Attack From Atlantis, page 4
He glanced back at his screen and let out a sudden shout. Haller jerked around, and Don dropped his finger to the screen. "The whale! He's coming back. See!"
The pip was there again, indicating something coming down toward them. The whale had apparently gone to the surface, taken a few good breaths, and immediately started down again.
Don realized he'd sounded close to panic, as Shep whined and came against his legs. The dog was always sensitive to tones of his voice. To have appar-endy found the answer to their problem, and then have the whale decide to return, though . . .
"Kill the jets," Haller said. He sounded disgusted, but there was still no fear in his voice. "We'll sink faster without speed, and that's the best we can try now."
They were nearly eight hundred fathoms down—a trifle under a mile—when the whale drew above them. It came down, but it was obviously uncomfortable. Instead of a charge against the Triton, it slid down slowly, to nuzzle against the ship once, and then retreat. It started down after them again. For a second, it hesitated. Finally, reluctantly, at eight hundred and fifty fathoms, it gave up and rose before circling around and seeming to wait for them to come up again.
Don sighed at the end of that menace for the moment; it would at least have to return to the surface, which might give them a chance to ascend. He wondered again at nature's ability to handle problems that had baffled men for years; it had taken huge amounts of the finest alloys and careful design to permit the Triton to stand the pressure, but that big animal of simple flesh and bones could drop from the surface to a region where the pressure was over a ton to the square inch without apparently worrying.
"He must have high blood pressure down here," he commented. It wasn't much of a joke, but it brought enough of a laugh to ease some of the tension, and he felt better for it.
Haller had been speaking on the phone again. He cradled it now, and shrugged. "Torpedo tubes won't open at this pressure; I should have expected it. The Triton wasn't meant to carry them originally. And there isn't enough other weight we can eject. All the hatches were meant for escape, not for undersea dumping. Well . . ."
They were used to having Haller find a solution for them by now, and waited for his next idea. But he shrugged at last.
"So we go down," he said. "Unless someone has ideas? No? All right, Don, try to spot the highest section of the bottom you think we can drift to, will you?"
Don noticed the use of his first name, and knew it was actually an admission that they were now under extreme emergency. Yet Haller seemed as unruffled as ever—until he came around to join Don in the search. Then the boy saw that the admiral's hands were sweating as much as his own, and noticed that there were tiny lines of strain around the man's eyes. Haller was worried and afraid too, but he had it under complete control, and wasn't losing his head. Don's respect for him rose again.
Upjohn stuck his head in then. The expression in his eyes showed that he was aware of the seriousness of the situation. His grin was a failure, though he managed to keep up a generally good act of normality. "Dexter and I've been busy keeping Kenney from tearing up the ship/' he said. "We finally got him knocked out with a little force and some sleeping tablets. Anything we can do?"
"Thanks, nothing. Oh, tell the others we've decided to find a place on the bottom while we make repairs. That whale you felt made things pretty rough, but nothing we can't fix. And tell them what I said, Sid —not what you think I mean!"
"Right." The reporter went back quietly.
Haller turned back to the echo-sounder as Don grunted suddenly. The boy indicated what he had found. "There. It's about the highest point I've seen, and we might make it. Big enough, too."
"Twelve hundred fathoms—that's within our limits, from what I can find. About a ton and a half pressure to the inch." He nodded, and began giving directions to Cavanaugh.
The power came back on, at half speed. They shuddered and fluttered through the water, and Cavanaugh was having a rough time trying to compensate for the erratic behavior of the damaged diving plane and the stuck stern planes. They turned gradually until they were heading for the undersea plateau Don had spotted.
"Can you stand a little more?" Haller asked.
"Try," the helmsman said. The muscles bulged on his arms, but it was from strain rather than effort; the control motors were still working, doing the physical labor.
The ship increased its speed a trifle, and the fluttering and twisting grew worse. But now they were covering more distance for each foot they drifted downward. The plateau was nearer, but they were almost too low to make it.
"I can take a little more, sir," Cavanaugh forced out between clenched teeth. The deep brown of his skin seemed to be covered with tiny rhinestones of perspiration. At Haller's nod, he pushed the lever over a bit and hastily grabbed back at the wheel as the pitching threatened to get out of control.
It was going to be close. The edge of the plateau was a sharp cliff. If they missed the top, they would strike against that and go drifting down for thousands of feet more.
Then it was below them. They held their breath for a second, but there was no scraping or shock of collision.
"Kill the jets," Haller ordered.
Cavanaugh reached for the lever, and pushed it to STOP, but they continued drifting. Now there was a faint scraping sound from below. They began to relax, just as the helmsman shouted.
Ahead, and too small to have shown by echo-sounding, a single rock the size of several houses stuck up, and they were headed straight for it. There was more crunching against the bottom; then they barely had time to brace themselves for the collision before they hit.
It knocked Don over against his radar panel, and there was a terrific din. But most of their speed had been killed. He pushed himself back, saw that the others were all right, and let out a sigh of relief.
They were still helpless, stranded where the pressure would be sure death at the least tiny leak, but there wasn't the lost feeling of drifting that they had known before.
Smoke suddenly reached his nose, together with a hissing sound. He jerked his eyes down and hastily ripped aside a panel of the set. With a groan, he yanked out a section of 600-ohm cable that had broken free on the impact and was shorting his power. But it was too late. The short had already burned out one section of his radio transmitter, leaving blackened resistors and melted connections mixed with the soft, waxy goo that had surrounded other parts.
"Better eject the antenna and send out a call for a rush job on a new diving plane," Haller began. Then he saw the mess of the transmitter. They could receive signals now, but there was no chance of sending any message from the ship.
"All right," he said. "So we'll have to make all repairs ourselves."
Don looked at his viewing panels, seeing the damaged diving plane outside. Fixing that from here was going to be a real problem!
Chapter 5 Men of the Sea
ajller assembled the key men in the officer's wardroom to talk everything over before trying to start repairs. Don and his uncle were there, along with Drake, Walrich, Kayne and Upjohn. Haller summed up the situation. As he saw it, they were lucky in a lot of ways. The Triton was standing the pressure with no sign of trouble, and they had no need to worry about air or power for their living needs. There were even supplies on board for at least six months. In the old days, a submarine on the bottom meant that it had to be rescued in a few hours or the men inside would suffocate. In their case, there was no immediate need to worry about the time repairs would take.
Simpson shook his head. "Afraid it isn't that good, sir. We can stay here quite a while, but I'd hate to risk it even for a month. There's a ton and a half of pressure on every square inch of hull. She can take it; she can take twice that for a short time, maybe. But even a ton wouldn't be safe indefinitely.
When metal is under steady strain, the crystals of the alloys weaken—fatigue, we call it. Sooner or later, something will give—and we'd better not be here then!"
"I was coming to that," Haller agreed. "And men can only stand so much strain, too. In a month, some of us might very well crack under the emotional pressure, and that would be almost as disastrous. All right, we've got to get back to the surface as quickly as we can. That means repairing the tanks or the diving planes—preferably both. What about it?"
Drake looked at Walrich, who shrugged. The scientist made a disgusted grimace with his lips. "If we count on the tanks, we'll have to get outside to clean the valves. I was hoping the tar might have got inside —tar or whatever it is—and that dissolving some of it would free them. No results from the detergent, however. And doubling the engines on the valves strained the gears, but didn't budge them. As for the planes—well, it's the same situation. We'd have a hard time straightening the bow plane, even if we had it in our repair shop; but we can't touch it out there. All I know about the stern planes is that they won't respond."
"They stuck, just before the whale took after us," Kayne struck in. He was a slight, nervous man who always wore his cap to cover up his completely bald head, though he was only about twenty-five. "I was watching Cavanaugh when it happened. They just froze, with no warning. I'd like to get a good look at them."
"All right. Let's." Haller got up and started for the control room. "Will the packing glands on the periscope stand raising it, Dr. Simpson?"
Don's uncle grinned crookedly. "I wish the rest of the ship would hold as surely. The more pressure, the better they'll hold."
Don had never had a chance to look at the periscope in action before. It used a television remote pickup, too, instead of the old mirrors and prisms, but could be raised, tilted and turned to cover all directions. Haller reached for the controls, standing so the rest could see the big viewing screen that had replaced the tiny little opening of the old-style periscope. The big tube lifted easily for ten feet, while indicators threw cross-hatched lines over the image to show height and direction. He swung it to the bow diving plane first; it gave a better view than the bow pickup had done, showing that the plane was badly bent, but with no apparent damage to the hinge on which it swung.
"It'd be simple enough to get it off, if we were in shallow water," Simpson said. "Out there . . . Well, we've got a bathysuit on board that will stand any pressure the ship will. But working on that in the suit isn't going to be any picnic."
Haller's face cleared a little, though. Don remembered that he'd overlooked the bathysuit, which had been installed in a hatch after the plans had been first completed. It was a heavy steel ball, like a bathysphere, with just room inside for a man and an oxygen tank; but it was equipped with small caterpillar treads to move about and with grapples that could be controlled from inside, like arms. The trouble was that no grapple could be as skilful as a hand, and operating it was a continual backbreak-ing series of contortions.
The admiral swung the periscope to the rear, and began focusing on the stern diving plane. He frowned and adjusted it to show both rear planes. "What . . . ?"
Driven between the big planes and the tail assembly on both sides were two bright wedges that looked like copper! They looked as if they'd been designed to lock the planes, and had succeeded.
Drake recovered from the shock first. "Then I wasn't crazy. It was sabotage before. But how? Don't tell me your whale did that?"
"Somebody human, or something with a human being inside," Haller said grimly. "Something small and quiet enough to come up without our detecting him. Dr. Drake, when it happened to you, could it have been done at five hundred fathoms or more?"
Drake considered. "I guess so. We wouldn't have noticed it until we stopped diving, then, of course. I suppose so, yes."
"And this probably happened to us at about five hundred. Well, the Nautilus has reached almost that depth. And other bathysuits have been operated lower than that. Gentlemen, it looks as if someone doesn't want the Triton to succeed, and may be up there now, making sure we don't surface again. That would also account for the tarry material which apparently is jamming our valves."
It was the only explanation that seemed to fit, yet Don wondered about anyone in a bathysuit who could keep up with the Triton—even at half speed— and maneuver enough to remain out of sight of the pickups, make no sound, and also know exactly where to locate the ship, even when it was sailing under sealed orders. He saw his uncle stare at Drake; both of them also looked doubtful. Still, it was the only explanation they had.
And it wasn't a comfortable one.
Don moved to the sonar room, and began working the pickups, trying to explore the bottom around them. They were close to the edge of the clifflike drop that went down for thousands of feet further, he saw. Too close, in fact. The bottom sloped slightly, and it seemed that they were in constant danger of sliding slowly off.
Then he became aware that they had moved since landing. The ship was tilted slightly, as if it had rolled a few degrees toward the edge of the abyss below. And on the upper side, away from the cliff, there was a hollow in the soft bottom to show where they had first settled.
He looked at it sickly for a second before turning to call Haller. But the skipper had already guessed from his expression that something was up. Haller was at the screen at once, following Don's pointing finger. He studied the situation for a moment, and then began switching from pickup to pickup to get a better overall picture.
"I think we're all right," he decided. There was no need to tell the others. They had switched on the control screens, and were seeing it for themselves. "We slipped a litde at first, but now we've dug in and settled enough that we should be all right. Of course, we don't know what it's like under this soft stuff here; if there's a steeper slope than there seems to be, the least thing might tilt us over and send us rolling down. But the rock we hit is still there, and it rolled a trifle when we struck—so I think we can forget that."
Yet he still stood studying the screens. Don got up, almost afraid to move for fear that the minute jar might upset the balance; Haller might think it was safe, but he couldn't know. Then he saw for himself what was worrying the skipper.
They had sunk into the soft mud enough to keep from sliding more, but also enough to hold them down to some extent; and the hollow their slipping had left was filling in as the soft stuff rolled down into the hole. If they continued to settle, they would reach a state where the mud would suck down on them and keep them from floating properly, even after repairs.
"We've got less time than I thought," Haller decided. "All right, we'll have to be out of here in forty-eight hours or so. But that still gives us time enough. If we can get a signal out, they can at least drop us a new diving plane. That will save repairs."
"We can do better than that," Simpson told him. "There are two more of these bathysuits back on the island, both bigger models than the one we carry. I meant to take them along when I was still hoping we'd use the Triton for océanographie mapping. If we can send out a message, they can drop those down from above and handle the whole job."
Don looked at his uncle and then down at the wreck of the transmitter. He'd already checked the repair manual on the transmitter, and found that it was meant for normal troubles, and lacked the all-important information for a real rebuilding job. Still, there were replacements, and it could be fixed. He nodded doubtfully.
"I can fix it," he said. "But I don't know how long it will take."
Haller was also inspecting it. "We'll have to try. But the first thing we do is turn in and get some sleep. We'll save time in the long run—and sometimes a fresh idea hits while a man's asleep. Don, you want to take first watch here? You can start in on this. I'll relieve you in four hours. This is about the only place where we need to keep a watch—on the screens."
"I'll stick with him," Upjohn volunteered. "I know enough about radio to hand him anything he needs, though that's about all."
Haller grinned. "I know a little more than that. Leave the routine stuff to me, and I'll solder your joints when I take over. Want some food sent in?"
Don settled down, studying the mess of the transmitter and keeping his eyes on the screens. Haller hadn't actually done a thing, or contributed a single idea. Yet somehow he gave the feeling of having everything in hand. And because of his presence, their chances were probably a lot better. He didn't look like a typical admiral—he was too stout, too short, and much too chubby-faced. But his calm voice and spotless suit lent him an air of confidence they needed, and it was clear that he knew how to get things done. Apparently that was what being a leader meant.
Upjohn pulled out a pencil and began chewing on it idly. He grinned toward the captain's stateroom, as if reading Don's thoughts. "Quite a guy, Bob Haller. I knew him when he was commanding an old-time sub in the war, which makes me older than I look, Don. When he came on, the crew hated him because he was replacing one of the real hero-type commanders. Haller never did anything you could call heroic, but he saved two big battlewagons, sneaked into a heavily mined harbor and wiped out a whole nest of the other side's subs, and then got depth-bombed trying to unsnarl a situation his superior had made a mess of. He brought the old ship back through enemy territory when any sane man would have known it couldn't travel ten knots under water. And never lost a man. When he left, his men acted as if the world had come to an end. . . . Well, what can I do to help?"
"Not much," Don admitted. "Keep Shep out of things, maybe."
The dog didn't like the smell of the burned parts, but he was curious about all the work Don was trying to do, and kept sticking his head up to see what was going on. Upjohn laughed shortly, and pulled him away, while Don went ahead with the work.
