03 Underwater Adventure

by Willard Price

  Or had it already broken? The bell might now be falling softly, silently, towards the ocean floor. That was believed to be three miles down at this point.

  But no, when he looked out of the window he could tell by the lanterns of the fish that the bell was not falling. But it was not rising either. Why not? Had the engine failed again? Had Skink replaced Captain Ike at the winch?

  Without the electric heater, the chamber was growing icy cold. It was plain that he would freeze to death before he would suffocate.

  He called again, seized the telephone, shook it, tried to curb the panic that was rising in him. If he became excited he would only exhaust his air supply sooner. He must keep his nerve.

  Suddenly there was a terrifying crash and he was thrown hard against the steel wall. There was a crunching, grinding sound as the bell scraped over the rocks of an underwater mountain peak. A current was swirling the bell about. Hal steadied himself and ran his fingers over the windows. They were made not of window glass but of the finest quartz and could withstand great pressure but were not meant to take hard blows.

  The bell was floating free again but the incident might be repeated at any moment. The ship above could not anchor in such deep water and had merely hove to. That meant it was slowly drifting with the wind, which Hal remembered was from the west. It was bringing the ship and the bell beneath it closer to the precipices that rose steeply from great depths to form the reef of Truk.

  There were hatches that closed against the windows on the inside so that if they broke the sea could not enter. Hal tried to force them into position. They had not been greased and would not go far enough in to lock. They kept bobbing out.

  He struggled with them for what seemed a long time but had to give it up. The effort had made him warmer but as soon as he ‘stopped to rest he began to freeze. It seemed to him that hours had passed since the wire broke.

  Then he noticed that the windows glowed slightly like dim eyes. Perhaps it was just the phosphorescence of the fish outside. But no, it was different. It was daylight!

  He looked out. The sea was changing from black to purple, from purple to blue, from blue to orange. The Iron Man broke the surface, rose into the air, and came down with a thump on the deck. A bolt screeched, the steel trapdoor opened.

  ‘Are you all right?’ It was Blake’s anxious voice.

  ‘Sure.’

  Hands reached in to him. ‘You’re as cold as ice!’ Roger and Blake hauled him out into the warm sunshine.

  He saw the electric wire twisted tightly around the cable and broken just above the bell.

  ‘Did anything happen to the winch?’

  Things got rather balled up after the wire broke,’ Blake said. ‘Then we started hauling and you’ve been coming up at the rate of two hundred feet a minute. But you had a long way to come.’

  He saw that Hal was shaking with the cold and the nervous strain of the terrible ordeal he had gone through.

  ‘You must have had a rough time,’ he said sympathetically, ‘a quarter mile down, blacked out, no telling whether you’d ever come up.’

  Hal tried to shrug it off - but his shoulders shivered rather than shrugged. ‘I think I got some good pictures.’ He lay down on the warm deck and went sound asleep.

  Chapter 9

  Treasure hunt

  It would be six days yet before Skink’s plane would leave. During lunch Dr Blake announced his intention of sailing the ship to the island of Para for a few days, returning just in time to put Skink on the plane.

  ‘Why are we going to Para?’ Hal inquired.

  ‘To search for treasure!’

  Roger pricked up his ears. This was exciting news. He noticed that Skink was also interested, showing it not as the others did with delighted remarks, but with a dark scowl that made devilish lights flash in his cruel eyes.

  Blake was not facing Skink and did not observe how he had taken the news. ‘According to an old Spanish volume of travels,’ he said, ‘a galleon from the Philippines bound for Mexico and Spain foundered near the island of Para in the great storm of 1663. On board was the Spanish governor of the Philippines returning to Spain with all his household goods, gold and silver ornaments, tables, chests, statues, chandeliers, candlesticks, vases, bowls, cutlery - all the furnishings of a great mansion - cargo worth perhaps half a million dollars.’

  Roger whistled. Skink’s eyes glinted with greed.

  The Metropolitan Museum would like to obtain such articles to show how Spanish grandees lived three hundred years ago, and they have asked the Oceanographic Institute to be on the lookout for this wreck.’

  ‘When would we leave?’ Skink inquired.

  ‘The island lies about a hundred and fifty miles south of Truk. We have a good west wind. The captain estimates that if we sail at sunset we should be there early tomorrow morning.’

  ‘You still expect me to leave on the next plane?’ Skink inquired blandly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you won’t get back here until six days from now - just before the plane leaves?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Then I think I should go to the base this afternoon to book passage and make arrangements for my baggage.’

  That seemed reasonable enough and Blake agreed. A look of sly satisfaction came over Skink’s face and a sneer curled the corners of his mouth. Only Roger saw it and it made him uncomfortable. ‘What is the fox up to now?’ he wondered.

  The Lively Lady returned through the pass and crossed the lagoon to the eastern side of Moen. There she dropped anchor and Skink went ashore in the dinghy.

  He was gone nearly two hours. The others put in their time watching the manoeuvres of half a dozen tiny submarines of the same type as those which invaded Pearl Harbour on 7th December 1941. Known as one-man subs, but actually accommodating three, they had been built by the Japanese and left behind in Truk lagoon at the close of the war. Most of them had rusted away, but some had been refitted and improved by navy mechanics. One of the improvements was the addition of an escape chamber by which it was possible for a man to leave the submarine or return to it under the surface.

  It was odd to see through the clear water a man emerge from a submarine, rise to the surface, go down

  again and re-enter, closing the trapdoor behind him.

  ‘The escape chamber,’ Hal explained to Roger, ‘has two trapdoors, one opening into the submarine and one opening to the outside. If a man wishes to leave the sub, the chamber is filled with air from the sub’s air supply. He enters the chamber and closes the door. Then the air is replaced by water to the same pressure as the sea outside. The man opens the sea door and comes out. He wears an aqualung, so he has no trouble breathing until he can get to the surface. Going back in, the process is reversed.’

  ‘Wonder what’s keeping Inkham?’ Blake fretted. ‘Booking shouldn’t have taken him more than fifteen minutes.’

  When Skink returned he seemed in high spirits. He did not apologize for keeping the ship waiting two hours, but stood by the rail enjoying the cavorting of the submarines while Captain Ike got the ship under way.

  ‘I hate those things,’ the captain growled. ‘I can’t forget what they did to us at Pearl Harbour.’

  ‘I don’t hate ‘em,’ Skink said happily. ‘I love ‘em.’

  ‘They’re no good for anything except mischief,’ insisted the captain.

  ‘That makes them very good indeed,’ laughed Skink, and strolled off down the deck, leaving the old captain to bite the stem of his pipe and wonder what the devil the fellow had meant.

  The Lively Lady flew like a bird all night and before sunrise dropped anchor in nine fathoms off the shore of the lovely atoll of Para.

  It was a loop of land encircling a green lagoon only a half-mile long. The people of the island had fled during the war and it was now uninhabited. Its soil was volcanic rather than coralline and so rich that every sort of tropical tree and plant flourished magnificently - great coconut palms and sago pal
ms, fantastic pandanus, stately bamboos, spreading mango and breadfruit trees, fruits and flowers of every description.

  Somewhere in the waters round about this atoll lay the wreck of the Spanish galleon, Santa Cruz. Dr Blake and his companions stood at the rail, looking down into the lovely blue-green depths.

  ‘Are we the first to search for the galleon?’ Roger asked.

  ‘No. Many divers have tried to locate the wreck. Some of them died trying. Top bad they had to lose their lives - but every man has to check out some time and I can’t imagine a more pleasant cemetery.’

  Hal glanced up at the doctor’s grave face. He remembered that the scientist had said something like this before. Evidently he was serious about it. His love of his mistress, the sea, to which he had devoted his life, must be very deep and profound.

  ‘The reason that previous attempts have failed,’ Blake went on, ‘is that the divers could only go down and come up again. They could not stay down, move along the ocean floor, and inspect every inch of it. Now, with the aqualung, that can be done. But walking on the floor would be too slow. We must have a way to ride over it -and that’s where the undersea sled comes in. Roger, do you and Omo want to bring it up?’

  A strange contraption was hoisted out of the hold and laid on deck.

  It was more like a surfboard than anything else, but it was narrow at the front end and spread out widely behind. Beneath it were two runners exactly like those on a sled. Roger found himself humming:

  Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way,

  Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh.

  But whoever wrote that song had never dreamed of going sleighing under the sea!

  Dr Blake was explaining the mechanism. ‘It’s like a glider, except that it’s built to fly under water instead of in the air. It was designed by an airman, Captain Van-laer, an ace pilot in the French army during the last war. It’s made of pressed wood and cork covered with a synthetic tissue. You notice it has twin rudders at the back, and also two ailerons like those of an aeroplane. With these controls the diver can regulate the depth of his glide. He can skim along the surface if he wishes, or descend to various levels, or slide along the ocean floor.

  ‘The sled is towed by a motorboat. Our dinghy with the outboard motor will do nicely. Even if we go along at a speed of only six knots we can complete the search of one square mile in half an hour. The same job done in the old way with divers going up and down would take the best part of a year. So you see this means a real revolution in sea-bed prospecting and the search for sunken wrecks.’

  ‘Has it been used for that purpose?’ Hal inquired.

  ‘Not in the Pacific. In fact I think we will be the first to use it in this ocean. But it has been used for the past two years in the Mediterranean. First it was just thought of as a novelty, a toy for the playboys along the Riviera. Then its scientific value was realized and it has been the means of discovering eighteen sunken ships, some of them with valuable cargoes. They have found many aeroplanes shot down in the war. One of the men who tested it was Lord Louis Mountbatten - and the sled is now being studied by the British Admiralty with a view to using it in salvage operations.’

  ‘I’m crazy to try it!’ Roger burst forth.

  ‘You’d be crazy if you did,’ snarled Skink. ‘It would be a good way to get yourself drowned. This is no job for amateurs.’

  The remark irritated not only Roger but Dr Blake as well. ‘I don’t consider Roger an amateur. In fact, since he’s the first to volunteer, I think we’ll let him initiate the undersea sled.’

  ‘Whoopee!’ cried Roger, and leaped up to make preparations for the dive. Everyone helped to lower the submarine glider to the softly heaving surface of the sea. The dinghy was launched, a four-hundred-foot cable connecting it with the glider.

  ‘It has to be long,’ Dr Blake explained. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to,go down far.’

  Roger put on his mask and aqualung. He went down the ladder and, instructed by Blake, extended himself on his stomach along the glider. His feet slipped into the rudder controls and his hands lay on the levers that adjusted the ailerons.

  ‘You’ll find two straps fastened to the deck, one on each side of you. Put them around you and buckle yourself down.’ Roger did so. Now he and the glider were one. A button protruded from the sled’s deck just in front of his face. ‘What’s the button for?’

  That’s your signal. Press it.’

  Roger pressed the button and a buzz sounded in the dinghy.

  ‘If you want to stop, give me a buzz,’ Blake directed, and climbed into the dinghy. Hal, a little anxious for his brother, stepped into the dinghy with Blake. The latter started the motor and idled the boat out four hundred feet until the slack in the cable was taken up.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he called back.

  Roger took off his mask, spat into it, and rinsed it out. That would prevent fogging. He put the mask on again, testing it to make sure it was tight. He could guess that the rush of the water would do its best to tear the mask from his head. He adjusted the flanges of the aqualung mouthpiece behind his lips and closed his teeth on the rubber tabs.

  He waved to Blake. The motor whined, the boat slid forward until the cable was taut, the sled began to move.

  At first Roger was content to glide along the surface. Then he dipped the sled until the deck was awash and his arms and legs submerged, but his head was still above. He dipped farther and the water tore into his face. Involuntarily he blinked and held his breath - then realized it was not necessary to do either. The mask protected his eyes and although he was now completely under water he breathed comfortably from the tank on his back.

  He steered down to a depth of about twenty feet. To stay down, he had to keep constant pressure on the controls. Whenever he let up, the sled immediately began to climb towards the surface. It behaved like the aerial glider, but in reverse. Whereas the aerial glider always tends to drop earthwards, the submarine glider wants to climb. Well, Roger reflected, this would be all to the good in case of accident. If the pilot should pass out, the sled would surface and be seen by the crew in the motorboat. In fact, this was pretty soft compared with sky flying. It was a lot safer to fall up than to fall down.

  He changed his mind a little about the softness of it when he was dragged through a great colony of jellyfish whose stinging tentacles left his skin on fire. But he would not signal to stop - this was too much fun. Besides, he longed to be the one to locate the wreck of the Santa Cruz. In a way it seemed fantastic to expect to find a wreck on his first dive. But why not? If the glider could cover in half an hour as much ground as could be surveyed in a year with old-fashioned diving methods, his chances were good.

  The bottom slid swiftly by beneath him - not too swiftly, for the motor had been throttled down to six knots. He could see every detail of the ocean floor. It was covered by a thousand forms of life in all the colours of the rainbow. There were things like cabbages and roses, cauliflowers and lilies. There were fans and ferns and feathers. There were clouds of angelfish, peacock fish, and Moorish idols. He didn’t like the look of the sea snakes in spite of their gorgeous livery of blue, gold and green on. velvet brown. They glided in and out of holes in the coral or coiled around the branches.

  Then there would suddenly be a stretch of snow-white sand, as bare as the desert. Then would come rock land, a wild tumble of crags and boulders.

  He climbed sloping hills and went deep into the valleys to be sure to miss nothing at the bottom of the ravines.

  He noticed especially the great number of giant clams, monsters four or five feet wide with their shells agape, waiting for food. If anything should come between them the shells would close like a steel trap. Many a diver whose foot had been caught in those merciless jaws had stayed to spend eternity at the bottom of the sea.

  He shivered at the idea - but would have shivered more had he known the fate that one of these giants held in store for a member of the compa
ny of the Lively Lady.

  At the end of about ten minutes Roger felt the sled swing around and then proceed in the opposite direction. Dr Blake had covered a mile and was now doubling back. He would keep doubling until Roger had surveyed a square mile of the sea bottom.

  The floor here was flat and bare and looked like snow. Roger brought the sled down until the runners slid along the ground. Now he was actually sleighing at the bottom of the sea.

  He went up over a slight rise, then tobogganed down a long slope. The slope ended in a precipice that dropped away to great depths.

  Here was where a sleigh ride would end in disaster in the world above. Roger had a moment of panic as he shot out into space above the terrible abyss - but the sled soared like a bird over the yawning gulch ‘and touched ground again on the other side. Roger’s fear turned to exultation and he would have shouted with glee if he could have done so without losing his mouthpiece.

  He was so happy that he failed to notice a hump in the sand until it was too late. The sled ploughed into it and uprooted a large and very much surprised octopus. Having the ability to take on the colour of its surroundings, the beast was nearly as white as the sand. If it had been among brown rocks it would have been brown, or among green plants it would have turned green. But no matter what its surroundings may be an octopus always turns red when it is angry, and this one was a terrible red as it found itself caught on the prow of the glider and carried away at a speed of six knots.

  Some of the tentacles were below the deck and some above, and two of them fastened themselves to Roger’s bare back. The parrot-like beak of the creature was within a few inches of his face and the big, almost human eyes glared hatefully into his.

  His first impulse was to signal for a stop. But if he stopped, the octopus could disentangle itself from the sled and attack. So long as he kept moving it might be too bewildered or terrified to do anything but hang on. The sac-like body of the beast was beneath the edge of the deck and the motion kept it there. Roger decided to keep going.