Together we saw it: A heap of rags, huddled before the control panel, it seemed. We leaped forward, Gideon a half-step before me.
The face, pale and still, was the face of my uncle Stewart. The eyes were closed; there was not a trace of motion. Gideon bent over him with a half-smothered sound.
Time stood still. At last Gideon, his eyes huge, looked up at me.
“Glory be to God, Jim Eden,” he said prayerfully. “He’s alive!”
19
Back from the Dead
That was how my Uncle Stewart came back to us.
We got Bob Eskow to help us; the three of us managed to get him up through the tiny hatch, onto our own sea-car, into the light. Stewart opened his eyes and looked at me, and he smiled. But he had no strength to speak.
Once again the Academy helped me. Exhaustion, starvation and the poisonous effects of foul air were no strangers to the men of the Sub-Sea Fleet; and every semester, we had had drilled into us the methods of emergency treatment. From the little first-aid locker of the sea-car we took stimulants and elixirs and the miraculous chemical blends that were guaranteed to bring a near- corpse whooping back to life. Stewart needed them all. While I was mixing up a sugar solution for intravenous feeding, Gideon quickly injected a whole series of stimulating drugs, and Bob arranged the electric heart stimulator coils in position for quick use—if they were needed. We had found my uncle Stewart alive—and we were not going to let him go!
I don’t know how long we worked over him. It must have been only half an hour or so—we hadn’t the complicated equipment to take much longer—but time stopped. It might have been seconds, or years.
And time began to tick forward once more when the last injection was made, and the food solution was trickling into his veins, and my uncle Stewart opened his eyes once more.
They were sane eyes, wakeful eyes. They were the soberly humorous, warmly gay eyes I remembered from my childhood and the New London shore.
And Stewart whispered, with the old chuckling undertone:
“Hello, Jim.”
In the wild excitement of that moment, can we be blamed for forgetting a couple of comparatively unimportant little things?
We propped Stewart up in the closest approach to comfort you can find in a sea-car. We bundled him in warm covers and tried to keep him as quiet as could be, and then, almost at once, we looked at each other with foolish surprise. For we had remembered something.
What had happened to Brand Sperry?
We left Gideon clucking over my uncle, and Bob and I raced for the other sea-car. It lay bobbing gently in the slacking tide, looking harmless and deserted.
As, indeed, it was. Brand Sperry was gone.
Bob and I looked out over the peaceful lagoon at Fisherman’s Island. The peaceful look of the water was a lie. We knew that it was much less than peaceful; we had seen the triangular warning signals of sharks, we knew of the octopus lairs and the scores of other shallow-water perils that that harmless sparkling water concealed.
“If he wanted to get away that bad,” said Bob Eskow, “I say let him go.”
I nodded. “Especially since there isn’t anything we can do about it!” I agreed. “We can’t stay here forever. He’s out of trouble, leave him alone.”
We went back to our own sea-car, feeling relaxed and at ease for the first time, it seemed, in many months.
Stewart Eden was sitting up, and his eyes were bright. Gideon declared that he was strong enough to talk, if we didn’t excite him too much. Stewart chuckled: “After the—call it a rest cure—I’ve just gone through, I doubt you’ll excite me too much, Gideon. It was a most restful time, believe me. Plenty of sleep, plenty of idle hours. I had no complaints on that score…”
We pressed him for his story, but there was little he had to tell. What we had plucked from dead Catroni’s mind, what we had surmised ourselves from the wrecked interior of his sea-car—that was the story. There was nothing much beside. Except—
“Uranium!” my uncle whispered, his eyes agleam and fixed on something far beyond us all. “Thousands and thousands of tons of the highest-grade ore, Jim! Just scrape away the ooze, and there it is. Eden Deep is the richest store of fissionable ore the world has ever seen, and with my new Edenite it’s there for the taking. We’ve proved that!” He leaned back against the wall, panting heavily. “It’s power for the world; power to run every machine that man can build for centuries to come. Cheap power, power in quantities the world has never known.” He smiled, and almost as an afterthought he said: “Do you know, Jim, that you will be very, very rich?”
I protested: “It isn’t mine, Uncle Stewart! It’s all yours. You filed claim on Eden Deep; you invented the armor.”
“And what good did it do me, while I was locked away down there, watching the oxygen level go down? No, Jim—it’s not mine, it’s for all of us. A share for you and a share for me, yes—and shares for Gideon and Bob as well. No need to be hoggish about this! There’s plenty for all of us. Why, we’ll be walking on thousand-dollar bills, Jim; well be richer than old Hallam Sperry ever was, we’ll—”
“Hallam Sperry,” said Gideon thoughtfully. “Mr. Eden, you have made me remember something. Excuse me.” He disappeared toward the control chamber; and, in a moment, we heard him grunt as though he had received a blow.
He reappeared, his dark face furrowed. “Perhaps we ought to hold off on the congratulations for a little while,” he said. “They might be just a little bit premature. While we’re sitting around here, counting our money and deciding how we’re going to spend it, trouble’s coming our way. And it’s coming fast!”
I jumped to the microsonar, and Gideon’s words came true before my eyes. A thin single trace across the blue, shining face of the instrument. It was another sea-car, not at extreme range but in close, not patrolling in easy curves, but vectored in on Fishermen’s Island. There was only one explanation: Some time, somehow, Brand Sperry had found a moment unguarded at the communicators and sent an alarm. And his father’s ship was on our trail!
“Secure all ports!” I bawled to Bob Eskow, and with the quick discipline of our days at the Academy he leaped to obey. Gideon jumped to the instruments, and I started the motors. We slipped out from the reef, under the surface of the water and down.
There was no hope of evasion this time. They had us spotted and dead to rights. We could flee; that was all.
As fast as the hard-driven engines could take us, we pounded through the clinging water, straight out in the Pacific deeps.
We slid through the water, deeper and deeper, for long minutes, while we watched the trace of the pursuers in the plates. They were not gaining on us perceptibly, but I knew that the time would come when luck would run out for us. Our little sea-car had been through a punishing ordeal; primitive and crudely wrought, it had been at the very limit of its endurance when we rescued my uncle; underpowered and never broken in, it had been pushed too far too long. If only we could stay ahead of them long enough to reach Thetis, or one of the other underwater cities! At least there we could hope to evade Sperry’s thugs long enough to reach some high official, too high to have been bought by the power of Sperry’s millions…
But it was out of the question. It was a trip of many hours to the nearest of the cities. And we had, at the brutally high speeds we were using, no hope of averting a breakdown for that length of time.
“Go deep,” said my uncle. “Perhaps we can bluff them.”
I advanced the diving planes and blinked at him with the beginnings of hope. “Bluff?” I asked. “But that’s no bluff, Uncle Stewart! You’re right! We can avoid them forever that way! This ship will go clear to the bottom of Eden Deep—they’ll never be able to touch us. We can—”