Attack From Atlantis, page 5
The first job was to diagram all the layout that had been ruined. When he was sure he had it all down on paper, it would be safe to rip out the damaged section, but not until then. And since a few of the wires had come unsoldered, it was a matter of tracing and retracing circuits to be sure. This was work that would have been saved if the instruction manual had carried a complete schematic diagram, but that had somehow been omitted. From the fact that the list of tubes didn't check with the ones in the set, Don guessed that it was one of those cases where a model had been changed, and the manual revised hastily, with the idea of rewriting it later. He wondered how many men had lost their lives because somebody decided that such details weren't really important, and put off doing a good job until later.
Upjohn yawned after an hour of it, and stood up. "Gonna get me some coffee and walk around a bit. Want anything from the galley?"
Don shook his head. He glanced up at his screens, and switched to various pickups to keep an eye on things. But nothing seemed to have changed, except that the mud had filled in evenly around the Triton now.
He'd come to an experimental part of the rig now, where some engineer had discovered a new way to do things. He frowned over it and began pulling down books of tube characteristics while he figured out the mathematics behind it, so that he could reconstruct the actual circuit. The work at M.I.T. was coming in useful now.
Finally, he began tearing out all the ruined section. Since he had spare parts—something he'd checked carefully—it was simpler and faster to discard all this than to try to save whatever was still good. Shep suddenly growled, and Don glanced at him.
The dog was standing up, looking at the screen. Don glanced up at it, and saw something just sliding out of range, but was unable to make out any details. He frowned in surprise. While the screen gave a clear picture in colors as natural as could be expected through the water, he was surprised at Shep's reaction. Like most animals, the dog usually paid no attention to anything on a screen, apparently on the idea that if it didn't smell real, it was all nonsense. A few times before, he'd reacted to Don's uncle's face on the telephone panel from the office. He could recognize things when they interested him, apparently, but he usually didn't believe in them.
He must have been aware of the nervous tension on the ship, and ready to bark at anything.
Don went back to his work, only to hear another growl. This time he jerked his eyes directly up to the screen.
Swimming there in front of the pickup was a man! There was nothing unusual about the man, except for a seeming paleness to the skin and the odd clothes, that looked like a combination of a woman's ice-skating skirt and swimming trunk tops. But all around the man was a bubble. It didn't quite touch him anywhere, but was never more than half an inch from him. It seemed to be made of nothing but air, impossible as that was—or else of very thin cellophane. And on the back of the man was a small tank, which might contain more air.
Then another one swam into view, carrying a load of what looked like mud in his hands.
Chapter Ö Distress Signal
s he watched, Don saw the second swimmer come closer and heave the dark stuff in his hands. Then blackness settled onto the screen, just as Shep let out a sharp bark. Don stood with his mouth ajar for a second, then dived for the switch to change to another pickup. He heard Upjohn come into the room, but was too busy to look up.
He caught just a shadow in another pickup. Then the swimmers were gone.
"Did you see them?" he asked quickly, finally glancing at the reporter.
Upjohn looked puzzled. "I saw the screen go blank and saw you trying to get something on the pickup. What was it? It must have been good to make Shep react."
"It was," Don said. He told what he'd seen as factually as he could, trying to make it sound believable. But even with the knowledge that Drake and another had seen something of the same thing, he couldn't make it sound convincing to himself. Men
simply couldn't exist without elaborate protection from bathyspheres or submarines at this depth; and air didn't form bubbles that fitted exactly the contours of a human being.
Upjohn didn't laugh, but he didn't seem excited, either. "I'm not saying you didn't see just what you said, Don," he decided. "I've seen things that couldn't exist before. One of the pictures that the experimental automatic rocket we sent around the moon brought back showed something that was obviously a piece of machinery. And no life of any advanced kind can live up there. But I've also seen some queer forms of life coming out of the ocean. You already heard Hawkes' story. And men just naturally see faces in clouds, and such things. Still-it must have looked darned close to human, if it wasn't. And there's that copper wedge out there in the diving plane."
He shrugged. "If we see 'em again, we'll yell out for the rest to come up. Otherwise report it to Haller later. What can we do about it if there are men out there, anyhow?"
When Haller came in to replace Don—looking as if he hadn't just gotten up—he listened, his face expressionless, and agreed with Upjohn. "No use writing it up in the log yet. I don't believe you saw such things, Don, but I don't think you're crazy or lying, either. Sid, where's your camera?"
Upjohn went out to get it, and came back, giving instructions on setting it so a picture could be taken from the screen. Haller set it beside him within easy reach, and went over Don's schematic and the work he had done on the set. "I'll stick to this section," he decided. "You handle the trick stuff, and I'll wire up the rest of it."
He ran a resistor wire through the hole in a tube socket, twisted it easily with needle-nose pliers, and touched it with the hot soldering iron, adding the smallest amount of solder. It was a beautiful job, and Don felt more confident. Haller had done electronic wiring before, obviously.
"I'll be back in four hours, Mr.—sir," Don said.
Haller grinned up at him as he marked off the work done on the diagram. "Make it Bob, Don. You're not bound to Navy regs, and I've been handing out first names already. Except when you're on duty—then we'll stick to the 'sir.' You're entitled to eight hours sack time—but if you want to cut it to four, I'll be grateful. Want me to buzz you?"
Don nodded. "Please," he said. He'd always been hard to wake, even with a full night's sleep, and he'd been wondering how he'd get up in time. The period between full sleep and really waking up always seemed too pleasant to give up.
But surprisingly, he was up when Haller buzzed him. Shep growled at the signal, and then relaxed as he heard Haller's voice. He was an obedient dog, but ships imposed strains on his habits; anything more than a small sailboat was foreign territory to him, except as something men kept at the docks to make interesting smells.
Haller had done a remarkable amount. Except for the experimental section—the part with the circuit that had given Don the trouble before—it was finished.
The boy took over, twisting the coils around coil-forms of plastic he had stripped. He could only hope they would work; coil tables told how they should be wound, but any time a man followed such a table and got exactly what he wanted, he put it down as a minor miracle. Haller finished them with coil dope and tinned the leads as Don completed them.
"Wish I had a Q-meter," Don complained. "We're a little limited on test equipment. I'll have to check it all with a signal generator and meter, I guess."
He stayed at it while Haller began picking up the business of getting repairs under way, as the rest of the men got up.
From the wardroom, he heard the querulous voice of Senator Kenney complaining. There was the sound of the man's feet stamping toward the control room, and more angry words. Don strained his ears, but he couldn't make out what Haller told him. Apparently, it was a short course on the events that had happened.
"And you didn't waken me? You let Dexter and that upstart reporter lock me up while that was going on? Admiral Haller, I might have been killed! When I report this ..."
"Not at all," Haller said, and this time his voice was plainer. "If we had been about to die, I'd have had you wakened, Senator. I've always felt that no man should die in his sleep if he doesn't want to."
"Hmm." The Senator thought that one over, apparently, and decided to ignore any possible sarcasm. "Well, what's done is done. And you say we'll soon be able to communicate?"
Don heard the panel slide back, and looked up to see the Senator's gray face. The man looked in and nodded slowly. "Go right ahead, young man. Don't stop anything that will get us out of this situation." His voice was curiously subdued. "Admiral, I—I'm not used to this sort of thing. I find it—well, I find it somewhat shocking. I confess, I feel somewhat sick. I think I'll retire. I—uh—thank you, Admiral. Thank you, young man."
He staggered out of the control room, no longer a man who could make and break others, but a beaten, tired old man who saw signs of danger he was untrained to meet or even understand. When talk failed to settle things, he had nothing else to fall back on. He probably was the same man underneath as he had been thirty years before, when his name had been on so much of the legislation that was still studied in schools as a model of good government. But too many years had passed with people around who bowed to his slightest wish, and the Senator had no real contact with the world outside of his own narrow sphere. Maybe he knew he hadn't kept up, and that added to his bitterness.
Don shrugged these thoughts off, and dug the voltmeter and signal generator out of the kit. The signal generator was a small, portable one. It had tiny batteries to power it, and a pair of the new aluminum-antimony transistors to generate the signal. By varying the setting, a tiny radio signal of any frequency between a hundred kilocycles and five hundred megacycles could be produced. Don switched it on and tested it quickly, setting it for an audio modulation. This added a four hundred cycle beat to the regular signal. The four hundred cycles raised and lowered the amount of the high-frequency radio signal four hundred times a second, of course—and he could strip it back off with a tiny crystal and pair of headphones, to give him an audible test of how it was going.
He coupled on the generator, set it to the proper frequency, and began testing the circuit with the meter. Then he stuck the generator into his shirt pocket and began checking voltages.
Everything seemed to be in order, except that the signal barely crept through, where it should have been amplified thousands of times. He puzzled over the circuits, while he heard Haller, Drake, Walrich and his uncle conferring. The ship was busy as men went about trying everything that they could think of.
Repairs of the transmitter had gone much faster than he had expected, but obviously the others weren't waiting on him. They were hoping he could get a message out, so that nobody would have to go out in the bathysuit, but they weren't counting on it. Maybe it was a good thing, too—certainly the set seemed as useless as before.
Then, as he tapped an electrolytic condenser in the tricky section, the meter suddenly jumped. An intermittent! A part that seemed to be in good condition, but went off and on, sometimes acting one way when "loaded" with the meter and another way in normal operation.
He yanked it out and soldered in another. And this time, the signal built up a step at a time as it should, until it reached the main transmitter section, which was still in good condition. The new coils weren't quite right, but a few trial squeezings and spread-ings settled that; it wasn't perfect, but it would work properly.
He called in Haller, but didn't wait to eject the antenna buoy and began letting it unreel toward the surface. The buoy collapsed violently as the pressure hit it—he could follow that from a nearby pickup— but it was filled with helium and designed to collapse without losing the power to float. The thin, insulated wire began rising steadily.
Haller clapped him on the back. "Good work, Don. Here, I've had the message written out for hours. It'll give them enough dope to proceed with caution and watch out for whatever jammed those planes. Keep sending until they locate the buoy."
It might take hours for an accurate fix, Don knew. But now there was hope again inside the ship. Finally an automatic signal came back down the wire to indicate it had surfaced. He pulled the key to him and began sending the dots and dashes of an SOS.
The little antenna, so far above, was the best that could be designed for the purpose, but it wasn't too efficient. Lying so close to the surface of the ocean, it was capable of sending out only a limited signal. If someone were listening for it, and conditions were good, the answer might come at once. Otherwise, he'd have to keep trying.
He cut off after five minutes, and began listening across the dial. The receiver could operate better, since it was hunting for a signal pumped out by the huge shore installations, with kilowatts of power and whole buildings of equipment; anyhow, even a small receiver could amplify by millions of times a signal picked up.
He caught a rapid flash of Spanish, and started to turn on. But Haller bent closer, twisting one of the phones to his ear. "Storm up above," he translated. "That's the big government job sending out storm warnings to all small craft. The storm we saw coming must have hit. Waves . . . Uh! We're right in the hurricane path, if they're correct. There it comes in English."
Don heard it through, groaning. It was coming in with a heavy surge, fading to nothing, and then blasting out again. The little antenna must be bobbing about, under water a lot of the time. It was completely waterproofed, but it couldn't operate normally under such conditions. It must be really pitching on the surface!
He tried again, listened, and then again. There was no answer. He shifted down to the lowest frequency his set could handle, where there would be less chance of the beaming effect keeping it from spreading the maximum distance. And still there was no answer.
Then an answer came, faint and almost inaudible. Obviously, judging by the hand-operated keying, it was from some ship, rather than from one of the big installations. From the words he got, he gathered that they were asking what they could do.
"Have them relay," Haller instructed.
Don sent instructions, and repeated the message. This time he got more of the answer as the operator checked back. They were having trouble receiving him. Only part of his message was complete.
There was more, too. He read it off to Haller as it came through. ". . . Sorry can't do better. Bad shape ourselves. Edge of hurricane got us. We're sinking fast, waiting arrival rescue ship. Will send what we have, then must contact rescue ship. Will..."
Then it cut down to a faint trickle of sound, and was suddenly gone. Don shook his head. From the sound of things, and the erratic keying, the operator up there was in a lot worse trouble than he was. He had a picture of the man, sitting pounding at his key while he heard the shouts of the men on his ship as the water rose higher and higher, and the ship probably began to break up under the pounding of the waves. In the middle of his desperate attempts to keep in touch with the rescue ship, he'd taken time out to answer another SOS and relay what he could of the message. Don had no idea of how close that rescue ship might be, but he made a hasty, silent prayer that it would arrive in time.
He began searching and sending again, alternately, trying to make another contact. He heard bits of totally useless chitchat. And then a strong signal came through, in precise, machine Morse, obviously beamed with the full power of a land station.
"Calling Triton. Relay message received, incomplete. We are attempting to get a fix, will despatch destroyer for bathysuits—query bathysuits?—earliest possible and proceed to location. Set transmitter to frequency. . . ."
It cut off abruptly, without warning. Don checked
his receiver, and then began tuning again. But now there was no message of any sort coming in. He cut in the transmitter, and a meter dipped suddenly, indicating something wrong, as if his antenna were disconnected.
A sudden sickening sensation ran through him. He cut on the pickup that covered the section where the antenna wire had run out, and pressed the rewind button. The wire was almost invisible, even under the lights that bit through the thick water, but he could just make it out as it bobbed downward under the slightly unsteady force of the reel.
After about five hundred feet had been reeled in, it came to an end. There was nothing more. The wire had parted. Somewhere up above, their only antenna buoy floated on the lashing waves of a hurricane, no longer connected. There was now no way in which they could send a signal for the needed fix.
And without that, the Navy might hunt for weeks without locating them. The buoy would drift for miles, even if it could be located. To make matters worse, there was a storm raging which might not abate for days, and sonar traces from this depth would be useless.
Chapter 7^po ir Task
Out!" Haller exclaimed. "Don, I'm almost ready to believe in those bubble men everyone has been ■ seeing!"
^ Don jerked back from his bitter thoughts to even grimmer ones. Haller was right. The line couldn't have broken. Not at five hundred feet up. The reel was set to soak up all normal shocks—even such ones as might be produced by the waves above. And if the wire had broken under strain, it would have broken near the top, where there would have been more snap, rather than so far down that all the pitching had long since been absorbed.
It looked as if something had deliberately severed the line. And since the wire was a tough alloy of copper and beryllium, it must have taken some cutting; an alloy like that could cut steel, or stand more bending than the best phosphor bronze—not to mention the protection of the rugged plastic insulation.
It couldn't have been the whale, either, even if
the creature had teeth with which to bite, which it did not. The whale had stayed up a good deal higher than that. He'd spotted it on the sonar screen, high above, not too long before. He was sure that this wasn't the explanation. There were also a number of monstrous creatures swimming about outside, some that looked as if they had evolved from lobsters, except that their pinchers had great flaming bunches of hairlike material growing from them, shining phosphorescently as most of the life forms did down here. But they had shown no interest in the wire, and certainly couldn't have cut through it without giving some warning on the strain signal.
