Undersea Quest Read Online Free Page A

lines that showed the routes of the sub-sea traders, the thin web that showed the pipelines and vacuum tubeways that carried the wealth of the sea. All the domed cities of Marinia were there—Eden Dome and Black Camp and Thousand Fathom and Gold Ridge and Rudspatt and a hundred others. I looked longingly at the dot that marked Thetis, far into the South Pacific, where my Uncle Stewart lived and performed his mysterious duties—for he never discussed his work with me, only mine.
    There was incalculable wealth there on the floor of the sea—three times as great an area as all the continents, and three times as wealthy! The shaded zones and colored patches showed tracts of minerals—oil fields, gold sands, coal beds, seams of copper and zinc and platinum. Marked in warning red were the uranium mines, the lifeblood of the world’s powerlines and, particularly, of the Sub-Sea Service, for without atomic energy from the raw uranium our vessels would be as surface-bound as the ancients. It was a sobering experience to see how few and sparse those flecks were; every one of them was being worked intensively, and the supply, the rumors said, was running low.
    But most exciting and provocative of all were the patches of pure, featureless white in the middle of the sea. For they are the unexplored Deeps—the Philippine Trench, Nares Deep, the Marianas—six miles, seven miles and more straight down, beyond even the range of our most powerful exploring cruisers, untouched and almost unknown. On the giant map the patches of color that marked mineral deposits seemed to grow thicker and larger as the depth increased—up to the very edges of the unexplored white. It was, they said, natural enough: the heavy minerals settled farthest down. What treasures the Deeps must conceal!
    There were treasures enough, though, in Dixon Hall itself—cases of pearls and sea-amethysts and coral, the great pieces of ivory from the deepest plumbed abysses that scientists said were the tusks of ancient sea-monsters. I think that within the range of my eyes, as I stood in the center of the Hall, must have been a million dollars’ worth of precious gems—with never a lock or guard! Truly, the honor system at the Academy was strong!
    It was a wonderful, absorbing, exciting place. Most wonderful of all to me, though, were the ranked masses of cabinets and cases where the history of undersea navigation was on display. Beebe’s tiny bathysphere was represented, and the doomed Squalus, and the old German Deutschland and many more, in carefully precise models. And there was one thing more: the tiny model of my uncle’s first, crude cylindrical Edenite diver.
    I think I piled up more demerits in Dixon Hall than anywhere else in the Academy—standing transfixed before some model or map, until the ship’s bell announced the dinner formation, and I arrived at the lines before our quarters, breathless and racing, in time to be gigged by some officer or upperclassman for being late. It was costly of my leisure time, walking off the demerits on the Quad; but it was worth it.
    Eskow was usually beside me as we circled the Quad.
    It was hard for me to understand what forces drove Bob Eskow through the grinding years of the Academy. In his family was no tradition of the sub-sea service as in mine; his father owned a newsstand in New York, his grandparents had been immigrants from some agricultural community in the Balkans.
    The question, when I brought it up, embarrassed him. He said, almost shame-faced, “I guess I just wanted to do something for my country.” And we let it drop. But Eskow was always there with me, prowling through the Nautilus or pondering the unmarked Deeps, beyond the four-mile limit where Edenite no longer could turn the force of the water back on itself. I didn’t realize how much I was coming to depend on Eskow’s cheerful determination and quiet friendship.
    I didn’t realize it—until it was gone.

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Man Missing
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