Gideon and I looked at each other questioningly.
It was impossible for us to cross from one ship to another—we had no armor capable of standing these pressures. The armor in the sea-car was standard Edenite, like every other suit of depth armor on every other sea-car in the oceans; perfectly safe at four miles, even five—but not at seven and a half!
Gideon said, “The grapples, Jim.”
I crossed my fingers; but I nodded. It was the only way. I coaxed our little sub into perfect alignment with the pattern of the other on the microsonar; then gently opened the rheostats to the magnetic grapples. It was quite a load to try on them; but it had to work. There was no alternative.
I started the ballast pumps, forcing a part of the water out of the buoyancy tanks—not too much, for too much strain on the grappling magnets would break our grip for sure. Then, gently, I rocked the two linked sea-cars back and forth with the drive propellers…
It was a strange thing, but in shallow water it would have been impossible. Here it was—almost—but not quite.
In shallow water there would have been currents and turbulence; the scouring of the water flow would have heaped silt around my uncle’s sea-car, half buried it. I never could have broken the suction of hundreds of tons of mud.
But at the bottom of Eden Deep, the water lay dead and cold.
There were no currents—it is heat that makes currents in the water, just as it is the sun’s heat that makes the winds of the air, and here, nearly forty thousand feet down, the sun’s heat never reached.
There had been some slight disturbance from the coming to rest of the sea-car itself; but the suction was not great; and if was only a few moments before we were free.
We were free!
I set course for a steep, ascending curve, to top the ridges that surround Eden Deep, en route to Thetis.
Thetis was our destination—but Thetis was out of reach.
Long before we topped the ridge, while we were still hundreds of fathoms below the normal cruising depth, we ran into the first signs of trouble.
It was only a flickering shadow on the very rim of the microsonar—a shadow that split and wavered, and joined again, and divided to become three shadows.
The Sea Patrol!
Bob Eskow said miserably, “My fault, Jim. I called them.”
I shook my head. “You did what you thought was right, Bob. The question is, what do we do now?”
“Give up,” snarled Brand Sperry. Now that we were out of the Deep itself, he seemed to have recovered his nerve. “You’re beaten, you know. I don’t care what you find in your uncle’s sub—you can’t stand up against my father!”
We ignored him. Gideon said meditatively, “Looking at the charts, I notice something. We’re only about fifty miles from Fisherman’s Island, Jim. Your uncle used to have a post there—used it for air transport connections, back in the days when he had mining operations all over this area. I believe the island is deserted now—it’s just a tiny thing, with a coral reef; never had any native population.”
Bob said, “What about it? What good would that do us?”
Gideon shrugged. “We might perhaps hole up there for a while,” he suggested. “And—well, I don’t know about you, Mr. Eskow. But I’m pretty sure Jim and I are anxious to get inside Stewart Eden’s sea-car as quickly as we can.” He didn’t say why—but I knew without his mentioning it what he had in mind. Neither of us wanted to mention it, neither of us dared voice the hope aloud—
But we didn’t know for sure that Uncle Stewart was dead.
Gideon pointed out the advantages to his scheme: The route to Fisherman’s Island was almost perfect for our needs. We could hug the slope of the ridge for half the distance, well below the usual cruising depth of sea-cars, almost certainly beyond range of detection (since microsonar equipment had its limitations, one of which was that scanning downward, was harder than scanning upward, due to reflection-return from the sea bottom). And even when we breasted the ridge, the bottom at that point was covered with peaks and guyots; we could slip through the valleys between them, and only the wildest chance would let the Sea-Patrol spot us.
The trip took less than two hours, in spite of our serpentine wanderings among the submarine peaks. The ranging Sea Patrol cars were constantly in our sonar screen; but always at extreme range. I was certain they never detected us.
We circled around the underwater slopes that surfaced as Fisherman’s Island, and I headed for the surface. At a depth of only a few yards, operating on the sonar plate, I found the channel to the lagoon inside the coral reef, threaded the passage, the captive sea-car clutched beneath us in the grapples clearing the bottom by scant feet in places, and surfaced a few hundred feet from shore.
It was the first time I had been oh the surface in—was it only weeks? It seemed like years!
I spun the upper hatch open and poked my head out, ready to be blinded by the sun.
There wasn’t any sun. Overhead the sky was a powder bf white.
It was night time; the stars were infinite and brilliant; the water was flickering with luminous life; the shore was dead dark. I had forgotten, almost, that there were such things as night and day!
I quickly checked my chronometer: it was an hour or so before sunrise. Looking hard at the horizon, I thought I could see the beginning of a faint violet glow.
“Let’s get to work,” said Gideon.
It took us an hour to jockey my uncle’s sea-car into position. With the help of every straining combination of grapples and hydraulic extensors, we succeeded in easing it out from under us, heaving it ahead of us onto the coral sand. The tide was high—as high as the gentle tides of the Pacific ever run—and the top of the sub’s hull was just, awash. We waited, then. For half an hour, then half an hour more, until the waterline had receded to just below the entrance port.
All four of us were standing atop the little sea-car’s hull, waiting for the last licking wavecrest to fall below the lip of the port. Brand Sperry was haughty and still; Bob Eskow was plainly bone-tired. But Gideon and I were tense and eager, and it was all I could do to keep myself from opening the port prematurely.
Then we could wait no longer. We left Bob to watch over Brand Sperry; Gideon and I wrenched the port open and clattered inside. A cascade of water followed us as one large wave topped the port; but that was all.
Inside was fetid darkness. The hot, stale air was almost a poison; I found myself choking, heard Gideon’s cough beside me. Gideon had been more foresighted than I: While I was staring around dazedly, trying to see in the gloom, there was a click and Gideon turned on a hand- light.
We were in the after compartment. Around us were the signs of Catroni’s treachery—wrecked equipment, smashed instruments, sabotaged engines. It would be a long, long time before this ship would be fit again.
But wreckage was not what we were looking for; we searched every corner of the after compartment with Gideon’s flash, looking for some trace of my uncle—or the other man. There was no one, live or dead.
And there was no sound.
I think that that was the worst moment of all for me. To have salvaged the sea-car itself, in the face of everything, was so great a triumph that I had almost felt certain that we would find my uncle alive inside—I had known, somehow, just what it would be like to open the port and have my uncle, somehow alive and hearty, come chuckling out…
Gideon touched my shoulder wordlessly. The two of us turned hopelessly toward the forward cabin.
There was no destruction here, at any rate—this was where my uncle and his friend had been, all unsuspecting, while Catroni murdered the ship. The darkness was blacker still. Gideon pierced it with his flash…