CHAPTER VI
Worm, Submarine, and Freedom
Since both Costigan and Bradley had often watched their captors at workduring the long voyage from the Solar System to Nevia, they were quitefamiliar with the machine tools of the amphibians. Their stolenlifeboat, being an emergency craft, of course carried full repairequipment; and to such good purpose did the two officers labor that evenbefore their air-tanks were fully charged, all the damage had beenrepaired.
The lifeboat lay motionless upon the mirror-smooth surface of the ocean.Captain Bradley had opened the upper port and the three stood in theopening, gazing in silence toward the incredibly distant horizon, whilepowerful pumps were forcing the last possible ounces of air into thepractically unbreakable storage cylinders. Mile upon strangely flat milestretched that waveless, unbroken expanse of water, merging finally intothe violent redness of the Nevian sky. The sun was setting; a vast ballof purple flame dropping rapidly toward the horizon. Darkness camesuddenly as that seething ball disappeared, and the air became bitterlycold, in sharp contrast to the pleasant warmth of a moment before. Andas suddenly clouds appeared in blackly banked masses and a cold, drivingrain began to beat down in torrents.
"Br-r-r, it's cold! Let's go in--Oh! _Shut the door!_" Clio shrieked,and leaped wildly down into the compartment below, out of Costigan'sway, for he and Bradley also had seen slithering toward them thefrightful arm of the Thing.
Almost before the girl had spoken Costigan had leaped to the levers, andnot an instant too soon; for the tip of that horrible tentacle flashedinto the rapidly narrowing crack just before the door clanged shut. Asthe powerful toggles forced the heavy screw threads into engagement anddrove the massive disk home into its bottle-tight, insulated seat, thatgrisly tip fell severed to the floor of the compartment and lay there,twitching and writhing with a loathsome and unearthly vigor. Two feetlong the piece was, and larger than a strong man's leg. It was armedwith spiked and jointed metallic scales, and instead of sucking disks itwas equipped with a series of _mouths_--mouths filled with sharpmetallic teeth which gnashed and ground together furiously, even thoughsundered from the horrible organism which they were designed to feed.
The little submarine shuddered in every plate and member as monstrouscoils encircled her and tightened inexorably in terrific, ripplingsurges eloquent of mastodonic power; and a strident vibration smotesickeningly upon Terrestrial eardrums as the metal spikes of themonstrosity crunched and ground upon the outer plating of their smallvessel. Costigan stood unmoved at the plate, watching intently; handsready upon the controls. Due to the artificial gravity of the lifeboatit seemed perfectly stationary to its occupants. Only the weirdgyrations of the pictures upon the lookout screens showed that the craftwas being shaken and thrown about like a rat in the jaws of a terrier;only the gauges revealed that they were almost a mile below the surfaceof the ocean already, and were still going downward at an appallingrate. Finally Clio could stand no more.
"Aren't you going to do something, Conway?" she cried.
"Not unless I have to," he replied, composedly. "I don't believe that hecan really hurt us, and if I use a ray of any kind I'm afraid that itwill kick up enough disturbance to bring Nerado down on us like a hawkafter a chicken. However, if he takes us much deeper I'll have to go towork on him. We're getting down pretty close to our limit, and thebottom's a long way down yet."
Deeper and deeper the lifeboat was dragged by its dreadful opponent,whose spiked teeth still tore savagely at the tough outer plating of thecraft until Costigan reluctantly threw in his power switches. Againstthe full propellant thrust the monster could draw them no lower, butneither could the lifeboat make any headway toward the surface. TheTerrestrial then turned on his rays, but found that they wereineffective. So closely was the creature wrapped around the submarinethat his weapons could not be brought to bear upon it without meltingthe vessel's own outer skin.
"What can it possibly be, anyway, and what can we do about it?" Clioasked.
"I thought at first it was something like a devilfish, or possibly anovergrown starfish, but it's too flat, and has no body that I can see,"Costigan made answer. "It must be a kind of flat worm. That doesn'tsound reasonable--the thing must be all of a hundred meters long--butthere it is. The only thing left to do now, as I see it, is to try toboil him alive."
He closed other circuits, diffusing a terrific beam of pure heat, andthe water all about them burst into furious clouds of steam. The boatleaped upward as the metallic fins of the gigantic worm fanned vaporinstead of water, but the creature neither released its hold nor ceasedits relentlessly grinding attack. Minute after minute went by, butfinally the worm dropped limply away--cooked through and through;vanquished only by death.
"Now we've put our foot in it, clear to the knee!" Costigan exclaimed,as he shot the lifeboat upward at its maximum power. "Look at that! Iknew that Nerado could trace us, but I didn't have any idea that _they_could. It's a good thing these ultra-vision plates don't need light tosee by or we'd be _'spurlos versenkt'_ in a hurry!"
Staring with Costigan into the plate, Bradley and the girl saw, not theNevian sky-rover they had expected, but a fast submarine cruiser, mannedby the frightful fishes of the greater deeps. It was coming directlytoward the lifeboat, and even as Costigan hurled the little vessel offat an angle and then upward into the air one of the deadly offensiverods, tipped with its glowing ball of pure destruction, flashed throughthe spot where they would have been had they held their former course.
But powerful as were the propellant forces and fiercely though Costiganapplied them, the denizens of the deep clamped a tractor ray upon theflying vessel before it had gained a mile of altitude. Costigan alignedhis every driving projector as his vessel came to an abrupt halt in theinvisible grip of the beam, then experimented with various dials.
"There ought to be some way of cutting that beam," he pondered audibly,"but I don't know enough about their system to do it, and I'm afraid tomonkey around with things too much, because I might accidentally releasethe screens we've already got out, and they're stopping altogether toomuch stuff for us to do without them right now."
He frowned as he studied the flaring defensive screens, now radiating anincandescent violet under the concentration of the forces being hurledagainst them by the warlike fishes, then stiffened suddenly.
"I thought so--they _can_ shoot 'em!" he exclaimed, throwing thelifeboat into a furious corkscrew turn, and the very air blazed intoflaming splendor as a dazzlingly scintillating ball of energy sped pastthem and high into the air beyond.
Then for minutes a spectacular battle raged. The twisting, turning,leaping airship, small as she was agile, kept on eluding the explosiveprojectiles of the fishes, and her screens neutralized and re-radiatedthe full power of the attacking beams. More--since Costigan did not needto think of sparing his iron, the ocean around the great submarine beganfuriously to boil under the full-driven offensive beams of the tinyNevian ship. But escape Costigan could not. He could not cut thattractor beam and the utmost power of his drivers could not wrest thelifeboat from its tenacious clutch. And slowly but inexorably the shipof space was being drawn downward toward the ship of ocean's depths.Downward, in spite of the utmost possible effort of every projector andpenetrator, and the two Terrestrial spectators, sick at heart, lookedonce at each other. Then they looked at Costigan, who, jaw hard set andeyes unflinchingly upon his plate, was concentrating his attack upon oneturret of the green monster as they settled lower and lower.
"If this is ... if our number is going up, Conway," Clio began,unsteadily.
"Not yet, it isn't!" he snapped. "Keep a stiff upper lip, girl. We'restill breathing air, and the battle's not over yet!"
Nor was it; but it was not Costigan's efforts, mighty though they were,that ended the attack of the fishes of the greater deeps. The tractorbeam snapped without warning, and so prodigious were the forces beingexerted by the lifeboat that, as it hurled itself away, the threepassengers were thrown violently to the flo
or, in spite of the powerfulgravity controls. Scrambling up on hands and knees, bracing himself asbest he could against the terrific forces, Costigan managed finally toforce a hand up to his panel. He was barely in time; for even as he cutthe driving power to its normal value the outer shell of the lifeboatwas blazing at white heat from the friction of the atmosphere throughwhich it had been tearing with such an insane acceleration!
"Oh, I see--Nerado to the rescue," Costigan commented, after a glanceinto the plate. "I hope that those fish blow him clear out of theGalaxy!"
"Why?" demanded Clio. "I should think that you'd...."
"Think again," he advised her. "The worse Nerado gets licked the betterfor us. I don't really expect that, but if they can keep him busy longenough, we can get far enough away so that he won't bother about us anymore."
As the lifeboat tore upward through the air at the highest permissibleatmospheric velocity Bradley and Clio peered over Costigan's shouldersinto the plate, watching in absorbed interest the scene which was beingkept in focus upon it. The Nevian ship of space was plunging downward ina long, slanting dive, her terrific beams of force screaming out aheadof her. The rays of the little lifeboat had boiled the waters of theocean; those of the parent craft seemed literally to blast them out ofexistence. All about the green submarine there had been volumes offuriously-boiling water and dense clouds of vapor; now water and fogalike disappeared, converted into transparent superheated steam by theblasts of Nevian energy. Through that tenuous gas the enormous mass ofthe submarine fell like a plummet, her defensive screens flaming analmost invisible violet, her every offensive weapon vomiting forth solidand vibratory destruction toward the Nevian cruiser so high in theangry, scarlet heavens.
For miles the submarine dropped, until the frightful pressure of thedepth drove water into Nerado's beam faster than his forces couldvolatilize it. Then in that seething funnel there was waged desperateconflict. At that funnel's wildly turbulent bottom lay the submarine,now apparently trying to escape, but held fast by the tractor rays ofthe space-ship; at its top, smothered almost to the point ofinvisibility by billowing masses of steam, hung poised the Neviancruiser.
As the atmosphere had grown thinner and thinner with increasing altitudeCostigan had regulated his velocity accordingly, keeping the outer shellof the vessel at the highest temperature consistent with safety. Nowbeyond measurable atmospheric pressure, the shell cooled rapidly and heapplied full touring acceleration. At an appalling and constantlyincreasing speed the miniature space-ship shot away from the strange,red planet; and smaller and smaller upon the plate became its picture.Long since the great vessel of the void had plunged beneath the surfaceof the sea, more closely to come to grips with the vessel of the fishes;for a long time nothing of the battle had been visible save immenseclouds of steam, blanketing hundreds of square miles of the ocean'ssurface. But just before the picture became too small to reveal detailsa few tiny dark spots appeared above the banks of cloud, now brilliantlyilluminated by the rays of the rising sun--dots which might have beenfragments of either vessel, blown bodily from the depths of the oceanand, riven asunder, hurled high into the air by the incredible forces atthe command of the other.
Nevia a tiny moon and the fierce blue sun rapidly growing smaller in thedistance, Costigan swung his visiray beam into the line of travel andturned to his companions.
"Well, we're off," he said, scowling. "I hope it was Nerado that gotblown up back there, but I'm afraid it wasn't. He whipped two of thosesubmarines that we know of, and probably half their fleet besides.There's no particular reason why that one should be able to take him, soit's my idea that we should get ready for great gobs of trouble.
"They'll chase us, of course; and I'm afraid that with their immensepower, they'll catch us."
"But what can we do, Conway?" asked Clio.
"Several things," he grinned. "I managed to get quite a lot of dope onthat paralyzing ray and some of their other stuff, and we can installthe necessary equipment in our suits easily enough."
They removed their armor, and Costigan explained in detail the changeswhich must be made in the Triplanetary field generators. All three setvigorously to work--the two officers deftly and surely; Clio uncertainlyand with many questions, but with undaunted spirit. Finally, having doneall they could do to strengthen their position, they settled down to thewatchful routine of the flight, with every possible instrument set todetect any sign of the pursuit they so feared.