From the Ocean from teh Stars (6 page)

would not be jeopardized. On the whole, this part of the agreement had
been well kept.

"I've ordered two torpedoes from the garage," said Burley as they
walked down the flight of stairs at the end of the jetty and passed through
the double doors of a large air lock. Franklin's ears gave the disconcert
ing internal "click" as they adjusted themselves to the increased pressure;
he guessed that he was now about twenty feet below the water line.
Around him was a brightly lighted chamber crammed with various types
of underwater equipment, from simple lungs to elaborate propulsion devices. The two torpedoes that Don had requisitioned were lying in their cradles on a sloping ramp leading down into the still water at the far end
of the chamber. They were painted the bright yellow reserved for training
equipment, and Don looked at them with some distaste.

"It's a couple of years since I used one of these things," he said to
Franklin. "You'll probably be better at it than I am. When I get myself
wet, I like to be under my own power."

They stripped to swim trunks and pull-overs, then fastened on the
harness of their breathing equipment. Don picked up one of the small but surprisingly heavy plastic cylinders and handed it to Franklin.

"These are the high-pressure jobs that I told you about," he said.
"They're pumped to a thousand atmospheres, so the air in them is denser
than water. Hence these buoyancy tanks at either end to keep them in
neutral. The automatic adjustment is pretty good; as you use up your air
the tanks slowly flood so that the cylinder stays just about weightless.
Otherwise you'd come up to the surface like a cork whether you wanted
to or not."

He looked at the pressure gauges on the tanks and gave a satisfied
nod.

"They're nearly half charged," he said. "That's far more than we
need. You can stay down for a day on one of these tanks when it's really
pumped up, and we won't be gone more than an hour."

They adjusted the new, full-face masks that had already been checked
for leaks and comfortable fitting. These would be as much their personal property as their toothbrushes while they were on the station, for no two
people's faces were exactly the same shape, and even the slightest leak
could be disastrous.

When they had checked the air supply and the short-range under
water radio sets, they lay almost flat along the slim torpedoes, heads
down behind the low, transparent shields which would protect them from
the rush of water sweeping past at speeds of up to thirty knots. Franklin
settled his feet comfortably in the stirrups, feeling for the throttle and

jet reversal controls with his toes. The little joy stick which allowed him to "fly" the torpedo like a plane was just in front of his face, in the center
of the instrument board. Apart from a few switches, the compass, and
the meters giving speed, depth, and battery charge, there were no other
controls.

Don gave Franklin his final instructions, ending with the words:
"Keep about twenty feet away on my right, so that I can see you all the
time. // anything goes wrong and you do have to dump the torp, for
heaven's sake remember to cut the motor. We don't want it charging all
over the reef. All set?"

"Yes—I'm ready," Franklin answered into his little microphone.

"Right—here we go."

The torpedoes slid easily down the ramps, and the water rose above
their heads. This was no new experience to Franklin; like most other
people in the world, he had occasionally tried his hand at underwater
swimming and had sometimes used a lung just to see what it was like.
He felt nothing but a pleasant sense of anticipation as the little turbine
started to whir beneath him and the walls of the submerged chamber slid
slowly past.

The light strengthened around them as they emerged into the open
and pulled away from the piles of the jetty. Visibility was not very good—
thirty feet at the most—but it would improve as they came to deeper
water. Don swung his torpedo at right angles to the edge of the reef and
headed out to sea at a leisurely five knots.

"The biggest danger with these toys," said Don's voice from the tiny loudspeaker by Franklin's ear, "is going too fast and running into some
thing. It takes a lot of experience to judge underwater visibility. See what I mean?"

He banked steeply to avoid a towering mass of coral which had
suddenly appeared ahead of them. If the demonstration had been
planned, thought Franklin, Don had timed it beautifully. As the living
mountain swept past, not more than ten feet away, he caught a glimpse
of a myriad brilliantly colored fish staring at him with apparent uncon
cern. By this time, he assumed, they must be so used to torpedoes and
subs that they were quite unexcited by them. And since this entire area
was rigidly protected, they had no reason to fear man.

A few minutes at cruising speed brought them out into the open water
of the channel between the island and the adjacent reefs. Now they had room to maneuver, and Franklin followed his mentor in a series of rolls
and loops and great submarine switchbacks that soon had him hopelessly
lost. Sometimes they shot down to the sea bed, a hundred feet below,

then broke surface like flying fish to check their position. All the time
Don kept up a running commentary, interspersed with questions de
signed to see how Franklin was reacting to the ride.

It was one of the most exhilarating experiences he had ever known.
The water was much clearer out here in the channel, and one could see
for almost a hundred feet. Once they ran into a great school of bonitos,
which formed an inquisitive escort until Don put on speed and left them
behind. They saw no sharks, as Franklin had half expected, and he
commented to Don on their absence.

"You won't see many while you're riding a torp," the other replied. "The noise of the jet scares them. If you want to meet the local sharks,
you'll have to go swimming in the old-fashioned way—or cut your motor
and wait until they come to look at you."

A dark mass was looming indistinctly from the sea bed, and they
reduced speed to a gentle drift as they approached a little range of coral
hills, twenty or thirty feet high.

"An old friend of mine lives around here," said Don. "I wonder if
he's home? It's been about four years since I saw him last, but that won't
seem much to him. He's been around for a couple of centuries."

They were now skirting the edge of a huge green-clad mushroom of
coral, and Franklin peered into the shadows beneath it. There were a few large boulders there, and a pair of elegant angelfish which almost dis
appeared when they turned edge on to him. But he could see nothing
else to justify Burley's interest.

It was very unsettling when one of the boulders began to move, fortu
nately not in his direction. The biggest fish he had ever seen—it was
almost as long as the torpedo, and very much fatter—was staring at him
with great bulbous eyes. Suddenly it opened its mouth in a menacing
yawn, and Franklin felt like Jonah at the big moment of his career. He had a glimpse of huge, blubbery lips enclosing surprisingly tiny teeth;
then the great jaws snapped shut again and he could almost feel the rush
of displaced water.

Don seemed delighted at the encounter, which had obviously brought
back memories of his own days as a trainee here.

"Well, it's nice to see old Slobberchops again! Isn't he a beauty? Seven
hundred and fifty pounds if he's an ounce. We've been able to identify
him on photos taken as far back as eighty years ago, and he wasn't much
smaller then. It's a wonder he escaped the spear fishers before this area
was made a reservation."

"I should think," said Franklin, "that it was a wonder the spear fishers escaped him."

"Oh, he's not really dangerous. Groupers only swallow things they
can get down whole—those silly little teeth aren't much good for biting. And a full-sized man would be a trifle too much for him. Give him an
other century for that."

They left the giant grouper still patrolling the entrance to its cave, and continued on along the edge of the reef. For the next ten minutes
they saw nothing of interest except a large ray, which was lying on the
bottom and took off with an agitated flapping of its wings as soon as they
approached. As it flew away into the distance, it seemed an uncannily
accurate replica of the big delta-winged aircraft which had ruled the air
for a short while, sixty or seventy years ago. It was strange, thought
Franklin, how Nature had anticipated so many of man's inventions—
for example, the precise shape of the vehicle on which he was riding, and
even the jet principle by which it was propelled.

"I'm going to circle right around the reef," said Don. "It will take us
about forty minutes to get home. Are you feeling O.K.?"

"I'm fine."

"No ear trouble?"

"My left ear bothered me a bit at first, but it seems to have popped
now."

"Right—let's go. Follow just above and behind me, so I can see you
in my rearview mirror. I was always afraid of running into you when you
were on my right."

In the new formation, they sped on toward the east at a steady ten
knots, following the irregular line of the reef. Don was well satisfied
with the trip; Franklin had seemed perfectly at home under water—
though one could never be sure of this until one had seen how he faced
an emergency. That would be part of the next lesson; Franklin did not
know it yet, but an emergency had been arranged.

☆
CHAPTER FOUR

t was hard to distinguish one day from another on
the island. The weather had settled in for a period of prolonged calm,
and the sun rose and set in a cloudless sky. But there was no danger of
monotony, for there was far too much to learn and do.

Slowly, as his mind absorbed new knowledge and skills, Franklin
was escaping from whatever nightmare must have engulfed him in the past. He was, Don sometimes thought, like an overtightened spring that

was now unwinding. It was true that he still showed occasional signs of nervousness and impatience when there was no obvious cause for them, and once or twice there had been flare-ups that had caused brief interrup
tions in the training program. One of these had been partly Don's fault,
and the memory of it still left him annoyed with himself.

He had not been too bright that morning, owing to a late night with
the boys who had just completed their course and were now full-fledged
third wardens (probationary), very proud of the silver dolphins on their
tunics. It would not be true to say that he had a hangover, but all his
mental processes were extremely sluggish, and as bad luck would have it
they were dealing with a subtle point in underwater acoustics. Even at
the best of times, Don would have passed it by somewhat hastily, with a
lame: "I've never been into the math, but it seems that if you take the
compressibility and temperature curves this is what happens. . . ."

This worked on most pupils, but it failed to work on Franklin, who had an annoying fondness for going into unnecessary details. He began
to draw curves and to differentiate equations while Don, anxious to con
ceal his ignorance, fumed in the background. It was soon obvious that
Franklin had bitten off more than he could chew, and he appealed to
his tutor for assistance. Don, both stupid and stubborn that morning,
would not admit frankly that he didn't know, with the result that he gave
the impression of refusing to co-operate. In no time at all, Franklin lost
his temper and walked out in a huff, leaving Don to wander to the
dispensary. He was not pleased to find that the entire stock of "morning-
after" pills had already been consumed by the departing class.

Fortunately, such incidents were rare, for the two men had grown to
respect each other's abilities and to make those allowances that are
essential in every partnership. With the rest of the staff, and with the
trainees, however, Franklin was not popular. This was partly because he
avoided close contacts, which in the little world of the island gave him a reputation for being standoffish. The trainees also resented his special privileges—particularly the fact that he had a room of his own. And the staff, while grumbling mildly at the extra work he involved, were also
annoyed because they could discover so little about him. Don had
several times found himself, rather to his surprise, defending Franklin
against the criticisms of his colleagues.

"He's not a bad chap when you get to know him," he had said. "If
he doesn't want to talk about his past, that's his affair. The fact that a lot
of people way up in the administration must be backing him is good
enough for me. Besides, when I've finished with him he'll be a better
warden than half the people in this room."