Undersea Quest

20 Duel in the Deeps

In the center of the microsonar screen was the hovering pip that was our own sea-car; the pursuer was so close that the two pips were actually touching in the screen.

Deep-sea subs are armed, but at the speeds we were using the arms were useless. There are torpedoes and submarine rockets and mines; but none of them can travel any faster than a full-speed seacar, and at our depths, as close as we were to each other, any explosion that harmed us would destroy Hallam Sperry as well. The pure concussion would stove in the hulls of both vessels.

It was a matter of ramming that we had to fear, and it could be only seconds off.

My uncle Stewart, by now as fully recovered as though he had spent a month sunning himself under the Troyon lamps at Thetis, was handling the controls himself. He had built the sea-car; he could get every last knot out of the straining engines. But, drive them to their limit as he might, we couldn’t gain a fathom on Sperry, hovering close behind. Each moment Sperry drew infinitesimally nearer; each second brought us that much closer to the gentle nudging jolt that would start our plates and send us spinning toward the ooze below.

We were too deep for safety already; Gideon and Bob Eskow were pounding caulking into the dozen splitting leaks at the joints of the hull—but under the pressures that were forcing their way through, the caulking came arrowing out as quickly as they could drive it in. We were fifteen hundred fathoms down—deeper than the safe range of a normal sea-car, at least twice as deep as we should have dared to take the limping, rickety hulk we were piloting.

There was no escape. There was nothing we could do. We couldn’t even turn and fight. We could only keep running—hopelessly.

“Blast it all!” roared my uncle Stewart. “Gideon, Bob—I apologize to you for getting you into this. I don’t have to apologize to you, Jim—we’re the same blood; but it’s not your fight, Bob. Or yours, Gideon.”

Gideon grinned, die white teeth friendly. “It is now, captain,” he said. “And Bob Eskow’s too, I’d guess; I doubt that Hallam Sperry would let us surrender even if we wanted to.”

Stewart Eden pounded the depth compass and sent its needle spinning crazily. “That’s what I wanted to know!” he cried. “All right, boys; we’ll call it one for all and all for one, eh? It’s no hope I’m giving you—there isn’t any hope. But if we’re going to drown, I’m going to drown a couple of Sperrys along with us! Stations for action!”

At the command we leaped to our posts—a futile gesture, considering what we had to fight with; but the training at the Academy made it instinctive for Bob and me, and old Gideon had spent too many years under the sea to fail to act without thinking at the word of command.

The little sea-car lurched and groaned as my uncle gave hard emergency right rudder and at the same time backed the inboard screws. We were turning to fight! If it was ramming they wanted, we could give it to them—not the gentle nudge from behind that would collapse our tired plates and let them go free, but a jolting, grinding head-on collision that would stove both our sea-cars in like eggshells and let the Deeps take us all at once!

The pursuer veered off like a skittish trout when the dry-fly takes an unexpected jump. They swung away, outside our curve of turn, and matched our emergency rudder in the other direction. On a battle chart the courses of the two sea-cars would have looked like two lobes of a fleur-de-lis, each of us swinging away and completely around, two hundred and seventy degrees; and at the end of the turn, we were headed directly for each other, scant scores of yards apart, arrowing in to certain destruction for us both.

They gave way. Stewart had known it would happen; he had been alert for the faint twitch in the microsonar trace that would indicate the split second when Hallam Sperry’s hand faltered on the controls and tried to avert the crash that would destroy both craft. He saw it, and he spun the wheel to match it, desperately determined to meet them bow-to-bow. But our engines were weary, and theirs were powered for endless leagues of submarine cruising. Strain as we might, we couldn’t quite catch them before they made their turn.

And then we were streaming straight-line through the vast deeps again, pursuer and pursued. But the tables were turned, for we were pursuing and they were running with all the force of their engines!

Stewart Eden grinned his fighting grin. In his hoarse, chuckling whisper he said, “It’s worth it, boy, it’s worth ending this way, just to see Hallam Sperry turn tail and run. Ah, bless the man, I could almost forgive him for the sake of this moment!”

“But we can’t ram him this way!” I objected. “The speed differential isn’t enough—we’d start our own plates, and hardly touch him!”

“As to that,” chuckled Stewart Eden, “I have a trick or two. Watch his trace, boy! He’s running crazy—not straight and true, but veering a little. If he loses two knots on us, if he just makes one run a fraction too far off course—trust me! I’ll nail him!”

It was true. The course of the Sperrys’ ship was nothing like arrow-true. There were hesitant dartings to one side and the other, up and down—not evasive tactics, not as we learned them in the Academy, but what seemed to be plain indecision, as though whoever was at the controls was faltering under the strain, unable to make the right move, afraid to make the wrong.

It was hard to understand…

And the moment came. The fleeing sea-car swerved two points to starboard, hesitated, came back, swerved again. Not much loss in speed, but enough! For my uncle had designed enough sea-cars to know tricks that were not in the manuals; he brought one hand crashing down on the emergency-disconnect panel, and instantly we were plunged in darkness. Every light in the sea-car went dead, every inboard engine stopped. The ballast pumps halted; the air circulator fans rolled still, the heating coils faded, even the instrument lights went out. There wasn’t a light or a sound inside our little car.

And every watt of power that was saved went direct into the throbbing engines.

It gave us barely two more knots of speed; and Stewart, without the microsonar greenish glow, was navigating blind. But we lunged ahead.

And we connected.

There was a horrible rattling screech from ahead—our bow planes tangling with the screws of the enemy. Our sea-car shuddered and bucked, and then plunged free.

As soon as we had disengaged, Stewart slapped the inboard circuits back into life again and peered anxiously into the microsonar.

“Stirred them up that time!” he gloated. “Look at them roll!”

Roll they did. The fading green trace showed the Sperrys’ craft spiralling crazily through the sea. We had shattered one of their screws, perhaps fouled their stern diving planes. The damage could not have been fatal; but it had them temporarily out of control.

But our own ship—the returning light showed trouble! Where before there had been tiny fountains, feathering into mist, now there was a roaring, pounding stream at the edge of one of the forward bulkheads. Gideon leaped to scan the damage.

“It’s bad,” he reported, his face grave. “If we could surface right now, we might limp home—”

Stewart Eden shook his head. “Sorry, Gideon,” he whispered.

“Look at the microsonar.”

We all looked, and we all knew that this was the end. The crazy spiral of the Sperry sea-car had straightened out; they were on our course, a quarter of a mile below us and far to the west, but they were coming up and back at nearly full speed. Whatever damage we had done had hardly cut their maximum speed by a quarter.

And we—were filling. At surface, we could pump and float; but at any depth at all we were doomed, even if they didn’t reach us to ram us again—and ram us they easily could. For with the added weight of water our craft was loggy and slow.

Ram us they easily could. But they didn’t.

While we watched, the trace of the other sea-car came driving up to our level; it came up, rounding out and over like an ancient aircraft doing a loop-the-loop. And, like that same aircraft, it barreled up and over and down again. It streaked down the long watery inclines, driving full-speed for the Deeps. Down and down and down, until the microsonar lost it.

“What in the world—” gasped Bob Eskow. None of us had an answer.

“Maybe—maybe we damaged them more than we thought,” I guessed. My uncle shook his head.

“No,” he said, “but—”

But there was no way of accounting for what they were doing.

We stared, and we didn’t believe what we saw…

I think that, perhaps, I know what happened inside that sea-car.

I remember Brand Sperry, on that first day at the Academy. He was strict and severe, a cadet-martinet. But he was not a thief, not a criminal. And when he found out that his father was all of the things the Academy had taught him to hate, when he learned that his family’s rule of Marinia depended on blood and terror and underhanded dealings, I think that perhaps something inside him finally said sternly: “No! No farther than this!” And I think that when the sea-car wavered as it fled us, it was not a struggle of the helmsman to make up his mind, but perhaps a struggle between father and son, silent and deadly there under the deep Pacific waters, for command. And when the sea-car regained control and came up and over and down…there, I think, is the moment when the son won—

And lost.

A flickering spot came weaving up into the microsonar screen.

“It’s them!” cried Bob Eskow. “They’re coming back!”

But my uncle Stewart was wiser than he. He stared deep into the pale glowing screen and shook his head.

Unhurriedly he set the sea-car on a gentle upward course, easy and slow, saving driving power to give extra energy to the hard-fighting pumps.

“The sea-car?” he asked. “No. Not exactly, Bob. Take a good look at the screen.”

We looked, all of us.

It was no sea-car, that wavering, shapeless mass. It looked like—it was—a bubble of air, shuddering and wobbling, driving mindlessly to the surface.

A bubble of air. Stove plates, and a wrecked ship, and nothing to come to the surface to mark the death of a father and son but a bubble of air…

We surfaced and set course for Fisherman’s Island, where we could be picked up for the return trip to Thetis.