Undersea Quest (19 page)

“The sea-car?” he asked. “No. Not exactly, Bob. Take a good look at the screen.”

We looked, all of us.

It was no sea-car, that wavering, shapeless mass. It looked like—it was—a bubble of air, shuddering and wobbling, driving mindlessly to the surface.

A bubble of air. Stove plates, and a wrecked ship, and nothing to come to the surface to mark the death of a father and son but a bubble of air…

We surfaced and set course for Fisherman’s Island, where we could be picked up for the return trip to Thetis.

Fisherman’s Island hadn’t changed. We moored at almost the same spot on the coral reef as before, and Bob got busy on the communicator while we set the pumps to draining the last drops of seepage.

Bob looked worriedly up at me. “The only acknowledgment I get from Thetis,” he said, “is ‘Stand by for boarding.’ It doesn’t sound right, Jim.”

My uncle Stewart rubbed his long jaw. “It isn’t right,” he said softly. “We’ve chopped off the head of the octopus, boys, but the arms are something else again. The Sperrys are out of the way, but the men they put in power are still in Thetis.”

“You mean you think Sperry’s sea-police will make trouble for us?” I asked.

“Think it, boy?” My uncle waved at the microsonar screen. “What do you make of that?”

There was something there, all right, big and distant but coming up fast. “I can’t make it out,” I said. “It—it doesn’t look like a Marinian police vessel, and it’s too fast for a tramp freighter.”

Stewart Eden peered into the viewplate and shook his head. “I don’t know, boy,” he said in his soft voice. “No, it’s not Marinian—not unless they’ve laid some new keels while I was tucked away at the bottom of the Deep. Whatever it is, we’ll know soon enough.”

The ship was literally boiling through the water toward us; perhaps
Isle of Spain
or another crack passenger liner might have made as many knots, but we were far from the liner routes.

Gideon coughed and said, “What happens if it is the sea-police?”

“Trouble, maybe,” my uncle said grimly. “It depends.” He looked, at me with sober humor. “You didn’t bargain on this, did you, Jim? I didn’t mean to get you into it. I had other plans for you—plenty of money, out of the royalties on the new Edenite, the mines at the bottom of the Deep. But we can’t always know how things will work out.”

“But you still have all that, Mr. Eden!” Bob said.

Stewart Eden shook his head, the wry smile still on his lips.

“Our lease on the Deep expires—Hallam Sperry’s littie trick of putting me out of the way for a while took care of that. And the new Edenite—I gave that away. I can’t take it back.” He patted me on the shoulder and winked. “Wouldn’t if I could,” he said. “There’s money to be made and things to do. If we need the money, we’ll earn it. If we don’t—why, what is the use of having it?”

I said very sincerely, “Uncle Stewart, I never wanted the money, and I don’t want it now. What I wanted most of anything in the world I got.”

Stewart Eden looked at me for a moment, and then he looked away. We Edens don’t show our feelings much; he didn’t say anything; and he didn’t have to.

Gideon said, “Whatever it is that’s coming, it’s within the thousand-yard range now!”

We swung to look at the microsonar, Gideon and Bob and I with apprehension, my uncle Stewart with a half smile. I couldn’t understand it for a moment—it was not like my uncle to sit quiet and careless when an unknown danger was coming close. I stared, perplexed…

Bob Eskow said tensely, “Think it’s the sea-police?”

To my astonishment, my uncle was grinning broadly now. He must have seen the perplexity in my eyes, because he laughed and said, “No, Bob, it isn’t the sea- police. What in the seven seas did they teach you at that Academy, anyhow?”

Bob and I looked at each other for a moment, then, with the same impulse stared again at the screen—unbelieving, then sure.

“Of course!” said Bob, and even Gideon leaned back and sighed a long, relaxed sigh.

We scrambled out of the hatchway and up on deck in time to greet the upthrust nose of the long, gray silhouette of the
Nares,
flagship of the Marinian Patrol Command of the Sub-Sea Fleet.

The
Nares
was commanded by Fleet Captain Bogardus, a stern-faced four-striper with a chest full of ribbons and eyes of piercing black. We were escorted to the command cabin with full military honors, including a guard of armed seamen in full dress.

They didn’t say whether they were a guard of honor or a prisoner-detail, and I, for one, didn’t quite want to ask.

Bob and I saluted the captain with all of the snap and precision the Academy had given us. Gideon and my uncle were less formal. My uncle said, “Thanks for picking us up, Captain. You’ve done us a favor.”

“That,” the captain said frostily, “remains to be seen. It may interest you to know that the governor of Marinia has ordered this command to pick you up.”

“I appreciate his concern,” my uncle said gravely.

“Indeed.” The captain nodded with a brisk motion. “You may sit down, gentlemen. I need hardly say that you’ve stirred up quite a commotion over the past few hours. Accusations against the mayor of Thetis——”

“The
late
mayor of Thetis,” my uncle interrupted politely.

“The
late
mayor, then. All right. But he was a responsible public official, all the same, and if he is dead the circumstances concerning that death must be gone into very deeply, Mr. Eden. As, of course, must your allegation that he and his son were endeavoring to ram and destroy you.”

“Of course,” my uncle said shortly. He might have gone on from there, but Fleet Captain Bogardus held up his hand, and for the first time his expression seemed a trifle less frosty.

“On the other hand,” he went on, “I need hardly say, Mr. Eden, that your word has a certain amount of weight too. Now, suppose you begin at the beginning and tell me just what all this hullabaloo is about…”

We were in his office for an hour or more, while the captain asked questions and listened, and a methodical seaman took all our conversation down on a dictating machine. Then the Fleet Captain, courteously but blank- faced, excused himself and left us alone for a litde while longer.

It wasn’t for long. Bob had hardly had time to get restless when we heard the .sharp crack of heels in die corridor outside and Fleet Captain Bogardus came in through the door.

“I’ve been in touch with the governor of Marinia,” he said crisply. “I have my orders, gentlemen. We are already on course to Thetis!”

A fast cruiser of the Sub-Sea Fleet eats up the miles like no other vessel under the surface of the sea. We had time to eat and get a little cleaned up, and we were there.

And my uncle and I set out to clean up unfinished business.

We went to a certain place and opened a certain door, and the man behind the door jumped up, staring at us as though we were ghosts.

“Stewart Eden!” he gasped.

“The same,” said my uncle. “What’s the matter, Faulkner? Did you think I was out of the way for good?”

The lawyer sat down suddenly, breathing heavily. “My—my heart,” he gasped. “This shock—

“Too bad,” said my uncle sharply. “We’ve had a few shocks too. Do you recognize my nephew here, the man you tried to have killed?”

Faulkner was getting a grip on himself. “Have killed?” he repeated. “Nonsense. This young man came around and tried to cause trouble, but I certainly—Besides, he’s not your nephew. He’s an imposter! I’ve seen the real James Eden, and—”

“That’s enough, Faulkner!”
Stewart Eden’s quiet voice was a whiplash. He towered over the white-lipped man, looking like some avenging sea-god about to strike down an infidel. “We’ve had lies enough out of you, Faulkner,” my uncle snapped. “Now we’ll take the truth. All of it!”

The man licked his lips. “What—what do you want?” he asked.

“The truth,” my uncle repeated, like the tolling of some sea-bell.

“The truth, Faulkner, the truth! The truth about you and Hallam Sperry, for a start. You were my lawyer, Faulkner, taking my money. And all the while you were secretly hand-in-glove with Sperry, selling me out to him, working with him in every shady deal in Thetis. Is that the truth, Faulkner?”

The man said feebly, “I—I—”

“Is it the truth?”

Faulkner swallowed. “Yes.”

“In fact,” my uncle went on remorselessly, “you helped Sperry take power in Thetis, didn’t you? You sold out my Edenite patents to him and framed the contract so I lost control and lost my royalties. True? And with the money and power that gave him, you helped him build an empire here under the sea.”

Faulkner only nodded. He was staring at my uncle in fascination, like a bird at a cobra, helpless and unable to move.

“And then Sperry got me out of the way,” said Stewart Eden,

“and Jim here came along. You tried to scare him off with crazy lies about sea-monsters. When he wouldn’t scare, you tried to buy him out. When he wouldn’t sell, you tried to kill him. When you couldn’t kill him, you hired some cheap cut-purse from Kelly’s Kingdom to impersonate him. Am I right, Faulkner?”

There was something glittering in Faulkner’s eyes now, something that hadn’t been there before. He was still looking at my uncle, but from time to time his eyes skipped past my uncle, to the door—the door that was moving slightiy as though there were someone waiting on the other side of it.

Faulkner said viciously, “Right, Eden? Of course you’re right!

You and your nephew are two fools from the same hatch—and neither one of you deserves power or money, it’s wasted on you!”

He stood up and leaned forward, over the desk, staring piercingly at my uncle. “Do you doubt it, Eden?” he demanded. “Let me show you! You came in here, but you may not find it so easy to get out alive. Take a look at that door, Eden! I’ve standing orders here: When there’s unwelcome company in the office, my man Bishop waits there to show them out when the time comes. And that time is now!
Bishop, shoot them down!
”

He shouted the last words on a note of triumph. But the triumph didn’t last. Quick as the lashing stroke of a hammerhead, my uncle leaped to the door and flung it wide. “Your man has other engagements, Faulkner,” he cried. “See for yourself!”

And Faulkner, staring in a moment of horror and unbelief at his Neanderthal doorman, helpless in the grip of two sturdy men of the Sub-Sea Fleet while an armed squad of others stood at the ready before him, slumped slowly and finally to the desk…

With Thetis under martial law—established by Fleet Captain Bogardus at the radioed order of the governor of Marinia—a new day opened up for all of us. The Sperrys were gone; Faulkner and his staff and a few score others were under lock and key; and the power of the Sperrys, like a sea-sorcerer’s spell, vanished in a bubble of froth.

Even the Sub-Sea Fleet’s martial law was hardly needed, after those first hours—it stayed on only long enough for new and free elections to be held.

It didn’t take long. Only a few days after the Sub-Sea Fleet had ringed Thetis and cleaned out the last of the Sperry influence, Bob Eskow and I walked down one of the broad ways between long lines of citizens of Thetis, casting their ballots. There was no trouble. Every polling booth was guarded by a detachment from the Sub-Sea Fleet, the bright scarlet uniforms of the Western Allies, the sea-blue and fouled anchors of the European Union, even the sea-bottom gray of the Asian Command. Every component of the Sub-Sea Fleet was represented in the Marinian Patrol Command; and all of them took turn and turn about in policing Thetis.

Neither Bob nor I said a word; but I could tell what he was thinking as we looked at the smart submariners. The closest Bob came to saying what was in both our hearts was when he sighed and said, “With the Sperrys out of business, I guess I’m out of a job.”

I nodded. “And I guess I’d better start looking for one.”

And that seemed to be that…

Until, returning to the hotel where we shared quarters with my uncle, we found a message waiting for us: “Report to Fleet Captain Bogardus without delay.”

My uncle was in the Captain’s command room, waiting for us and there was a smile on his face. Perhaps I should have guessed—but I didn’t. It was only when the captain handed me the familiar platinum-crested envelope that I began to suspect. “The Sub-Sea Fleet doesn’t often make a mistake,” he said, “but when it does, it
always
admits it. When you two resigned, it was under pressure—and there’s no doubt, now, that a lot of the pressure was more than improper. So—well, this is from the Academy, for both of you. Open it up.”

The words danced in front of my eyes as I held the sheet of paper up before me. “In view of new information,” it said, and, “resignation disapproved,” and, most important of all, the last sentence, unbelievable but clear before my eyes:

“Cadets Eden, J., and Eskow, R., will therefore proceed by fastest available transportation to the Academy to resume training. By order of the Commandant, U.S.S.S.”

We were reinstated!

Bob and I found ourselves in the passageway outside the command cabin, half dazed. We looked at each other incredulously.

“Well,” I said, trying to seem unemotional about it, “it looks like we won’t have to worry about a job for a while.”

“Sure,” he said, poker-faced as I… And then his broad face split in a grin. “Who are you kidding?” he demanded exuberantly.

“Jim, we made it, we made it! Let’s get going, lubber—we’ve got packing to do. And
the tides won’t wait!
”