He was shaking his head. “No, Jim,” he said. “Even at the bottom of Eden Deep, they’d just circle overhead, waiting for us. We would have to come up, some time, and there they would be. But it’s worse than that. Look!”
He pointed to the bulkhead, where a fine dancing needle was feathering into the room. I stared at it, not recognizing what it was.
But Gideon recognized it. “We’re leaking,” he said, in a voice that tolled like the dirges of doom.
Stewart Eden nodded. In his dry whisper he said, “Leaking is right, and we’re only a thousand fathoms down. If we had my own sea-car instead of this one—But we don’t. We’ll never see the bottom of Eden Deep, my boy. But the only hope we have is to persuade Sperry otherwise. ..
It was a desperate gamble, but it was all we could do.
The cards were all stacked Hallam Sperry’s way. We watched the dancing feather of spray that came from the tiny leakage between the plates of our hull, and turned to the microsonar screen, where the little pip of light that marked the pursuers grew steadily closer, and wherever we looked there was no hope.
For a moment I thought we had a chance. The following pip darted upward toward the mass of Fisherman’s Island. “They’ve lost us!” I thought. “They think we’re still on the Island.”
But even while I thought it, I knew I was wrong. The pip hesitated only a matter of moments; then it came sliding down the side of the submarine mountain again, hot on our trail.
Hallam Sperry had stopped just long enough to pick up his son; it had delayed him bare minutes, and there would be no more delays.
At the end of one hour, the end was upon us.
My uncle Stewart was on his feet, ranging the little cabin of the sea-car, his voice hoarse and raging as he talked to the face of the microsonar. “You squids, you sea-urchins,” he whispered, “You unblessed children of mangy devilfish! Ah, it gravels me to see you get your way, Hallam Sperry! Death I can face, but to see the likes of you running the world with the power I found—that hurts, Sperry, it hurts deep down!”
Gideon said soothingly, “Just sit down and rest, Mr. Eden. You’ll wear yourself out like that.”
“Wear myself out!” Stewart Eden’s whisper crackled with passion. “I’ll wear Sperry out, if I ever get my hands on him! Jim!”
I said automatically, “Yessir!”
“Jim, I promised you thousand-dollar bills to walk on, and I’m not going to be able to keep the promise. I’m sorry, boy. About all I can promise you right now is a sub-sea sailor’s grave.”
“That’s good enough for me, Uncle Stewart,” I said. “But I hate to see Hallam Sperry getting control of Eden Deep!”
Stewart Eden’s fighting grin was on his lips. “If that’s all that’s bothering you, boy,” he said in his whispering chuckle, “why, I can take care of that right now. Eskow, can you raise Thetis on the communicator?”
“Why—yes, sir. But they can’t reach us in time—”
“Of course they can’t. Get them on the communicator, that’s all I ask.” While Bob worked the controls of the deep-sea TBS, my uncle carefully printed a long message on the back of a chart of Eden Deep.
It took long minutes, while the pursuing shadow gained on the overloaded motors of our sea-car; but finally Bob raised his head and reported. “Contact with Thetis, sir,” he sang out.
“Good enough,” chuckled my uncle. “Here’s the message.”
Bob took it from him, scanning the first line. “There’s no addressee, sir,” he said. “Who shall I send it to?”
“Route it to all interested parties, boy! Don’t wait—you’ve got to get it out before Hallam Sperry catches up with us! One little ram from his sea-car and we’ll open up like an oyster in Deep-Sea Dave’s!”
Bob looked puzzled, but as his eyes traveled farther down the message he first stared disbelievingly, then grinned to match my uncle’s lean, wolfish expression. “Aye-aye, sir!” he said joyously, and bent to the communicator.
I leaned over his shoulder as his racing fingers tapped out the message. It began:
“To whom it may concern. This is Stewart Eden calling. We are being pursued, and will shortly be rammed and sunk, by a sea-car operated by or under the control of Hallam Sperry, who was accomplice to the sabotage of my experimental very-deep sea-car which was sunk in Eden Deep. Sperry now has possession of one of the two existing models of a sea-car constructed of a new form of Edenite armor which makes it possible to attain any depth of water that exists anywhere on earth. With this armor, it will be possible to mine Eden Deep, at the bottom of which is located an enormous field of uranium ore. I, Stewart Eden, hereby give and transfer all of my right, tide and interest in the process for manufacturing this new armor to the world at large, irrevocably and forever. The formula for manufacture is as follows: A generator capable of maintaining a K-87 magnetostriction field is connected in series to—”
The rest was technical. But the effect was plain:
My uncle Stewart had robbed Hallam Sperry of his super-Edenite by giving it to the world! Gone were the billions that his process would have brought him and me—gone perhaps were our very lives—but Hallam Sperry would not be able to exploit the Deeps single-handed!
20
Duel in the Deeps
In the center of the microsonar screen was the hovering pip that was our own sea-car; the pursuer was so close that the two pips were actually touching in the screen.
Deep-sea subs are armed, but at the speeds we were using the arms were useless. There are torpedoes and submarine rockets and mines; but none of them can travel any faster than a full-speed seacar, and at our depths, as close as we were to each other, any explosion that harmed us would destroy Hallam Sperry as well. The pure concussion would stove in the hulls of both vessels.
It was a matter of ramming that we had to fear, and it could be only seconds off.
My uncle Stewart, by now as fully recovered as though he had spent a month sunning himself under the Troyon lamps at Thetis, was handling the controls himself. He had built the sea-car; he could get every last knot out of the straining engines. But, drive them to their limit as he might, we couldn’t gain a fathom on Sperry, hovering close behind. Each moment Sperry drew infinitesimally nearer; each second brought us that much closer to the gentle nudging jolt that would start our plates and send us spinning toward the ooze below.
We were too deep for safety already; Gideon and Bob Eskow were pounding caulking into the dozen splitting leaks at the joints of the hull—but under the pressures that were forcing their way through, the caulking came arrowing out as quickly as they could drive it in. We were fifteen hundred fathoms down—deeper than the safe range of a normal sea-car, at least twice as deep as we should have dared to take the limping, rickety hulk we were piloting.
There was no escape. There was nothing we could do. We couldn’t even turn and fight. We could only keep running—hopelessly.
“Blast it all!” roared my uncle Stewart. “Gideon, Bob—I apologize to you for getting you into this. I don’t have to apologize to you, Jim—we’re the same blood; but it’s not your fight, Bob. Or yours, Gideon.”
Gideon grinned, die white teeth friendly. “It is now, captain,” he said. “And Bob Eskow’s too, I’d guess; I doubt that Hallam Sperry would let us surrender even if we wanted to.”
Stewart Eden pounded the depth compass and sent its needle spinning crazily. “That’s what I wanted to know!” he cried. “All right, boys; we’ll call it one for all and all for one, eh? It’s no hope I’m giving you—there isn’t any hope. But if we’re going to drown, I’m going to drown a couple of Sperrys along with us! Stations for action!”