Undersea Fleet Read Online Free Page B

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