Undersea Quest

19 Back from the Dead

That was how my Uncle Stewart came back to us.

We got Bob Eskow to help us; the three of us managed to get him up through the tiny hatch, onto our own sea-car, into the light. Stewart opened his eyes and looked at me, and he smiled. But he had no strength to speak.

Once again the Academy helped me. Exhaustion, starvation and the poisonous effects of foul air were no strangers to the men of the Sub-Sea Fleet; and every semester, we had had drilled into us the methods of emergency treatment. From the little first-aid locker of the sea-car we took stimulants and elixirs and the miraculous chemical blends that were guaranteed to bring a near- corpse whooping back to life. Stewart needed them all. While I was mixing up a sugar solution for intravenous feeding, Gideon quickly injected a whole series of stimulating drugs, and Bob arranged the electric heart stimulator coils in position for quick use—if they were needed. We had found my uncle Stewart alive—and we were not going to let him go!

I don’t know how long we worked over him. It must have been only half an hour or so—we hadn’t the complicated equipment to take much longer—but time stopped. It might have been seconds, or years.

And time began to tick forward once more when the last injection was made, and the food solution was trickling into his veins, and my uncle Stewart opened his eyes once more.

They were sane eyes, wakeful eyes. They were the soberly humorous, warmly gay eyes I remembered from my childhood and the New London shore.

And Stewart whispered, with the old chuckling undertone:

“Hello, Jim.”

In the wild excitement of that moment, can we be blamed for forgetting a couple of comparatively unimportant little things?

We propped Stewart up in the closest approach to comfort you can find in a sea-car. We bundled him in warm covers and tried to keep him as quiet as could be, and then, almost at once, we looked at each other with foolish surprise. For we had remembered something.

What had happened to Brand Sperry?

We left Gideon clucking over my uncle, and Bob and I raced for the other sea-car. It lay bobbing gently in the slacking tide, looking harmless and deserted.

As, indeed, it was. Brand Sperry was gone.

Bob and I looked out over the peaceful lagoon at Fisherman’s Island. The peaceful look of the water was a lie. We knew that it was much less than peaceful; we had seen the triangular warning signals of sharks, we knew of the octopus lairs and the scores of other shallow-water perils that that harmless sparkling water concealed.

“If he wanted to get away that bad,” said Bob Eskow, “I say let him go.”

I nodded. “Especially since there isn’t anything we can do about it!” I agreed. “We can’t stay here forever. He’s out of trouble, leave him alone.”

We went back to our own sea-car, feeling relaxed and at ease for the first time, it seemed, in many months.

Stewart Eden was sitting up, and his eyes were bright. Gideon declared that he was strong enough to talk, if we didn’t excite him too much. Stewart chuckled: “After the—call it a rest cure—I’ve just gone through, I doubt you’ll excite me too much, Gideon. It was a most restful time, believe me. Plenty of sleep, plenty of idle hours. I had no complaints on that score…”

We pressed him for his story, but there was little he had to tell. What we had plucked from dead Catroni’s mind, what we had surmised ourselves from the wrecked interior of his sea-car—that was the story. There was nothing much beside. Except—

“Uranium!” my uncle whispered, his eyes agleam and fixed on something far beyond us all. “Thousands and thousands of tons of the highest-grade ore, Jim! Just scrape away the ooze, and there it is. Eden Deep is the richest store of fissionable ore the world has ever seen, and with my new Edenite it’s there for the taking. We’ve proved that!” He leaned back against the wall, panting heavily. “It’s power for the world; power to run every machine that man can build for centuries to come. Cheap power, power in quantities the world has never known.” He smiled, and almost as an afterthought he said: “Do you know, Jim, that you will be very, very rich?”

I protested: “It isn’t mine, Uncle Stewart! It’s all yours. You filed claim on Eden Deep; you invented the armor.”

“And what good did it do me, while I was locked away down there, watching the oxygen level go down? No, Jim—it’s not mine, it’s for all of us. A share for you and a share for me, yes—and shares for Gideon and Bob as well. No need to be hoggish about this! There’s plenty for all of us. Why, we’ll be walking on thousand-dollar bills, Jim; well be richer than old Hallam Sperry ever was, we’ll—”

“Hallam Sperry,” said Gideon thoughtfully. “Mr. Eden, you have made me remember something. Excuse me.” He disappeared toward the control chamber; and, in a moment, we heard him grunt as though he had received a blow.

He reappeared, his dark face furrowed. “Perhaps we ought to hold off on the congratulations for a little while,” he said. “They might be just a little bit premature. While we’re sitting around here, counting our money and deciding how we’re going to spend it, trouble’s coming our way. And it’s coming fast!”

I jumped to the microsonar, and Gideon’s words came true before my eyes. A thin single trace across the blue, shining face of the instrument. It was another sea-car, not at extreme range but in close, not patrolling in easy curves, but vectored in on Fishermen’s Island. There was only one explanation: Some time, somehow, Brand Sperry had found a moment unguarded at the communicators and sent an alarm. And his father’s ship was on our trail!

“Secure all ports!” I bawled to Bob Eskow, and with the quick discipline of our days at the Academy he leaped to obey. Gideon jumped to the instruments, and I started the motors. We slipped out from the reef, under the surface of the water and down.

There was no hope of evasion this time. They had us spotted and dead to rights. We could flee; that was all.

As fast as the hard-driven engines could take us, we pounded through the clinging water, straight out in the Pacific deeps.

We slid through the water, deeper and deeper, for long minutes, while we watched the trace of the pursuers in the plates. They were not gaining on us perceptibly, but I knew that the time would come when luck would run out for us. Our little sea-car had been through a punishing ordeal; primitive and crudely wrought, it had been at the very limit of its endurance when we rescued my uncle; underpowered and never broken in, it had been pushed too far too long. If only we could stay ahead of them long enough to reach Thetis, or one of the other underwater cities! At least there we could hope to evade Sperry’s thugs long enough to reach some high official, too high to have been bought by the power of Sperry’s millions…

But it was out of the question. It was a trip of many hours to the nearest of the cities. And we had, at the brutally high speeds we were using, no hope of averting a breakdown for that length of time.

“Go deep,” said my uncle. “Perhaps we can bluff them.”

I advanced the diving planes and blinked at him with the beginnings of hope. “Bluff?” I asked. “But that’s no bluff, Uncle Stewart! You’re right! We can avoid them forever that way! This ship will go clear to the bottom of Eden Deep—they’ll never be able to touch us. We can—”

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!