by Frederik
He slumped back against the bed and grinned at me. “That’s all, Jim. Better sign off now—this call must be costing a fortune! But remember—we owe a lot to Jason Craken, because if it hadn’t been for him neither you nor I would be here now.”
And that was all.
I turned, a little shaken, to where David was waiting outside the booth.
“It’s all right, David,” I told him, glancing around the room. “He’s going to help. We’ll get some money from him—enough, he says. And—”
I broke off. “David!” I cried. “Look—over there, where we were filling out the application forms!”
He whirled. He had left the forms on a little desk to come over while I called my uncle. They weje still there—and over them was bending the figure of a man.
Or was it man? For the figure turned and saw us looking at him—saw us with pearly eyes, that contracted and glared. It was the person from the sea who called himself “Joe Trencher”!
He turned and ran—through the door, out into the crowded passages beyond. “Come on!” cried David. “Let’s catch him—maybe he’s still got the pearls!”
10
Tencha of Tonga Trench
We scoured Sargasso City that day—but we never found Joe Trencher.
At the end, David stopped, panting.
“We’ve lost him,” he said. “Once he got out of sight, he was gone.”
“But he’s got to be in the city somewhere! We can search level by level—”
“No.” David shook his head. “He doesn’t have to be in the city, Jim. He—isn’t like you and me, Jim. He might calmly walk into an escape lock and disappear into the sea, and we’d be spending our next month searching in here while he was a hundred miles away.”
“Into the sea? Nearly three miles down? It isn’t humanly possible!”
David only said: “Sign the bid form, Jim. We have to get it in.”
That was all he would say.
We returned to the lieutenant commander’s office. I signed my name to the application form with hardly a glance at it; we put down the minimum bid—fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand dollars! But of course the ship had cost many times that, new.
We barely made it back to the subsea shuttle for the return trip to Bermuda.
We were both quiet, and I suppose thinking the same thoughts. Curious, that Joe Trencher should have been able to find us in Sargasso Dome! It made it almost certain that the sound of motors we had heard in the boat basin was indeed Trencher, or someone close to him, listening in on our discussion. So they knew everything we had planned…
But there was no help for it; we couldn’t change our plans. There simply was nothing else for us to do.
We sat in silence, in the main passenger lounge, for half an hour or so. We were nearly alone. There was a faint whisper of music from the loud speakers, and a few couples on holiday at the far end of the lounge; and that was all. Business was not brisk between Bermuda and Sargasso City at that particular season.
Finally I could stand it no longer.
I burst out: “David! This has gone far enough. Don’t you see, I have to know what we’re up against! Who is this Joe Trencher? What’s his connection with your father and the Tonga pearls?”
David looked at me with troubled eyes.
Then he glanced around the lounge. No one was near by, no one could hear.
He said at last: “All right, Jim. I suppose it’s the best way. I did promise my father—But he’s a sick man, and a long way off. I think I’U have to use my own judgment now.”
“You’ll tell me about Trencher and—and those sea serpents, or whatever they were?”
He nodded.
“Trencher,” he said. “Joe Trencher. He was once my father’s foreman. His most trusted employee—and now he is leading the mutineers.”
“Mutineers against what, David?” I was more than a little exasperated. So many things I didn’t understand—so much mystery that I could not penetrate!
“Mutineers against my father, of course. I told you about my father’s dome—about the undersea empire he built out of the Tonga pearls. Well, it’s slipping out of his hands now. The helpers he used to trust have turned against him. Trencher is only one.”
I couldn’t help wondering once more about that “empire” beneath the sea. It didn’t seem that David’s father could have built it by strictly legal and honest methods—but that was a long time ago, of course…
“It began with the sea serpents,” David was saying. “They have lived in the Tonga Trench, made their lairs in the very sea mount where my father built his dome, for millions of years, Jim. Maybe hundreds of millions. You see reconstructions of beasts like them in the museums, and they go back to a time long, long before there were any humans on earth. They’re unbelievably ancient, and they haven’t changed a bit in all those hundreds of millions of years. Until my father came along. And he—he is trying to do something with them, Jim. Something that’s hard to believe. He’s trying to train them as horses and dogs are trained—to help him, to work for him. He’s trying to domesticate saurians that date back to the age of dinosaurs!”
I stared at him, hardly believing. I remembered that giant, dimly seen head that loomed over the rail of the gym ship. Domesticate that? It would be as easy to teach a rattlesnake to carry a newspaper!
But he was still talking.
“Naturally, Dad couldn’t do it alone,” he said. “But he had help—a curious kind of help, almost as unbelievable as the sea serpents themselves.
“Joe Trencher. And a few hundred others like him. Not very many—but enough. Without them my father couldn’t have got to first base with the saurians. Trencher’s people were a great help.”
“They’re ugly enough looking, if Trencher is any sample,” I told him. “Those white, pearly eyes—that pale skin. The funny way they breathe. They don’t even seem human!”
David nodded calmly. “They aren’t,” he said. “Not any more, at any rate. They’re descended from humans—Polynesians, somehow trapped in a subsidence of land. You’ve heard of the sea-mounts of the Pacific?”
We nodded, all of us. Those flat-topped submarine mountains, planed level by wave action—yet far below the surface, below any waves.
“Once they were islands,” David went on. “And Trencher’s ancestors lived on one of them. I suppose they were divers—so far back, it is impossible to tell. But they had Polynesian names, so it couldn’t have been too far back. Trencher’s own father’s name was Tencha—and Trencher took the new name on a whim of Dad’s. Trencher. A being from the Tonga Trench.
“And when their island submerged, they somehow managed to live. They reverted to the past, the far-distant past when every living thing lived in the water.”
“You mean—” I hesitated, fumbling for words, hardly able to believe I was hearing right. “You mean Joe Trencher is some sort of—of merman?”
“Dad calls them ‘amphibians.’ They are mutations. Their lungs are changed to work like gills. They’re more at home in the water now, actually, than they are on dry land.”
I nodded, remembered all too clearly the panting, wheezing difficulty Joe Trencher had had with breathing air. I began to understand it now.
Trencher used to be my friend,” said David somberly. When I was at home, I used to put on a lung and dive with him—not down in the Trench, but at a thousand feet or so. I watched him training the—the creatures. He showed me things on the floor of the sea that the Fleet has never seen.
“But then he changed. Dad blames himself. He says the mutation made the amphibians somehow temperamentally unstable, and then, as they learned something about the outside world—they—changed. But whatever it was, now he hates Dad—and all humans. He’s the one who kidnapped me from the gym ship. He’d been waiting for his chance—do you remember how many strange little things had been happening, pieces of equipment mysteriously missing, that sort of thing? That was Joe Trencher.
�
�He turned up, down there at thirteen hundred feet. I—I didn’t suspect anything, Jim. I was glad to see him. But I didn’t know what had been happening back in my father’s dome. I don’t know what Trencher did to me—clubbed me, I suppose. I woke up in his sea car, on the way back to Tonga Trench.
“He threatened to kill me, you see. I was his hostage. He used me to threaten my father. But my father’s a stubborn man. He has ruled his subsea empire a long time, and he didn’t give in.”
“Then how did you get away?”
For the first time, David Craken smiled.
“Maeva,” he said. “Maeva—my friend. She’s just an amphibian girl, but she was loyal. I’d known her since we were both very small. We grew up together. We both watched Joe Trenchor breaking the saurians. Then Maeva and I would go exploring, after—me in my edenite suit, she breathing the water itself. We’d go through the caves in the seamount. I suppose it was dangerous, in a way—those caves belonged to the saurians; they laid their eggs there, and raised their young. We were careful not to go near them in the summer, of course—that’s the breeding season. And there is another mystery—for there are no seasons under the sea. But the saurians remembered…
It was dangerous.
“But not as dangerous as what Maeva did for me two months ago.
“She found me in Joe Trencher’s sea car. She brought the edenite cylinder from my father, along with a message. And she helped me get away in the sea car.
“Trencher followed—naturally. I don’t know if he suspected her or not. I hope not.” David’s face looked pinched and drawn as he said it.
“Anyway,” he went on, “Joe Trencher followed me—not in a sea car, but swimming free, and riding one of the saurians. They can make a fabulous rate of speed in the open sea—they kept right after me. And then they caught me.”
David looked up.
“And the rest you know,” he said. “Now—it’s up to all of us. And we don’t have much time.”
We didn’t have much time.
But time passed.
David went back to the little apartment over the boat shed, to wait. Roger and Bob and I went on with our classes.
The next day there was not much time for thinking. It was only a week until Graduation Week, and there were the last of our examinations to get through. Hard to focus our minds on Mahan’s theories and the physics of liquid masses, with high adventure in the background! But we had to do it.
And after the final day of examinations, no break. For there was close-order drill, parade formation. We struggled into our dress-scarlet uniforms and fell out for unending hours of countermarching and wheeling. It wasn’t our own graduation we would be marching for—but every one of us looked forward to the time when we would be sworn in before the assembled ranks of the Academy, and every one of us clipped off the maneuvers with every ounce of precision we could manage. It was blistering hot in the Bermuda sun as we practiced, hour after hour, for the final review. Then, just before the sunset gun, there came a welcome change. The cumulus masses had been building and towering over the sea; they came lowering in on us, split with lightning flashes. The clouds opened up, and pelting rain drenched us all.
We raced for shelter, any shelter we could find.
I found myself in the lee of an upended whaleboat, and crouched beside me was another cadet, as wet as I. He brushed rivulets of rain from his flat-visored dress-scarlet cap and turned to me, grinning.
It was Eladio Angel.
“Jim!” he cried. “Jim Eden! So long since I have seen you!”
I took his hand as he held it out to shake, and I suppose I must have said something. But I don’t know what.
Eladio Angel—David Craken’s old roommate, his close friend, the only cadet in all the Academy, save Bob Eskow and myself, who thought enough of David to feel the loss when he was gone.
And what could I say to Laddy Angel now?
He was going on and on. “—since you wrote your letter to Jason Craken, the father of David. Ah, David—even now, Jim, I think sometimes of him. So great a loss, so good a friend! I can scarcely believe that he is gone. And truly, Jim, even to this day I cannot believe it. No, in my heart I believe he is alive somewhere—somehow he escaped, somehow he did not drown. But—enough!” He grinned again. “Tell me, Jim, how are you? I have seen you only a time or two, leaving a class or crossing the quadrangle—we have not had time to speak. Convenient, this rain—it causes us to meet again!”
I cleared my throat. “Why—why, yes, Laddy,” I said, uncomfortably. “Yes, it—it certainly is good to see you again. I, uh—” I pretended to look out at the teeming rain and to be surprised. “Why, look, Laddy!” I cried. “I believe it’s letting up! Well, I’ve got to get back to dorm—I’ll be seeing you!”
And I fled, through the unrelenting downpour.
I could feel his eyes on my back as I went—not angry, but hurt. Undoubtedly hurt. I had been rude to him—but what could I do? David had said, over and over, that we must keep this matter secret—and I am no accomplished liar, that I could talk to his close friend and not give away the secret that he was not dead!
But I didn’t have much time to brood about it. As I was racing across the quadrangle, drenched to the skin, someone hailed me. “Eden! Cadet Eden, report!”
I skidded to a halt and saluted.
It was an upperclassman, on temporary duty with the Commandant’s office. He was outfitted in bad-weather oilskins, only his face peeping out into the downpour. He returned my salute uncomfortably, rain pouring into his sleeve as he lifted his arm.
“Cadet Eden,” he rapped, “report to the Commandant’s office immediately! Someone to see you!”
Someone to see me?
The standing orders of the Academy are: Cadets reporting to the Commandant will do so on the double! But I didn’t need the spur of the standing orders to make me move. I could hardly wait to get there—for I could not imagine who might want me. If it was David, or anyone connected with David, it could only mean trouble. Bad trouble, bad enough to make him give up his secrecy…
But it wasn’t trouble at all.
I ran panting into the Commandant’s outer office and braked to stiff attention. Even while I was saluting I gasped: “Cadet Eden, sir, reporting as ordered by—”
I stopped, astonished.
A tall, black figure was getting up out of a chair in the reception room—a figure I knew well, the figure of someone I had thought to be half a world away. Gideon Park!
He grinned at me, his white teeth flashing. “Jim,” he said, in his soft, mild voice. “Your uncle said you needed help. Here I am!”
11
Graduation Week
Gideon Park! Tall, black, loyal—just to see him there waiting for me in the Commandant’s office took an enormous weight off my shoulders. Gideon and I had been in plenty of tight spots together, and I had a lot of respect for the man.
Maybe we had a chance to carry through our plans after all!
Gideon and I had only a moment to talk together, that first afternoon. I whispered to him where he could find David Craken—in the boathouse on the estate of Trident’s Atlantic manager. He nodded and winked and left.
And I went back to dorm to get ready for evening mess, feeling better than I had in days.
I couldn’t get off Academy grounds that evening, but Bob hadn’t used all his passes. Right after evening chow he took off for the boathouse, to talk things over with Gideon and David Craken.
He returned seconds before Lights Out. He had been gone nearly four hours.
“It’s all right,” he whispered to me, hastily getting ready for bed. “Gideon brought the money with him.”
“How much?” I asked, keeping my own voice down—if the duty officer heard us, it was a demerit. And it was too close to the end of the school year to want demerits.
“Enough. Ninety-seven thousand dollars, Jim! He had it with him in cash. That’s the most money I ever saw in one place.”
/> I nodded in the darkness. “Ninety-seven thousand,” I repeated. “Funny amount—I suppose it was every penny he could raise.” It was a grim thought. I whispered urgently: “Bob, we’ve got to come through on this! If I know my uncle, he’s gone in debt for this—he’s repaying an obligation to Jason Craken. If anything goes wrong—if we can’t help Craken, can’t get this money back for my uncle—it’ll mean trouble for him.”
“Of course, Jim.” Bob was in bed already. “Gideon’s going to Sargasso Dome tomorrow,” he whispered. “To put up the bond so that our bid will be counted. There isn’t much time left.”
“Did you tell David that I’d seen Laddy Angel?” There was a pause for a second. “I—I forgot, Jim. I didn’t have much time, anyway. I was only there for a few minutes—”
I sat straight up in bed. “Only a few minutes! But, Bob—you were gone for hours!”
His voice was apologetic—and strained. “I was, well, delayed, Jim. I, uh—”
We both heard the rapping of the duty officer’s heels in the corridor outside.
That put an end to the conversation. But I couldn’t help wondering fuzzily, as I went to sleep—if Bob was gone four hours, and had only a few minutes in the beach house…what had he done with the rest of his time?
“Atten-HUT!” The voice of the Commandant roared through the loudhailers, and the whole student body of the Academy snapped to.
“By squadrons! Forward MARCH!”
The sea band struck up the Academy anthem, and the classes passed in review.
It was the end of Graduation Week. We wheeled briskly off the Quadrangle, past the reviewing stands, down the crushed coral of the Ramp, to the dispersal areas.
The school year was at an end.
Bob Eskow and I were now upperclassmen, with the whole summer ahead of us.
And today was the day when the sealed bids of the condemned Fleet cruisers would be opened—and we would know if we owned the Killer Whale or not.
Bob and I raced back to barracks. Discipline was at an end! The halls were full of milling cadets, talking, laughing, making plans for the summer. Even the duty officers, for once relaxed and smiling, were walking around, shaking hands with the cadets they had been dressing down or putting on report a few hours before.