Attack From Atlantis, page 8
This time, getting into the bathysuit seemed to take longer. But at last, Don was settled. He nodded for them to screw down the seal on the dome of the suit, and tried not to look at his uncle's misery. Then there was quiet while they sealed the inner seal of the hatch. Don sat waiting, trying to plan his moves to bring himself nearest the hatch as he freed the last rock.
The seconds ticked by, and he still waited. Then, just as he was about to shout over the phone, he saw the inner seal open again. Drake and his uncle began unscrewing the top of the bathysuit.
It was Drake who explained, when the cover was off. "No dice, Don. The outer seal is stuck. They must have cemented it shut with that tar of theirs. We're locked in!"
Don had been struggling up. Now he dropped back helplessly, just as Haller and Upjohn came into the tool room. He could feel the reaction from his keyed-up state hit like a hot hammer smashing against soft butter. He seemed to swell up and spatter against the walls. For a minute, his senses reeled, and the little globe swam around in front of his eyes.
Drake and Simpson were lifting him out. At a motion from Haller, they put him on one of the work tables. "Take it easy, Don," Haller said quietly. "I know what you feel like. I had something like it happen once. And don't fool yourself. You did just as much for us as if you'd freed us and died doing it. There's nothing ridiculous about it. I'm glad that hatch was sealed—and so are the rest of us."
The feeling passed finally. Don got up, still a little shaky, but able to walk without showing it. He didn't try to grin, because he knew it would be a failure.
Instead, he nodded, and followed Haller back toward the control room. As he passed his uncle, Simpson put a hand on his arm; it almost unnerved him again, but it felt good.
In the sonar room, the viewing screen showed the bubble men still clustered around, but now they seemed more excited. One of them swam off and came back a minute later, pointing behind him.
Then Don saw the things for which they were waiting. Upjohn and Haller were staring at the same screen, and he heard their breaths catch.
Swimming through the water, behind a smaller group of the bubble men, were ten huge creatures of unbelievable ugliness. They looked like a cross between a crocodile and an unusually ugly fish. Their huge heads were almost all mouth and teeth, and their bodies were covered with ugly grayish warts that glowed with a faint phosphorescence. They were over twenty feet long, dwarfing the men who led them on halters of some sort.
"Ichthyosaurs," Upjohn said in surprise. "Fish lizards. The dinosaurs that took to the sea and were supposed to be extinct three hundred million years ago. Not like any I've seen pictured, but not too different, either."
Don saw the resemblance then. And he knew that the sea was always bringing up forms of life that were supposed to be extinct. Instead of dying out, some of the ichthyosaurs had apparently gone further and further down into the depths of the ocean, and had lasted long after all the other great reptiles had died.
"I thought they breathed air, though," he protested.
Sid nodded. "Yeah. They were supposed to, like any reptile. But you're seeing something that nobody ever saw before—an animal that not only went back to the sea, but learned to breathe water again. In three to five hundred million years, I guess anything can happen. Look, see there by their ribs—see how the water swirls out. They don't have gills, but they've developed lungs that can handle water, and an opening below their ribs to exhaust it. Man, what a good zoologist would give for a chance to examine that lung tissue!"
Now the last of the creatures had been driven up beside the Triton, and Don could see that the beasts wore harnesses. More ropes were being wrapped around the Triton. The bubble men began hitching their beasts to the ropes, using an odd, glittering object to make the connection between the harness and the ropes. The ichthyosaurs seemed impatient to be off.
They started at a gesture from one of the bubble men. There was one of the men on the back of each beast. The lizards stretched out great flippers and began churning the water. The Triton stirred, and began to slide along the ooze of the bottom.
They reached the edge of the abyss finally, and the ichthyosaurs headed downward, dragging the Triton behind toward the depths so far below—and toward unthinkable pressures that might crack the stout walls of the ship like a walnut in a nutcracker!
Chapter 10 The Bubble City
aller snapped up from his study. "Full speed . astern!" he ordered sharply. The downward movement had been smooth and effortless before. But as the great jets lashed out, there was a feeling of wrenching inside the ship. On the screen, the bow pickup showed the sea men and their mounts scattering wildly to the side. But their ropes were long enough, apparently, to permit them to move off to the side out of the wash of the jets and still keep dragging the ship down. The jets slowed the Tritons descent, but could not stop it.
A big bubble flashed up from below at an amazing speed, and came to a stop beside the ship. There were men inside it. Apparently it could be enlarged or contracted to vary the displacement of water, and hence make it rise or sink as they wanted. Now it hovered, while other men in bubbles moved into it. Don could see no sign of doors, but the men moved in effortlessly, as if the walls weren't there. For that matter, there
was no sign of anything that could be called a wall. The water just seemed to end and the air to begin.
A bulky piece of apparatus was being assembled inside the bubble, apparently from a group of smaller units. Each part looked like a four-inch crystal cube, with a black box under it. It was similar to one of the things worn on the back of the men. The final equipment was simply a group of such things attached together.
The bubble floated over beside the Triton, nearly touching. A smaller bubble was shoved out, with the equipment inside. Then that bubble suddenly disappeared, and the apparatus drifted against the wall of the Triton and stuck there. Don could see only a portion of it at the far edge of one of the pickups angle of view.
One of the bubble men suddenly darted ahead of the ship, just beyond the reach of the jets, and began making frantic gestures toward the hot steam and water issuing from the ship.
"Threatening us?" Upjohn asked.
Haller shook his head doubtfully. "Doesn't look like it—but I can't be sure. Kayne, get on the jet control. Be ready to cut at my signal. It looks as if he's warning us of something. . . ."
Abruptly, the Triton was surrounded by a bubble that lay about half an inch beyond its hull. It looked as if it had started out touching the hull and been pushed beyond almost at once.
"Cut jets!" Haller shouted. The navigator threw the lever and the meters flopped over. With the bubble around them, the jets could get no water to cool the atomic reactor, and had to be cut before they could overheat.
But that left them completely helpless. Shep had been curled up sleeping through most of the excitement. Now he got up, sniffing doubtfully. He smelled around the control room, casting unhappy looks at Don. Then he lifted his nose and let out a wild, low howl. Don reached for him, and ordered him to be quiet. Shep sank back then, without another sound, but with a worried, uncertain expression.
"Something about the way that bubble is made that he doesn't like," Haller said. "Maybe something like a static charge that we can't sense. And maybe he reacts some to our emotions."
They were still going down. Don tried to guess their rate of descent and add the amount they had dropped to their original depth. It came out to a figure that he hated to consider. They would soon be close to two thousand fathoms down—over two miles, and where the pressure would exceed the two tons per square inch that was all the Triton had been built to stand for even short times.
He looked at the pressure gauge, and frowned. It was registering less than twenty-five hundred pounds and going down rapidly. Either whatever was making the bubble had interfered with its operation or else it had been broken in one of the series of shocks.
He wondered for a second if they could have turned around and be moving upward. But the pressure of his feet on the deck told him unmistakably that there was a definite down direction, and that they were heading that way.
"How deep is it here?" Haller asked him.
He tried to remember, but couldn't be sure of the figure directly below the edge of the cliff; he couldn't know definitely whether they were heading straight down or drifting horizontally, either.
"From the minimum of about seven thousand to a maximum of over twenty thousand feet—about twenty-five thousand in some places," he answered. "And we weren't too near any minimum spots, except for that one plateau."
"So we could drop to four thousand fathoms," Haller said. "That's better than five tons to the inch. Hmm. We would be over the Milwaukee Deep when it happened."
The bubble around them seemed to have lightened them until the Triton now weighed practically the same as the water they displaced. The ship was moving smoothly, being drawn down by the ichthyo-saurs. Don studied the scene on the panel, and blinked as he saw a new detail he must have overlooked before. The bubble ran out along the towropes, keeping its distance from the cords the same as its distance from the hull. But where the odd plastic or crystal hitches joined the rope to the harness of the ichthyosaurs, the bubble ended abruptly, closing in just before it could touch the hitches.
When Don pointed this out, Simpson studied it, and traced the bubble back and forth from ship to hitch. "I don't know how they do it," he admitted. "It's new to me. They must have some science that we haven't hit yet. It acts like a controlled electrostatic shield—though I don't know exactly what that would be, either."
Drake could give no better explanation. "Unless you figure on these tractor and pressor rays the men on those space-opera programs throw around. If the pressor ray were anything more than just a meaningless word—and if you could make one lie down on its side and hug the ship—it might act like that. Something's keeping the water away from the hull. Maybe they've learned what the energy that binds the atom together is. Call it binding force energy—one form of it—for want of a better name. But it's only a name—it doesn't explain anything."
"It only muddies the water," Simpson protested. "You men who talk about exact science are always pulling a razzle-dazzle with words. If you'd learn a little engineering . . ."
Then he stopped, realizing that this wasn't the time and place for his favorite argument over whether theoretical science or applied engineering was more valuable to human progress.
Upjohn filled the gap in the conversation. "As long as we're all going to go down to our death with a fine, philosophical conversation, you might consider those ichthyosaurs again. Men don't domesticate animals unless they live around them. If we came down here with all the science those boys out there have, we'd never think of taming those beasts. We'd use machinery. But if we grew up down here, with the lizards around all the time, some of us would decide to use them."
"You mean those people live down here?" Haller asked.
"I dont know. But it looks like it. The clothes they wear might be a disguise—but they don't act as if they were wearing anything but normal clothes. The science doesn't fit ours. And they don't even look like people we usually see. They remind me of some figures I've seen in museums. Cro-Magnards—the men from the Cro-Magnon."
Don blinked, and stared out again. But now that he thought of it, Upjohn was right. They did look a little like the reconstructions he had seen and studied. Cro-Magnon man had replaced Neanderthal man in Europe somewhere between fifty and twenty-five thousand years before, and had then either disappeared or been absorbed by other races. He'd left his bones, and the beautiful colored pictures of his life on the walls of his caves. With his large brain and fine physical structure, he seemed almost superior to the races that had survived.
"Nonsense," Drake said. "No race could live down here. Those men don't breathe water like the lizards. Maybe they could adapt to the pressure in enough centuries. But they couldn't maintain life down here without a lot of science, and primitive men never had that."
"What about Atlantis?" Upjohn asked, grinning at Haller. "We have accounts there of a scientific race long before our time."
Haller grunted this time. "A bunch of mythology. The Greeks claimed they had heard about it from Egyptian priests, who never told where they heard it. And ever since, people have been talcing what was meant to be a good story seriously. There are a lot of myths about continents that sink into the ocean, but no scientific evidence has been found. No, this wouldn't have anything to do with either Plato's Greek Atlantis or some of the later nonsense men have used to explain things that already had a better explanation. And you know it, Sid."
"Sure," Sid Upjohn admitted. "I know it. But do they? Anyhow, I wasn't too serious about Atlantis. But you might consider the number of stories about mermaids and mermen. Because out there, unless I'm crazy, is a race of people who have lived here long enough to domesticate animals."
Dexter smiled faintly, and nodded. "If you'd look at your screen, I'm afraid you'd have to agree with Mr. Upjohn."
They turned quickly to stare where he pointed. There were more people out there now—and a different crowd. Among the men were others dressed in fuller costumes, extending from neck to near the knee, with a split skirt something like a pair of jodhpurs, something like a woman's bicycle skirt. They were obviously women, now staring at the ship the men were dragging home. And with them were even a few smaller figures that must have been children. All were in the bubbles, and the crowd of bubble people was growing steadily.
"All right," Haller admitted. "You win, Sid. When you find women and children around, I guess it means they live here. We're collecting quite a crowd."
The gathering grew by the second. Don studied these people. Except for the pallor of their skins and their odd costumes, they were rather attractive. They must have averaged over six feet in height, with straight figures. Their heads were a trifle large, but the sharp planes of their faces hid this. He saw no one who was either too fat or too thin; in fact, they seemed surprisingly alike, even to their faintly golden hair.
Haller sighed, and swung back from the screen. "All of which is fine—but it doesn't get us out of this. We can be crushed just as flat being captured by genuine sea people as by some enemy nation down here. How deep are we?"
Kayne stared morosely at the useless depth gauge, which now registered a depth of about three feet on its fine dial. "I estimate we must be down to about three miles—a little over three tons per square inch. But it may be nearer four."
They were still going down. Don sat frozen, staring at the useless gauge, trying to make the figures mean something. Over fifteen thousand feet down, with a pressure of more than six thousand pounds on every square inch. That meant nearly a million pounds for every square foot. He'd taken the ability of the Tritons hull to stand such pressures for granted before, but now it seemed impossible that anything under any conditions could endure.
Yet there was still life swimming in the water. Every so often, a strange thing would flash by, or pass near the people. One looked like an old oak root that had been dug up and had sprouted new twigs with leaves. It swam along by moving its "roots" in a totally fantastic way. One of the young girls outside reached out and shoved her hand down into it, to come up with a tiny thing that looked like it, except for size. The bigger one stopped swimming and began to curl up until she put the little one back among the twisting arms. Nothing like that had been in any of the pictures Don had seen.
Brought to the surface, such a form would explode with all the violence of a bomb. The pressures inside, now equalized by the outside water pressure, were simply impossible to picture.
They were still going down, but more slowly now. Ahead, the ichthyosaurs had stretched out in a fanlike arrangement and were paddling along. Don went to the sonar gear, but could get no response. The bubble cut it off completely. He had no way of finding how much further down the bottom lay.
Abruptly, they leveled off completely, so far as he could tell. Now the lizards seemed to pick up speed, as if heading for some place they knew.
The crowd began to stream away. Some of them swam along casually, drifting behind. But most had either the small sleds with propellers or else held something that looked like a brief case, also with a propeller sticking out from it. These began leaving the ship behind, as they disappeared into murkiness beyond which the ship's lights could not penetrate.
Cavanaugh had been standing by the helm all during the trip. Now Haller looked up, and seemed to become suddenly aware of this. He motioned toward the galley. "Better knock off, Paul, and get something. No sense in your standing by the helm now."
The big Negro threw a glance back that was a mixture of worry and amusement. "Ever see a car towed on a line, sir? It needs someone at the wheel. Same here. We ride a lot smoother when I keep the ship centered behind them."
"You mean the rudder still works?" Simpson asked sharply. Then he nodded to himself. "Yes, it would. If the bubble around us is that thin, it wouldn't make much difference in steering."
"Take over, Kayne," Haller suggested. "Thanks, Paul."
The navigator took the controls, but Cavanaugh remained beside him, staring into the screen he had been using to guide the ship behind the ichthyosaurs. "Something up ahead," he reported.
Don had been using a side pickup to study the crowd. Now he switched to the forward one. Cavanaugh was right. There seemed to be a faint glow of light ahead that was increasing rapidly as they cut through the dark water.
