There was incalculable wealth there on the floor of the sea—three times as great an area as all the continents, and three times as wealthy! The shaded zones and colored patches showed tracts of minerals—oil fields, gold sands, coal beds, seams of copper and zinc and platinum. Marked in warning red were the uranium mines, the lifeblood of the world’s powerlines and, particularly, of the Sub-Sea Service, for without atomic energy from the raw uranium our vessels would be as surface-bound as the ancients. It was a sobering experience to see how few and sparse those flecks were; every one of them was being worked intensively, and the supply, the rumors said, was running low.
But most exciting and provocative of all were the patches of pure, featureless white in the middle of the sea. For they are the unexplored Deeps—the Philippine Trench, Nares Deep, the Marianas—six miles, seven miles and more straight down, beyond even the range of our most powerful exploring cruisers, untouched and almost unknown. On the giant map the patches of color that marked mineral deposits seemed to grow thicker and larger as the depth increased—up to the very edges of the unexplored white. It was, they said, natural enough: the heavy minerals settled farthest down. What treasures the Deeps must conceal!
There were treasures enough, though, in Dixon Hall itself—cases of pearls and sea-amethysts and coral, the great pieces of ivory from the deepest plumbed abysses that scientists said were the tusks of ancient sea-monsters. I think that within the range of my eyes, as I stood in the center of the Hall, must have been a million dollars’ worth of precious gems—with never a lock or guard! Truly, the honor system at the Academy was strong!
It was a wonderful, absorbing, exciting place. Most wonderful of all to me, though, were the ranked masses of cabinets and cases where the history of undersea navigation was on display. Beebe’s tiny bathysphere was represented, and the doomed Squalus, and the old German Deutschland and many more, in carefully precise models. And there was one thing more: the tiny model of my uncle’s first, crude cylindrical Edenite diver.
I think I piled up more demerits in Dixon Hall than anywhere else in the Academy—standing transfixed before some model or map, until the ship’s bell announced the dinner formation, and I arrived at the lines before our quarters, breathless and racing, in time to be gigged by some officer or upperclassman for being late. It was costly of my leisure time, walking off the demerits on the Quad; but it was worth it.
Eskow was usually beside me as we circled the Quad.
It was hard for me to understand what forces drove Bob Eskow through the grinding years of the Academy. In his family was no tradition of the sub-sea service as in mine; his father owned a newsstand in New York, his grandparents had been immigrants from some agricultural community in the Balkans.
The question, when I brought it up, embarrassed him. He said, almost shame-faced, “I guess I just wanted to do something for my country.” And we let it drop. But Eskow was always there with me, prowling through the Nautilus or pondering the unmarked Deeps, beyond the four-mile limit where Edenite no longer could turn the force of the water back on itself. I didn’t realize how much I was coming to depend on Eskow’s cheerful determination and quiet friendship.
I didn’t realize it—until it was gone.
4
Man Missing
Within the first month we were actually going beneath the surface of the sea.
True enough, we were not going very far. But squad by squad, we drew diving gear—aqualungs, face-masks, pneumatic guns and frog-flippers—and set out on our first undersea expeditions.
I was in Crew Five, with twenty others, under Cadet Lieutenant Hachette. When we had drawn our gear we boarded a whaleboat and stood out to sea. We were not quite out of sight of land—Bermuda was a low line on the horizon—and when Lt.
Hachette gave the order to stop the engines. We drifted, bobbing gently on the Caribbean swell until, at the lieutenant’s command, we went over the side, one by one.
The water was shallow there—not more than twenty feet—and crystal clear. We wore regulation weighted shoes, carefully balanced to each man’s weight and body volume. With them on, we exactly balanced the weight of water we displaced. It was like hanging suspended like Mohammed’s Tomb. At the flick of a webbed foot we climbed; at the merest stroke of the arms, we sank.
We gathered in ranks on the rippled, sandy bottom and waited for orders.
Talking, of course, was out of the question. Standing there, teetering gently back and forth like a pillar of smoke on a still day, I was conscious of the absolute silence. The only whisper of sound that came to me was the ripple of bubbles from my breathing gear. I found out later that this was unusual—the bottom of the sea can be a very noisy place! Fish are not the mute beasts they seem; and, as I can testify, being within range of a battle royal between a hammerhead shark and a squid is about like being on the fringe of two fighting wildcats.
But that morning off Bermuda, I felt as remote as the spaces between the stars.
Lt. Hachette looked us over to make sure everything was in order; signaled us to check our gear for leaks or malfunctions; then ordered us on. In columns of twos, we marched off along the sea bottom. Curious march—in slow motion! We were at route step, and the uneven footing made it a struggle to keep in some sort of proper dress. Stumbling over sand mounds and broken branches of coral, dodging the wicked little sea anemones, that look like chrysanthemums and sting like hornets, we must have been a ludicrous sight to the curious little fishes that swam in schools overhead! It was more a ballet step than a march; half the time my right foot was off the ground before my left foot had touched before me, in a slow, stately grand jete that Nijinsky would have envied.
I doubted that we were making more than a mile an hour. We had air, that first dive, for only thirty minutes; we marched about a thousand yards in all, a hundred yards in one direction, then a sharp right turn and a hundred yards more. At the end of the thirty minutes we were back where we started; Lt. Hatchette gave us the signal, and we, two by two, slipped upward toward the waiting whaleboat.
It sounds rather dull, perhaps.
It was not! Every second of that first half hour was pure adventure, and unbelievable excitement. It was not dangerous excitement—we were, after all, only twenty feet down! Even though Bermuda’s waters teem with sharks, they rarely go near humans, and certainly not when the humans come in groups of twenty. But it was an enchanted land we were traveling, inhabited by long- legged starfish and slow sea-cucumbers and pulsing sponges and brilliant-colored, inch-long fish by the uncounted thousands.
We dived twice more that day, and then the whaleboat started back. It would be two weeks before our turn would come again; but already I was making plans for the next time. For I had been on the sea-bottom… it was like going home again, after a long, long time away.