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dome.
The idea was desperation itself for surely the amphi-bians, stronger
and better-equipped, would be driving the frantic monsters in upon us,
and there was little doubt that it was going to be a harrowingly unsafe
place to be, out at the base of the dome, under four miles of water,
with thirty-ton saurians milling and raving about in frenzy.
But it was the only chance we had.
Jason Craken was mooning about by himself, talking excitedly in gibberish;
Gideon and Roger were fully occu-pied in the turret. It left only Laddy,
David, the sea-girl Maeva, and myself to try to get the suits ready for us.
For Bob Eskow was nowhere to be seen.
It took us interminable minutes, while the dome
rocked and quivered under our feet. Then David threw down the last oxygen
cylinder angrily. "No more gas in the tank!" he cried. "We'll have to
make do with what we have. How do we stand, Laddy?"
Laddy Angel, fitting cylinders into the suits, counted rapidly and shrugged.
"It is not good, my friend David," he said softly.
"There is not much oxygen ----- "
"I know that! How much?"
Laddy frowned and squinted thoughtfully.
"Perhaps perhaps twenty minutes for each suit. Four suits. We have enough
oxygen for four of us to put on suits and go out into the abyss, to
try to frighten away your saurians.
Only ---- " he shrugged. "It is what they teach at the
Academy," he confessed, "but I am not sure it is true
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here. So many cubic centimeters of oxygen, so many seconds of safe breathing
time. But I cannot be sure, David, if the instructors in my classroom were
thinking of such a use of breath as we shall be making! We must leap and
pound gongs and jump about like cheerleaders at a football game, and
I have some doubt that the air that would last twenty minutes of quiet
walking about will last as long while we cavort like acrobats."
David demanded feverishly: "Power?"
That was my department. I had hooked the
leyden-type batteries onto the dome's own power reactor, watch-ed the
gauges that recorded the time.
"Not much power," I admitted. "But if we only have twenty minutes
of breathing time, it doesn't matter. The power will hold the edenite
armor on the suits for at least twice that."
David stood thoughtfully silent for a moment.
Then he shrugged. "Well," he said, "it's the best we can do. If it
isn't good enough ---- "
He didn't finish the sentence.
He didn't have to, because we all knew what it meant if we failed.
Lacking oxygen and power, we could be out on the floor of the sea for
only a few minutes so we had to wait there in the conn room until the stampede
was raging upon us. We watched the mosaic screens for the sign of the big
rush, the rush that Gideon with his missile-gun would not be able to stem.
We didn't speak much; there wasn't much left to say.
And I remembered again: Bob Eskow was missing.
Where had he got to? I said: "David Bob's been gone a long time. We'll need
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him when we go outside."
David frowned, his eyes intent on the screen. "He was rummaging through the
storerooms looking for more oxygen cylinders, I think, though I told
him there weren't any. Perhaps one of us should look for him." He turned to
the sea-girl, Maeva, who stood silently by, watching us with wide, calm
eyes. I envied her! If the saurians blun-dered through our weak
defenses and the dome came pounding down she at least would live!
And then I remembered Joe Trencher and his blazing
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anger against everything connected with the Crakens, and I wasn't so
sure that she would live, after all. For surely Joe Trencher would not
spare a traitor to the amphibian people, one who took the side of
the
Crakens against them.
"Maeva," he told her, "see if you can find him." She nodded, gasping for
breath, and started soundlessly out of the conn room. But she didn't have to
go far, for as she reached the door Bob appeared on the other side.
We all stared at him. He was lugging a huge, yellow-painted metal
cylinder, a foot thick and as long as Bob himself. Black letters were
stenciled on the yellow:
DEEP SEA SURVIVAL KIT
Contents: Four-place raft, with emergency sur-vival and signal
equipment. Edenite shield tested to twenty thousand feet.
"What in the world are you going to do with that?" I
demanded.
He looked up, startled, and out of breath. "We can reach radiolarian,
don't you see? I mean ----- "
"What?"
He broke off, and some of the absorbed gleam faded from his eyes. "I
mean ---- " he hesitated. "I mean, if a couple of us took it to the
surface, we could, well, sum-
mon the Fleet. We would be able to ---- "
He went on, while I stared at him. Bob was acting very queerly, I
thought. Could he be going to pieces under the strain of our situation?
I was sure he had said something about "radiolarian" the same sort of
jumbled nonsense he was muttering when he woke up after Maeva had res-cued us.
But he seemed perfectly all right....
David told him sharply: "Wait, Bob. It's a pretty idea, but there are two
things wrong with it. In the first place, we're pretty far off the beaten
track here and you have no guarantee that there would be a Fleet
vessel anywhere around to receive your message." Bob opened his mouth to say
something; David stopped him. "And even more important we don't have that
much time.
One of those survival kit buoys will haul you up to the surface easily
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enough, I admit. But it takes at least ten minutes from this far
down even assuming you can hold on while you're being jerked up at
twenty or thirty miles an hour!" He glanced at the microsonar screens
worriedly. "We may not even have ten minutes!"
We didn't.
In fact, we didn't have ten seconds.
There was a rattle from the intercom that connected with the
missile-gun turret high above, and
Gideon's soft voice came to us crying: "Stand by for trouble! They're
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coming fast!"
We didn't need that warning. In our own microsonar screens we could see
the saurians streaming toward us not just two or three this time, but a
solid group of a score or more, and the whole monstrous herd following
close behind!
We crowded into the lock, the four of us in pressure suits and the
sea-girl, Maeva, close beside.
The sea came in around us. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]