Undersea Fleet (3 page)

I said: “I’ve got to get my gear on. Sorry.”

“You’ll be sorry before you’re through with Craken!” Roger Fairfane blazed. “There’s something funny about him. He knows more about the Deeps than—“

He stopped short, glared at us, and turned away.

Bob and I looked at each other and shrugged. We didn’t have time to talk by then, the other cadets were already falling in by crews, ready to go to the locks.

We hurried into our diving gear. It was simple enough—flippers for the feet, mouthpiece and goggles for the face, the portable lung on the back.

It was a late-issue electrolung, one of the new types that generates oxygen by the electrolysis of sea water. Dechlorinators remove the poison gases from the salt. It saves weight; it extends the range considerably—for water is eight-ninths oxygen by weight, and there is an endless supply, as long as the strontium atomic battery holds out to provide the electric current.

But Bob put his on reluctantly. I knew why. As the old early lung divers had found, pure oxygen was chancy; for those who were prone to experience “the raptures of the depths,” oxygen in too great strength seemed to bring on seizures earlier and more violently than ordinary air. Perhaps the injections would help…

We filed into the lock in squads of twenty men, our fins slapping the deck. We were issued tight thermo-suits there—first proof that this was no ordinary skin-diving expe-dition; we would be going deep enough so that the water would be remorselessly cold as well as crushingly heavy above us.

We sat on the wet benches around the rim of the low, gloomy dome of the lock and Coach Blighman gave us our final briefing:

“Each of you has a number. When we flood the lock and open the sea door, you are to swim to the bow super-structure, find your number, punch the button under it. The light over your number will go out, proving that you have completed the test. Then swim back here and come into the lock.

“That’s all there is to it. There’s a guide line in case any of you are tempted to get lost. If you stick to the guide line, you can’t get lost. If you don’t—”

He stared around at us, his shark’s eyes cold as the sea.

“If you don’t,” he rasped, “you’ll put the sub-sea service to the expense of a search party for you—or for your body.”

His eyes roved over us, waiting.

No one said anything. There wasn’t really much chance of our being lost—

Or was there? One of the fathometers was missing. In the hookup as used on the gym ship, it was a part of the microsonar; without it, it might be very hard indeed to locate one dazed and wandering cadet, overcome by depth-narcosis…

I resolved to keep an eye on Bob.

“Any questions?” Coach Blighman rapped out. There were no questions. Very well. Secure face-pieces! Open Sea Valves One and Three!”

We snapped our face-lenses and mouthpieces into place.

The cadet at the control panel saluted and twisted two plastic knobs. The sea poured in.

It came in two great jets of white water, foaming and crashing against the bulkhead. Blinding spray distorted our lenses, and the cold brine surged and pulled around our feet.

Coach Blighman had retreated to the command port, where he stood watching behind thick glass. As the lock filled we could hear his voice, sounding hollow and far away through the water, coming over the communicators: “Sea door open!”

Motors whined, and the sea door irised wide.

“Count and out!”

Bob Eskow was number-four man in our crew, just before me. I could hear him rap sharply four times on the bulkhead as he squeezed through the iris door.

I rapped five times and followed.

The raptures of the depths!

But they weren’t dangerous, they were—being alive. All of the work and strain at the Academy, all of my life in fact, was pointed toward this. I was in the sea.

I took a breath and felt my body start to soar toward the surface, a hundred feet above; I exhaled, and my body dipped back toward the deck of the sub-sea raft. The electrolung chuckled and whispered behind my ear, measuring my breathing, supplying oxygen to keep me alive, a ten-story building’s height below the waves and the sky. It was broad daylight above, but down here was only a pale greenish wash of light.

The deck of the gym ship—all gray steel and black shadow on the surface—was transformed into a Sinbad’s cave, gray-green floor beneath us, sea-green, transparent walls to the sides. The guide line was a glowing, greenish snake stretched tautly out ahead of me, into the greenish glow of the water. There was no sense of being under-water, no feeling of being “wet”; I was flying.

I kicked and surged rapidly ahead of the guide line without touching it.

Bob was just ahead, swimming slowly, fingers almost touching the guide line. I dawdled impatiently behind him, while he doggedly swam to the bow superstructure and fumbled around the scoring rig. Our numbers were there, with the Troyon tubes glowing blue over the signal buttons. They stood out clearly in the wash of green light, but Bob seemed to be having trouble.

For a moment I thought of helping him—but there is an honor code at the Academy, strict and sharp: Each cadet does his own tasks, no one can coast on someone else’s work. And then he found the button, and his number went out.

I followed him with growing concern, back along the guide line. He was finding it difficult to stay with the guide; twice I saw him clutch at it and pull himself along, as his swimming strokes became erratic.

And this at a hundred feet! The bare beginning of the qualifying dives!

What would happen at three hundred? At five?

Finally we were all back inside the lock, and the seapumps began their deep, purring hum. As soon as the water was down to our waists Coach Blighman rasped:

“Eden, Eskow! What were you jellyfish doing? You held up the whole crew!”

We stood dripping on the slippery duckboards, waiting for the tongue-lashing; but we were spared it. One of the other cadets cried out sharply and splashed to the floor. The sea-medics were there almost before the water was out of the lock. I grabbed him, holding his head out of the last of the water; they took him from me and quickly, roughly, stripped his face-piece and goggles away. His face was convulsed with pain; he was unconscious.

Sea Coach Blighman strode in, splashing and raging. Even before the sea medics had finished with him, he roared: “Ear plugs! Theres one in every crew! I’ve told you a hundred times—I’ve dinned it in to you, over and over—ear plugs are worse than useless below a fathom! Men, if you can’t take the sea, don’t try to hide behind ear plugs; all they’ll do is let the pressure build up a little more—a very little more—and then they’ll give in, and you’ll have a burst eardrum, and you’ll be out of the Academy! Just like Dorritt, here!”

It was too bad for Dorritt—but it saved us for the moment.

But only for the moment.

We weren’t more than a yard out of the lock when Bob swayed and stumbled.

I caught his arm, trying to keep him on his feet at least until we were out of range of Coach Blighman’s searching eyes. “Bob! Buck up, man! What’s the matter?”

He looked at me with a strange, distant expression; and then without warning his eyes closed and he fell out of my grasp to the floor.

They let me come with him to the sick-bay; they even let me take one end of the stretcher.

He woke up as we set the stretcher down and turned to catch my eye. For a moment I thought he had lost his mind. “Jim? Jim? Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you, Bob. I—”

“You’re so far away!” His eyes were glazed, staring at me. “Is that you, Jim? I can’t see—There’s a green fog, and lightning flashes—Jim, where are you?”

I said, trying to reassure him: “You’re in the sick-bay, Bob. Lieutenant Saxon is right here. We’ll fix you up—”

He closed his eyes as one of the sea medics jabbed him with a needle. It put him to sleep, almost at once. But before he went under I heard him whisper: “Narcosis…I knew I’d never make it.”

Lieutenant Saxon looked at me over his unconscious form. “Sorry, Eden,” he said.

“You mean he’s washed out, sir?”

He nodded. “Pressure sensitive. Sorry, but—You’d better get back to your crew.”

At seven hundred feet I swam out into blackness.

The powerful sub-sea floodlamps of the gym ship could no more than shadow the gloomy deck. There was no trace of light from the bright sun overhead, and only the dimmest corona, far distant, to mark the bow superstructure.

I felt—dizzy, almost sick.

Was it the pressure, I wondered, or was it my friend Bob Eskow, back in the sick-bay? I had left him and gone back to the trials, but my thoughts stayed with him.

I tried to put him out of my mind, and stroked forward through the gloomy depths toward the faintly glowing bow superstructure, where my number had to be put out.

There were only seventeen of us left—the rest had completed a few dives and been disqualified by the sea-medics from going on, or had disqualified themselves. Or, like Bob Eskow, had cracked up.

Two were left from our original twenty-man crew—myself and one other—and fifteen from all the other crews combined. I recognized David Craken and the boy from Peru, Eladio; there was Cadet Captain Fairfane, glowering fiercely at the two foreign cadets; and a few more.

I left them behind and stroked out. There was no feeling of pressure on me, for the pressure inside my body was fully as great as the pressure without. The chuckling, whispering electrolung on my back supplied gas under pressure, filled my lungs and my bloodstream. Clever chemical filters sucked out every trace of chlorine, nitrogen and carbon-dioxide, so that there was no risk of being poisoned or of “the bends”—that joint-crippling sickness that came after pressure that had killed and maimed so many early divers.

A column of water seven hundred feet tall was squeezing me, but my own body was pushing back; I couldn’t feel the pressure itself. But I felt ancient, weary, exhausted, without knowing why. I was drained of energy. Every stroke of the flippers on my feet, every movement of my arms, seemed to take all the strength in my body. Each time I completed a stroke it seemed utterly impossible that I would find the energy and strength necessary for another. I would be so much easier to let myself drift…

But somehow I found the strength. And somehow, slowly, the greenish corona at the bow grew nearer. Its shape appeared; the fiercely radiant floodlights brightened and took form, and I began to be able to make out the rows of numbers.

Fumblingly I found the button and saw my own number flash and wink out. I turned and wearily, slowly, made my way back along the guide line, into the lock once more.

Nine hundred feet.

Only eleven of us had completed the seven-hundred-foot dive. And the sea medics, with their quick, sure tests, eliminated six out of the eleven. Eladio was one of those to go—Lt. Saxon’s electro-stethoscope had detected the faint stirrings of a heart murmur; he curtly refused the Peruvian permission to go out again.

Five of us left—and two of the five showed unmistakable signs of collapse as soon as the water came pounding in; cadets in armor floundered out of the emergency locks and bore them away while the rest of us remained to feel the whining tingle of the motors opening the sea-gates and see the deeps open to us once more.

“The rest of us.” There were only three now. Myself. And Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane—worn, strained, irritable, tense, but grimly determined. And David Craken, the cadet from Marinia.

There was not even a glow from the superstructure now. I dragged myself through the water, doggedly concentrating on the gleam of the guide line—how dully, how feebly it gleamed under the nine hundred feet!

It seemed as though I were trying to slide through jelly, for hours, making no progress. Suddenly I noticed some-thing ahead—the faint, distant glimmer of lights (the bow floodlights—visible on the surface for a score of miles, but down here for only as many feet!) And outlined against them, some sort of weird, unrecognizable sea beings…

There were two of them. I looked at them incuriously and then somehow I realized what they were: David Craken and Roger Fairfane. They had left the lock a moment before me, they had reached their goals and they were on their way back.

They passed me almost without a glance. I struggled onward wearily; by the time I had found my button and turned out my number, they were out of sight again.

I saw them again halfway back—or so I thought.

And then I realized that it could not be them.

Something
was moving in the water near me. I looked more closely, somehow summoning the strength to be curious.

Fish. Dozens of little fish, scurrying through the water, directly across my course along the guide line.

There is nothing strange about seeing fish in the Bermuda waters, not even at nine hundred feet. But these fish seemed—frightened. I stared wearily at them, resting one hand on the guide line while I thought about the strangeness of their being frightened. I glanced back toward where they had come from…

I saw something, something I could not believe.

I could see—very faintly—the line of shadow against a deeper shadow that was the port rail of the gym ship. And traced in blacker shadow still,
something
hovered over that rail. There was almost no light, but it seemed to have a definite shape, and an unbelievable one.

It looked like—like a
head.
An enormous head, lifted out of the blackness below the deck. It was longer than a man, and it seemed to be looking at me through tiny, slitted eyes, yawning at me with a whole nightmare of teeth…

I suppose I should have been terrified. But nine hundred feet down, with armor, I didn’t have the strength to feel terror.

I hung there, one hand resting on the guide line, staring, not believing and yet not doubting.

And then it was gone—if it had ever been there.

I stared at the place where it had been, or where I had thought I had seen it, waiting for something to happen—for it to appear again, or for something to convince me that it had been only imagination.