “that young pirate raises a question in my mind. You and me, Jim, we know what we’re doing; this is a risk we’ve got to take, and I’m not looking for a way out of it. But what about Sperry and your friend Bob, here? It isn’t their risk, Jim.”
I swallowed—it wasn’t easy. The temptation to say enthusiastically, “Sure, Gideon!” and send the sea-car up again as fast as its propellers could drive was almost overpowering. For the flickering on the inside of the Edenite armor was a dazzling blur of color now; I could hear a symphony of tiny metallic creaks and squeals as the armor settled under its load; I had all too vivid a picture in my mind of the Edenite charge leaking off the armor under the stress of the pressure, and the sea thundering in to destroy us.
I looked at Bob Eskow. He was the calmest of us all. His face was like something carved out of sea-basalt; he said:
“Keep going, Jim.”
Six and a half miles.
Seven. I came out of a half stupor, tore my eyes from the clicking, purring depth gauge, switched on the scanning drive of the microsonar. Faint spots of color began to appear in its viewplate, nothing recognizable as yet.
Gideon’s voice was very quiet. “Jim,” he said softly, but with a note that snatched my eyes off the viewplate. “Look at the floor.”
From the after compartment, through the door, came trickling a thin, lazy line of water.
18
The Bottom of the World
Training counts for a great deal.
I think that if it had not been for the years of constant pounding and discipline in the Academy—Panic is the enemy!—I would have cracked right then and there; I would have manhandled the little sea-car straight up, crash-blasted the ballast out of the tanks, lost control and most likely killed us all.
But some little voice inside me, something that had more wit than I, stopped me, told me that the picture was somehow wrong. I held off wrenching the controls to full-climb for a fraction of a second.
And in that fraction of a second I understood. At seven miles, sea-water doesn’t trickle. What made that thin line of water I didn’t know—but it wasn’t, it couldn’t be, a leak.
I jumped up from the controls, leaving them locked in position, and raced back to the after compartment. There, lacking occupants and therefore lacking heat, the walls were icy cold; moisture was condensing on them; it was that moisture that had trickled in.
I went back to my seat more slowly. I told Bob and Gideon what it was. Neither of them said a word.
Brand Sperry was beginning to stir. Gideon stood close to him, one eye still on Bob, but ready to handle Sperry if he still wanted fight. There was no fight in him, though; he opened his eyes, looked at me once, and then lay staring at the ceiling.
I went back to my controls.
And on the microsonar screen was a tiny, torpedolike shape, its outline blurred and half drowned out by bottom-return, but easy enough to recognize. It could be nothing else; it had to be my uncle’s ship.
The armor held.
We gently, prayerfully, settled down atop the other sea-car; there was a gentle bump, and we were locked hull-to-hull.
That was as far as bur planning had gone—if “planning” is the word for as frantic and harum-scarum a dash as Gideon and I had made from Thetis to Eden Deep. We were actually touching my uncle Stewart’s ship—or his tomb.
What next?