Sub-Sea Skirmish     

The ship was the Killer, no question about it. It was headed straight for us. Roger looked around at the rest of us, his face pale. "Well what about it?" he demanded. "What can they do? They've no armament, have they? The Fleet must have stripped the  Killer just as
 they did the Dolphin ---"

            "Don't count on it," David said quietly. "Remember, Trencher's at home under the water. They've been delayed for something—they must have put the saurian to following us, while they were doing something. Doing what? I don't know, Roger. But I could make a guess, and my guess would be that they've been stripping sunken ships somewhere, taking armament off them. ... I don't know, I admit. But if you think they can hurt us, Roger, I'm afraid you're living in a fool's paradise."

            Roger said harshly: "Eden! Give them a hail on the sonarphone! Ask them what they want."
 "Aye-aye, sir!" I started the sonarphone pulsing and beamed a message at the ship behind us. "Dolphin to Killer Whale. Dolphin to Killer Whaler
 No answer.
 I tried again: "Dolphin to Killer Whale! Come in, Killer Whale."
 Silence, while we waited. The sonarphone picked up and amplified the noises of the ship behind us, the half-musical whine of her atomic turbines, the soft hissing of the water sliding past her edenite armor.
 But there was no answer.
 Roger glared at me and shouldered past. He picked up
 the sonarphone mike himself. "Killer Whale!" he cried.
 "This is the Dolphin, Roger Fairfane commanding. I de
 mand you answer ----"
 I stopped listening abruptly.
 I had glanced at the microsonar screen. Against the dark field that was black sea water, I saw a bright little fleck dart away from the bright silhouette of the Killer.
 I leaped past Roger to the autopilot, cut it out with a flick of the switch, grabbed the conn wheel and heaved the Dolphin into a crash dive.
 Everyone went sprawling and clinging to whatever they could hold. Roger Fairfane fought his way up, glaring at me, his face contorted. "Eden! I'm in command here! If you—"
Whump.
 A dull concussion interrupted him. The old
Dolphinshook and shivered, and the strained metal of her hull made ominous snapping sounds.
 "What was that?" Roger cried.
 Gideon answered. "A jet missile," he said. "If Jim hadn't crash-dived us—we'd be trying to breathe water right now."

 Cut and run!    We jumped to battle stations, and Roger poured on the coal.
 Battle stations. But what did we have to fight with? The Killer Whale had found arms somewhere—either by salvaging wrecks or buying them in some illegal way. But we had none.
 Bob Eskow and Gideon manned the engines, and coax-ed every watt of power out of the creaking old reactors.
 It wasn't enough. Newer, bigger, faster—the Killer Whale was gaining on us. Roger, sweating, banged the handle of the engine-room telegraph uselessly against the stops. He grabbed the speaking tube and cried: "Engine room! Eskow, listen. Cut out the safety stops—run the reactors on manual. We'll need more power!"
 Bob's voice rattled back, with a note of alarm: "On manual? But Roger—these reactors are old! If we cut out
 the safety stops ---"
 "That's an order!" blazed Roger, and slammed the microphone into its cradle. He looked anxiously to me, manning the microsonar. "Are we gaining, Eden?"
 I shook my head. "No, sir. They're still closing up. I—I guess they're trying to get so close that we can't dodge their missiles."
 Beside me, David Craken was working the fathometer, tracing our course on the chart he had made. He looked up, and he was almost smiling. "Roger—Jim!" he cried. "I—I think we're going to make it." He stabbed at the chart with his pencil. "The last sounding shows we've just passed a check point. It isn't more than twenty miles to my father's sea-mount!"
 I stared over his shoulder. The little pencil tick he had made showed us well over the slope of the Tonga Trench. There was thirty thousand feet of water from the surface to the muck at the bottom, and we were nearly halfway
 Kermadec Trenches sprawled a thousand miles across the great chart on the bulkhead—went completely off the little chart David was using. We were over the cliffs at the brink of the great, strange furrow itself, heading steeply down.
 I caught myself and glanced at the microsonar screen— just barely in time. "Missile! Take evasive action!"
 Roger wrestled the conn wheel over and down; the old Dolphin went into a spiraling, descending turn.
Whump.
 It was closer than before.
 Roger panted something indistinguishable and grabbed the microphone again. "Bob! I've got to have more power!"
 It was Gideon who answered this time. Even now, his voice was soft and gentle. "I'm afraid we don't have any more power to give, Roger. The reactor's overheating
 now."

 
 between. The long, crooked outline of the Tonga and
 "But I've got to have more power!"      Gideon said softly: "There's something leaking inside the shield. I guess the old conduits were pretty badly corroded—that last missile may have sprung them." The gentle voice paused for a second. Then it went on: "We've been trying to keep it running, but you don't repair Series K reactors, Roger. It's hot now. Way past the red line. If it gets any hotter, we'll have to dump it—or else abandon ship!"
 For a while I thought we might make it.
 At full power, the old Dolphin was eating up the

            last few miles to Jason Craken's sea-mount and the dome. Even the Killer Whale, bigger and newer and faster though she was, gained on us only slowly. They held their fire for long minutes, while the little blob of light that was Craken's dome took shape in the forward microsonar screen.

            Then they opened fire again—a full salvo this time, six missiles opening up like the ribs of a fan as they came toward us.

 Roger twisted the Dolphin's tail, and we swung through violent evolutions.
 Whurnp. Whumpwhwnp. Whumpwhumpwhump. But they were all short, all exploding astern. Roger grinned crazily. "Maybe we'll make it! If we can hold

 out
 another ten minutes ----- "       "Missiles!" I cried, interrupting him. Another spreading salvo of bright little flecks leaped out from the pursuing shape in the microsonar screen.

            Violent evasive action again ... and once again they all exploded astern.
 But closer this time, much closer.
 They were using up their missies at a prodigious rate. Evidently Joe Trencher wanted to keep us from getting to that dome, at any cost!
 The speaker from the engine room rattled and Bob's voice cried: "Bridge! We're going to have to cut power in three minutes! The reactor stops are all out. Repeat, we're going to have to cut power in three minutes!"
 "Keep her going as long as you can!" Roger yelled. He slammed the conn wheel hard over, diving us sharply once more. "All hands!" he yelled. "All hands into pres-sure suits! The next salvo is likely to zero in right on our heads. We're bound to have hull leaks." He shook his head and grinned. "They'll fill us with water, but I'll get us in, wet or dry!"
 In that moment, I had to admire Roger Fairfane. He wasn't the kind you could like very well—but the Acade-my doesn't make many mistakes, and I should have known that if he was a cadet at all, he was bound to have the stuff somewhere.
 He caught me looking at him and he must have read the expression on my face, for he grinned. Even in the rush of that moment of wild flight he said: "You never liked me, did you? I don't blame you, Jim. There hasn't
 been much to like! I ---- " He licked his lips. "I have to
 admit something, Jim."
 I said gruffly, "You don't have to admit anything
 ------------------------------------------------------------------
 "
 "No, no. I do." He kept his eyes on the microsonar, his hands on the conn wheel. He said quickly: "My father isn't a big shot, Jim! He's an accountant for Trident Lines, that's all. They let me use the boathouse at the Atlantic Manager's estate because they were sorry for  him. But I've always dreamed that some day, somehow ---"          He broke off. Then he said somberly: "If I can help open up another important route for Trident, down here to the Tonga Trench, it'll be a big thing for my father!"

            I shook my head silently. It was a funny thing. All these months Bob and I had made fun of Roger, had disliked him—and yet, underneath it all he was a fine, likeable youth!

            We all struggled into our pressure suits, keeping the helmets cracked so we could maneuver better. Time enough to seal up when the crashing missiles split our hull open.. ..

            And that time was almost at hand.
 But first—the blare of a warning horn screamed at us. Red warning lights blazed all over the instrument panel at once, it seemed. The ceiling lights flickered and yellowed as the current from the main engines flipped off and the batteries cut in. The hurtling Dolphin faltered in her mad rush through the sea.
 The yell from the engine room told us what we already knew: "Reactor out! We've lost our power. Batteries only now!"
 Roger looked at me and gave me a half-grin. There was no bluster about him now, no pretense. He checked the instrument panel and made his decision quickly.
 He kicked the restraining stops on the conn wheel free, and wrenched it up—far past normal diving angle, to the absolute maximum it would travel. He stood the old Dolphin right on her nose, heading straight down into the abyss below.
 Minutes passed. We heard the distant whump of missiles—but far above us now. Even with only battery power to turn the screws, the Dolphin was dropping faster than the missiles could travel, for gravity was pulling at us.
 Roger kept his eyes glued to the microsonar and the fathometers. At the last possible moment he pulled back on the conn wheel; the diving vanes brought the ship into a full-G pullout.
 He cut the power to the screws.

  In a moment there was a slithering, scraping sound from the hull, then a hard thud.
 We had come to rest—without arms, without power, with twenty thousand feet of sea water over our heads, at the bottom in the Tonga Trench.

  
 Abandon Ship!          

We lay on the steep slope of the Tonga Trench, nearly four miles down, waiting for the Killer to finish us off.

            Gideon and Bob Eskow came tumbling in from the engine room. "She's going to blow!" Bob yelled. "We ran the engines too long—the reactor's too hot. We've got to get out of here, Roger!"

            Roger Fairfane nodded quietly, remotely. His face was abstracted, as though he were thinking out a classroom problem in sea tactics or navigation.

            The microsonar was still working, after a fashion—one more drain on our batteries. I could see the blurred and dimmed image of the Killer on the topside screen. They were cricling far above us. Waiting.

            The dead  Dolphin lay onimously still, except for a faint pulsing from the circulator-tubes of the reactors. Nuclear reactions make no sound; there was nothing to warn us that an explosion was building a few yards away. Now and then there was an onimous creak of metal, an occasional snap, as though the underpowered edenite ar-mor were yielding, millimeter by millimeter, to the crush-ing weight of the water above.

 We lay sloping sharply, stern down. Roger stood with one hand on the conn-wheel to brace himself, staring into space.             He roused himself—I suppose it was only a matter of seconds—and looked around at us.
 "Abandon ship!" he ordered.
 And that was the end of the Dolphin.
 We clustered in the emergency pressure-lock for a final council of war. Roger said commandingiy: "We're only a few miles from Jason Craken's sea-mount. David, you lead the way. We'll have to conserve power, so only one of us will use his suit floodlamps at a time. Stay together! If anyone lags behind, he's lost. There won't be any chance of rescue. And we'll have to move right along. The air in the suits may not last for more than half an hour. The suit batteries are old; they have a lot of pres-sure to fight off. They may not last even as long as the air. Understand?"

            We all nodded, looking around at each other. We checked our depth armor, each inspecting the oth-ers'. The suits were fragile-seeming things, of aluminum and plastic. Only the glowing edenite film would keep them from collapsing instantly—and as Roger said, there wasn't much power to keep the edenite glowing.
 "Seal helmets!" Roger ordered.
 As we closed the faceplates, the edenite film on each suit of armor sprang into life, rippling faintly as we moved.
 Roger waved an arm. Laddy Angel, nearest the lock valves, gestured his understanding of the order, and sprang to the locks.
 The hatch behind us closed and locked.
 The intake ports irised open and spewed fiercely driven jets of deep-sea water against the baffles.
 Even the ricocheting spray nearly knocked us off our feet, but in a moment the lock was filled.
 The outer hatch opened.
 And we stepped out into the ancient sludge of the Tonga Trench, under four miles of water.

            Behind us the hull of the Dolphin coruscated brightly. It seemed to light up the whole sea-bottom around us. I glanced back once. Shadows were chasing themselves over the edenite film—sure sign that the power was failing, that it was only a matter of time.

 And then I had to look ahead.
 We formed in line and started off, following David        Craken. It took us each a few moments of trial-and-error to adjust our suits for a pound or two of weight—
 carefully balancing weight against buoyancy be
 valving off air—so that we could soar over the sludgy sea bottom in great, floating, slow-motion leaps.
 And then we really began to cover ground.
 In a moment the Dolphin behind us was a vague blur of bluish color. In another moment, it was only a faint, distant glow.
 Yet—still there was light!
 I cried: "What in the world!"—forgetting, for the mo-ment, that no one could hear. It was incredible! Light— four miles down!
 And more incredible still, there were things growing there.
 The bottom of the sea is bare, black muck—nearly
 every square foot of it. Yet here there was vegetation. A shining forest of waving sea-fronds, growing strangely out
 of the rocky slope before us. Their thin, pliant stems rose
 upward, out of sight, snaking up into the shadows above.
 They carried thick, odd-shaped leaves ----
 And the leaves and trunks, the branches and curious flowers—every part of them glowed with soft green light!
 I bounded ahead and tapped David Craken on the shoulder. The edenite films on my gauntlet and his shoul-derpiece flared brightly as they touched; he could not have felt my hand, but must have seen the glow out of the corner of his eye. He turned stiffly, his whole body swinging around. I could see, dimly and murkily, his face behind the edenite-filmed plastic visor.
 I waved my arm wordlessly at the glowing forest.
 He nodded, and his lips shaped words—but I couldn't make them out.
 Yet one thing came across—this was no surprise to him.
 And then I remembered something: The strange water-color Laddy Angel had showed me, hanging over David's bed at the Academy. It had portrayed a forest like this one, a rocky slope like this one—
 And it had also shown something else, I remembered.
 A saurian, huge and hideous, plunging through the submarine forest.
 I had written off the submarine forest as a crazy fantasy—yet here it sprawled before my eyes. And the saurians? I turned my mind to safer grounds—there was plenty of trouble right in front of us, without looking for more to worry about!

            David seemed at home. We leaped lazily through the underwater glades in file, like monstrous slow-motion
 kangaroos on the Moon. After a few minutes, David signaled a halt. Gideon came up from his second place in
 the file to join David; Gideon's suit-lamps went on and
 Roger, who had led the procession with David, switched
 off his lights and fell back. It was a necessary precaution;
 the suit-lamps were blindingly bright—and terribly ex
 pensive of our hoarded battery power. We had to equalize
 the drain on our batteries—else one of us, with less reserve than the others, would sooner or later hear a warning creak of his flimsy suit armor as the edenite film flickered and faltered ----

            And that would be the last sound he heard on earth.
 On and on.
 Perhaps it had been only a few miles—but it

            seemed endless.
 I began to feel queerly elated, faintly dizzy ----It took a moment for me to realize the cause: The

            old oxygen tanks were running low. We had not dared use power for electrolungs; the little tanks were for emergency use only.

            Whatever the reason, I was breathing bad air. Something shoved against sprawling. I heard a distant through the water, and looked around to see that all of us had been tumbled about like straw men.
 Gideon picked himself up and waved back toward the Dolphin. At once I understood.
 The Dolphin's overwrought reactors had finally let go. Back behind us, a nuclear explosion had ripped the dead ship's hulk into atoms.
 Thank heaven we were across the last ridge and out of range!
 We picked ourselves up and moved on.
 my back, sent me giant roar, rumbling
 We were skirting the edge of an old lava flow, where molten stone from a sub-sea volcano had frozen into black, grotesque shapes. The weirdly gleaming sea-plants were all about us, growing out of the bare rock itself, it seemed.
 I glanced at them—then again.
 For a moment it seemed I had seen something moving in there. Something huge. ...
 It was impossible to tell. The only light was from the plants themselves, and it concealed as much as it showed. I paused to look again and saw nothing; and then I had to speed up to catch up with the others.
 It was getting harder to put out a burst, of extra speed.
 There was no doubt about it now, the air in the suit was growing worse.
 Down a long slope, and out over a plain. The glowing sea-plants still clustered thickly about us, everywhere. Above us the strange weeds made a ragged curtain be-tween the black cliffs we had just passed.
 David halted and waved ahead with a great spread-armed gesture.
 I coughed, choked and tried to move forward. Then I realized that he was not calling for me to move up to the front of the column; Laddy Angel was already there.
 David was showing us something.
 I lifted my head to look. And there, peeping through the gaps in the sea-plants ahead, I could see the looming bulk of something enormous and black. A sea-mount! And atop it, like the gold on the Academy dome, a pale, blue glow shining.
 Edenite! The. glow was the dome of Jason Craken!
 But I wondered if it were in time.
 Someone—I couldn't tell who—stumbled and fell, struggled to get up, finally stood wavering, even buoyed up by the water. Someone else—Gideon, I thought— leaped to his side and steadied him with an arm.
 Evidently it was not only my air which was going bad.
 We moved ahead once more—but slower now, and keeping closer together.
 Out of the corner of my eye I saw that flicker of movement again.
 I looked, expecting to see nothing ---
 I was terribly, terribly wrong!
 What I saw was far from nothing. It had been a faint, furtive glimpse of something huge and menacing. no
 And when I looked at it straight on, it was still there— huger, more menacing, real and tangible! It was a saurian, giant and strange, and it was pacing us.
 I turned on my suit-lamps, flooded the others with light to attract their attention. I waved frantically toward the monster in the undersea jungle. And they saw. I could tell from the queer, contorted attitudes in which they stood that they saw. David Craken made a wild, excited gesture, but I couldn't understand what he meant. The others, with one accord, leaped forward and scattered. And I was with them—all of us running, leaping, scurrying away in the slow, slow jumps the resistance of the water allowed. We dodged in among the tall, gently wavering stems of the sea-plants, looking for a hiding place.
 I could hear my breath rasping inside the helmet, and the world was growing queerly black. There was a pound-ing in my head and a dull ache; the air was worse now, so bad that I was tempted to stop, to relax, to fall to the ground and rest, sleep, relax. . . .
 I forced myself to squirm into the shelter of a clump of brightly glowing bushes. I lay on my back there, breath-ing raggedly and hard, and noticed without worry, with-out emotion, that the huge, strange beast was close upon me. Queer, I thought, it is just like David's painting— even to the rider on its back.
 There was something on its back—no, not something, but someone. A person. A—a girl figure, slight and frail, brown-skinned, black-haired, her eyes glowing white as Joe Trencher's, her blue swim-suit woven of something as luminous as the weed. She was close, so close that I could see her wide-flaring nostrils, see the expression on her face.
 It was easy enough to see, for she wore no pressure suit! Here four miles down, she was breathing the water of the Deeps!
 But I had no time to study her, for the monster she rode took all my attention. Even in the poisoned calm of my slow suffocation, I knew that here was deadly danger. The enormous head was swaying down toward me, the great supple neck curving like a swan's. Its open mouth  could have swallowed me in a single bite; its teeth seemed long as cavalry sabers.             The blue-gleaming forest turned gray-black and whirled about me.
 I could see the detail of overlapping scales on the armored neck of the saurian, the enormous black claws that tipped its great oarlike limbs.
 The gigantic head came down through the torn strands of shining weed, and I thought I had come to my last port....
 The grayness turned black. The blackness spun and roared around me.
 I was unconscious, passed out cold.

  

 Hermit of the Tonga Trench            

I woke up with the memory of a dream— huge, hideous lizard things, through the sea, with strange mermaids riding their backs and directing them with goads.

 Fantastic! But even more fantastic was that I woke up at all!
 fantastic swimming       I was lying on my back on a canvas cot, in a little metal-walled room. Someone had opened the helmet of my pressure suit, and fresh air was in my lungs!

 I struggled up and looked about me.     Roger Fairfane lay on one side of me, Bob Eskow on the other. Both were still unconscious.
 There was a pressure port in the wall of the room, and through it I could see a lock, filled with water under pressure. I could see something moving inside the lock— something that looked familiar, but strange at the same time.
 It was both strange and familiar! The strange sea-girl, she was there! She had been no dream of oxygen starva-tion, but real flesh and blood, for now I saw her, pearl-eyed like the strange man named Joe Trencher ... but with human worry and warm compassion on her face as  she struggled to carry pressure-suited figures into the lock.   One—two—three! There were three of them, weakly stirring.
 It was—it had to be—Gideon, Laddy and David. She had saved us all.
 And behind her loomed the hulk of something strange and deadly—but she showed no fear. It was the gaping triangular face of the saurian.
 As I watched, she turned about with an eel-like wriggle and slapped the monster familiarly on its horny nose. Not a blow in anger—but a caress, almost, as a rider might pat the muzzle of a faithful horse.
 It was true, what David had said: The saurians were domesticated. The sea-creatures he called amphibians tru-ly rode them, truly used them as beasts of burden.
 The sea-girl left the saurian and swam inside. I saw her at the glowing dials of a control panel.
 The great doors swung shut, closing out the huge, inquisitive saurian face. I saw the doors glow suddenly with edenite film.
 Pumps began to labor and chug.
 Floodlights came on.
 In a moment the girl was standing on the wet floor of the lock, trying to tug at the pressure-suited figures of my friends toward the inner gate.

 Bob Eskow twisted and turned and cried out sharply: "Diatom! Diatom to radiolarian. The molluscans are
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------" He opened his eyes and gazed at me. For a moment he hardly recognized me.
 Then he smiled. "I—I thought we were goners, Jim. Are you sure we're here?"
 I slapped his pressure-suited shoulder. "We're here. This young lady and her friend, the dinosaur—they brought us to Craken's dome!"
 David was already standing, stripping off his pressure suit. He nodded gravely. "Thank Maeva." He nodded to the girl, standing wide-eyed and silent, watching us. "If
 Maeva hadn't come along ----But Maeva and I have
 always been friends."
 The girl spoke. It was queer, hearing human speech from what I still couldn't help thinking of as a mermaid!

 But her voice was soft and musical as she said: "Please,
 David. Don't waste time. My people know you are here."
 She glanced at the lock port anxiously, as though she was expecting it to burst open, with a horde of amphibians or flame-breathing saurians charging through. "As we
 brought you to the dome, Old Ironsides and I, I saw another saurian with a rider watching us. Let us go to
 your father ---"

            David said sharply: "She's right. Come on!" We were all of us conscious again. David and Gideon had never really passed out from the lack of oxygen, but they had been so weak that it was nearly the same thing. Without Maeva to help them, and the saurian she called "Old Ironsides" to bear them on its broad, scaly back, they would have been as dead as the rest of us.
 Strange girl! Her skin was smooth and brown, her short-cut hair black. The pearly eyes, which on Joe Tren-cher had seemed empty and grim, on her seemed cool and gentle; they gave her face an expression of sadness, of wistfulness.
 I thought that she was beautiful.
 She was smiling at David, even in the urgency of that moment. I saw her hands flashing through a series of complicated motions—and realized that she was urging him on, to hurry to his father, in some sign language of the Deep that was more natural to her than speech.
 Roger caught David's shoulder roughly and hauled him aside. He hissed, so that Maeva couldn't hear: "There aren't any mermaids! What—what sort of monster is she?"
 David said angrily: "Monster? She's as human as you! She is one of the amphibians—like Joe Trencher, but one we can trust to be on our side. Her ancestors were the Polynesian father found trapped under the sea."

            "But—but she's a fish, Craken! water! It isn't human!"
 David's face stiffened, and for a moment I thought there might be trouble. He was furious.
 But he calmed himself. Struggling for control— evidently this sea-girl meant something to him!—he said: "Come on! Let's find my father!"

 
 We raced through the dome, along slippery steel hills,
 islanders my
 She breathes    past rooms that, in the glimpse we caught as we passed, seemed like ancient chambers from a Sultan's palace, costly and beautiful and—falling into decay.

            Fantastic place! A sub-sea dome is a fearfully expen-sive thing to construct—expensive not only of money, but of time and materials and human lives. There were hun-dreds upon hundreds of them scattered across the floors of the sea, true—but very few were those which were owned by a single man.

            And to build one, as David Craken's father had built this, in secrecy, with only the help of a few technicians sworn to silence and the manual labor of the amphibians and the saurians—it was incredible!

            I counted five levels below the topmost bulge of the dome—five levels packed with living quarters and re-creation areas, with shops and docks and storage space, with a monster nuclear reactor chuckling away as it made the power to run the dome and keep the sea's might harmlessly away. There were rooms, a dozen of them or more, that looked like laboratories. We crossed through one that was lined with enormous vats, filled with the macerated remains of stalks of the strange, glowing weed that grew in the Trench outside. It was glowing only fitfully, fading almost into extinction here in the atmo-sphere; and the musty reek that rose from those vats nearly strangled poor Maeva—who was having a bad enough time out of the water anyway—and made the rest of us quicken our steps.

            "Dad's experiments," David said briefly. "He's been trying to find the secret of the weed. He's tried every-thing—macerated them, dissolved them in acids, treated them with solvents, burned them, centrifuged them. Some
 day ---" He glanced around at the benches of glassware,
 the bubbling beakers that reeked of acid, the racks of test tubes and distilling apparatus.

            "Some day things will be different," David finished in an altered tone. "But now we have no time for this. Come on!"

 We came to the topmost chamber of all.
 There was no sign of David's father.
 David said worriedly: "Maeva, I can't understand it! Where can he be?"
 The sea-girl said, in her voice which was soft and liquid and occasionally gasping for breath: "He isn't well, David. He—he is not of the sea. Perhaps he is asleep." She touched David gently with her hand—and I saw with a fresh shock that the fingers were ever so slightly webbed. "You must take him up to the surface, David," she said, panting. "Or else I think he will die."
 "I have to find him first!" David said worriedly. He cast about him, staring. We were in a room—once, it seemed, a luxurious salon. It was walled with books, thousands of them, stacked in shelves to the ceiling—titles of science and philosophy mixed helter-skelter with blood-and-thunder tales of danger and excitement. There were long, high shelves of portfolios of art works—left by David's mother when she passed away, I supposed, for they were gray with dust.
 The room was now cluttered with more of the same tangle of scientific equipment we had seen below, as though the man who owned the dome had no interest left in life but his scientific researches. There were unpacked crates of glassware and reagents, with labels that showed he had bought them in Marinia, consignment tags that were addressed to a hundred fictitious names, none to himself. There was a cobalt "bomb" encased in tons of lead. A new electric autoclave that he had found no space for below. A big hydraulic press that could create experi-mental pressures a hundred times higher than those in the Deep outside. Test tubes and hypodermic needles and half-emptied bottles that Craken had labeled in hieroglyphics of his own.
 The windows were the strangest thing in the room. They were wide picture windows, draped and curtained tastefully.
 And the view in them was—rolling landscapes!
 Outside those windows, four miles down, one saw spruce trees and tall pines, green mountain meadows and grassy foothills, far-off peaks that were white with snow!
 I stared at them incredulously. David glanced at me, then half-smiled. "Stereoscapes," he said carelessly, his eyes roaming about, his mind far away. "They were for my mother. She came from Colorado, and always she longed for the dry land and the mountains of her home...."

            Maeva's voice came imploringly: "David! We must hurry."
 He said, worriedly, "I don't know what to do, Maeva! I suppose the best thing is for us to fan out and search the dome. But ---"
 We never heard the end of that sentence.
 There was a sudden scratching sound that seemed to permeate the dome. Then a blare of noise, from dozens of concealed loudspeakers.
 The mechanical voice of an electric watchman roared: "Attention! Attention! The dome is under attack! Atten-tion, attention! The dome is under attack!"
 Roger said in a panicky voice: "David, let's do something! Forget your father. The amphibians, they're attacking and ---"
 But David wasn't listening to him.
 David was staring, across the room, toward a clutter of equipment and gear that nearly filled one corner.
 "Dad!" he cried.
 We all whirled.
 There, in the corner, an old man, wasted and gaunt, was sitting up, propping himself on a cot. He had been out of sight behind the tangled junk that surrounded him.
 The warning of the electronic watchman had waked him.
 He was sitting up, calm as can be, his eyes remote but friendly, his expression unperturbed. He wore a little beard—once dapper, now scraggly and gray.
 "Why, David," he said. "I've been wondering where you were. How nice that you've brought some friends to visit us.

 
 
 Craken of the Sea-Mount   

We looked at him, and then at each other. The same thought was in all our minds, I could see it in the eyes of David and the sea-girl, reflected on the faces of the others.

 Jason Craken's mind was going.
 He beamed at us pleasantly. "Welcome," he said. "Welcome to you all."            Once he had been a powerful man. I could see that, from the size of his bones and the lean muscles that he had left. But he was wasted now, and gaunt. His skin hung loose, and it was mottled with a queer greenish stain. His gray hair needed cutting, and the beard was a tangle. There was almost no trace left of the dandy my uncle had described.

            He had been sleeping in his laboratory smock—once white, now wrinkled and stained. He glanced down at it and chuckled.

            He said ruefully, "I was not expecting guests, as you. can see. I do apologize to you. I dislike greeting my son's guests in so unkempt an array. But my experiments, gentlemen, my experiments take all too much of my time. One has not enough hours in the day for all the many

            David stepped over to him. He said gravely, "Father. Why don't you rest a bit? I'll show the—the guests around the dome."

            And all this time the robot watchman was howling: Attention, attention, attention!
 David signaled to us and we left the room quietly. In a moment he joined us. "He'll be all right," he said. "Now— let's go to the conn room!"
 The conn room was a tiny chamber at the base of the dome, ringed by televisor screens, where a picture of the sea-floor all about the dome was in mosiac patches. There was nothing in sight. David nodded worriedly. "Not yet," he commented. "I thought not. The robot watchman—it is set to warn of approaching sub-sea vessels, but it has a considerable range. They won't be in sight for a while yet."

 "They?" I demanded.   David shrugged. "I don't know if there will be more than one. The Killer Whale, perhaps—but the amphibians had another sea-car that I know of, the one they took from me. How many besides that I don't know."

            Gideon said softly, his brow furrowed: "Bad luck, I think. I'd hoped that they would believe we had all gone up with the Dolphin when the reactor exploded."

            The sea-girl shook her head. "I told you," she reminded him, gasping. "We were seen. I—I am sorry, David, that I let them see me, but ----- "

            "Maeva! Don't apologize. You saved our lives!" David wrung her hand. He looked thoughtfully at the screens, then nodded.

            "I've got to look after my father," he said. "Jim, will you come with me? The rest of you—it would be better if you stayed here, kept an eye on the screens."

            Gideon nodded. "Fine," he agreed, in his gentle voice. "Then—that's a Mark XIX fire-control director I see
 there? And a turret gun, I suppose? Yes. Then we can
 fight them off, if need be, right from here. I've handled
 the Mark XIX before and ----- "

            David interrupted him.
 "I don't think you can do much with this one," he said.
 Gideon looked at him thoughtfully. "And why not?"

 he asked after a moment.         David said: "It's broken, Gideon. The amphibians de-stroyed the circuits when they rebelled against my father. If they do attack—we have no weapons to fight them with."

            We left them behind us, and I must say the heart was out of me. Nothing to fight with! Not even a sea-car to escape in, now!

            But Gideon was already at work before we left the fire-control room, stripping down the circuit-junction mains, checking the ruined connections. It was very un-likely that he could repair the gun. But Gideon had done some very unlikely things before.

 David's father was asleep again when we came back to him. David woke him gently.
 He rubbed his eyes and blinked at David.
 This time there was none of that absent serenity with which he had greeted us before. He seemed to remember what was going on about him—and he seemed to be in despair.
 "David," he said. "David ----"
 He shook himself and stood up.
 He stumbled weakly to a laboratory, filled a little glass beaker out of a bottle of colorless fluid and gulped it down.
 He came back to us, smiling and walking more steadily.
 "Sit down," he said, "sit down." He shoved piles of books off a couple of chairs. "I had given you up, David. It is good to see you."
 David Craken hurried to find another chair for the old man, but he ignored it. He sat down on the edge of the creaking cot and ran his hands through his thinning hair.
 David said: "Dad, you're sick!"
 Jason Craken shrugged. "A few unfortunate reactions." He glanced absently at the strange green blotches on his hands. "I suppose I've been my own guinea pig a few times too many. But I'm strong enough, David. Strong enough—as Joe Trencher will find—to take back what belongs to me!"
 His eyes were hollowed and bloodshot, yet strangely intense with a light that came from fever—or madness, I thought. He beckoned to us with his gnarled, lean hand. David said: "Dad—we're being attacked! Didn't you know that? The robot warning came ten minutes ago."
 Jason Craken shook his head impatiently. He made a careless gesture, as though he was brushing the attackers away. "There have been many attacks," he boomed, "but I am still here. And I will stay here while I live. And when I am gone—you shall stay after me, David."
 He stood up, swaying slightly, and walked over to the laboratory bench once more for another beaker of the colorless fluid. Whatever it was, it seemed to put new life into him. He said strongly: "Joe Trencher will learn! I'll conquer him as David!" He
 we've conquered the saurians, came back and sat beside us, a scarecrow emperor with that rumpled cot for a throne. He turned to me. "Jim Eden," he said, "I welcome you to Tonga Trench. I never thought I would need the help your uncle promised, so many years ago. But I never thought that Trencher and his people would turn against me!"

            He seemed to be both raging with fury and morbidly depressed. "Trencher!" he spat. "I assure you, Jim Eden, that without my help the amphibians would still be living
 the life of animals! That was how I found them—trapped in their own submerged caves. If I were an egotist, I could say that I created them, and it would be near to the truth. Yet—they are ungrateful! They have turned against
 me! They and the saurians, I must crush them, show them
 who is the master ---"
 He broke off suddenly as his voice reached a crescendo. For a moment he sat there, staring at us wildly.

            David went to him, patted him and soothed him, calmed him down. It was hard to tell there, for a mo-ment, which was the parent and which the child.

 But one thing I knew.
 David Craken's father was nearly mad!            Yet—he could talk as sanely as anyone in the world, between attacks of his raging obsession.
 David quieted him down, and we sat there for what seemed a long time, talking, waiting. Waiting—I hardly hardly knew what we were waiting for.
 Queer interlude! The robot watchman had been cut off, its mindless cries of warning no longer battered against our ears. Yet—we were still under attack! There had not yet been a jet missile fired against us, but the robot could not have made a mistake.
 There was no doubt about it: Somewhere just outside the range of the microsonars, Joe Trencher and the Killer Whale swung, getting ready to batter down the dome we were in.
 And we had no weapons.
 I knew that Gideon would be racing against time, trying to fit the maimed circuits of the gun controls back into some semblance of order—but it was a long, complex job. It was something a trained crew might take a week to  do—and he was one man, working on unfamiliar components!          But somehow, in that room with Jason Craken and his son, I was not afraid.
 After a bit he collected himself again and began to talk of my father and my uncle. Astonishing how clearly he recollected every detail of those days, decades ago—and could hardly remember how he had lived in the months he had been alone here, while David and the rest of us were preparing to come to help him!
 David whispered to me: "Talk to him about his experi-ments and discoveries. It—it helps to keep him steady."
 I said obediently: "Tell me about—ah—tell me about those queer plants outside the dome. I've been under the sea before this, Mr. Craken, but I've never seen anything like them!"
 He nodded—it was like an eagle nodding, the fierce face quiet, the eyes hooded. "No one else has either, Jim Eden! The deeps are a funnel—a funnel of life. Every-where but here. Do you understand what I mean by that?"
 I nodded eagerly—even there, with the danger of destruction hanging over us all, I couldn't help being held by that strange old man. "One of my instructors said that," I told him. "I remember. He said that life in the ocean is a funnel, filled from the top. Tiny plants grow near the surface, where the sunlight reaches them. They make food for tiny creatures that eat them—and the tiny animal creatures are eaten by larger ones, and so on. But everything depends on the little plants at the surface, making food for the whole sea out of sunlight. Only a few crumbs get down the spout of the funnel, to the depths."
 "Quite true!" boomed the old man. "And here we have another funnel, Jim Eden. But one that is upside down. Those plants ---" he looked at me sharply, almost suspi
 ciously. "Those plants are the secret of the Tonga Trench,
 Jim Eden. It is the greatest secret of all, for on them depend all the other wonders of my kingdom of the Trench. They have their own source of energy! It is an atomic process." He frowned at me thoughtfully. "I—I have not finally succeeded in penetrating all of its secrets," he confessed. "Believe me, I have tried. But it is a nuclear reaction of some sort—deriving energy, I be-lieve, from the unstable potassium isotope in sea water. But I have not yet been able to get the process to work in a test tube. Not yet. But I will!"

            He got up and walked more slowly, thoughtfully, to the laboratory bench. Absently he poured himself another beaker of the elixir on which he seemed to be absolutely dependent. He looked at it thoughtfully and then set it down, untasted.

 Evidently the thought of the secret of the Tonga            Trench was as powerful a stimulant to him as the elixir! I began to see how this man had been able to keep going for so long, alone and sick—he was driven by the remorse-less compulsion that makes great men . . . and maniacs.

            "So you see," he said, "there is a second funnel of life here. The shining weed, with its own energy, that does not need the light of the sun. The little animals that feed off it. The larger ones—the saurians and the amphibians— that live off the small."

            "The saurians," I broke in, strangely excited. "David said something about—about some sort of danger from them. Is it true?"

            "Danger?" The old man stared at his son with a hint of reproof. As though the word had been a trigger that set him off, he picked up the beaker of fluid and swallowed it. "Danger? Ah, David—you cannot fear the saurians! They cannot harm us in the dome!" He turned to me, and once again assumed the tone and attitude of a schoolmas-ter, lecturing a pupil. "It is a matter of breeding pat-terns," he said soberly. "'The saurians are egg-layers, and their eggs cannot stand the pressures of the bottom of the Trench, where the shining weeds grow. So each year—at the time of the breeding season—they must come up to the top of the sea-mount, to lay their eggs. There is only one way to the caves where, from ages past, they had always laid them—and I built this dome squarely across it!"

            He chuckled softly, as though he had done a clever thing. "While they were tamed," he told me gleefully, "I permitted them to pass. But now—now they shall not enter their caves! This Trench is mine, and I intend to keep it!"

  He paused, staring at me.
 "I may need help," he admitted at last. "There are many

            saurians ---- But you are here! You and the others, you
 must help me. I can pay you. I can pay very well, for all the wealth of the Tonga Trench is mine. Tonga pearls! I have found a way to increase the yield—like the old

            Japanese cultured-pearl fishers, years ago. It cannot be done with ordinary oysters, for the Tonga pearls must have the radioactive nucleus that comes from the shining weed. But I have planted Tonga pearls, Jim Eden, and the first harvest is ready to be gathered!"

            He stood up. Bent as he was, he towered over us, "I offer you a share in a thousand thousand Tonga pearls for your help! You owe me that help anyway, as you know—for your father and your uncle have promised it. What do you say, Jim Eden? Will you help me hold the empire of the Tonga Trench?"
 His eyes were growing wilder and wilder.
 "Here is what you must do!" he cried. "You must take your subsea cruiser, the Dolphin. You must destroy the ship Joe Trencher is using. The dome's own armaments will suffice for the saurians—I have a most powerful missile gun mounted high on the dome, well supplied with ammunition, with the latest automatic fire-control built in. Crush Joe Trencher for me—the dome itself will destroy the saurians if they try to come through. Is that agreed, Jim Eden?"
 And that was when the bubble burst.
 He stood waiting for my answer. He had nearly made me believe that these things were possible, for a moment. He was so absolutely sure of himself, that I forgot, while he was speaking, a few things.
 For instance ---
 The Dolphin was destroyed, blown to atoms.
 His missile gun was not working, sabotaged by the amphibians when they turned against him.
 David Craken and I stared at each other somberly, while the crazed light faded and died in his father's eyes.
 For Jason Craken's mind was wandering again. He had fought the sea too long, and taken too much of his own strange potions.
 He had conceived a battle scheme—a perfect  tactical plan, except that it relied on a gun that would not fire and a ship that had been sunk!
 I don't know what we would have said to him then.
 But it turned out that we didn't have to say anything.
 There was a scratching, racing sound of foosteps from outside and the sea-girl, Maeva, burst gasping and frantic into the room.
 "David!" she cried raggedly, fighting for breath. "David, they're coming back! The saurians are attacking again, and there is a subsea ship leading them!" We leaped to our feet.
 But even before we got out of the room, a dull ex-plosion rocked the dome.
 A sub-sea missile from the Killer! The fight for Tonga Trench had begun!

  

 The Fight for Tonga Trench            

"Up!" cried Maeva. "Up to the missile-gun turret. Gideon couldn't fix the fire-control equipment—he's try-ing to handle the gun manually!"

            We pounded up narrow steel stairs, David flying ahead.
 We found Gideon in the turret, his eyes on a compli-cated panel of wires and resistors, his mind so fixed on his task that he didn't even look up to see us come in.
 "Gideon!" I cried—and then had to stop, holding onto the wall, as another explosion rocked the dome.
 They meant business this time!
 The turret was tiny and gloomy, and filled with the reek that rose from Jason Craken's laboratories below. There were tiny windows spotted about it—not much more than portholes, really—and there was little to see through them. All I could make out, through the pale glimmer of the edenite film on the window itself, was the steep curve of the dome beneath us, glowing unsteadily with its own film. The cold blue light from the dome caught two or three jutting points of dark rock. Beyond that, the darkness of the deep was broken only by the occasional ghostly glimmerings of deep-sea crea-tures that carried lights of their own.

            I glanced at David, startled. "I don't see anything!" He nodded. "You wouldn't, Jim. You need microsonar to see very far under the surface of the sea. That's what Gideon is working on now, I should judge. This missile gun—it can be worked manually, if its microsonar sights are working. But it's been fifteen years at least since it was
 manned—always it was controlled from the fire-control chamber below, you see. And that is wrecked _ "
 Gideon glanced up abstractedly. He nodded agreement, started to speak, and returned to his work.
 It wasn't hard to see that he was worried.
 The missile gun almost filled the turret. It was an ugly, efficient machine of destruction, though the firing tube, what little of it was within its turret, looked oddly slim. The bright-cased missiles racked in the magazine weren't much larger than my arm.
 "Looks old-fashioned to you?" David was reading my mind. "But it's deadly enough, Jim. One of those shells will destroy a sea-car—the shock neutralizes the edenite film for a tiny fraction of a second. And the sea's own pressure does the rest. They're steam jets—athodyds, they're called; they scoop up water and fire it out behind in the form of steam."
 There was a sudden exclamation from Gideon.
 He plucked something out of a kit of spare parts, plugged a new component into the tangle of wires and sub-assemblies.
 "That should do it!" he said softly. And he touched a switch.
 We all stood waiting, almost holding our breaths.
 There was a distant hum of tiny motors.
 The turret shuddered and turned slightly.
 The microsonar screen came to life.
 "You've done it!" David cried.
 Gideon nodded. "It works, at any rate." He patted the slim breech, almost fondly. "Anyway, I think it does. It was the sonar hookup that was the big headache. It serves as the sights for the missile-gun. Without the sonar, it  would be like firing blind. Now—I think we can see what we're doing."    I stared into the microsonar, fascinated. It was an old, old model—hardly like the bright new screen the Acade-my had taught me to work with. Everything was reduced and distorted, as though we were looking into the wrong end of a cheap telescope.

            But, as I grew used to it, I could pick some details out. I could see the steep slopes of the sea-mount falling away from us. I found the jagged rim of a ravine—the one the saurians used for their breeding trail, no doubt; the same one that Maeva and Old Ironsides had carried us along.

            I glanced at the screen, and then again.
 There was a whirling pattern of tiny shapes. For a moment I couldn't make them out. Then I said: "Why, it's a school of fish. At least that proves the saurians aren't around, doesn't it? I mean, they would frighten the fish away and ---"
 "Fish?" Gideon was staring at me. "What are you talking about?"
 I said patiently, "Why, Gideon, don't you see? If there were saurians, they'd show in the microsonar, wouldn't they? And that school of fish ---"
 He looked at me with a puzzled expression, then shrugged.
 "Jim," he said, "look here." He adjusted the verniers of the microsonar with a delicate touch, bringing into sharp focus. He pointed. "There," he said. "Right in front of you. Saurians—a couple of hundred of them, I'd guess. They look pretty small, because these old target screens reduce everything—but there they are, just out of range!"
 I stared, unbelieving.
 What he was pointing at was what I had thought was a school of tiny fish!
 They were saurians, all right—hundreds upon hun-dreds of them. I looked more closely, and I could see another little object among my "fish"—not a saurian this time, dangerous.
 I pointed to it. pointing finger.
 "That's right, Jim," said David. "It's the Killer Whale. They're waiting _ But they won't wait much longer."

 They waited exactly five more minutes.
 Then all three of us saw the little spurt of light jet out from the Killer's bright outline and come arrowing in toward us. Another jet missile!
 Seconds later, the dull boom of its explosion shook the dome once more.
 But even before that, Gideon had leaped into the cradle
 of the missile-gun. One hand on the trips, the other coax
 ing the best possible image from the microsonar sights, he
 wheeled the turret to bring the weapon to bear on the
 distant shape of the Killer Whale. I saw him press the
 trips ---
 There was a staccato rapping, and the slim breech but something infinitely more

            Gideon and David followed my of the missile-gun leaped a fraction of an inch, half a dozen times, as Gideon fired a salvo of six missiles at the Killer.

            The microsonar flared six times as the missiles went off, in a blast of pressure waves.
 When the screen cleared—the Killer Whale still hung there, surrounded by its cluster of circling saurians.
 Gideon nodded soberly. "Out of range, of course. But we're at extreme range too. Even with the better weapons they have on the cruiser. At least we can hope to keep them at arm's length." He checked the loading bays of the missile-gun. "Jim, David," he said. "Reload for me, will you? I don't want to get away from the trigger, in case Trencher and his boys decide to make a, sudden jump."
 We leaped to do as he asked. The stacks of missiles in their neat racks around the turret were none too many for our needs. We filled the bays—the gun's own automatic loading mechanism would take over from there—and looked worriedly at the dwindling pile of missiles that were left.
 "Not too many," David conceded. "Gideon, will you be all right here alone? Jim and I had best go down to the storeroom for more missiles."
 "I'll be all right!" Gideon's smile flashed white. "But don't take too long. I have a feeling we're going to need every missile we can get any minute now!"

            But the attack didn't come. We rounded up a work party, David and I. Bob and Laddy and Roger Fairfane formed teams to haul clips of the slim missiles from the storerooms at the base of the dome, up to the missile turret. Three of them was a load for one man; we made two or three trips apiece.

            And still the attack didn't come.
 And then David and Bob came out of the storeroom with only one missile apiece. David's face was ghastly white.
 "They're gone!" he said tensely. "This is all that is left. The amphibians—when they turned against my father, they cleaned out the armory too, all but a few missiles we've found."
 We made a quick count. About seventy-five rounds, no more.
 And the missile gun fired in bursts of half a dozen!
 We held a quick council of war in the conn room at the base of the dome, near the storage chambers. The screens that ringed it showed a mosiac of the sea-mount and sea-bottom around us.
 The Killer Whale still hung there, still threatening, still waiting. At odd intervals they loosed a missile, but none of them had caused any damage; we had come to ignore them. And the saurians still milled about in their racing schools.
 David said somberly: "It's the beginning of their breed
 ing season. I suppose for millions of years they've been doing it just that way. They go through that strange sort
 of ritual, down there at the base of the sea-mount, working themselves up. I've seen it many times. They go on
 like that for hours. And then at last, one of them will
 start up the side of the sea-mount, toward the caves, where they will lay their eggs. And then all the others will
 follow ---"
 He closed his eyes. I could imagine what he was seeing in his mind's eye: A horde of saurians, hundreds strong, streaming up the side of the sea-mount, battering past the dome. And with Joe Trencher in his Killer Whale riding herd on them, driving them against the dome itself, while he pounded it with missiles!
 The edenite dome—yes, it was strong, no doubt! But each of those beasts was nearly the size of a whale. Twenty or thirty tons of fiercely driven flesh pounding against the dome would, at the least, shake it. Multiply that by a hundred, two hundred, three hundred—and remember that the edenite film was after all maintained only by the power that came from delicate electronic parts. If for one split fraction of a second the power fal-tered. . . .
 Then in moments the dome would be flat.
 And we would be crushed blobs of matter in a

            tangle of wreckage, as four miles of sea stamped us into the muck.
 Bob Eskow mopped his brow and stood up.
 He turned to David Craken.
 "David," he said, "that settles it. The missile-gun might stop the saurians—but with only seventy-five rounds for it, and hundreds of the saurians, we might as well not bother. And we'll never get the Killer Whale with the gun; it isn't powerful enough, hasn't got the range. There's only one thing to do."
 I said: "He's right, David. It's up to you. You've got to make peace with the amphibians."
 David looked at us strangely.
 "Make peace with them!" He laughed sharply. "If I only could! But, don't you see? My father—he is the one who must make peace. And his mind is—is wandering. You've seen it for yourselves. The amphibians aren't used to the world, you know. They understand the rule of one man, a leader. Joe Trencher is their leader; and Joe once bowed to the rule of my father. I don't say my father was always right. He was a stern man. Perhaps all along, his mind was a little—well, strained. He's been through enough to strain anyone! But he was perhaps a little too severe, a little too unyielding. And so Joe Trencher's people turned against him.
 "But it is my father they still respect, even though they are fighting him. If he would try to make peace—yes, that might work. But he never will. He can't. His mind simply cannot accept it."
 I said, suddenly struck by a thought: "David! This must have happened before, hasn't it? I don't mean the rebel-lion of the amphibians, but the breeding season of the saurians. What did you do other years, when they made their procession up to the caves in the sea mount? How did you keep them from damaging the dome?"
 David shrugged wretchedly. "The amphibians
 herded them/* he said. "We would station a dozen of them outside the dome with floodlights and gongs. Sound car-ries under water, you know—and the sound of the gongs and the light from the floods would keep them away from the dome. Oh, we had a good many narrow escapes—my father never should have built his dome right here, in their track. But he is a willful man.

            "But without the amphibians to help us—with them attacking at the same time—it's hopeless."
 There was no more time for discussion.
 We heard a dull crunch of another jet missile from the Killer Whale—and then another, and a third, almost at once.
 And simultaneously, the light, staccato rattle of our own turret missile-gun, as Gideon, high above us, fired in return.
 We all turned to stare at the mosiac of the sea-mount below us.
 The herd of saurians were milling purposelessly no longer. Two, three, four of them had started coming up toward us—more were following.
 And the glittering hull of the Killer Whale was coming in with them, firing as it came.

 
 Sub-Sea Stampede!

The dome was thundering and quivering under the almost incessant fire from the Killer Whale.
 Gideon was returning their fire—coolly, desperately .,. and in the end, hopelessly. But he was managing to keep the saurians in a state of confusion. He had beaten back the first surge of a handful of the enormous beasts. The main herd had milled a bit more, than another batch had made the dash for their breeding trail past the dome. The explosions of our little missile-gun had demoralized and confused them.
 There had been a third attempt, and a fourth.
 And each time Gideon had managed to rout the
 monsters. But I had kept a rough count, and I knew what Gideon knew: We were nearly out of missiles.           I thought of Gideon, clinging desperately to his missile-gun high above, and felt regret. This wasn't his fight; I had got myself into it, but I blamed myself for involving Gideon.

            But I didn't have much time for such thoughts, for we were busy.
 David had had one desperate idea: We would recharge the little oxygen flasks in our pressure suits, feed as much charge into the batteries as they would take, and try at the last to go out into the deep with the lights and the gongs, to see if we could herd the saurians away from the dome.
 The idea was desperation itself—for surely the amphi-bians, stronger and better-equipped, would be driving the frantic monsters in upon us, and there was little doubt that it was going to be a harrowingly unsafe place to be, out at the base of the dome, under four miles of water, with thirty-ton saurians milling and raving about in frenzy.
 But it was the only chance we had.
 Jason Craken was mooning about by himself, talking excitedly in gibberish; Gideon and Roger were fully occu-pied in the turret. It left only Laddy, David, the sea-girl Maeva, and myself to try to get the suits ready for us.
 For Bob Eskow was nowhere to be seen.
 It took us interminable minutes, while the dome rocked and quivered under our feet. Then David threw down the last oxygen cylinder angrily. "No more gas in the tank!" he cried. "We'll have to make do with what we have. How do we stand, Laddy?"
 Laddy Angel, fitting cylinders into the suits, counted rapidly and shrugged.
 "It is not good, my friend David," he said softly. "There is not much oxygen ----- "
 "I know that! How much?"
 Laddy frowned and squinted thoughtfully. "Perhaps— perhaps twenty minutes for each suit. Four suits. We have enough oxygen for four of us to put on suits and go out into the abyss, to try to frighten away your saurians.
 Only ---- " he shrugged. "It is what they teach at the
 Academy," he confessed, "but I am not sure it is true here. So many cubic centimeters of oxygen, so many seconds of safe breathing time. But I cannot be sure, David, if the instructors in my classroom were thinking of such a use of breath as we shall be making! We must leap and pound gongs and jump about like cheerleaders at a football game, and I have some doubt that the air that would last twenty minutes of quiet walking about will last as long while we cavort like acrobats."

            David demanded feverishly: "Power?"
 That was my department. I had hooked the leyden-type batteries onto the dome's own power reactor, watch-ed the gauges that recorded the time.

            "Not much power," I admitted. "But if we only have twenty minutes of breathing time, it doesn't matter. The power will hold the edenite armor on the suits for at least twice that."

            David stood thoughtfully silent for a moment. Then he shrugged. "Well," he said, "it's the best we can
 do. If it isn't good enough ---- "
 He didn't finish the sentence.
 He didn't have to, because we all knew what it meant if we failed.

            Lacking oxygen and power, we could be out on the floor of the sea for only a few minutes—so we had to wait there in the conn room until the stampede was raging upon us. We watched the mosaic screens for the sign of the big rush, the rush that Gideon with his missile-gun would not be able to stem.

            We didn't speak much; there wasn't much left to say. And I remembered again: Bob Eskow was missing. Where had he got to? I said: "David—Bob's been

 gone a long time. We'll need him—when we go outside."          David frowned, his eyes intent on the screen. "He was rummaging through the storerooms—looking for more oxygen cylinders, I think, though I told him there weren't any. Perhaps one of us should look for him." He turned to the sea-girl, Maeva, who stood silently by, watching us with wide, calm eyes. I envied her! If the saurians blun-dered through our weak defenses and the dome came pounding down—she at least would live!

 And then I remembered Joe Trencher and his blazing anger against everything connected with the Crakens, and I wasn't so sure that she would live, after all. For surely Joe Trencher would not spare a traitor to the amphibian people, one who took the side of the Crakens against them.
 "Maeva," he told her, "see if you can find him." She nodded, gasping for breath, and started soundlessly out of the conn room. But she didn't have to go far, for as she reached the door Bob appeared on the other side.

            We all stared at him. He was lugging a huge, yellow-painted metal cylinder, a foot thick and as long as Bob himself. Black letters were stenciled on the yellow:

            DEEP SEA SURVIVAL KIT Contents: Four-place raft, with emergency sur-vival and signal equipment. Edenite shield tested to twenty thousand feet.

            "What in the world are you going to do with that?" I demanded.
 He looked up, startled, and out of breath. "We can
 reach radiolarian, don't you see? I mean ----"
"What?"

            He broke off, and some of the absorbed gleam faded
 from his eyes. "I mean ---" he hesitated. "I mean,
 if a
 couple of us took it to the surface, we could, well, summon the Fleet. We would be able to ---"
 He went on, while I stared at him. Bob was acting
 very queerly, I thought. Could he be going to pieces
 under the strain of our situation? I was sure he had said
 something about "radiolarian"—the same sort of
 jumbled nonsense he was muttering when he woke up
 after Maeva had res-cued us.
 But he seemed perfectly all right....
 David told him sharply: "Wait, Bob. It's a pretty idea,
 but there are two things wrong with it. In the first place,
 we're pretty far off the beaten track here—and you have
 no guarantee that there would be a Fleet vessel
 anywhere around to receive your message." Bob opened
 his mouth to say something; David stopped him. "And
 even more important—we don't have that much time.
 One of those survival kit buoys will haul you up to
 the surface easily enough, I admit. But it takes at least ten minutes from this far down—even assuming you can hold on while you're being jerked up at twenty or thirty miles an hour!" He glanced at the microsonar screens worriedly. "We may not even have ten minutes!"

            We didn't.
 In fact, we didn't have ten seconds.
 There was a rattle from the intercom that

            connected with the missile-gun turret high above, and Gideon's soft voice came to us crying: "Stand by for trouble! They're coming fast!"

            We didn't need that warning. In our own microsonar screens we could see the saurians streaming toward us— not just two or three this time, but a solid group of a score or more, and the whole monstrous herd following close behind!

            We crowded into the lock, the four of us in pressure suits and the sea-girl, Maeva, close beside.
 The sea came in around us.
 Under that tremendous pressure, it didn't flow in a stream from the valve. It exploded into a thundering fog that blinded our face plates and tore at our suits like a wild white hurricane.
 The thunder stopped at last. We stepped out onto the slope of the sea-mount to face the greater thunder from the rampaging saurians.
 Endless minutes! We spread out, the five of us, with suit-lamps and gongs and tiny old explosive grenades David had dug up from somewhere—too small to do much harm, big enough to make a startling noise.
 The saurians came down on us in hordes. It seemed like thousands of them, clustered as thick as bees on a field of August clover. It was impossible to believe that we five, with the pathetic substitutes for arms we carried, could do anything to divert that tide of Juggernauts.
 But we tried.
 We flashed our lights at them, and tossed our grenades. We beat the huge brass gongs David had given us, and the low mellow booming sound echoed and multiplied in the terrible pressure of the Trench.
 We terrified the monsters. I think that they would have fled from the field entire-ly—if it had been only them.
 But as we were driving them from one side, so were others from behind. The amphibians! A dozen or more of the saurians carried low-crouched riders, jabbing at them with long, pointed goads, driving them in upon us. And other amphibians swam behind the maddened herd, mak-ing nearly as much noise as we, causing nearly as much panic in the beasts.
 It seemed to go on forever....
 And I began to feel faint and weak. The air was giving out!
 I looked about feverishly, fighting to stay conscious. I could see Maeva and David Craken to one side, doggedly leaping and pounding their gongs like mad undersea puppets. Farther down the slope, toward the fringe of shining weed that stopped short of the dome, I saw Laddy Angel dodging the onslaught of a pair of great saurians, leaping up after them and driving them away from the dome. It was hard to see, in the pale blue glow that shone from Jason Craken's edenite fortress, but—where was Bob?
 Look as I might, I couldn't see him anywhere.
 I reeled and nearly fell, even buoyed up by the water.
 I must have used up my oxygen even sooner than we had figured. I choked and blinked and tried to focus on the round, blue-lit bulk of the dome—so far away!
 I took a step toward it—and another -
 It seemed impossibly far away.

 
 "The Molluscans Are Ripe!"         

Yards short of the dome I toppled and slowly fell, and I had not the strength to stand up again—little though I needed with the buoying water to help.

            Everything was queerly blurred, strangely unimportant. I knew my air was bad. I could live a few more minutes— perhaps even a quarter of an hour—but I couldn't move,

  for there simply was not air enough left in my tanks to sustain me.         It was perfectly obvious. I would lie there, I thought drowsily, lazily, until I fell asleep. And then, after some minutes, I would die, poisoned by the carbon dioxide from my own breath....

            Or perhaps, if the edenite shield faltered first as the power ran out, crushed into a shapeless mass by the fury of the deeps.

            It was perfectly obvious, and I couldn't bring myself to care.
 Something strange was happening. I raised my head slightly to see better. There was a queer, narrow metal
 cave, and something moving around in it—something
 with a bright yellow head and a bright yellow body ---
 I shook my head violently to clear it and looked
 again.
 The cave became the airlock of the dome.
 The queer object with the bright yellow head became Bob Eskow, wearing his pressure suit and carrying— carrying that yellow cylinder he had lugged up from the storerooms, the emergency escape kit.
 I thought in a dreamy way how remarkable it was that he should be bothering with something like that. But I didn't really care. All I felt was an overwhelming laziness— narcosis, from bad air rather than pressure, but narcosis all the same. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.
 Suddenly Bob was tugging at me.
 That didn't matter either, but he was interfering with my pleasant lazy rest. I pushed at him angrily. I couldn't make out what he was doing.
 Then I saw: He was binding me to the shackles around the yellow-painted rescue buoy. For a moment his hel-meted face hung in front of mine, huge and dim. I saw him gesture vehemently with a chopping motion.
 I stared at him, irritated and puzzled. Chop? What did he mean?
 I glanced behind me, and saw the end of the yellow rescue buoy, where the deadweight was shackled to the flotation unit. The idea was to uncouple the weight and drop it off, then the buoy would surge toward the surface, carrying its rescued passengers with it.

 Possibly that was what Bob wanted me to do—knock the weights loose.
 Fretfully I pressed the release lever. The weighted end of the cylinder sprang free.
 And the flotation unit jerked us toward the surface.
 It was fast! It was almost like being fired from a cannon. The shock made me black out for a second, I think. I was conscious of the black rock and the shimmer-ing blue dome falling away beneath us, and then things became very confused. There was a fading gray glow in the water about us, then only darkness. Then I began to see queer bright lights—shining eyes, they seemed, that dived at us from above and dropped rapidly away beneath. The air was growing rapidly worse.
 I could hear myself breathing—great, rapid, panting upheavals, like Maeva after hours of breathing air, like a dying man. I began to have a burning in my lungs. My head ached . . . great gongs beat and spirals of fire spun and vanished in the dark sea.
 And then suddenly, we werQ at the surface of the sea.

            Amazingly, it was night!
 Somehow I had not thought of its being night-time above. We cracked our faceplates, clinging to the buoy, and I breathed deeply of cool, damp, night air. I stared at the stars as though I had never seen a night sky before. Amazing!
 But what was most amazing was that we were alive.
 As the air hit me it was like a dose of the strongest stimulant known to man. I coughed and choked and, if I hadn't been bound to the buoy, I think I might have dropped free and sunk back into the awesome miles of the Tonga Trench that waited hungrily beneath us.
 I heard a sharp, metallic snap: It was Bob, a little better off than I, pulling the lever that opened the emergency escape kit.
 The glow of the edenite film faded from the yellowpainted cylinder. The cap popped off. The plastic raft shot out of it, swelling out with a soft hiss of gas. .. .
 Somehow we scrambled aboard. We got our helmets off and lay on our backs, getting back our strength.

 The tall Pacific swell lifted us and dropped us, lifted us and dropped us. In the trough between the long, rounded waves we lay between walls of water; on the crest, we were hanging in midair in a plain of rolling black dunes. There were little sounds all around us—the wash of wave-lets against the rubber raft, the sounds of the air, our own breathing, the little creaks and rattles the raft itself made.

            It was utterly impossible to believe that four miles straight down a frightful battle was raging!
 But Bob believed it; he remembered. Before I could get my breath back, before I could demand an explana-tion, he was up and about.
 I lay there on the wet cushion of the raft, staring up at the blazing tropical stars that I had never expected to see again. My lungs and throat were burning still. I forced myself to sit up, to see what Bob was doing.
 He was squatting at the end of the tiny raft, fussing over the sealed lockers that contained emergency rations, first aid medical equipment—and a radio-sonar distress transmitter.
 It was the transmitter that Bob was frantically fumbling with.
 "Bob!" I had to stop and cough. My throat was raw,
 sore, exhausted. "Bob, what's this all about? You've been
 acting so strangely ----- "
 "Wait, Jim!"
 I said: "I can't wait! Don't you realize that the Crakens and the rest of our friends down there may be dying by now? They needed us! Without our help the saurians are bound to break through
 'Please, Jim. Trust me!" Trust him! Yet there was nothing else I could do. I was cut off from the struggle at the bottom of Tonga Trench now as irrevocably as though it were being fought on the surface of the moon. It had taken perhaps ten minutes for us to get away from it—and it was literally impossible to get back. Even if there had been air for the pressure suit and power to keep its edenite shield going, what could I do? Cut loose and drop free? Yes—and land perhaps miles from the sea-mount where Jason Craken's besieged dome might even now be crumbling as the deeps pounded in. For I had no way of knowing what sub-sea currents had tossed us about as we came up—and would clutch at me again on the way down.

            Trust him. It was a tall order—but somehow, I began to be able to do it.
 I growled, "All right," and cleared my throat. Watching his fingers work so feverishly over the radio-sonar apparatus a thought struck me. I said: "One thing, anyway. When we get back to the Academy—if we ever do—I'll be able to report to Coach Blighman that you finally qualified . . at twenty thousand feet!"
 He grinned briefly at me, and returned to the distress transmitter.
 It was built to send an automatic SOS signal on distress frequency radio, and simultaneously on sonarphone. The sonarphone would reach any cruising subsea vessels with-in range—and precious short the range of a sonarphone was, of course. The radio component would transmit the same signal electronically. Of course, with most traffic under the surface of the sea these days, there would be few ships to receive it—but its range was thousands of miles, and somewhere there would be a ship, or a monitor-ing relay buoy re-transmitting via sonarphone to a subsea vessel beneath, to hear—and to act.
 I bent closer to see what he was doing.
 He was disconnecting the automatic signal tape!
 While I watched, he completed his connections and switched on the transmitter. He picked up a tiny micro-phone on a short cable and began to talk into it.
 I stared at him as I heard what he said.
 "Diatom tQ radiolarian, diatom to radiolarian."
 It didn't mean anything! It was the same garbled gib-berish he had mumbled before. I had taken it to be the half-delirium of a mind just waking up from a shock—yet now he was saying it into a transmitter, and it was going out by radio and sonarphone to—to whom?
 "Diatom to radiolarian," he said again, and again. "Di-atom to radiolarian! The molluscans are ripe. Repeat, the molluscans are ripe! Hurry, radiolarian!"
 I sank back, unbelieving, as the little emergency raft bobbed up and down, up and down in the swell.
 Below us, our friends were fighting for their lives.

 And up here on the surface, where we had fled—my friend Bob Eskow had gone mad as old Jason Craken himself.

 But—appearances are deceiving.         I sat there on that wet, flimsy raft, staring at my friend. And finally I began to understand a few things.
 Bob looked up at me, almost worriedly.
 I said: "Hello, diatom."
 He hesitated for a second, and then grinned. "So you've guessed."
 "It took me long enough. But you're right, I've guessed. At least I think I have." I took a deep breath. "Diatom. That's your code name, right? You are diatom. And radiolarian—I suppose that's the code name for the Fleet? You're what we call an undercover agent, Bob. You're on a mission. All this time—you've been working for the Fleet itself. You came with us not for the fun of it, not to help me pay my family's debt to the Crakens —but because the Fleet gave you orders. Am I right?" He nodded silently. "Close enough," he said after a moment.
 It was hard to take in.
 But—now that I had the key, things began to fall into place. All those mysterious absences of Bob's back at the Academy—the hours, the afternoons, when he disap-peared and didn't tell me where he had gone, when I thought he had been practicing for the underwater tests— he had been reporting to Fleet. When he had hesitated before promising secrecy to David Craken—it had been because he had his duty to the Fleet, and couldn't prom-ise until David so worded it that it didn't conflict.
 And most important of all—when he had seemed to be deserting our friends down there beneath us, at the bot-tom of the Trench, it was because he had to come up here, to usq the radio to report to the Fleet!
 I said: "I think I owe you an apology, Bob. To tell the
 truth, I thought --"
 He interrupted me. "It doesn't matter what you
 thought, Jim. I'm only sorry I couldn't tell you the truth
 before this. But my orders ----- "

 It was my turn to interrupt. "Forget it! But—what happens next?"
 He looked sober. "I hope we're in time! 'The molluscans are ripe'—that's our SOS. It means the battle is going
 on, way down there at the bottom, Jim. The Fleet is supposed to be standing by, monitoring the radio for this
 signal. Then they're supposed to come racing up and
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------" His voice broke. He said in a different tone: "They're supposed to come down, pick us up, and take over in the Trench. You see, the Fleet knew something was up here— but they couldn't interfere, as long as there was no vio-lence. But we've cut it pretty fine, Jim. Now that the violence has started—I only hope they get here before it's too late!"
 I started to say, "I wish we could ----"
 I stopped in the middle of the wish, and forgot what it was I was going to wish for.
 Something fast and faintly glowing was brightening the swells beneath us. I pointed. "Look, Bob!" It was a faint blue shimmer in the black water; it grew brighter, and shaped itself into the long hull of a sub-sea ship, strangely familiar, surfacing close to us. "They're here!" I cried. "Bob, they're here!"
 He stared at the gleaming hull, then at me.
 He said dazedly, "I should have cut off the sonarphone. They heard me."
 "What are you talking about?" I demanded. "You wanted the Fleet, didn't you?"
 I stopped then, because all at once I knew I was wrong—badly wrong, terribly wrong.
 I knew then why that long hull, shimmering blue under the gentle wash of the waves, had seemed familiar. I hardly heard Bob saying:
 "That's not the Fleet. It's the Killer Whale! They heard my message on the sonarphone!"

 
 
 Aboard the Killer Whale     

The amphibians had us aboard their sub-sea cruiser and hatches closed. I don't think it took more than a minute. We were too startled, too shocked to put up much of a fight.

            And there was no point to a fight, not any more. If there was any hope for us anywhere, it was as likely to be aboard the Killer as waiting hopelessly on the raft.

            The Killer stank. The fetid air reeked with the strange, sharp odor of the gleaming plants of the Trench, the aroma I associated with the amphibians. The whole ship was drenched with fog and trickling, condensed moisture. Everything we touched was wet, and clammy, and dap-pled with rust and mold.

            There must have been twenty amphibians aboard the Killer. They manhandled us down the gangways, with hardly a word. I don't know if most of them spoke English or not; when they talked among themselves it was with such a slurring of the consonants and a singing of the vowels that I couldn't understand them.

            But they took us to Joe Trencher.
 The pearl-eyed leader of the amphibians was in the conn room, captain of the ship. He was naked to the waist and he had rigged up a spray nozzle on a water coupling that kept him continually drenched with salt water.
 He stood scowling at us while he sprayed his fishbelly skin. He looked like some monster from an old legend, but I didn't miss the fact that he had conned the ship into a steep, circling dive as briskly as any Fleet officer.
 "Why do you interfere against us?" he demanded.
 I spoke for both of us. "The Crakens are our friends. And the Fleet has jurisdiction over the whole sea bot-tom."
 He scowled without speaking for a moment. He broke into a fit of coughing and wheezing under his spray. "I've caught a cold," he muttered accusingly, glowering at us. "I can't stand this dry air!"
 Bob said sharply: "It isn't dry. In fact, you're ruining this ship! Don't you know this moisture will rot it out?"
 Trencher said angrily: "It is my ship! Anyway ------"
 he
 shrugged—"it will last long enough. Already we have defeated the Crakens and once they are gone we shall no longer need this ship."
 I took a deep breath. Defeated the Crakens! I asked: "Are they—are they ----"
 He finished for me. "Dead, you mean?" He shrugged again. "If they are not, it will be only a short time. They are defeated, do you hear me?" He hurled the spray nozzle away from him as though the mere thought of them had infuriated him. At least there was still some hope, I thought If they could only hold out a little longer....
 Trencher was wheezing: "Explain! We saw you flee to the surface, and we heard your message. But I do not understand it! Who is diatom? Who is radiolarian? What do you mean about the molluscans?"
 Bob glanced at me, then moved a step toward him.
 "I am diatom," he said. "Radiolarian is my superior officer, Trencher—a commander of the Sub-Sea Fleet! As diatom, I was on a special mission—concerning the Tonga pearls and you and your people. I needed information, and I got it; and my message will bring the whole Fleet here, if necessary, to put down any resistance and take over this entire area!" He sounded absolutely self-assured, absolutely confident. I hardly recognized him!
 He went on, with a poise that an admiral might envy: "This is your last chance, Trencher. I advise you to give up. I'm willing to accept your surrender now!"

            It was a brave attempt. But the amphibian leader had courage of his own. For a moment he was shaken; he stood there, blinking

            and wheezing, with a doubt in his eye. But then he exploded into raucous, gasping laughter. He caught up his spray again and wet himself down, still laughing.

            "Ridiculous," he hissed, wheezing. "You are fantastic, young man. I have you here aboard my ship, and you live only as long as I wish to let you live. And you ask me to surrender!"
 Bob said quickly: "It's your only chance. I -----"
 "Silence!" Trencher bellowed. He stood there, panting and scowling for a moment, while he made up his mind. "Enough. Perhaps you are a spy—I don't know. But I heard your message, and I did not hear a reply. Did it reach the Fleet? I think not, my young air-breather. And you will not have another chance, for we are now diving toward the Trench."
 He played the spray nozzle on his face, staring at us through the tiny slits that half-covered his pearly eyes. "You will not see the sky again, young man. I cannot let you live."
 Joe Trencher shrugged and spread his webbed fingers in a gesture that disclaimed responsibility. It was a sen-tence of death, and both Bob and I knew it.
 Yet—even in that moment, I saw something in the amphibian's cold, pearly eyes that'might almost have been sadness—compassion—regret.
 He said heavily: "It is not that I wish to destroy you. It is only that you have left us no choice. We must keep the secret of the Tonga Trench to ourselves, and you wish to tell it to the world. We cannot allow that! We must keep you in the Trench. It is too bad that you cannot breathe salt water—but it is your misfortune, not ours, that this air will not last forever."
 I was sweating, even in the cold and damp, but I tried to reason with him. "You can't keep your secret, Trench-er. The exploration of the sea is moving too fast. If we don't come back, other men will be here to find the saurians and the shining weed and the Tonga pearls."
 "They may come." He nodded heavily. "But we can't let them go back to the surface."
 I demanded: "Why?"
 "Because we are different, air-breather!" Trencher blinked, like a sad-faced idol in some queer temple, with Tonga pearls for eyes. "We learned our lesson many generations ago! We are mutations, as Jason Craken calls us—but once we were human. Our ancestors lived on the islands. And when some of us tried to go back, the islanders tried to kill us! They drove us into the sea. We found the Trench—and it is a kind world for us, young man, a world where we can live at peace. "At peace—as long as we are left alone!" He was wheezing and panting and struggling for breath—and it seemed to me that part of his distress was in his feelings and his mind. He sounded earnest and tragic. Even though he was saying that, in cold blood, he was going to take our lives—I couldn't help thinking that I almost understood how he felt.

            Perhaps he had good reasons to hate and fear the breathers of air!
 I said slowly: "Trencher, it seems there have been mistakes on both sides. But don't you see, we must make a
 peace that is fair to your people and to men! Men need
 you—but you need men, as well. You amphibians can be
 of great help in carrying out the conquest of the sea
 bottoms. But our society has many things you must have
 as well. Medicine. Scientific discoveries. Help of a thou
 sand kinds ---"
 "And more than that," Bob put in, "you need the protection of the Fleet!"
 Trencher snorted, and paused to breathe his salt fog again.
 "Jason Craken tried to tell us that," he puffed con-temptuously. "He tried to bribe us with the trinkets your civilization has to offer—and when we welcomed him, he tried to turn us to slaves! The gifts he gave us were weapons to conquer us!"
 "But Craken is insane, Trencher!" I told him. "Don't you see that? He has lived here alone so long that his mind is wandering; he needs medical care, attention. He needs to be placed in an institution where he can be
 helped. He needs a ---"
 "What he needs," Trencher wheezed brutally, "is a tomb. For I do not think he is any longer alive."
 He paused again, thoughtfully, and once more it seemed there was a touch of regret in his milky eyes. "We thought he was our friend," he said, "and perhaps it is true that his mind has deserted him. But it is too late now. There were other men once, too—other men we thought our friends, and we could have trusted them. But it is also too late for that. It is too late for anything now, air-breathers, for as I left the dome to follow you to the surface it could have been only a matter of minutes until it fell."

            I asked, on a sudden impulse: "These other men—what were their names?"
 He glanced at me, wheezing, his opaque pearly eyes curious. "Why," he said, "they were ---- -"
 There was an excited, screaming cry from one of the other amphibians. I couldn't understand a word of it.
 But Joe Trencher did! He dived for the microsonar screen the other amphibian had manned. "The Fleet!" he wheezed, raging. "The Fleet!"
 And it was true, for there in the screen were a dozen fat blips—undersea men-of-war, big ones, coming fast!
 The Killer Whale went into a steep, twisting dive, and there was a rush and a commotion among its crew. Bob and I were manhandled, hurled aside, out of the way.
 I felt the Killer shudder, and knew that jet missiles were streaking out toward the oncoming task force. We were in trouble now, no doubt about it! For if the Fleet won, it would be by blasting the Killer to atoms—and us with it; and if the Fleet, by any miraculous mischance should lose . . . then Joe Trencher would put us to breath-ing salt water, when the air ran out!
 I said tensely to Bob: "At least they got your message! There's still some hope!"
 He shrugged, eyes fast to the bank of microsonars. We
 were nearing the bottom of the Trench now. I could pick
 out the dimly seen shape of the sea-mount, the valleys
 and cliffs about it. I said, out of a vagrant thought, "I
 wish—I wish the Fleet hadn't turned up just then. I had
 an idea that ----- "
 Bob looked at me "That what?"
 I hesitated. "Well—that the men he spoke of were, well, someone we might know. But I couldn't hear the
 names ----- "

            "You couldn't?" Bob asked, while the amphibians milled and shouted around us. "I could. And you're right, Jim—the men he said he might have been able to trust were the only other men who have ever been down here. Stewart Eden and your father!"

  I stared at him.
 "Bob! But—but don't you see? Then there's a chance! If he would trust them, then perhaps he'll listen to me! We've got to talk to him, stop this slaughter while there's still some hope—"
 "Hope?"
 Bob laughed sharply, but not with humor. He gestured at the microsonar screens, where the bottom of the Trench now was etched sharp and bright. "Take a look," he said in a tight, choked voice. "Take a look, and see what hope there is."
 I looked.
 Hope? No—not for the Crakens, at any rate; not for Laddy Angel, or Roger Fairfane, or the man who had saved my life once before, Gideon Park.
 There was the sea-mount, standing tall in its valley; and there was the dome Jason Craken had built.
 But it no longer stood high above the slope of the sea-mount.
 The saurians had done their frightful work.
 The edenite shield was down—barely a glimmer from a few scattered edges of raw metal.
 And the dome itself—it was smashed flat, crushed, utterly destroyed.