There was a moment’s pause. Then a new, crisp voice spoke.
“This is Coast Guard Rescue Nine. Repeat, Coast Guard Rescue Nine. We are fourteen miles north of you and will continue to approach transmission point at speed of one hundred and forty knots until occupants of flyer are reported rescued. Keep your radio open on this channel until then, and acknowledge this transmission.”
“Acknowledged,” came the voice of Bob Clanson. “I ought to have them picked up in five minutes. I’ll keep you informed, Rescue Nine.”
“Better go check on Mac,” Dr. Hoenig turned to Robby.
Robby could not remember a sound from the sea lion since the fan had first jammed. He got up and hurried back into the cargo compartment. But Mac was sitting up with excitement making him quiver all over. He was evidently picking up Robby’s excitement through his rapport cap, again. He barked happily when he saw Robby. Clearly he was unharmed and still feeling like Sir Bleoberis ("I fear no wreck at sea!”). Robby went back to his father.
As he sat down again, he looked out through the windshield. The skimmer from Alligator Reef was already insight. Robby could see it as a black dot with two wide wings of water spray thrown up on either side. It was rushing toward them, borne not upon water, but on air—riding, as Robby knew, on thousands of tiny jets of compressed air. It was a descendant of the Hydroskimmer skmr-1, built by Bell Aerosystems in the early 1960’s for the U.S. Navy BuShips.The compressed air jets held the ship a foot or two above the wave crests. And the jets propelling it could send the ship over the ocean surface at hissing speeds of more than one hundred knots, which was more than a hundred and fifteen miles per hour.
Coast Guard Rescue Nine would be similar but larger and much faster, and would also have special hydrofoil vanes for especially rough water. Robby had ridden the Mexican Patrol Boat in waters near his home, the Point Loma Experimental Station. He knew how swift such powerful craft could be.
Five minutes later, Robby and his father were with Bob Clanson aboard the small, saucer-shaped skimmer, headed back to the archeological site. The flyer was in tow behind them and Mac was still in the flyer. Robby’s father had decided that a thoroughly excited, totally fearless, three-hundred-pound sea lion was much better in a cargo compartment than galumphing around the cockpit of a small skimmer, where he might quite possibly take it into his head to defy and attack the skimmer’s controls, to the regret of one and all.
“I want to take a look at him, though,” Bob Clanson said, after phoning Coast Guard Rescue Nine that the castaways were safe, “after we get back to the site. Steller’s sea lion, is he? I thought they were too big and rough to handle safely.
”Bob Clanson was a broad-shouldered, athletic-looking man with a sun-tanned round face under blond, crewcut hair. He was shorter than Robby’s father, but was more muscular. There was a kind of twinkling humor about his dark blue eyes as he grinned at Robby now, as if he were just about to play some friendly but harmless joke on him or Dr. Hoenig. He looked more like a high-school football coach than the head of a scientific expedition. Robby had thought well of him at first sight.
“A full grown bull Steller’s would be,” answered Robby’s father. “But Mac’s still a youngster. And Robby seems to have a knack for handling sea animals like him. Mac would follow Robby anywhere. In fact, he does—that’s the trouble.”
“Oh?” Bob grinned at Robby and turned to his father. “By the way, do you know a man from the International Bureau of Police named Lillibulero?”
“Lillibulero?” asked Robby’s father. “I know him well.”
“He was out at the site last Sunday, when everyone except me had gone ashore,” said Bob. “He came to warn me about an art-treasure thief called Red Carswell who may try to steal the ship we’ve excavated. For years now Lillibulero’s been after this Carswell, but he’s never been able to convict him.
Lately Carswell’s been mixed up with an old and rich collector of art treasures who’d be able to pay Carswell’s price for the robbery.”
“I’d watch out,” said Dr. Hoenig. “Lillibulero’s a good man. When he gives a warning, he’s worth listening to.”
“I intend to listen,” said Bob. “Well, here we are.”
And there they were, indeed. Bob had just swung the skimmer, with its flyer in tow, across jagged reefs that lay less than a yard below the water’s surface. They came to a halt alongside a flat metal barge some eighty by forty feet in area. It was anchored inside and parallel with the reef, and its gun-metal gray sides lifted some three feet above the small waves of the sheltered waters inside the reef. Metal ladder sled up from the sea on each side of the barge. At one end was a sort of pocket leading underwater to a glass bubble from which the excavation on the sea bottom could be filmed as it proceeded. Almost beside the pocket was a curved pipe, like the handle of a cane, with a screen on its open end, projecting out of the water. Below it was a device called an airlift, a canvas tube going down through the water to the sea bottom.Robby recognized its straight vacuum-cleaner-like end from his reading on sunken treasure. Not far from this end, looking down through thirty feet of the clear water, Robby saw the shadowy shape of the craft that had been excavated, resting on an underwater metal framework.
Half the barge was covered by buildings with white-painted sides and roofs; the other half was taken up with compressors, donkey engines, machine tools, and so forth, including a large crane sticking up in the air between the skimmer and a squat-bodied power boat on the opposite side of the barge. A little man with mousy hair was busy using the crane to lift heavy pieces of equipment onto the deck of the power boat.
“This way,” said Bob, leading them up on the deck of the barge. He called to the little man at the crane, “Cal! Will you lift the flyer onto the power boat, so we can take her into Miami with the rest?”
The man named Cal waved and began to drive the motor that would swing the twenty-foot-high tip of the crane, with its dangling wire cable and magnet, over the flyer.
“Now, wait a minute, Bob,” said Dr. Hoenig, who had gained the deck of the barge just behind Bob, with Robby right behind him. “We’re not going to let you make a special trip in to Miami to take our flyer in—”
“We’re not making a special trip,” said Bob, turning around. “We’re going in anyway. You hit us at just the right time. Cal, there, is our power engineer, and he had a bit of bad luck earlier today. We’ve got one of the new MHD generators aboard the power ship to run all our equipment—you know what the MHD generators are?”
“Yes,” Dr. Hoenig replied.
“I don’t,” said Robby, quickly, at the same moment.
“Well,” said Bob. MHD stands for magnetohydrodynamic. They’re generators that make use of extremely high temperatures. Gas at those temperatures, seeded with a potassium salt, is moved through a magnetic field. The flow across the field creates electric power to run our machines here. Does that explain it?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Hoenig.
“No,” said Robby.
They looked at each other again.
“I guess Robby’s just going to have to take your word for it for the present,” said Dr. Hoenig. He looked back at Bob. “And?”
“Cal heated the generator up too fast this morning and developed some microscopic cracks in the main chamber. We daren’t run the generator for fear of gas leakage. I don’t blame Cal. It’s just that these things happen. But it’s stopped work here until we can get the chamber repaired in Miami. So, I gave everyone on the team a couple of days off. Cal and I and the three men crewing aboard the power ship are the only ones left here. So, you see, you had your accident at the right time and place. You and your flyer can ride in with us.”
“You’re leaving right away?” asked Dr. Hoenig.
“In about twenty minutes,” answered Bob. Robby gave a cry of dismay.
“Something wrong?” asked Bob, looking at him. Robby turned and looked desperately at his father, who frowned reprovingly at him.
/> “Robby,” said Dr. Hoenig, “was looking forward to seeing the ship and the site. It’s the main reason we were coming by to see you on our way back from the Whale Hospital in Nassau.” He looked sternly at Robby. “However, when equipment breaks down, plans have to be changed. That’s something we all have to learn to adjust to.”
Why? thought Robby, bitterly, his hopes of treasure tumbling.
“Oh, now,” said Bob, grinning cheerfully at Robby. “I guess I can manage a few minutes to take him down and show him around the ship and the site. You’ll find a spare water lung in the communications shack down at the end of the barge, there, Robby. Get it and I’ll get mine from my office shack, and we’ll go down to have a look.” Robby’s hopes soared again.
He raced off. Shortly he was back, stripped down to the swimming trunks he usually wore under his shorts and tee shirt, and the converter collar of a water lung buckled around his neck, with the face plate hanging from it.
This water lung was a clever little device which had replaced the somewhat clumsy mask and tanks of compressed air originally used by the scuba divers. The converter collar of the water lung recycled the atmosphere in a person’s own lungs, getting rid of moisture and waste products, but otherwise using the same atmosphere over and over again. It also added oxygen extracted from surrounding water, which, fortunately, is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. A tiny atomic battery powered the collar.
When Robby got back to where he had left Bob and his father, however, the two men were not in sight. He looked around and saw only Cal, the power engineer, who had just finished loading the flyer onto the deck of the power boat. Robby went over to him.
“Excuse me,” said Robby. “Do you know where my father and Bob are?”
Cal turned slowly and looked at him. Under the mousy hair the little man’s gray eyes were as hard and as unfriendly as stone.
“Bunkhouse. They’ll be here in a minute.” Cal looked at Robby in a chilly way that made him feel uncomfortable.
“Going down to the ship, are you?” said Cal, after a second.“Look out for the ghost.” He spoke between tight lips that made his words sound like a threat.
Robby stared. He searched the engineer’s face for some sign that this was a joke. But there was no gleam of humor to be seen, either in the face or in the flat gray eyes hooded under reddish eyelashes. Cal turned and walked away. Robby stared after him until, a few seconds later, his father and Bob came out of the bunkhouse and joined him. Bob was wearing swimming trunks with a weighted belt to help him stay underwater, and had a water lung around his neck. He handed Robby a weighted belt.
“Cal said to look out for the ghost,” said Robby resentfully, as he put on the belt. “What ghost? What did he mean?”
Bob stared, then laughed.
“It’s a joke around here,” he answered. “Ever since 1923,when Carter and Breasted opened the tomb of old Egyptian King Tutankhamen, some joker is always ready to invent a superstition around the site of an archeological excavation. The legend on this site of ours is that the ghost of the captain of La Floridana still haunts his sunken ship. But it’s just a joke, Robby, even if some of our gang do like to tell each other they’ve actually seen the old captain.”
“I wasn’t worried!” said Robby, indignantly. “I don’t believe in ghosts.” He didn’t either. It was three years since he, with the help of his father, had rigged a ghost trap. They had caught nothing. Which, thought Robby, proved that was what ghosts were—nothing.
“Come on, then,” said Bob, pulling his transparent face plate up over his eyes, nose, and mouth. His voice changed then, sounding oddly hollow as he began to speak through the diaphragm designed for talking underwater, in the bottom of the face plate. “I’ll explain things as we go down.”
Robby pulled up his own face plate and followed Bob across the deck of the barge. Cal, Robby saw, had disappeared. Undoubtedly he had actually been trying to frighten Robby, and, thought Robby, now that he had failed, was keeping out of sight. He did not, Robby decided sourly, like the hooded-eyed little man. A moment later Bob walked off the side of the barge into the blue water between the observation bubble and the power boat, and Robby followed.
They sank slowly down through the magnificently clear water toward the white sand bottom where the ship lay. Bob’s voice, distorted by coming from the water lung diaphragm and through the water, sounded abruptly in Robby’s ears. It echoed like someone speaking with his head in a box.
“This ship of ours, La Floridana,” said Bob, as he and Robby drifted downward together, “was thought to have sunk outside the reef in deep water. But when we located her with modern metal-detecting tools, we found her inside the reef, buried under a lot of mud and sand. That’s one of the reasons she’s so uniquely valuable. Do you have any idea why?”
“Yes,” said Robby. “Because maybe there was treasure she’d been carrying spilled out in the mud and sand?”
“Not exactly,” said Bob’s funny-sounding voice. "La Floridana was among the smallest of the silver fleet vessels that left Havana, Cuba, on July 13, 1733. The four large galleons, and the seventeen noas, or merchant ships, carried most of the silver and the treasure. Of those, four grounded,but all the rest were sunk by the hurricane of July 15th, that sunk La Floridana. So we didn’t expect to, and we didn’t, find any real treasure aboard her.”
“Then why is she so valuable?” asked Robby unbelievingly, as they both landed, lightly as two feathers, on the white sand thirty feet down.
“Because she was covered up by the mud and sand,” said Bob. “Because of that, instead of being broken up by wave action and riddled by the teredo worm—and all the other destruction that would have put a quick end to her in open underseas water—she was preserved. If you look at her now,you’ll see how little she’s been damaged.”
Robby looked. He saw a shallow-sided ship about forty feet long with a square stem, a kind of low cabin toward the bow, and a mast just behind this, broken off short.
“Her mast is broken,” Robby pointed out quickly.
“That probably happened before she was sunk,” Bob replied. “Outside of that and except for being waterlogged,she’s almost ready to sail the seas once more. No eighteenth-century Spanish ship has ever been recovered in such good condition. She’s in better shape than the Swedish warship, Wasa, that was raised in I960 from the bottom of Copenhagen Bay, after seven hundred years. And the Baltic Seawaters of Copenhagen Bay have so little salt that they’re especially kind to sunken ships.”
They bounded gracefully from the sandy bottom the way skin divers do underwater and swam up toward the bow of the ship. As they went, Robby looked around at the underwater area where La Floridana had been excavated. It had a floor of white sand, for the most part. This was fairly clear where the ship had been excavated, but farther off it was covered by the dark shapes of rocks broken by storms off the reef beyond. And in among the rocks were sea fans, coral heads, and other marine growths, both plant and animal—for many of the seeming plants on the sea bottom are merely animals fastened in one spot.
Beyond, the reef rose like a miniature mountain range some twenty feet in height, with a gap in it, looking like a mountain pass on a small scale, particularly full of broken-off rock and coral heads and sea fans. Robby, having seen most of what there was to see around the ship, looked back at the ship itself.
They were right up by the bow now, and Robby noticed that there was no name to be seen written there. A flash of imagination suddenly lit up his thoughts. What if, he wondered, this ship was not La Floridana at all? What if it were some other ship known to have carried treasure, and the archeologists, not knowing this, had not bothered to look too hard for gold, silver, and other items . . . ?
“There’s no name,” said Robby slyly to Bob. “How do you know it’s La Floridana?"
Bob laughed, and the laugh sounded high and tinny in the water, because of its sound traveling at triple the speed it would have made in air.
“
That’s part of the detective work that goes into archeology,” he answered. “First, we found this ship here about where La Floridana is known to have gone down. Second, this ship is a sloop”—he pointed to the stump of the single mast broken off about four feet above the deck planking—“and we only know of one ship like it in the flota of 1733.”
“But maybe,” said Robby, “this was a ship sunk some other time?”
“No,” came back Bob’s water-changed voice. “For this ship is built of both cedar and oak. Those woods indicate she’s of Spanish construction. We found her ballast was of smooth stones about the size of my fist, which indicates her nationality and period. And the lead sheathing on her hull as protection against the teredo worms indicates the same thing.”
“But if it just indicates,” said Robby triumphantly, feeling like some clever lawyer pinning down a reluctant witness,“you’re not sure."
Bob laughed again.
“We are, though,” he said. “You see, we did find a few coins, such as pieces of eight, aboard this ship. None of them were dated after 1733, and several of them were the first coins made in Mexico with a screw press, in 1732. These 1732 coins were called Pillar or Dos Mundos (meaning ‘two worlds’) coins. So, this is La Floridana, all right—”
The ringing of a bell from the barge above them, just under the surface of the water, interrupted him.
“That’s funny,” said Bob. “We can’t be out of time already? Well, I guess we’d better head up.”
He started toward the surface. Robby lagged behind. With the water lungs, where the same gases were used over and over with oxygen added, there was not the danger of dissolved nitrogen in the blood that had bothered divers breathing compressed air under pressure. It was still just as well, of course, not to rush to the surface from more than thirty feet down, where the pressure is double that of the air above the waves. But this was not the reason Robby hung back. It was because he wanted to take a look around the site for possible treasure, on his own.
Secrets of the Deep Page 19