Undersea Fleet

20 “The Molluscans Are Ripe!”

Yards short of the dome I toppled and slowly fell, and I had not the strength to stand up again—little though I needed with the buoying water to help.

Everything was queerly blurred, strangely unimportant. I knew my air was bad. I could live a few more minutes—perhaps even a quarter of an hour—but I couldn’t move, for there simply was not air enough left in my tanks to sustain me. It was perfectly obvious. I would lie there, I thought drowsily, lazily, until I fell asleep. And then, after some minutes, I would die, poisoned by the carbon dioxide from my own breath…

Or perhaps, if the edenite shield faltered first as the power ran out, crushed into a shapeless mass by the fury of the deeps.

It was perfectly obvious, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.

Something strange was happening. I raised my head slightly to see better. There was a queer, narrow metal cave, and something moving around in it—something with a bright yellow head and a bright yellow body—

I shook my head violently to clear it and looked again.

The cave became the airlock of the dome.

The queer object with the bright yellow head became Bob Eskow, wearing his pressure suit and carrying—carrying that yellow cylinder he had lugged up from the storerooms, the emergency escape kit.

I thought in a dreamy way how remarkable it was that he should be bothering with something like that. But I didn’t really care. All I felt was an overwhelming laziness—narcosis, from bad air rather than pressure, but narcosis all the same. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

Suddenly Bob was tugging at me.

That didn’t matter either, but he was interfering with my pleasant lazy rest. I pushed at him angrily. I couldn’t make out what he was doing.

Then I saw: He was binding me to the shackles around the yellow-painted rescue buoy. For a moment his helmeted face hung in front of mine, huge and dim. I saw him gesture vehemently with a chopping motion.

I stared at him, irritated and puzzled. Chop? What did he mean?

I glanced behind me, and saw the end of the yellow rescue buoy, where the deadweight was shackled to the flotation unit. The idea was to uncouple the weight and drop it off, then the buoy would surge toward the surface, carrying its rescued passengers with it.

Possibly that was what Bob wanted me to do—knock the weights loose.

Fretfully I pressed the release lever. The weighted end of the cylinder sprang free.

And the flotation unit jerked us toward the surface.

It was fast! It was almost like being fired from a cannon. The shock made me black out for a second, I think. I was conscious of the black rock and the shimmering blue dome falling away beneath us, and then things became very confused. There was a fading gray glow in the water about us, then only darkness. Then I began to see queer bright lights—shining eyes, they seemed, that dived at us from above and dropped rapidly away beneath.

The air was growing rapidly worse.

I could hear myself breathing—great, rapid, panting upheavals, like Maeva after hours of breathing air, like a dying man. I began to have a burning in my lungs. My head ached…great gongs beat and spirals of fire spun and vanished in the dark sea.

And then suddenly, we were at the surface of the sea.

Amazingly, it was night!

Somehow I had not thought of its being night-time above. We cracked our faceplates, clinging to the buoy, and I breathed deeply of cool, damp, night air. I stared at the stars as though I had never seen a night sky before. Amazing!

But what was most amazing was that we were alive.

As the air hit me it was like a dose of the strongest stimulant known to man. I coughed and choked and, if I hadn’t been bound to the buoy, I think I might have dropped free and sunk back into the awesome miles of the Tonga Trench that waited hungrily beneath us.

I heard a sharp, metallic snap: It was Bob, a little better off than I, pulling the lever that opened the emergency escape kit.

The glow of the edenite film faded from the yellow-painted cylinder. The cap popped off. The plastic raft shot out of it, swelling out with a soft hiss of gas. .. .

Somehow we scrambled aboard. We got our helmets off and lay on our backs, getting back our strength.

The tall Pacific swell lifted us and dropped us, lifted us and dropped us. In the trough between the long, rounded waves we lay between walls of water; on the crest, we were hanging in midair in a plain of rolling black dunes. There were little sounds all around us—the wash of wavelets against the rubber raft, the sounds of the air, our own breathing, the little creaks and rattles the raft itself made.

It was utterly impossible to believe that four miles straight down a frightful battle was raging!

But Bob believed it; he remembered. Before I could get my breath back, before I could demand an explanation, he was up and about.

I lay there on the wet cushion of the raft, staring up at the blazing tropical stars that I had never expected to see again. My lungs and throat were burning still. I forced myself to sit up, to see what Bob was doing.

He was squatting at the end of the tiny raft, fussing over the sealed lockers that contained emergency rations, first aid medical equipment—and a radio-sonar distress transmitter.

It was the transmitter that Bob was frantically fumbling with.

“Bob!” I had to stop and cough. My throat was raw, sore, exhausted. “Bob, what’s this all about? You’ve been acting so strangely—”

“Wait, Jim!”

I said: “I can’t wait! Don’t you realize that the Crakens and the rest of our friends down there may be dying by now? They needed us! Without our help the saurians are bound to break through—

“Please, Jim. Trust me!”

Trust him! Yet there was nothing else I could do. I was cut off from the struggle at the bottom of Tonga Trench now as irrevocably as though it were being fought on the surface of the moon. It had taken perhaps ten minutes for us to get away from it—and it was literally impossible to get back. Even if there had been air for the pressure suit and power to keep its edenite shield going, what could I do? Cut loose and drop free? Yes—and land perhaps miles from the sea-mount where Jason Craken’s besieged dome might even now be crumbling as the deeps pounded in. For I had no way of knowing what sub-sea currents had tossed us about as we came up—and would clutch at me again on the way down.

Trust him. It was a tall order—but somehow, I began to be able to do it.

I growled, “All right,” and cleared my throat. Watching his fingers work so feverishly over the radio-sonar apparatus a thought struck me. I said: “One thing, anyway. When we get back to the Academy—if we ever do—I’ll be able to report to Coach Blighman that you finally qualified…at twenty thousand feet!”

He grinned briefly at me, and returned to the distress transmitter.

It was built to send an automatic SOS signal on distress frequency radio, and simultaneously on sonarphone. The sonarphone would reach any cruising subsea vessels within range—and precious short the range of a sonarphone was, of course. The radio component would transmit the same signal electronically. Of course, with most traffic under the surface of the sea these days, there would be few ships to receive it—but its range was thousands of miles, and somewhere there would be a ship, or a monitoring relay buoy retransmitting via sonarphone to a subsea vessel beneath, to hear—and to act.

I bent closer to see what he was doing.

He was disconnecting the automatic signal tape!

While I watched, he completed his connections and switched on the transmitter. He picked up a tiny microphone on a short cable and began to talk into it.

I stared at him as I heard what he said.

“Diatom to radiolarian, diatom to radiolarian.”

It didn’t mean anything! It was the same garbled gibberish he had mumbled before. I had taken it to be the half-delirium of a mind just waking up from a shock—yet now he was saying it into a transmitter, and it was going out by radio and sonarphone to—to whom?

“Diatom to radiolarian,” he said again, and again. “Diatom to radiolarian! The molluscans are ripe. Repeat, the molluscans are ripe! Hurry, radiolarian!”

I sank back, unbelieving, as the little emergency raft bobbed up and down, up and down in the swell.

Below us, our friends were fighting for their lives.

And up here on the surface, where we had fled—my friend Bob Eskow had gone mad as old Jason Craken himself.

But—appearances are deceiving.

I sat there on that wet, flimsy raft, staring at my friend. And finally I began to understand a few things.

Bob looked up at me, almost worriedly.

I said: “Hello, diatom.”

He hesitated for a second, and then grinned. “So you’ve guessed.”

“It took me long enough. But you’re right, I’ve guessed. At least I think I have.” I took a deep breath. “Diatom. That’s your code name, right? You are diatom. And radiolarian—I suppose that’s the code name for the Fleet? You’re what we call an undercover agent, Bob. You’re on a mission. All this time—you’ve been working for the Fleet itself. You came with us not for the fun of it, not to help me pay my family’s debt to the Crakens—but because the Fleet gave you orders. Am I right?”

He nodded silently. “Close enough,” he said after a moment.

It was hard to take in.

But—now that I had the key, things began to fall into place. All those mysterious absences of Bob’s back at the Academy—the hours, the afternoons, when he disappeared and didn’t tell me where he had gone, when I thought he had been practicing for the underwater tests—he had been reporting to Fleet. When he had hesitated before promising secrecy to David Craken—it had been because he had his duty to the Fleet, and couldn’t promise until David so worded it that it didn’t conflict.

And most important of all—when he had seemed to be deserting our friends down there beneath us, at the bottom of the Trench, it was because he had to come up here, to use the radio to report to the Fleet!

I said: “I think I owe you an apology, Bob. To tell the truth, I thought—”

He interrupted me. “It doesn’t matter what you thought, Jim. I’m only sorry I couldn’t tell you the truth before this. But my orders—”

It was my turn to interrupt. “Forget it! But—what happens next?”

He looked sober. “I hope we’re in time! ‘The molluscans are ripe’—that’s our SOS. It means the battle is going on, way down there at the bottom, Jim. The Fleet is supposed to be standing by, monitoring the radio for this signal. Then they’re supposed to come racing up and—”

His voice broke. He said in a different tone: “They’re supposed to come down, pick us up, and take over in the Trench. You see, the Fleet knew something was up here—but they couldn’t interfere, as long as there was no violence. But we’ve cut it pretty fine, Jim. Now that the violence has started—I only hope they get here before it’s too late!”

I started to say, “I wish we could—”

I stopped in the middle of the wish, and forgot what it was I was going to wish for.

Something fast and faintly glowing was brightening the swells beneath us. I pointed. “Look, Bob!”

It was a faint blue shimmer in the black water; it grew brighter, and shaped itself into the long hull of a sub-sea ship, strangely familiar, surfacing close to us.

“They’re here!” I cried. “Bob, they’re here!”

He stared at the gleaming hull, then at me.

He said dazedly, “I should have cut off the sonarphone. They heard me.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “You wanted the Fleet, didn’t you?”

I stopped then, because all at once I knew I was wrong—badly wrong, terribly wrong.

I knew then why that long hull, shimmering blue under the gentle wash of the waves, had seemed familiar. I hardly heard Bob saying:

“That’s not the Fleet. It’s the Killer Whale! They heard my message on the sonarphone!”