UNDERSEA FLEET

Copyright © 1956 by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson

 

 

The Raptures of the Depths

We marched aboard the gym ship at 0400. It was long before dawn. The sea was a calm, black mirror, rolling slowly under the stars. Standing at sharp attention, out of the corner of my eye I could see the distant docks of the Sub-Sea Academy, a splash of light against the low dark line of Bermuda.
 Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane rapped out: "Cadets! Ten-hut!"
 We snapped to attention, the whole formation of us. The gym ship was a huge undersea raft, about as lively and graceful as an iceberg. The sub-sea tugs were nuz-zling around it like busy little porpoises, hauling and pulling us around, getting us out to sea. We were still on the surface, standing roll-call formation on the deck of the gym ship, but already the raft was beginning to pitch and wallow in the swells of the open sea.
 I was almost shivering, and it wasn't only the wind that came in from the far Atlantic reaches. It was tingling excitement. I was back at the Sub-Sea Academy! As we fell in I could sense the eagerness in Bob Eskow, beside me. Both of us had given up all hope of ever being on the cadet muster rolls again. And yet—here we were!
 Bob whispered: "Jim, Jim! It gets you, doesn't it? I'm
 beginning to hope ---"
 He stopped abruptly, as the whole formation fell sud-denly silent. But he didn't have to finish the sentence; I knew what he meant.
 Bob and I—Jim Eden is my name, cadet at the  Sub Sea Academy—had almost lost hope for a while. Out of the Academy, in disgrace—but we had fought our way back and we were full-fledged cadets again. A new year was beginning for us with the traditional qualifying skin-dive tests. And that was Bob's problem, for there was something in his makeup that he fought against but could not quite defeat, something that made skin-diving as diffi-cult for him as, say, parachute-jumping would be for a man afraid of heights. It wasn't fear. It wasn't weakness. It was just a part of him. "Count off!"
 Captain Fairfane gave the order, and the whole long line of us roared out our roll-call. In the darkness—it was still far from dawn—I couldn't see the far end of the line, but I could see Cadet Captain Fairfane by the light of his flash-tipped baton. It was an inspiring sight, the rigid form of the captain, the braced ranks of cadets fading into the darkness, the dully gleaming deck of the gym ship, the white-tipped phosphorescence of the waves. We were the men who would soon command the SubSea Fleet!

            Every one of us had worked hard to be where we were. That was why Bob Eskow, day after day, grimly went through the tough, man-killing schedule of tests and work and study. The deep sea is a drug—so my uncle Stewart Eden used to say, and he gave his whole life to it. Sometimes it's deadly bitter. But once you've tasted it, you can't live without it. Captain Fairfane roared: "Crew commanders, report!"  "First crew, allpresentandaccountedforSIR!" "Second crew, allpresentandaccountedforSIR!" "Third crew, allpresentandaccountedforSIR!" The cadet captain returned the salutes of the three crew commanders, whirled in a stiff about-face and saluted Lieutenant Blighman, our sea coach. "Allpresentandac-countedforSIR!" he rapped out.

            Sea Coach Blighman returned the salute from where he stood in the lee of the bow superstructure. He strode swiftly forward, in the easy, loose-limbed gait of an old underseaman. He was a great, brown, rawboned man with the face of a starving shark. He was only a shadow to us in the ranks—the first pink-and-purple glow was barely

beginning to show on the horizon—but I could feel his hungry eyes roving over all of us. Coach Blighrnan was known through the whole Academy as a tough, exacting officer. He would spend hours, if necessary, to make sure every last cadet in his crews was drilled to perfection in every move he would have to make under the surface of the sea. His contempt for weaklings was a legend. And in Blighman's eyes, anyone who could not match his own records for depth and endurance was a weakling.

            Fifteen years before, his records had been unsurpassed in all the world—which made it hard to match them! When he talked, we listened.

            "At ease!" he barked at us. "Today you're going-down for your depth qualification dives. I want every man on the raft to pass the first time. You're all in shape—the medics have told me that. You all know what you have to do—and I'll go through it again, one more time, in case any of you were deaf or asleep. So there's no excuse for not qualifying!

            "Skin-diving is a big part of your Academy training. Every cadet has to qualify in one sub-sea sport in order to graduate; and you can't qualify for sports if you don't qualify to dive, right here and now this morning."

            He stopped and looked us over. I could see his face now, shadowy but strongly marked. He said: "Maybe you think our sub-sea sports are rough. They are. We make them that way. What you learn in sports here at the Academy may help you save lives some day. Maybe it will be your own life you save!

            "Sea sports are rough because the sea is rough. If you've ever seen the sea pound in through a hull leak, or a pressure-flawed city dome—well, then you know! If you haven't, take my word for it—the sea is rough.

            "We have an enemy, gentlemen. The enemy's name is 'hydrostatic pressure.' Every minute we spend under the sea is with that enemy right beside us—always deadly, always waiting. You can't afford to make mistakes when you're two miles down! So if you've got any mistakes to make—if you're going to cave in under pressure—take my advice and do it here today. When you're in the Deeps, a mistake means somebody dies!

 "Hydrostatic pressure! Never forget it. It amounts to nearly half a pound on every square inch, for every foot you submerge. Figure it out for yourselves! At one mile down—and a mile's nothing, gentlemen, it's only the beginning of the Deeps!—that comes to more than a ton pressing on every square inch. Several thousand tons on the surface of a human body.

            "No human being has ever endured that much punish-ment and lived to talk about it. You can't do it without a pressure suit, and the only suit that will take it is one made of edenite." Beside me, Bob Eskow nudged me. Edenite! My own uncle's great invention. I stood straighter than ever, listening, trying not to show the pride I felt.

            There still was very little light, but Lieutenant Blighman's eyes missed nothing; he glanced sharply at Bob Eskow before he went on. "We're trying something new," he said. "Today you lubbers are going to help the whole fleet. We're reaching toward greater depths—not only with edenite suits, but in skin-diving. Not only are we constantly improving our equipment, the sea medics are trying to improve us!

            "Today, for instance, part of your test will include trying out a new type of depth-adaptation injection. After we dive, you will all report to the surgeon for one of these shots. It is supposed to help you fight off tissue damage and narcosis—in simple words, it makes you stronger and smarter! Maybe it will work. I don't know. They tell me that it doesn't always work. Sometimes, in fact, it works the other way....

            "Narcosis! There's the danger of skin-diving, men! Get below a certain level, and we separate the real sea cows from the jellyfish. For down below fifty fathoms we come across what they call 'the rapture of the depths.'

            "The rapture of the depths." He paused and stared at us seriously. "It's a form of madness, and it kills. I've known men to tear off their face masks down below. I've asked them why—the ones that lived through it—-and they've said things like 'I wanted to give the mask to a fish!' Madness! And these shots may help you fight against it. Anyway, the sea medics say it will help some of you jellyfish. But some of you will find that the shots may  backfire—may even make you more sensitive instead of less!"           I heard Bob Eskow whisper glumly to himself, beside me: "That's me. That's my luck!"
 I started to say something to encourage him, but Blighman's hungry eyes were roving toward our end of the formation; I took a brace.
 He roared: "Listen—and keep alive! Some men can take pressure and some can not. We hope to separate you today, if there are any among you who can't take it. If you can't—watch for these warning signs. First, you may feel a severe headache. Second, you may see flashes of color. Third, you may have what the sea medics call 'auditory hallucinations'—bells ringing below the sea, that sort of thing.
 "If you get any of these signs, get back to the locks at once. We'll haul you inside and the medics will pull you out of danger.
 "But if you ignore these signals .. ,ⁿ
 He paused, with his cold eyes on Bob Eskow. Bob stood rigidly silent, but I could feel him tensing up.
 "Remember," the coach went on, without finishing his last sentence, "remember, most of you can find berths on the commercial lines if you fail the grade here. We don't want any dead cadets."
 He looked at his watch.
 "That's about all. Captain Fairfane, dismiss your men!"
 Cadet Captain Fairfane came front-and-center, barked out: "Break for breakfast! The ship dives in forty minutes, all crews will fall in for depth shots before putting on gear. Formation dis-MISSED!"
 We ate standing and hurried up the ladder, Bob and I. Most of the others were still eating, but Bob and I weren't that much interested in chow. For one thing, the Acad-emy was testing experimental depth rations with a faint-ly bilgy taste; for another, we both wanted to see the sun rise over the open sea.
 It was still a long way off; the stars were still bright overhead, though the horizon was all edged with color now. We stood almost alone on the long, dark deck. We walked to the side of the ship and held the rail with both hands. At the fantail a tender was unloading two fathom-eters to measure and check our dives from the deck of the sub-sea raft itself. A working crew was hoisting one of them onto the deck; both of them would be installed there and used, manned by upperclassmen in edenite pressure suits to provide a graphic, permanent record of our qual-ifications.

            The tender chugged away and the working crew began to bolt down the first of the fathometers. Bob and I turned and looked forward, down at the inky water.

            He said suddenly: "You'll make it, Jim. You don't need any depth shots!"
 "So will you."
 He looked at me without speaking. Then he shook his head. "Thanks, Jim. I wish I believed you." He stared out across the water, his brow wrinkled. It was an old, old story, his fight to conquer the effects of skin-diving. "The raptures of the depths. It's a pretty name, Jim. But an
 ugly thing ---" He stood up and grinned. "I'll lick it.
 I've got to!"
 I didn't know what to say; fortunately, I didn't have to say anything. Another cadet came across the deck toward us. He spoke to us and stood beside me, looking out at the black mirror of the water and the stars that shim-mered in it, colored by the rim of light around the sky. I didn't recognize him; a first-year man, obviously, but not from our own crew.
 "How strange to see," he said, almost speaking to himself. "Is it always like this?"
 Bob and I exchanged looks. A lubber, obviously— from some Indiana town, perhaps, getting his first real look at the sea. I said, a little condescendingly, "We're used to it. Is this your first experience with deep water?"
 "Deep water?" He looked at me with surprise. Then he shook his head. "It isn't the water I'm talking about. It's the sky. You can see so far! And the stars, and the sun coming up. Are there always so many stars?"
 Bob said curtly, "Usually there are a lot more. Haven't you ever seen stars before?"
 The strange cadet shook his head. There was an odd hush of amazement in his voice. "Very seldom."
 We both stared. Bob muttered, "Who are you?"

 "Craken," he said. "David Craken." His dark eyes turned to me. "I know you. You're Jim Eden. Your uncle is Stewart Eden—the inventor of edenite."

            I nodded, a little embarrassed by the eager awe in his voice. I was proud of my uncle's power-filmed edenite armor, that turns pressure back on itself so that men can reach the floors of the sea; but my uncle had taught me not to boast of it.

            "My father used to know your uncle," David Craken
 told me quickly. "A long time ago. When they were both trying to solve the problem of the pressure of the
 Deep ---"

            He broke off suddenly. I stared at him, a little angrily. Was he trying to tell me that my uncle had had some-one else's help in developing edenite? But it wasn't so; Stewart would never have hesitated to say so if it were true, and he had never mentioned another man.

            I waited for the stranger to explain; but there was no explanation from him, only a sudden, startled gasp.
 "What's the matter?" Bob Eskow demanded.
 David Craken was staring out across the water. It was still smooth and as black as a pool of oil, touched with shimmers of color from the coming sun. But something had frightened him.
 He pointed. I saw a faint swirl of light and a spreading patch of ripples, several hundred yards from the gym ship, out toward the open sea. Nothing more.
 "What was that?" he gasped.
 Bob Eskow chortled. "He saw something!" he told me. "I caught a glimpse of it myself—looked like a school of tuna. From the Bermuda Hatchery, I suppose." He grinned at the other cadet. "What did you think it was, a sea serpent?"
 David Craken looked at us without expression.
 "Why, yes," he said. "I thought it might be."

            The way he said it! It was as though it were perfectly possible that there really had been a sea-serpent there, coming up off the banks below the Bermuda shallows. He spoke as though sea-serpents were real and familiar; as one of us might have said, "Why, yes, I thought it might be a shark."

            Bob said harshly: "Cut out the kidding. You don't mean that. Or—if you did, how did you get into the Academy?"

            David Craken glanced at him, then away. For a long moment he leaned forward across the rail, staring toward the spreading ripples. The phosphorescence was gone, and now there was nothing more to see.

            He turned to us and shrugged. He smiled faintly. "Per-haps it was a tuna school. I hope so."
 "I'm sure it was!" said Bob. "There aren't any seaserpents at the Academy. That's a silly superstition!"
 David Craken said, after a moment, "I'm not superstitious, Bob. But believe me, there are things under the sea
 that ---- Well, things you might not believe."
 "Son," Bob said sharply, "I don't need to be told about the sub-sea Deeps by any lubber! I've been there— haven't we, Jim?"
 I nodded. Bob and I had been together through Thetis Dome in far, deep Marinia itself—the nation of under-water dome cities, lying deep beneath the dark Pacific, where both of us had fought and nearly lost against the Sperrys.
 "The Sub-Sea Fleet has explored the oceans pretty thoroughly," Bob went on. "They haven't turned up any sea-serpents that I know of. Oh, there are strange things, I grant you—but man put those things there! There are tubeways running like subways under the ocean floor, and modern cities under the domes, and sub-sea prospectors roving over the ocean floor; and there aren't any sea-serpents, because they would have been seen! It's crazy superstition, and let me tell you, we don't believe in these superstitions here at the Academy."
 "Perhaps you should," said David Craken.
 "Wake up, boy!" cried Bob. "I'm telling you I've been in the Deeps—don't try to tell me about them. The only time either Jim or I ever heard the words 'sea-serpent' used, the whole time we were in Marinia, was by silly old yarn-spinners, trying to cadge drinks by telling lies. Where do you hear stories like that, Craken? Out in Iowa or Kansas, where you came from?"
 "No," said David Craken. "That isn't where I
 came from." He hesitated, looking at us queerly. "I—I was born in Marinia," he told us. "I've lived there all my life, nearly four miles down."

 

 The Looters of the Sea        

At the bow, the stubby little sub-sea tugs were puffing and straining at the cables, towing us at a slow and powerful nine knots toward the off-shore submarine slopes. It was full daybreak now, and the sky was a wash of color, the golden sun looming huge ahead of us, wreathed in the film of cloud at the horizon.

 Bob Eskow said: "Marinia? You? You're from -----     But
 what are you doing here?"
 David Craken said gravely: "I was born near Kermadec Dome, in the South Pacific. I came to the Academy as an exchange student, you see. There are a few of us here— from Europe, from Asia, from South America. And even me, from Marinia."
 "I know that. But ----- "
 Craken said, with a flash of humor: "But you thought I was a lubber who'd never seen the sea. Well, the fact of the matter is that until two months ago I'd never seen anything else. I was born four miles down. That's why the sky and the sun and the stars seem—well, just as fantastic to me as sea serpents apparently are to you."
 "Don't kid me!" Bob flashed. "The sea-bottoms have been well explored ---"
 "No." He looked at us almost imploringly, praying us to believe him. "They have not. There are a handful of cities, tied together with the tubes. There are explorers and prospectors in all the Deeps, an occasional deep-sea farm, a few miles away from the dome cities. But the floor of the sea, Bob, is three times larger than the whole Earth's dry-land area. Microsonar can find some things; visual observation can find a few more. But the rest of the sea-bottom is as scarcely populated and as unknown as Antarctica...."
 The warning klaxon sounded, and that was the end of our chat.
 We raced across the deck toward the hatchways, even while the voice of sea coach Blighman rattled out of the loudspeaker:
 "Clear the deck. Clear the deck. All cadets report for depth shots. We dive in ten minutes."
 A dark, lean cadet joined us as we ran. "David," he called, "I lost you! We must go for the injections now!"
 David said: "Meet my friend, Eladio Angel."
 "Hi," Bob panted as we trotted along, and I nodded.
 "Laddy's an exchange student, like me."
 "From Marinia too?" I asked.
 "No, no!" he cried, grinning. His teeth flashed very
 white. "From Peru. As far from Marinia as from here is
 my home. I ----- "
 He stopped, queuing up at happening. The working crew was yelling for Sea Coach Blighman.
 We turned to look toward the stern. Lieutenant Blighman, his shark's eyes flashing, came boiling up out of the hatchway. We scattered out of his way as he raced toward the stern.
 One of the fathometers was missing.
 We could hear the excited cries of the working crew. They had been securing the first of the fathometers on deck, where it would provide a constant record of our dives. The second, still on the landing staring toward the stern. We were the hatchways, but something was stage—was gone. Gone, when no one was looking. Nearly a hundred pounds of sea-tight casing and instruments; and it was gone.

            We lined up to get our shots. Everyone was talking
 about the missing fathometer. "The working crew," Captain Fairfane said wisely. "They didn't lash it. A swell
 came along and ----- "

            "There was no swell," said David Craken, almost to himself.
 Fairfane glowered. "Ten-hut!" he barked. "There's too much noise in this line!"
 We quieted down; but David Craken was right. There had been no swell, no way for the hundred-pound instrument to fall over the side of the landing stage. It was
 just—gone. And it wasn't the first such incident, I remembered. The week before, a sub-sea dory, pneumatic
 powered, big enough for one man, had astonishingly dis
 appeared from the recreation beach. Possibly, I thought excitedly, the two disappearances were connected! Some
 one in a sub-sea dory could have slipped up behind the
 gym ship, surfaced while the work crew was busy on
 deck, stolen the fathometer ----

            No. It was impossible. For one thing, the dory was not fast enough to catch even the waddling raft we were on; for another, the microsonars would have spotted it. Pos-sibly a very fast skin-diver, lying in wait in our path and vectoring in to our course in the microsonar's blind spot, could have done it, but it was ridiculous to think of a skin-diver out that far on the Atlantic.

            I thought for a moment of the fantastic remark David Craken had made—the sea serpent. ...
 But that was ridiculous.
 The diving bells jangled, and the ungainly sub-sea raft tipped and wallowed down under the surface. Above us, the sub-sea tugs would be cruising about, one of the surface, one at our own level, to guard against wandering vessels and, if necessary, to render emergency rescue serv-ice.
 We were ready for our qualifying dives.
 The injections were a mild sting, a painful rubbing, and that was all. I didn't feel any different after they were over. Bob was wincing and trying not to show it; but he was cheerful enough as we raced from the sickbay to our diving-gear lockers.
 The gym ship was throbbing underfoot as its little auxiliary engines, too small to make it a sea-going craft under its own power, took over the job of maintaining depth and station. I could smell the faint, sharp odor of the ship itself, now that the fresh air from the surface was cut off. I could almost see, in my mind's eye, the green waves foaming over the deck, and I could feel all the mystery and vastness of the sub-sea world we were enter-ing.
 Bob nudged me, grinning. He didn't have to speak; I knew what he was feeling. The sea!

 ii          Cadet Captain Fairfane broke in on us. I had seen him talking excitedly to Sea Coach Blighman, but I hadn't paid much attention; I thought it might have been about the missing fathometer.

            But it was not. Fairfane came aggressively up to me, his good-looking face angry, his eyes blazing. "Eden! I want to talk to you."

            "Yessir!" I rapped out.
 "Never mind the sir. This is man-to-man."
 I was surprised. Roger Fairfane and I were not

            particu-larly close friends. He had been quite friendly when Bob and I first came back to his class—then, without warning, cold. Bob's notion was that he was afraid I would go after his place as cadet captain, though that didn't seem likely; the post came as a result of class standings and athletic attainment, and Fairfane had an impressive record. But Bob didn't like him anyhow—perhaps because he thought Roger Fairfane had too much money. His father was with one of the huge sub-sea shipping companies—Roger nev-er said exactly what his position was, but he made it sound important.

            "What do you want, Roger?" I hung my sea jacket in the locker and turned to talk to him.
 "Eden," he said sharply, "we're being cheated, you and I!"
 "Cheated?" I stared at him.
 "That's right! This Craken kid, he swims like a devilfish! With him against us, we haven't got a chance."
 I said: "Look, Roger, this isn't a race. It doesn't matter if David Craken can take the pressure a few fathoms
 deeper than you and ----- "
 "It may not matter to you, but it matters to me. Listen, Eden, he isn't even an American! He's a transfer student from the sea. He knows more about sea pressure than the coach does! I want you to go to Lieutenant Blighman and protest. Tell him it isn't fair to have Craken swimming against us!"
 "Why don't you protest yourself, if you feel that
 way?"
 "Why, Jim!" Fairfane looked hurt. "It just wouldn't
 look right—me being cadet captain and all. Besides
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------"
 Bob broke in: "Besides, you already did, and he turned you down. Right?"

 Roger Fairfane scowled. "Maybe so. I didn't actually protest, I just—— Well, what's the difference? He'll listen to you, Eden. He might think I'm prejudiced."

            "Aren't you?" Bob snapped.
 "Yes, I am!" Roger Fairfane said angrily. "I'm a better man than he is, and better than his pet Peruvian too! That's why I resent being made to look like a fool when he's in his natural element. We're supposed to be diving against men, Eskow—not against fish!"
 Bob was getting angry, I could see. I touched his arm to auiet him down. I said: "Sorry, Roger. I don't think I can help you."
 "But you're Stewart Eden's nephew! Listen to me, Jim, if you go to Blighman he'll pay attention."
 That was something Roger Fairfane hadn't learned, regardless of the grades he got in his studies. I was Stewart Eden's nephew—and that, along with five cents, would buy me a nickel's worth of candy bars at the Academy. The Academy doesn't care who your uncle is; the Academy cares who you are and what you can do.
 I said: "I've got to get my gear on. Sorry."
 "You'll be sorry before you're through with Craken!"
 Roger Fairfane blazed. "There's something funny about
 him. He knows more about the Deeps than ------ "
 He stopped short, glared at us, and turned away.
 Bob and I looked at each other and shrugged. We didn't have time to talk by then, the other cadets were already falling in by crews, ready to go to the locks.
 We hurried into our diving gear. It was simple enough— flippers for the feet, mouthpiece and goggles for the face, the portable lung on the back.
 It was a late-issue electrolung, one of the new types that generates oxygen by the electrolysis of sea water. Dechlorinators remove the poison gases from the salt. It saves weight; it extends the range considerably—for water is eight-ninths oxygen by weight, and there is an endless supply, as long as the strontium atomic battery holds out to provide the electric current.
 But Bob put his on reluctantly. I knew why. As the old early lung divers had found, pure oxygen was chancy; for those who were prone to experience "the raptures of the depths," oxygen in too great strength seemed to bring on seizures earlier and more violently than ordinary air. Perhaps the injections would help... •

            We filed into the lock in squads of twenty men, our fins slapping the deck. We were issued tight thermo-suits there —first proof that this was no ordinary skin-diving expe-dition; we would be going deep enough so that the water would be remorselessly cold as well as crushingly heavy above us.

            We sat on the wet benches around the rim of the low, gloomy dome of the lock and Coach Blighman gave us our final briefing:

            "Each of you has a number. When we flood the lock and open the sea door, you are to swim to the bow super-structure, find your number, punch the button under it. The light over your number will go out, proving that you have completed the test. Then swim back here and come into the lock.

            "That's all there is to it. There's a guide line in case
 any of you are tempted to get lost. If you stick to the
 guide line, you can't get lost. If you don't ---"

            He stared around at us, his shark's eyes cold as the sea.
 "If you don't," he rasped, "you'll put the sub-sea

            serv-ice to the expense of a search party for you—or for your body."
 His eyes roved over us, waiting.
 No one said anything. There wasn't really much chance
 of our being lost ---
 Or was there? One of the fathometers was missing. In the hookup as used on the gym ship, it was a part of the microsonar; without it, it might be very hard indeed to locate one dazed and wandering cadet, overcome by depth-narcosis. . . .
 I resolved to keep an eye on Bob.
 "Any questions?" Coach Blighman rapped out. There were no questions. Very well. Secure face-pieces! Open Sea Valves One and Three!"
 We snapped our face-lenses and mouthpieces into place.
 The cadet at the control panel saluted and twisted two plastic knobs. The sea poured in.

 It came in two great jets of white water, foaming and crashing against the bulkhead. Blinding spray distorted our lenses, and the cold brine surged and pulled around our feet.

            Coach Blighman had retreated to the command port, where he stood watching behind thick glass. As the lock filled we could hear his voice, sounding hollow and far away through the water, coming over the communicators: "Sea door open!"

            Motors whined, and the sea door irised wide. "Count and out!"
 Bob Eskow was number-four man in our crew,

 just before me. I could hear him rap sharply four times on the bulkhead as he squeezed through the iris door. I rapped five times and followed.       The raptures of the depths!
 But they weren't dangerous, they were—being alive. All of the work and strain at the Academy, all of my life in fact, was pointed toward this. I was in the sea.
 I took a breath and felt my body start to soar toward the surface, a hundred feet above; I exhaled, and my body dipped back toward the deck of the sub-sea raft. The electrolung chuckled and whispered behind my ear, measuring my breathing, supplying oxygen to keep me alive, a ten-story building's height below the waves and the sky. It was broad daylight above, but down here was only a pale greenish wash of light.
 The deck of the gym ship—all gray steel and black shadow on the surface—was transformed into a Sinbad's cave, gray-green floor beneath us, sea-green, transparent walls to the sides. The guide line was a glowing, greenish snake stretched tautly out ahead of me, into the greenish glow of the water. There was no sense of being under-water, no feeling of being "wet"; I was flying.
 I kicked and surged rapidly ahead of the guide line without touching it.
 Bob was just ahead, swimming slowly, fingers almost touching the guide line. I dawdled impatiently behind him, while he doggedly swam to the bow superstructure and fumbled around the scoring rig. Our numbers were there, with the Troyon tubes glowing blue over the signal  buttons. They stood out clearly in the wash of green ligjit, but Bob seemed to be having trouble.             For a moment I thought of helping him—but there is an honor code at the Academy, strict and sharp: Each cadet does his own tasks, no one can coast on someone else's work. And then he found the button, and his num-ber went out.

            I followed him with growing concern, back along the guide line. He was finding it difficult to stay with the guide; twice I saw him clutch at it and pull himself along, as his swimming strokes became erratic.

            And this at a hundred feet! The bare beginning of the qualifying dives!
 What would happen at three hundred? At five?
 Finally we were all back inside the lock, and the seapumps began their deep, purring hum. As soon as the water was down to our waists Coach Blighman rasped:
 "Eden, Eskow! What were you jellyfish doing? You held up the whole crew!"
 We stood dripping on the slippery duckboards, waiting for the tongue-lashing; but we were spared it. One of the other cadets cried out sharply and splashed to the floor. The sea-medics were there almost before the water was out of the lock. I grabbed him, holding his head out of the last of the water; they took him from me and quickly, roughly, stripped his face-piece and goggles away. His face was convulsed with pain; he was unconscious.
 Sea Coach Blighman strode in, splashing and raging. Even before the sea medics had finished with him, he roared: "Ear plugs! Theres one in every crew! I've told you a hundred times—I've dinned it in to you, over and over—ear plugs are worse than useless below a fathom! Men, if you can't take the sea, don't try to hide behind ear plugs; all they'll do is let the pressure build up a little more—a very little more—and then they'll give in, and you'll have a burst eardrum, and you'll be out of the Academy! Just like Dorritt, here!"
 It was too bad for Dorritt—but it saved us for the moment.
 But only for the moment.
 We weren't more than a yard out of the lock when Bob swayed and stumbled.

  I caught his arm, trying to keep him on his feet at least until we were out of range of Coach Blighman's searching eyes. "Bob! Buck up, man! What's the matter?"

            He looked at me with a strange, distant expression; and then without warning his eyes closed and he fell out of my grasp to the floor.

            They let me come with him to the sick-bay; they even let me take one end of the stretcher.
 He woke up as we set the stretcher down and turned to catch my eye. For a moment I thought he had lost his mind. "Jim? Jim? Can you hear me?"
 "I can hear you, Bob. I --- -"
 "You're so far away!" His eyes were glazed, staring at me. "Is that you, Jim? I can't see ------There's a green
 fog, and lightning flashes ------ Jim, where are you?"
 I said, trying to reassure him: "You're in the sick-bay, Bob. Lieutenant Saxon is right here. We'll fix you up
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------"
 He closed his eyes as one of the sea medics jabbed him with a needle. It put him to sleep, almost at once. But before he went under I heard him whisper: "Narcosis.... I knew I'd never make it."
 Lieutenant Saxon looked at me over his unconscious form. "Sorry, Eden," he said.
 "You mean he's washed out, sir?"
 He nodded. "Pressure sensitive. Sorry, but -------
 You'd
 better get back to your crew."

 

 Dive for Record!      

At seven hundred feet I swam out into blackness. The powerful sub-sea floodlamps of the gym ship could no more than shadow the gloomy deck. There was no trace of light from the bright sun overhead, and only the dimmest corona, far distant, to mark the bow superstruc-ture.
 I felt—dizzy, almost sick.
 Was it the pressure, I wondered, or was it my
 friend Bob Eskow, back in the sick-bay? I had left him and gone back to the trials, but my thoughts stayed with him.

            I tried to put him out of my mind, and stroked forward through the gloomy depths toward the faintly glowing bow superstructure, where my number had to be put out.

            There were only seventeen of us left—the rest had completed a few dives and been disqualified by the sea-medics from going on, or had disqualified themselves. Or, like Bob Eskow, had cracked up.

            Two were left from our original twenty-man crew— myself and one other—and fifteen from all the other crews combined. I recognized David Craken and the boy from Peru, Eladio; there was Cadet Captain Fairfane, glowering fiercely at the two foreign cadets; and a few more.

            I left them behind and stroked out. There was no feeling of pressure on me, for the pressure inside my body was fully as great as the pressure without. The chuckling, whispering electrolung on my back supplied gas under pressure, filled my lungs and my bloodstream. Clever chemical filters sucked out every trace of chlorine, nitrogen and carbon-dioxide, so that there was no risk of being poi-soned or of "the bends"—that joint-crippling sickness that came after pressure that had killed and maimed so many early divers.

            A column of water seven hundred feet tall was squeez-ing me, but my own body was pushing back; I couldn't feel the pressure itself. But I felt ancient, weary, ex-hausted, without knowing why. I was drained of energy. Every stroke of the flippers on my feet, every movement of my arms, seemed to take all the strength in my body. Each time I completed a stroke it seemed utterly impos-sible that I would find the energy and strength necessary for another. I would be so much easier to let myself drift....

            But somehow I found the strength. And somehow, slowly, the greenish corona at the bow grew nearer. Its shape appeared; the fiercely radiant floodlights brightened and took form, and I began to be able to make out the rows of numbers.

            Fumblingly I found the button and saw my own number flash and wink out. I turned and wearily, slowly,  made my way back along the guide line, into the lock once more.             Nine hundred feet.
 Only eleven of us had completed the seven-hundred-foot dive. And the sea medics, with their quick, sure tests, eliminated six out of the eleven. Eladio was one of those to go—Lt. Saxon's electro-stethoscope had detected the faint stirrings of a heart murmur; he curtly refused the Peruvian permission to go out again.
 Five of us left—and two of the five showed unmistak-able signs of collapse as soon as the water came pounding in; cadets in armor floundered out of the emergency locks and bore them away while the rest of us remained to feel the whining tingle of the motors opening the sea-gates and see the deeps open to us once more.
 "The rest of us." There were only three now. Myself. And Cadet Captain irri-table, tense, but Craken, the cadet from Marinia.
 There was not even a glow from the superstructure now. I dragged myself through the water, doggedly con-centrating on the gleam of the guide line—how dully, how feebly it gleamed under the nine hundred feet!
 It seemed as though I were trying to slide through jelly, for hours, making no progress. Suddenly I noticed some-thing ahead—the faint, distant glimmer of lights (the bow floodlights—visible on the surface for a score of miles, but down here for only as many feet!) And outlined against them, some sort of weird, unrecognizable sea beings....
 There were two of them. I looked at them incuriously and then somehow I realized what they were: David Crak-en and Roger Fairfane. They had left the lock a moment before me, they had reached their goals and they were on their way back.
 They passed me almost without a glance. I struggled onward wearily; by the time I had found my button and turned out my number, they were out of sight again. Roger Fairfane—worn, strained, grimly determined. And David I saw them again halfway back—or so I thought. And then I realized that it could not be them. Something was moving in the water near me. I looked  more closely, somehow summoning the strength to be curious.   Fish. Dozens of little fish, scurrying through the water, directly across my course along the guide line.
 There is nothing strange about seeing fish in the Ber-muda waters, not even at nine hundred feet. But these fish seemed—frightened. I stared wearily at them, resting one hand on the guide line while I thought about the strangeness of their being frightened. I glanced back toward where they had come from. ...
 I saw something, something I could not believe.
 I could see—very faintly—the line of shadow against a deeper shadow that was the port rail of the gym ship. And traced in blacker shadow still, something hovered over that rail. There was almost no light, but it seemed to have a definite shape, and an unbelievable one.
 It looked like—like a head. An enormous head, lifted out of the blackness below the deck. It was longer than a man, and it seemed to be looking at me through tiny, slitted eyes, yawning at me with a whole nightmare of teeth. . ..
 I suppose I should have been terrified. But nine hun-dred feet down, with armor, I didn't have the strength to feel terror.
 I hung there, one hand resting on the guide line, star-ing, not believing and yet not doubting.
 And then it was gone—if it had ever been there.
 I stared at the place where it had been, or where I had thought I had seen it, waiting for something to happen— for it to appear again, or for something to convince me that it had been only imagination.
 Nothing happened.
 I don't know how long I waited there. Then, slowly, I remembered. I was not supposed to stay there. I was supposed to be doing something. I had a definite goal. I was on my way back to the lock ---
 Painfully I forced myself into motion again.
 That brightly gleaming line seemed a million miles long. I kept close to it, swimming as hard as I could, until the stern lights took form and the dome of the lock itself bulged out of the dark.
 I dragged myself inside the sea-gate and looked back.

  There was nothing there.
 The sea-gates moaned and whined and closed, and the pumps forced the water out.     I don't know what the other two had seen—nothing, I suppose—but they looked as beaten, as exhausted as I did, when the last of the water was gone and Coach Blighman came swinging in from the escape hatch.

            He was grinning, and when he spoke his voice resound-ed like thunder in the little room.
 "Congratulations, men!" he boomed. "You're real sea-cows, you've proved that! The three of you have qualified at nine hundred feet—nine hundred feet! —and that's a record! In all the years I've been sea coach at the Acade-my, there haven't been half a dozen cadets to make the grade this far down—and now there are three of you in one class!"
 I was beginning to catch my breath. I said: "Coach. Lieutenant Blighman, I ----- "
 "Just a minute, Eden," he said sharply. "Before you say anything, I want to ask you all something." I wasn't sure what I had been going to say—something about the thing I had seen, or thought I had seen, I suppose. But in the brightly lightly little room, with Blighman talking about records, it seemed so utterly remote, that less and less could I believe that I actually had seen it.
 Blighman was saying: "You've all qualified, no question about that. But Lieutenant Saxon has asked if any of you are willing to try another dive two hundred feet farther down. It's a strictly volunteer operation—no objections if any of you don't want to do it. But he has hopes that his new injections are going to make it possible to establish deeper and deeper records; and he would like to try a little more. What do you say, men?"
 He looked us over, the shark's eyes glowing. He stopped at me. "Eden? Are you all right? You look like you might be getting some kind of reaction."
 "I—I think perhaps I am, sir." I hesitated, trying to think of a way to tell him just what that reaction was. But—a giant serpentine head! How could I tell him that?
 He didn't give me a chance. He barked: "All right, Eden, that lets you out. Don't argue with me. You've  made a splendid showing already—no sense going on unless you're sure you can take it. Craken?"          David said, almost too quietly to hear, "Yes, sir. I'm ready."
 I remembered, looking at him, what he had said about sea serpents, just a short time before while we were still on the surface. And what I had said to him! For a moment I was tempted to warn him that his sea serpent
 was really there ---
 But probably it was only an effect of pressure and the injection, anyhow. There were no sea serpents! Everyone
 knew that _
 "Fairfane?"
 Roger Fairfane said, with an effort: "I'm okay. Let's dive."
 Sea Coach Blighman looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. Then he shrugged. I could read his mind as clearly as though he had spoken. Fairfane didn't look too well, that was sure—but, Blighman had decided, if there was anything wrong the sea medics would spot it, and if there wasn't, it didn't matter how the Cadet Captain looked.
 The sea medics trotted in, made their quick checks, and reported both David and Roger in shape to go on.
 Then Blighman curtly ordered the sea medics and me out of the lock. As I left I saw Roger Fairfane turn to glare at David, and I heard him mutter something.
 It sounded like: "You'll never make a jellyfish out of me!"

            Eleven hundred feet.
 Coach Blighman let me come with him into the control room to watch Fairfane and David Craken swim their eleven-hundred-foot test.
 The ship's motors rumbled and sang, bringing us down another two hundred feet, trimming the ballast tanks. It was important that the ship be kept dead still in the water—if it had been moving when any of us were swim-ming our trials, we would have been swept away by the motion of the water. The diving vanes fore and aft were useless for that reason; the trim of the ship depended only on the tanks.

  Finally it was adjusted, and the lock was flooded. I could see the sea-gates iris open—the round portals spinning wide like the opening of a camera lens. David and Roger came slowly out of the lock.

            The thick lenses in the observation port made them look distorted and small. They swam painfully away into the gloom, queer little frogs, slower and more clumsy than the fish.

            As soon as they were out of sight I began to feel guilty.
 Crazy or not, I should have warned them of what

            I thought I saw. I waited, and they didn't come back—only seconds had passed, after all.
 I began to squirm.
 Hesitantly I said, "Sir."
 Blighman paid no attention to me.
 I blurted out: "Coach Blighman! That reaction—I didn't tell you, but what I thought I saw was ----- "
 "There they are!" he cried. He hadn't heard a word I was saying. "There they come—both of them! They've made it!"
 I looked, and I saw them too—the pair of them, com-ing slowly, limping, out of the dark. They kicked slug-gishly toward us and it seemed to me that Roger Fairfane was in trouble.
 Both of them moved slowly; but Fairfane looked weak, strained, erratic.
 David Craken was swimming close alongside him and just above, keeping watch on him. They swam into the lock above us and I heard the doors whine shut.
 It was over. I was glad I hadn't said anything about sea serpents. They had returned safely, the tests were at an end, and now we could go back to our life at the Academy.
 Or so I thought....
 The coach splashed in before all the water was out, and I was at his heels. Roger Fairfane was sprawled on the bench, exhausted; David Craken was looking at him anxi-ously.
 Blighman said exultantly: "Fine swimming, men! You're setting new records." He looked sharply at Roger. "Any reactions?"

 Roger Fairfane blinked at him glassily. "I—I'm okay," he said.
 "You, Craken?"
 "I'm perfectly well, sir," said David. "I tried to explain to Lieutenant Saxon that I didn't need the shots at all. I am not sensitive to pressure."
 Blighman looked at them, speculating. He said: "Do you feel fit for another dive?"
 I couldn't help it. I burst in: "Sir, they've gone two hundred feet farther down already than the regulations

            "Eden!" The voice was a whiplash. "I am in command of these tests! It's up to me to decide what the regulations say."

            "Yes, sir. But ---"
 "Eden!"
 "Yes, sir."
 He stared at me for a moment with the cold

 shark's eyes, then he turned back to Roger and David. "Well?" he asked.          Roger Fairfane looked white and worn, but he man-aged to get the strength to scowl—not at Coach Blighman, but at David. He said: "I'm ready, Coach. I'll show him who's a jellyfish!"

            David spoke up, his voice concerned. "Roger, listen. I don't think you ought to try it. You had a tough time
 making it back to the lock at eleven hundred feet. At
 thirteen hundred ---"

 "Coach!" cried Roger. "Get him off me, will you? He's trying to talk me out of a record because he can't swim me out of it!"             "No, please!" said David. "If the record is so impor-tant, I'll stop too. We'll leave it a tie. But it isn't safe for you, Roger. Can't you see that? It's different for me. I was born four miles down; pressure isn't important to
 me."

 "I want to go through with it," said Roger doggedly.      And that was the way it was. Coach Blighman made the sea medics double-check both of them this time. Both came up with clear records—no physical reactions at all. Were there mental reactions?—the narcosis of the depths?  There was no way to tell, for anyone except David and Roger themselves. And both of them denied it. The process of descending and trimming ship again seemed to take forever.
 Thirteen hundred feet!
 We were a quarter of a mile down now. On every square inch of the sturdy edenite hull of our sea-raft a force of more than five hundred pounds were pressing.
 And that same force would be squeezing the weak, human flesh of David and Roger as soon as they began their test.
 I heard the sea-gates whine open.
 David came out—slowly, but sure of himself. After a moment Roger came into sight behind him. They both headed down along the guide line toward the invisible bow superstructure.
 But Roger was in trouble.
 I saw him veer away from the guide line, toward the starboard rail. He caught himself, jerked convulsively back, then seemed just to drift for a moment. His arms and legs were moving but without co-ordination.
 "He's reacting!" Sea Coach Blighman said sharply. "I
 was afraid of that! But the tests were all right ---"
 Behind me the voice of Lieutenant Saxon said crisply: "Call him back!" I hadn't even seen Saxon come into the control room but I was glad for his presence then.
 Blighman nodded abruptly. "You are right. Keep an
 eye on him ---- I'll try to reach him."
 He trotted over to the deep-sea loud-hailer that would
 send a concentrated cone of vibrations through the water. Near the surface it could be heard by men in skin-diving outfits. But this far down ---
 Evidently pressures of couldn't even vi-brate, with five hundred pounds squeezing at every inch of it. But whatever the cause, Roger didn't come back. He jerked convulsively and began to swim—steadily, slowly, evenly.
 And in the wrong direction.
 He was headed straight for the port rail and the depths beyond.
 "Emergency crew! Emergency crew!" bellowed
 Bligh
 it wasn't penetrating the enormous the depths. Perhaps the diaphragm  man, and cadets in edenite depth armor clanked cumber-somely toward the emergency hatches.             But David Craken turned, looked for Roger, found him—and came back. He swam to overtake him, caught him still within sight of our observation ports.

            He seemed to be having difficulties; it looked as though Roger was struggling, but it was hard to see clearly.

            But whatever the struggle, David won. They came back, David partly towing Captain Roger Fairfane, into the lock.

            Once more we had to wait for the pumps.
 When we got inside the gloomy lock, Roger was lying on the wet bench with his goggles off, the mouthpiece hissing away as it hung from his shoulder harness. He looked pale as death; his eyes were bloodshot and glazed.
 "Fairfane, are you all right?" rapped the
 coach.
 Roger Fairfane took a deep breath. He said, choking, "He—he slugged me! That jellyfish slugged me!"
 David Craken blazed: "Sir, that's not true! Roger was obviously in difficulty, so I ---"
 "Never mind, Cracken," snapped Blighman. "I saw what was happening out there. You may have saved his life. In any case, that's the end of the tests. Get out of your gear, all of you."
 Roger Fairfane hauled himself erect. "Lieutenant Blighman," he said formally, controlling his rage, "I pro
 test this! I was attacked by Cadet Craken because he was afraid I'd beat him. I intend to take this up with the cadet court and ---"
 "Report to sick-bay!" cried Blighman. "Whether you know it or not, you're reacting to Saxon's serum or to pressure! Don't let me hear any more from you now!"
 He left. Grudgingly and angrily, but he left.
 And once again I thought that was an end to the tests. And once again I was wrong.
 For David Craken, looking weary but determined, said: "Sir, I request permission to complete the thirteen-hundred-foot test."
 "What?" demanded Blighman, for once off balance.
 "I request permission to complete the test, sir," David repeated doggedly. "I didn't strike Captain Fairfane. It  would be fairly simple for me to complete the test. And I request permission to demonstrate it."     Blighman hesitated, scowling. "Craken, you're at thir-teen hundred feet. That isn't any child's game out there,"

            "I know, sir. I'm a native of Marinia. I've had experi-ence with pressure before."
 Blighman looked him over thoughtfully. Then he nodded abruptly.
 "Very well, Craken. Lieutenant Saxon says these tests are important to help establish his serum. I suppose that justifies it. You may complete your dive."
 We went down once more to the control chamber.
 The sea-gates opened above us, and I watched David come swimming out into the cold blackness of the water at a quarter of a mile's depth.
 He looked as slow and clumsy as human swimmers always do under the water, but he stroked regularly, evenly, down the glowing guide line until he was out of sight.
 We waited for him to return.
 We waited for seconds. Then minutes.
 He swam down the guide line past the threshold of invisibility. And he never came back.

 

 "The Tides Don't Wait!"    

The next day it all seemed like a bad dream. There was no time for dreaming, though. It was Academy Day, and the big inspection and review had us all on the hop.
 Over the sea-coral portals of the Administration Build-ing, etched in silver, was the motto of the Academy: The Tides Don't Wait! The tides don't wait for anything—not for a lost shipmate, not for tragedy, not for any human affair. David Craken was gone, but the Academy went on.
 We fell in, in full-dress sea-scarlet uniforms, on the blindingly white crushed coral of the Ramp. Overhead the bright Bermuda sun shone fiercely out of a sky full of fleecy clouds. The cadet officers snapped their orders, the long files and crews went through the manual of arms and wheeled off in parade formation. As we passed David Craken's crew I risked a glance. There was not even a gap to mark where he should have been. I saw Eladio Angel, his face strained but expressionless as he stood at stiff attention, waiting for the order to march off; David would have been marching beside him.

            But David was—well, the wording of the official notice on our bulletin board was "lost and presumed drowned."

            The band blared into the sub-sea anthem as we wheeled left off the Ramp, boxed the Quadrangle and halted by squads in the center of the square, facing the inspection platform in front of the Ad Building. The sun was murderously hot, though it was not yet noon; but not a man of our class wavered. We stood there while the upperclassmen marched crisply through in their turn; we stood there through the brief address by the Commandant to remind us of the sacredness of the day. We stood there through the exacting man-by-man inspection of the Com-mandant and his officers, as they strolled down the lines, checking weapons, eagle-eyed for a smudged tunic or tarnished button.

            Then it was over and we marched off again by crews, to be dismissed at the end of the Ramp. Bob Eskow and I fell out and began to trot for our quarters—we had just twenty minutes before we were due to fall out again in undress whites for our first class of the day.

            We were stopped by a cadet from the Guards crews. "Eden?" he snapped. "Eskow?"
 That's right," I told him.
 "Report to the Commandant's office, both of you. On the double."
 We stared at each other. The Commandant! But we had done nothing to justify being reprimanded....

            On the double,  lubbers!" the Guard cadet barked. What are you waiting for? The tides don't wait!"

            They called me first. I left Bob sitting at ramrod atten-tion in the Commandant's outer office, opened the door to the private room, took a deep breath and entered. My hat was properly under my arm, my uniform was as nearly perfect as I could make it; at least, I thought, if the Commandant had to call me in, in was nice of him to make it right after a full-dress inspection! I saluted and said, with all the snap I could give it: "Sir, Cadet Eden, James, reporting to the Commandant as ordered!"

            The Commandant, still in his own dress uniform, mopped at his thick neck with a sea-scarlet handkerchief and looked me over appraisingly.

 "All right, Eden," he said after a moment. "Stand at
 ease." He got up and walked wearily to a private door of his office. "Come in, Lieutenant," he called.
 Sea Coach Blighman marched stiffly into the room. The Commandant stood for a moment at the window, looking somberly out at the bright, white beaches and the blue sea beyond. Without turning, he said:
 "Eden, we lost a shipmate of yours yesterday in the diving tests. His name was David Craken. I understand you knew him."
 "Yes, sir. Not very well. I only met him a short time before the dive, sir."
 He turned and looked at me thoughtfully. "But you did know him, Eden. And I'll tell you something you may not know. You are one of the very few cadets in the Academy who can say that. His roommate—Cadet An-gel. You. And just about nobody else. It seems that Cadet Craken, whatever his other traits, did not go in for mak-ing friends."
 I remained silent. When the Old Man wanted me to say something, he would let me know, I was sure of that.
 He looked at me for a moment longer, his solid, ruddy face serious. Then he said: "Lieutenant Blighman, have you anything to add to your report on Cadet Craken?"
 "No, sir," rasped Coach Blighman. "As I told you, as soon as Cadet Craken failed to return in a reasonable time I alerted the bridge and requested a microsonar search. They reported that the microsonar was not fully operative, and immediately beamed the escort tugs, asking them to conduct a search. It took a few minutes for the  tugs to reach us, and by the time they did they could find no trace of Cadet Craken."       I thought of David Craken, out alone in the icy, dark sea, under the squeeze of thirteen hundred feet of water. It was no wonder the tugs had been unable to locate him. A man's body is a tiny thing in the immensity of the sea.

            The Commandant said: "What about the microsonar? What was the trouble with it?"
 Blighman scowled. "Well, sir," said, "I—I don't know that it makes sense."
 "I'll decide that," the Commandant said with an edge to his voice.
 "Yes, sir." Blighman was clearly unhappy; he frowned at me. "In the first place, sir, one of the fathometer rigs was apparently lost from the deck of the gym ship before the dive. Since the microsonar had been adapted to use two fathometers to make an official diving record, that may have affected its efficiency. At any rate, the search room reported a—a ghost image. They had stripped down the sonar to find the trouble when Craken was lost."
 "A ghost image," repeated the Commandant. He looked at me. "Tell Cadet Eden what that image was supposed to be, Lieutenant."
 "Well ---The sonar crew thought it, well,
 looked
 something like a sea serpent."
 The Commandant let the words hang there for a mo-ment.
 "A sea serpent," he repeated. "Cadet Eden, the Lieu-tenant tells me that you said something about a sea ser-pent."
 I said stiffly, "Yes sir. I—I thought I saw something at eleven hundred feet. But it could have been anything, sir.
 It could have been a fish, or just my imagination— narcosis or something like that, sir. But ---- "
 "But you used the term 'sea serpent,' did you not?"
 I swallowed. "Yes, sir."
 "I see," The Commandant sat down at his desk again and looked at his hands. "Cadet Eden," he said, "I've investigated the disappearance of Cadet Craken as thor-oughly as I could. There are several aspects to it on which I have not fully made up my mind. In the first place, there is the loss of the fathometer. True, it was not secured, working slipped over the side. But there have been several such incidents. And in this case it may have cost us the life of a cadet.

            "Second, there is the suggestion that a sea serpent may somehow be involved. I must say, Eden, that I am in-stinctively inclined to think all sea serpents come out of bottles. I've spent forty-six years in the sub-sea service and I've been in some funny places; but I've never seen a sea serpent. The microsonar crew isn't very sure of what they saw—if they saw anything at all—and besides we know that the equipment was operating badly for which I have already disciplined the crew responsible, and it may merely have because of the loss of the fathometer. That puts it up to you. Can you say positively that you saw a sea serpent?"

            I thought rapidly, but there was only one conclusion. "No, sir. It may have been a reaction, either from the depth serum or from narcosis."

            The Commandant nodded. "I thought so. So there remains only point three.
 "Cadet Eden, I have already interviewed Cadet Cap-tain Roger Fairfane. He reports that there was a serious disagreement between Cadet Craken and himself, and it is his opinion after due reflection that Cadet Craken may have been in an unstable mental state at the time of his final dive. In other words, Eden, Captain Fairfane sug-gests that Craken may deliberately have gone over the side and straight down, in order to commit suicide."
 I completely forgot Academy discipline.
 "Sir!" I blazed. "Sir, that's ridiculous! Fairfane's crazy if he thinks David would have killed himself! Why, in the
 first place, the whole fight between them was Fairfane's own doing—and besides David had absolutely no reason to do anything of the sort! He might have been a little— well, odd, sir, keeping to himself and so on, but I'll swear
 he wasn't the kind to commit suicide. Why, he was ---"
 I stopped, suddenly remembering who and where I was. Lieutenant Blighman was frowning fiercely at me, and even the Commandant was looking at me with nar-rowed eyes.
 "Sorry, sir," I said. "But—no, sir, it's impossible. Cadet Craken couldn't have killed himself." The Commandant took a moment to think it over. Then he said:
 "All right, Cadet Eden. If it is of any interest to you, I may say that your Lieutenant Blighman's. In Craken—like yourself, I might mention—is, or was, one of the most promising cadets in the Academy. Dismissed!"
 I saluted, turned and left—but not before I caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Blighman, looking embarrassed. The old shark! I thought to myself, wonderingly. Evident-ly behind those fierce and hungry eyes there was a human being, after all.
 estimate agrees with his opinion Cadet

            Because it was Academy Day, there was only one class that afternoon, and Eladio Angel was in it with me. Since Bob didn't return from the Commandant's office before it was over, Laddy—so David Craken had called him—and I left together.

            We walked toward his quarters, comparing notes on what the Commandant had said to us. It had been about the same for both of us—Laddy was as furious as I at Fairfane's suggestion that David had committed suicide. "That squid Fairfane, Jeem," he said, "he hates greatly. David is beyond question a better diver, no? So when he is lost, the squid must destroy his name." He looked at me searchingly for a moment. "And also," he added, "I do not think David ees dead."

            I stopped and stared at him. "But ----"
 Eladio Angel held up his hand to interrupt me. "No, no," he begged, "do not tell me he is lost. For I know this, Jeem, and also I know David. I cannot say why I think it, but think it I do." He shrugged with a small smile. "But he ees declared missing and presumed to be drowned, that is true. And so no matter what Eladio thinks, Eladio must abide by what the Academy says. So I am packing his things now, Jeem, to send them back to his father near Kermadec Dome." He hesitated, then asked: "Would you—would you care to see something, Jeem?"
 I said, "Well, thanks. But it doesn't seem right to pry."
 "No, no! No prying, Jeem. It is only something
 that you might like to see, Jeem. Nothing personal. A—a thing that David made. It is not only not private, it is hang-ing on the wall for all to see. Perhaps you should see it before I take it down."

            Well, why not? Although I hadn't known David Crak-en well, I thought of him as a friend, and I was curious to see what Laddy Angel was talking about. We went to the room he had shared with David, and I saw it at once.

            The spot over the head of a cadet's bed is his own, to do with as he will. Half the cadets in the Academy have photos of their girl friends hanging there, most of the other half have their mothers' pictures, or photos of sub-sea vessels, or once in a while a signed portrait of some famous submariner or athlete.

            Over David Craken's bed hung a small, unframed water color.
 He had painted it himself; it was signed "DC" in the lower right-hand corner. And it showed ---
 It was a sub-sea scene. A great armored sub-sea creature was bursting out of a tangled forest of undersea plants.
 There was very little about the scene that was familiar,
 or even believable. The vegetation was straftge to me— vast thick leaves, somehow looking luminous against the dark water. The armored thing itself was just as strange, with a very long neck, wicked fanged flippers ---
 But with the same head I had seen over the side of the gym ship—if I had seen anything—eleven hundred feet down.
 And there was something that was odder still:
 When I looked more closely at the picture, I saw that the monster was not alone. Seated on its back, jabbing at it with a long goad like a mahout on an elephant, was a human figure.
 For a moment I had been shocked into believing fan-tastic things. Sea serpents!
 But the human figure put a stop to it. I might have believed in the existence of sea serpents. I might have thought that his picture was some sort of corroboration of what I had thought I had seen and what the sonarmen thought they had picked up and what David had talked about. But the man on the monster's back—that made it pure fantasy, the whole thing, just something that a youth from Marinia had painted to idle away some time.

 I thanked Eladio for letting me see the picture and left. Bob still had not returned from the Commandant's office.
 I went to chow and returned; still no Bob. I began to worry. I had thought it was only to ask him for his report on David's loss that he had been called in; but surely it couldn't have taken that long. I began to fear that it was something worse. Lieutenant Blighman was there with the Commandant; could it be that the sea coach had called Bob in in order to disqualify him? Certainly he was now a borderline case. All of us were required to qualify in one sub-sea sport a year to retain our status in the Academy, and Bob had now washed out in three of the four pos-sibles. The marathon sub-sea swim was still to come, and he would not usually wash out unless he failed in that one too—but what other explanation could there be?
 There was no point in sitting around worrying. I had got an address from Eladio of David Craken's father in Marinia. I sat down and began to write him a letter.
 The address was:
 Mr. J. Craken
 Care of Morgan Wensley, Esq. Kermadec Dome
 Marinia
 There wasn't much I could say, but I was determined to say something. Of course, the Academy would notify the elder Mr. Craken; but I wanted to say something beyond the bare, official radiogram. But on the other hand, it would be foolish to stir up worry and questions by saying anything about sea serpents, or about the dis-agreement with Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane....
 In the end, I merely wrote that, though I hadn't known David long, I felt a deep sense of loss; that he was a brave and skillful swimmer; and that if there was anything I could do, his father had only to ask me.
 As I was sealing the letter Bob came in.
 He looked worn but—not worried, exactly; excited was a better word. I pounced on him with questions. What had happened? Had he been there all this time over David's disappearance? Were there any developments?

            He laughed, and I felt relieved. "Jim, you worry too much. No, there aren't any developments. They asked me about David, all right. I just said I didn't know anything, which was perfectly true."
 "And that took you all this time?"
 His smile vanished. He looked suddenly—excited

            again. But he shook his head. "No, Jim," he said, "that isn't what took me all this time."
 And that was all he said.
 I didn't ask him any more questions. Evidently, I
 thought, Coach Blighman had given him a hard time
 after all. No doubt he had been put through a rough
 session, with both the Coach and the Commandant
 hammering at him, telling him that his record of
 sub-sea qualification was miserably unsatisfactory,
 reminding him that if he didn't qualify in the one
 remaining sub-sea sport activity of the year he
 would wash out. It was no wonder, I thought,
 that he didn't want to talk about it; it must have been
 an unpleasant experience.
 The more I thought of it, the more sure I got that
 that was it.
 And the more sure I got, the wronger I—much
 later— turned out to be.

 

 Visitor from the Sea

That was in October.
 Weeks passed. I got a curt note on the letterhead of Morgan Wensley, from Kermadec Dome. My letter had been received. It would be forwarded to Mr. Craken. The letter was signed by Morgan Wensley.
 Not a word about the disappearance of David Craken. This Morgan Wensley, whoever he was, showed no regret and no interest. As far as he was concerned, and as far as the Academy was concerned, David Craken might never have existed. David's name was stricken from the rolls as "lost." Laddy Angel and I met a few times and talked about him—but what was there to say, after all? And, since we weren't in the same crew, weren't even quartered in the same build-ing, the times we met were fewer and fewer.

            I almost began to forget David myself—for a while. To tell the truth, none of us had much time for brood- ing over the past. Classes, formations, inspections, sports. We were kept busy, minute by minute, and whenever we had an hour's free time we spent it, Bob Eskow and I, down by the shallows, practicing skin-diving. Bob was fiercely determined that when the big marathon under-water swim came up after the holidays he would be in the best shape he could manage. "Maybe I'll wash out, Jim," he told me grimly, sitting and panting on the raft between dives. "But it won't be because I haven't done the best I can!" And he was off again with his goggles in place, stretching his breathing limit as far as it would go. I was hard put to keep up with him. At first he could stay down only a matter of seconds. Then a minute, a minute and a half. Then he was making two-minute dives, and two and a half....
 From earliest childhood I was a three-minute diver, but that was nearly the limit; and by Christmas holidays Bob was able to pace me second for second.
 Without air supply, with only the oxygen in our lungs to keep us going, both of us were going down forty and fifty feet, staying down for as much as three and a half minutes. We worked out a whole elaborate system of trials. We checked out a pair of electrolungs and spent a whole precious Saturday afternoon underwater near the raft, marking distances and depths, setting ourselves goals and targets. Then every succeeding Saturday, in fair weather or foul, we were out there, sometimes in pound-ing rain and skies so gloomy that we couldn't see the underwater markers we had left.
 But it paid off for Bob.
 It showed on him in ways other than increased skill beneath the water. He began to lose weight, to grow leaner and wirier. When Lieutenant Saxon checked him over just before the Christmas holidays he gave Bob a sharp look. "You're the one who passed out in the diving tests?'*

            "Yes, sir."
 "And now you want to kill yourself completely, is that it?" the sea medic blazed. "Look at your chart, man! You've lost twenty pounds! You're running on nerve and guts, nothing else. What have you been doing to your-self?"
 Bob said mutinously: "Nothing, sir. Fm in good health."
 "I'm the judge of that!" But in the end Saxon passed him, grumbling. Bob was wearing himself down to sea-bottom, but there is no law that says a cadet must pamper himself. And the grinding routine went on. Not only the Saturday-afternoon extra-duty swimming with me, but Bob developed a habit of stealing off by himself at the occasional odd hours between times—just after chapel, or during Visitors' Hour, or whenever else he could find a moment. I knew how worried he was that he might not pass the marathon-swim. I didn't question him about these extra times, for I was sure they were spent either in the gym or out doing roadwork to build up his wind.
 Of course, I was utterly wrong.

            Time passed—months of it. And at last it was spring.
 We had almost forgotten David Craken—strange,

 sad boy from under the sea! It was April and then May, time for the marathon swim.     We boarded the gym ship again just after lunch. It was the first time Bob or I had been aboard her since David was lost. I caught Bob's eye on the spot where he and David and I had stood against the rail, looking back at the Bermuda shore. He saw me looking at him and smiled faintly. "Poor David," he said, and that was all.

            That was all for him. For me, I was seeing something else at that rail—something large and reptilian, a huge, angular head that had loomed out of the depths.

            I had seen it many times since—in dreams. But that first time, had that been a dream?
 There was no time for dreaming now. No sooner  were we well clear of land than Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane called us to fall in in crews, and Sea Coach Blighman put us through an intensive workout, there on the deck of the sub-sea raft being towed through the Bermuda waves by the snub-nosed tugs. We had fifteen minutes of that, then a ten-minute break.

            Then we were all ordered below decks. The hatches were sealed, the gym ship trimmed for diving, the signal made to the tugs, and we went to ten fathoms, to continue our voyage underwater. It was ten nautical miles to where we were going; at the nine-knot speed of the towed gym ship, a few minutes over an hour. Ten nautical miles, at 6,000 feet each. Sixty thousand feet. Nearly eleven and a half land miles.

            And we would swim those miles back to base, maintaining our ten-fathom depth until we reached the shallows.

            Halfway out, we were ordered into swimming gear, flippers, goggles, electrolung and thermo-suits. The suits would slow us down, but we had to have them. At ten fathoms—sixty feet—pressure is not the enemy. Cold is what is dangerous. Yes, cold! Even in Bermuda waters, even in late spring. The temperature of the human body is 98 degrees Fahrenheit and a bit; the temperature of sea water—even there and then—only in the seventies. Put a block of steel the size and temperature of the human body into the Bermuda sea, and in minutes it will cool to the temperature of the water around it. There is a difference between a block of steel and a human body, of course. The difference is this: It doesn't hurt a block of steel to be cooled to seventy degrees; but at that temperature the body cannot live.

            What keeps swimmers alive? Why, the heat their bodies produce, of course; for the body is tenacious of its heat, and keeps pouring calories out to replace the loss. But add to the drain of heat-calories from the cooling of the water the drain of energy-calories of the muscles propel-ling the swimmer along, and in ten sea miles the body's outpouring of calories has robbed its reserves past the danger point.

            The early surface swimmers—the conquerors of the English Channel, for example—tried to keep out the chill with heavy layers of grease covering every inch of the body but the eyes. Worse than useless! The grease actual-ly helped to dissipate the heat. Oh, some of them made it, all the same. But how many others—even helped by frequent pauses in mid-Channel to drink hot beverages— failed?

            There were a hundred and sixty-one of us on the gym ship. And it was the tradition of the Academy that none of us should fail.

            As we climbed the ladders to the sea-lock I punched Bob's arm. "You'll make it!" I whispered.
 He grinned at me, but the grin was worried. "I have to!" he said. And then we were in the lock.
 The sea-gates irised open.
 The gym ship, trimmed and motionless at ten fathoms, disgorged its hundred and sixty-one lungdivers by crews.
 Silently, in the filtered green sunlight from above, we went through a five-minute underwater calisthenic warm-up. Then we heard the rumbling, wavering voice of Sea Coach Blighman on the hailer from the control deck. "Crew leaders, attention! At the signal, by crews, shove off!"
 There was a ten-second pause, then the shrill, penetrat-ing beep of the signal.
 We were off.
 Bob and I were in the last crew, commanded by Roger Fairfane. I had made up my mind to one thing: I would not leave Bob alone. Almost at once our regular forma-tion broke up. I could see ten, twenty, perhaps thirty swimmers scattered about me in the water, looking like pale green ghosts stroking along in the space-eating swim the Academy taught us. I found Bob and clung close to him, keeping an eye on him.
 He saw me, grinned—or so it seemed, with the goggles and mouthpiece hiding most of his face—and then con-centrated his energies on the long swim before us.
 The first mile. Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane came in close to us, waving angrily. We were well behind the others and he wanted us to catch up. I shook my head determinedly and pointed to Bob. Roger grimaced furi-ously, shot ahead, then returned. He stayed sullenly close all through the long swim. As crew officer, it was his duty to keep tabs on stragglers—and we were straggling.

            The second mile. Bob kept right on plugging. We weren't making any speed, but he showed no signs of faltering.

            The third mile. The cold was seeping in now; we were all beginning to feel the strain and weariness. All the others were well out of sight by now. Bob paused for a second in his regular, slow kick-and-stroke. He rolled over on his back, stretched—

            And did a complete slow loop under water. Roger and I shot toward him, worried. But he straight-ened out, grinned at us again—no mistake this time!— and made a victory signal with his hand.
 For the first time I realized that the long months of training had paid off, and Bob was going to make it all the way.
 We pulled ourselves out into the surf about a mile down the beach from the Academy compound. It was nearly dark by now; the rest of the swimmers must long since have returned.
 Weary as we were, Bob and I clasped hands exultantly. Roger, impatiently standing in the shallows waiting for us, snarled something irritable and sharp, but we weren't listening. Bob had made it!
 Roger opened the waterproof pouch at his waist and took out the flare pistol. He pointed it up and out to sea and fired the rocket that announced our safe arrival-necessary, so that the tally-officer would know we were not lost and hopeless, and so send out searching parties. "Come on," he growled. "We're halfway off the island and it's about chow time!" Bob and I stripped off goggles and mouthpieces and drew deep breaths of the warm, fragrant air. We slid out of our thermo-suits and stood grinning at each other for a moment. "Come on!" Roger cried again. "What are you waiting for?"
 We splashed toward him, still grinning. We could see the yellow lights shining in the big resort hotels beyond the Academy compound, and a glow of light in the sky over Hamilton. A full moon was well up on the horizon.

 
 The scarlet all's-well flare went up from the Academy docks just then—proof that our signal had been the last; everyone had now completed the swim.   Roger yelled furiously: "Wake up, will you? Eskow! Get a move on. You held the whole crew up, you dumb
 jellyfish, and ---- "

            He broke off suddenly, looking at the water between us.
 A wave had washed something past us, up toward the high-water mark on the beach. Something that glowed, faint and blue.
 It was a little metal cylinder, no larger than a sea-ration can. The wave broke and retreated, sucking the little cylinder back.
 Bob bent down, curious even in his exhausted state, and picked it up.
 We all saw it at once. The faint blue glow was the glimmer of edenite!
 "Hey, Jim!" he cried. "Something armored! What
 in
 the world ---?"
 We stared at it. Armored with edenite! It had to be something from the deeps—edenite was for highpressure diving, nothing else. I took it from his hand. It was heavy, but not so heavy that it couldn't float. The glow of the edenite was very pale, here in the atmosphere, but the cylinder must still ripple of light shimmer across it as my breath made a pressure change on the cylinder.
 tiny field-generators inside the be working—I could see the And I saw a dark line, where two halves of it joined. "Let's open it," I said. "It must unscrew—here, where the line goes around it."
 Roger splashed toward us. "What have you got there?" he demanded, his swimming fins kicking spray and dig-ging into the coral sand. "Let me see!"
 Instinctively hesitated, then letting go.
 I handed it back to Bob. He held it toward Roger—but without

            Roger grabbed at it. "Give it here!" he rasped. "I saw it first!"
 "Now, wait a minute," Bob said quietly. "I felt it wash
 against my ankle before you ever saw it. You were too busy calling me a jellyfish to ------- "

 
 "It's mine, I say!"          I broke in. "Before we worry too much about it, why don't we open it up and see what's inside?"
 They both looked at me. Roger shrugged disdainfully. "Very well. But remember that I am your cadet officer. If its contents are of any importance, it will be my duty to take charge of them."
 "Sure," said Bob, and handed the cylinder to me. I caught the ghost of a wink in his eye, though his expres-sion was otherwise serious.
 I gripped the ends of the thing and twisted. It unscrewed more easily than I had expected, and as soon as it began to turn the glimmer of the edenite armor flickered and died. The connection to the tiny generators within it had been broken.
 The metal cap came off, and I shook the cylinder upside down over my hand.
 The first thing that came out was a thick roll of paper. We looked at it and gasped—that paper was money! A great deal of it, by the feel, rolled up and held with a rubber band. Next came a document of some sort— perhaps a letter—rolled to fit in the cylinder. Tucked inside the letter was a small black velvet bag. I loosened the drawstrings of the bag and peered inside.
 I couldn't help gasping.
 "What is it?" Roger rapped impatiently.
 I shook my head wordlessly and poured the contents of the bag out into the palm of my hand.
 There were thirteen enormous pearls, glimmering like milky edenite in the yellow moonlight.

            Thirteen pearls!
 They looked as huge and as bright as the moon itself. They were all perfect, all exactly the same size. They seemed to shine with a light of their own in my hand.
 "Pearls!" gasped Roger. "Tonga pearls! I've—I've seen one, once. A long time ago. They're—priceless!"
 Bob stared at them, unbelieving. "Tonga pearls," he echoed. "Imagine ----- "
 Everyone had heard of Tonga pearls—but very few had ever seen one. And here were thirteen of them, enormous and perfect! They were the most precious pearls in the sea—and the most mysterious. For the light that seemed to come from them was no illusion. They actually glowed with a life of their own, a silvery, ghost-like beauty that had never been explained by science. Not even the beds they came from had ever been located. I remembered hearing a submariner talking about them once. 'They call them Tonga pearls," he had said, "be-cause the legend is that they come from the Tonga Trench, six miles down. Nonsense, Jim! Oysters don't live below five thousand feet—not big ones, anyway. I've been on the rim of the Tonga Trench—as far down as ordinary edenite could take me—and there's nothing there, Jim, nothing but cold water and dead black mud."

            But they came from somewhere, obviously enough— for here were thirteen of them in my hand!
 "I'm rich!" crowed Roger Fairfane, half dazed with excitement. "Rich! Each one of them—worth thousands, believe me! And I have thirteen of them!"
 "Hold on," I said sharply. The dazed look faded from his eyes. He blinked, then made a sudden grab for my hand. I snatched it away from him.
 "They're mine!" he roared. "Blast you, Eden, give
 them to me! I saw them—never mind that cock-and-bull
 story of Eskow's! If you won't give them up, my father's lawyers will ---"
 "Hold on," I said again. "They may not even be real."
 Bob Eskow took a deep breath. "They're real," he said. "There's no mistaking that glow. Well, Roger—my father doesn't have any lawyers, but I think all three of us found them. And I think all three of us should share."
 "Eskow, you stinking little ----- "
 I stopped Roger quickly, before we all got involved with sea-knives. "Wait! You both forget something—we don't own these. Now yet, anyhow. Somebody lost them; somebody will probably want them back. Maybe we have some sort of salvage rights, but right now the thing for us to do is to turn the whole thing over to the Commandant. He can decide what to do next. Then, if we decide——"
 "Hush!"
 It was Bob, stopping me almost in the middle of a word.

  He was staring over my shoulder, down the beach; his eyes were narrowed and wary.
 He whispered: "I'm afraid you're right, Jim. Somebody did lose them! And—somebody's coming to take them back!"

 

 The Pearly Eyes       

Bob stood pointing toward the sea. The Atlantic lay dark under the thickening dusk, the light of the full moon shimmering on it.

            For a moment that was all I saw. Then Bob pointed, and I saw a man wading out of the black water.
 Roger said sharply: "Who's that? One of the
 cadets?"
 "No." I knew that was impossible.
 The same thought had crossed my own mind—a cadet like ourselves, a straggler from the sub-sea marathon. No one else had any business there, of course.
 But he was no cadet.
 He wore no sub-sea gear—nothing but swim trunks that had an odd, brightly metallic color. He came striding toward us over the wet sand, and the closer he got the stranger he seemed. Something about him was—strange. There was no other word to describe it.
 Moonlight is a thief of color; the polarized light steals reds and greens and washes out all the hues but grays. Perhaps it was only that. But his skin seemed much, much too white, pallid, fishbelly white. The way he walked was somehow odd. It was his flipper-shoes, I thought at first—and then as he came closer, I saw that he wore none. Or if there were any, they were much smaller than ours.
 And most of all, there was something quite odd about his eyes. They glowed milky white in the moonlight—like cold pearls, with a velvet black dot of pupil in the center.
 Quickly I poured the pearls back into the velvet bag and dropped them back cylinder. I  screwed the cap back on and flickered into bluish light.           The stranger stopped a foot away from me. His queer eyes were fixed on the edenite cylinder. I saw that he wore a long sea knife hung from the belt of his trunks.

            He said, breathing hard, almost gasping: "Hello. You have—recovered something that I lost, I see." His voice was oddly harsh and flat. There was no accent, exactly, but he clearly had difficulty with his breathing. That was not surprising, in a man just up out of the water—a long swim can put a hitch in anyone's breathing—but together with those eyes, that colorless skin, he seemed like some-one I'd have preferred to meet in broad daylight, with more people around.

            Roger said challengingly: "They're ours! You'll have to
 do better than that if you want the p -"

            I stopped him before he could say the word. "If you lost something," I cut in, "no doubt you can describe it."

            For a moment his face flashed with strange rage in the moonlight. But then he smiled disarmingly, and I noticed that his teeth looked remarkably fine and white.
 into the edenite

            the edenite film "Naturally," he agreed. "Why should I not?" He point-ed with a hand that seemed oddly shaped. "But I need not describe my missing property very clearly, since you hold it in your hand. It is that edenite tube."

            "Don't give to him," Roger said sharply. "Make him identify himself. Make him prove it's his."
 The stranger's clawed hand hesitated near the butt of his sea knife, and the sound of his rasping breath came clear in the. night. Curious that he should seem to be shorter of breath now than when he first came to us! But he was gasping and panting as though he had just com-pleted a twenty-mile swim. ...
 "I can identify myself," said the stranger. "My name— my name is Joe Trencher."
 "Where are you from?"
 "It's a long way from here," he said, and paused to get his breath, looking at us. "I come from Kermadec."
 Kermadec! That was where Jason Craken had lived— halfway around the world, four miles under the sea, on a flat-topped Zealand and the Ker

madec Deep. "You're a Tren-cher," I said.        "Too long," He made a breathless little chuckle. "I'm not used to this dry land! It is not like Kermadec."
 Strange how he called it "Kermadec" instead of "Ker

sea-mount between New long way from home, Mr. madec Dome," I thought. But perhaps it was a local question; and, anyway, there were more important things

            to think about. "Would you mind explaining what you were doing here?"
 "Not at all," he wheezed. "I left Kermadec -------- " again

            he called it that—"on a business trip, traveling in my own
 sea car. You can understand that I am not familiar with these waters. Evidently my sonar gear was defective. At any rate—an hour ago I was cruising on autopilot, toward
 Sargasso City at five hundred fathoms. The next thing I knew, I was swimming for my life." He looked at us soberly. "I suppose I ran aground, somewhere down there." He nodded toward the moonlit sea. "The edenite tube must have floated to the surface. I'll gladly reward
 the three of you for helping me recover it, of course.
 Now, if you'll hand it over ----- "

            He was reaching for it. I stepped back.
 Roger Fairfane came between us. "That isn't up to you!" he said sharply. "If you own it, we'll get a reward— from the salvage courts. But you'll have to prove your title to it!"
 "I can do that, certainly," wheezed the man who called himself Joe Trencher. "But you can see that I have lost everything except the tube itself in the wreck of my sea car. What sort of proof do you want?"
 Bob Eskow had been silent and thoughtful, but now he spoke up.
 "For one thing," he said, "you might explain something to us, Mr. Trencher. What happened to your thermo-suit, if you had one?"
 "Had one? Of course I had one!" But the stranger was off balance, glowering at us. "I had a thermo-suit and an electrolung—how else could I have survived the crash?"
 "Then what did you do with it?"
 Trencher convulsed with a sudden fit of coughing. I wondered how much of it was an attempt to cover up. "It—it was defective," he wheezed at last. "I couldn't open the face lens after I reached the surface. I—I was suffocating, so I had to cut it loose and abandon it." Roger said brutally: "That's a lie, Trencher!"

            For a moment I thought the stranger was going to spring at us—all three of us.
 He tensed and half-crouched, and his hand was on the butt of his sea-knife again. His breath came in whistling gasps, and the milky, pearly eyes were half-slitted, gleam-ing evilly in the moonlight.
 Then he stood straighter and showed those fine white teeth in a cold smile. He shook his head.
 "Your manners, young man," he wheezed, "they need improving. I do not like to be called a liar."
 Roger gulped and backed away. "All right," he said placatingly. "I only meant—that is, you have to admit your story isn't very convincing. This tube is very valu-able, you know."
 "I know," agreed the stranger breathlessly.
 I cut in: "If you are really who you say you are, isn't there someone who can identify you?"
 He shook his head. Again I noticed the strange dead whiteness of his skin in the moonlight. "I am not known here."
 "Well, who were you going to see in Sargasso City? Perhaps we could call there."
 His queer eyes narrowed. "I cannot discuss my busi-ness there. Still, that is a reasonable request. Suppose you check with Kermadec Dome. I can give you some names there—perhaps the name of my attorney, Morgan Wen-sley. ..."
 "Morgan Wensley!" I nearly shouted the name. "But that's the same name! That's the name of the man who answered Jason Craken's letter!"
 "Craken?"
 The stranger from the sea jumped back a step, as though the name had been a kind of threat. "Craken?" he repeated again, crouching as though he thought I would lunge at him, his hand on the sea knife. "What do you
_----------- " he whispered hoarsely, and had to stop for breath.
 "What do you know of Jason Craken?" He was gasping for air and his slitted eyes were blazing milkily. I explained, "His son, David, was a cadet here. A friend of mine, in fact—before he was lost. Do you know Mr. Craken?"

            The stranger called Joe Trencher shivered, as though the water had chilled him—or as though he had been afraid of the name "Craken." He was frightened—and somehow, his fright made him seem more strange and dangerous than ever.

            "I've heard the name," he muttered. His strange eyes were fixed hungrily on the edenite cylinder at my side. "I've no more time to waste. I want my property!"

            I said: "If it's yours, tell us what is in it." Trencher's white face looked ugly for an instant, before he smoothed the anger from it. "The tube contains—a—
 money ---- " He hesitated, choking and coughing, looking
 at us searchingly. "Yes, money. And—and legal papers." He had another coughing spasm.
 "And—pearls."
 "Look at him!" cried Roger. "Can't you see he's just guessing?"
 It was true that he did seem to be doubtful, I thought. Still, he had been right enough as far as he went.
 I asked: "What kind of pearls?"
 "Tonga pearls!" Well, that was easy enough to guess, for a man from Kermadec.
 "How many of them?"
 The pale face was contorted in an expression of rage and fear. The ragged breathing was the only sound we heard for a moment, while Joe Trencher stared at us.
 At last he admitted: "I don't know. I'm acting only as an agent, you see. An agent for Morgan Wensley. He asked me to undertake this trip, and he gave me the tube. I can't give you an itemized list of of its contents, because they belong to him."
 "Then it isn't yours!" cried Roger triumphantly.
 "I'm responsible for it," Trencher gasped. "I must recover it. Here, you!" He reached toward me. "Give me that!"
 For a moment I thought we had come to violence— violence had been in the air all those long minutes. But Bob Eskow jumped between us. He said: "Listen, Trench-er, we're going to the Commandant. He'll settle this whole  thing. Tf they belong to you, he'll see that you get them. He will make sure that no one is cheated."      Roger Fairfane grumbled: "I'm not so sure. I'd rather keep them until my Dad's lawyer can tell me what to do." Then he glanced at Trencher's long sea knife. "Oh, all right," he agreed uncomfortably. "Let's go to the com-mandant."

            I turned to Mr. Trencher. He was having trouble with his breathing, but he nodded. "An expedient solution," he gasped. "You needn't think I fear the law. I am willing to trust your Commandant to recognize my rights and see that justice is done. . .."

            He stopped suddenly, staring out to the dark sea. "Look!" he cried.
 We all turned to stare. I heard Bob's voice, as

 hoarse and breathless as Trencher's own. "What in the sea is that?"       It was hard to tell what we saw. A mile out, perhaps, there was something. Something in the water. I couldn't see it clearly, even in the moonlight. But it was enormous.

            For a moment I thought I saw a thick neck lifted out of the water, and a head—that same, immense, reptilian head that I had thought I had seen at the rail of the gym ship. . . .

 Something struck me just under the ear, and the world fell away from me.         It didn't really hurt, but for a moment I was paralyzed and I could see and feel nothing.
 I wasn't knocked out. I knew that I was falling, but I couldn't move a muscle to catch myself. Some judo blow, I suppose, some clever thrust at a nerve center.
 Then the world came back into focus. I heard feet pounding on the hard sand, and the splash of water.
 "Stop him, Eskow!" Roger was crying shrilly. "He's got the pearls!"
 But Bob was bending over me worriedly. The numb-ness was beginning to leave my body, and I could feel Bob's exploring fingers moving gently over the side of my head.
 "No bones broken," he muttered to himself. "But that shark really clipped you one, while you weren't looking. Hit you with the edge of his hand, I think. You're lucky, Jim; there doesn't seem to be any permanent damage."

            In a minute or two I was able to get up, Bob helping me. My neck was stiff and sore as I moved it, but there were no bones grating.

            By the edge of the water Roger stood hungrily staring out at the waves. The stranger who called himself Joe Trencher was gone. Bob said: "He hit you, grabbed the edenite tube and dived for the water. Roger ran after him to tackle him—but when he waved that sea knife Roger stopped cold. Then he dived under the water—and that's the last we saw of him."

            Roger heard our voices and came running back to us. "Get up!" he cried. "Keep a watch over the water! He can't get far. He hasn't come up for air yet—but he can't stay under much longer, not without sub-sea gear! I want those pearls back!"

            He caught my arm. "Go after him, Eden! Bring back those pearls and I'll give you a half interest in them!"

            "You'll have to do better than that," I told him. I was beginning to feel better. "I want Bob counted in. An equal three-way split for all of us, in everything that comes out of this deal. Agreed?"

 Roger sputtered for a moment, but at last he gave in. "Agreed. But don't let him get away!"       "All right then," I said. "Here's what we're going to do. All of us will put our sub-sea gear back on— electrolungs and face lenses anyway, I don't suppose we need the thermo-suits. We'll go out on the surface and wait for him to stick his nose up for air. Then we'll surround him and bring him in. You're right about him needing air, Roger—he can't get more than a few hundred yards away without coming up for a breath."

            We all quickly checked our face lenses and electrolungs and splashed out through the shallows into the calm Bermuda waves.

            "Watch out for that sea knife!" I called, and then all three of us were swimming, spreading out, searching the surface of the sea for the pale face and gleaming eyes of the stranger.

 Minutes passed. I could see Roger to my left and Bob Eskow to my right, treading water, staring around. And that was all.
 More minutes. I saw nothing. In desperation, I pulled my legs up, bent from the waist and surface-dived to see what was below. It was a strangely frightening experi-ence. I was swimming through ink, swimming about in the space between the worlds where there is neither light nor gravitation. There was no up and no down; there was no sign of light except an occasional feeble flicker of phosphorescence from some marine life. I could easily have got lost and swum straight down. That was a dan-ger; to counter it, I stopped swimming entirely and took a deep breath and held it. In a moment I felt the wash of air across my back and shoulders, as the buoyancy of my lungs lifted me to the surface.
 I lifted my head and looked around.
 Bob Eskow was shouting and splashing, a hundred yards to my right. And cutting toward him, close to where I had surfaced, Roger Fairfane was swimming with fran-tic speed.
 "Come on!" cried Roger, panting. "Bob's found him, I think!" That was all I had to hear. I drove through the water as fast as my arms and flipper-shoes would take me. But I had breath enough left over to cry out: "Careful, Bob! Watch out for his knife!"
 We got there in moments, and the three of us warily surrounded a feebly floating form in the water. Knife? There was no knife.
 There were no pearly eyes, no milk-white face. We looked at the figure, and at each other, and without a word the three of us caught hold of him and swam rapidly toward the shore.
 We dragged the inert body up on the sand.
 I couldn't help staring back at the sea and shivering. What mysteries it held! That strange, huge head—the white-eyed man who had clipped me and stolen the pearls—where were they now? And what was this newest and strangest mystery of all?
 For the inert body that we brought up wasn't Joe Trencher. We all recognized him at once.
 It was David Craken, unconscious and apparently more than half drowned.