The Deep Range Read online

“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.”

  There were snorts of disbelief at this statement, and someone asked:

  “Have you tried any tricks on him yet?”

  “No, but I’m going to soon. I’ve thought up a nice one. Will let you know how he makes out.”

  “Five to one he panics.”

  “I’ll take that. Start saving up your money.”

  Franklin knew nothing of his financial responsibilities when he and Don left the garage on their second torpedo ride, nor had he reason to suspect the entertainment that had been planned for him. This time they headed south as soon as they had cleared the jetty, cruising about thirty feet below the surface. In a few minutes they had passed the narrow channel blasted through the reef so that small ships could get in to the Research Station, and they circled once round the observation chamber from which the scientists could watch the inhabitants of the sea bed in comfort. There was no one inside at the moment to look out at them through the thick plate-glass windows; quite unexpectedly, Franklin found himself wondering what the little shark fancier was doing today.

  “We’ll head over to the Wistari Reef,” said Don. “I want to give you some practice in navigation.”

  Don’s torpedo swung round to the west as he set a new course, out into the deeper water. Visibility was not good today—less than thirty feet—and it was difficult to keep him in sight. Presently he halted and began to orbit slowly as he gave Franklin his instructions.

  “I want you to hold course 250 for one minute at twenty knots, then 010 for the same time and speed. I’ll meet you there. Got it?”

  Franklin repeated the instructions and they checked the synchronization of their watches. It was rather obvious what Don was doing; he had given his pupil two sides of an equilateral triangle to follow, and would doubtless proceed slowly along the third to make the appointment.

  Carefully setting his course, Franklin pressed down the throttle and felt the surge of power as the torpedo leaped forward into the blue haze. The steady rush of water against his partly exposed legs was almost the only sensation of speed; without the shield, he would have been swept away in a moment. From time to time he caught a glimpse of the sea bed—drab and featureless here in the channel between the great reefs—and once he overtook a school of surprised bat-fish which scattered in dismay at his approach.

  For the first time, Franklin suddenly realized, he was alone beneath the sea, totally surrounded by the element which would be his new domain. It supported and protected him—yet it would kill him in two or three minutes at the most if he made a mistake or if his equipment failed. That knowledge did not disturb him; it had little weight against the increasing confidence and sense of mastery he was acquiring day by day. He now knew and understood the challenge of the sea, and it was a challenge he wished to meet. With a lifting of the heart, he realized that he once more had a goal in life.

  The first minute was up, and he reduced speed to four knots with the reverse jet. He had now covered a third of a mile and it was time to start on the second leg of the triangle, to make his rendezvous with Don.

  The moment he swung the little joy stick to starboard, he knew that something was wrong. The torpedo was wallowing like a pig, completely out of control. He cut speed to zero, and with all dynamic forces gone the vessel began to sink very slowly to the bottom.

  Franklin lay motionless along the back of his recalcitrant steed, trying to analyze the situation. He was not so much alarmed as annoyed that his navigational exercise had been spoiled. It was no good calling Don, who would now be out of range—these little radio sets could not establish contact through more than a couple of hundred yards of water. What was the best thing to do?

  Swiftly, his mind outlined alternative plans of action, and dismissed most of them at once. There was nothing he could do to repair the torp, for all the controls were sealed and, in any event, he had no tools. Since both rudder and elevator were out of action, the trouble was quite fundamental, and Franklin was unable to see how such a simultaneous breakdown could have happened.

  He was now about fifty feet down, and gaining speed as he dropped to the bottom. The flat, sandy sea bed was just coming into sight, and for a moment Franklin had to fight the automatic impulse to press the button which would blow the torpedo’s tanks and take him up to the surface. That would be the worst thing to do, natural though it was to seek air and sun when anything went wrong under water. Once on the bottom, he could take his time to think matters out, whereas if he surfaced the current might sweep him miles away. It was true that the station would soon pick up his radio calls once he was above water—but he wanted to extricate himself from this predicament without any outside help.

  The torp grounded, throwing up a cloud of sand which soon drifted away in the slight current. A small grouper appeared from nowhere, staring at the intruder with its characteristic popeyed expression. Franklin had no time to bother with spectators, but climbed carefully off his vehicle and pulled himself to the stern. Without flippers, he had little mobility under water, but fortunately there were sufficient handholds for him to move along the torpedo without difficulty.

  As Franklin had feared—but was still unable to explain—the rudder and elevator were flopping around uselessly. There was no resistance when he moved the little vanes by hand, and he wondered if there was any way in which he could fix external control lines and steer the torpedo manually. He had some nylon line, and a knife, in the pouch on his harness, but there seemed no practical way in which he could fasten the line to the smooth, streamlined vanes.

  It looked as if he would have to walk home. That should not be too difficult—he could set the motor running at low speed and let the torp pull him along the bottom while he aimed it in the right direction by brute force. It would be clumsy, but seemed possible in theory, and he could think of nothing better.

  He glanced at his watch; it had been only a couple of minutes since he had tried to turn at the leg of the triangle, so he was no more than a minute late at his destination. Don would not be anxious yet, but before long he would start searching for his lost pupil. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to stay right here until Don turned up, as he would be bound to do sooner or later.…

  It was at this moment that suspicion dawned in Franklin’s mind, and almost instantly became a full-fledged conviction. He recalled certain rumors he had heard, and remembered that Don’s behavior before they set out had been—well, slightly skittish was the only expression for it, as if he had been cherishing some secret joke.

  So that was it. The torpedo had been sabotaged. Probably at this very moment Don was hovering out there at the limits of visibility, waiting to see what he would do and ready to step in if he ran into real trouble. Franklin glanced quickly around his hemisphere of vision, to see if the other torp was lurking in the mist, but was not surprised that there was no sign of it. Burley would be too clever to be caught so easily. This, thought Franklin, changed the situation completely. He not only had to extricate himself from his dilemma, but, if possible, he had to get his own back on Don as well.

  He walked back to the control position, and switched on the motor. A slight pressure on the throttle, and the torp began to stir restlessly while a flurry of sand was gouged out of the sea bed by the jet. A little experimenting showed that it was possible to “walk” the machine, though it required continual adjustments of trim to stop it from climbing up to the surface or burying itself in the sand. It was, thought Franklin, going to take him a long time to get home this way, but he could do it if there was no alternative.

  He had walked no more than a dozen paces, and had acquired quite a retinue of astonished fish, when another idea struck him. It seemed too good to be tr
ue, but it would do no harm to try. Climbing on to the torpedo and lying in the normal prone position, he adjusted the trim as carefully as he could by moving his weight back and forth. Then he tilted the nose toward the surface, pushed his hands out into the slip stream on either side, and started the motor at quarter speed.

  It was hard on his wrists, and his responses had to be almost instantaneous to check the weaving and bucking of the torpedo. But with a little experimenting, he found he could use his hands for steering, though it was as difficult as riding a bicycle with one’s arms crossed. At five knots, the area of his flattened palms was just sufficient to give control over the vehicle.

  He wondered if anyone had ever ridden a torp this way before, and felt rather pleased with himself. Experimentally, he pushed the speed up to eight knots, but the pressure on his wrists and forearms was too great and he had to throttle back before he lost control.

  There was no reason, Franklin told himself, why he should not now make his original rendezvous, just in case Don was waiting there for him. He would be about five minutes late, but at least it would prove that he could carry out his assignment in the face of obstacles which he was not quite sure were entirely man-made.

  Don was nowhere in sight when he arrived, and Franklin guessed what had happened. His unexpected mobility had taken Burley by surprise, and the warden had lost him in the submarine haze. Well, he could keep on looking. Franklin made one radio call as a matter of principle, but there was no reply from his tutor. “I’m going home!” he shouted to the watery world around him; still there was silence. Don was probably a good quarter of a mile away, conducting an increasingly more anxious search for his lost pupil.

  There was no point in remaining below the surface and adding to the difficulties of navigation and control. Franklin took his vehicle up to the top and found that he was less than a thousand yards from the Maintenance Section jetty. By keeping the torp tail heavy and nose up he was able to scorch along on the surface like a speedboat without the slightest trouble, and he was home in five minutes.

  As soon as the torpedo had come out of the anticorrosion sprays which were used on all equipment after salt-water dives, Franklin got to work on it. When he pulled off the panel of the control compartment, he discovered that his was a very special model indeed. Without a circuit diagram, it was not possible to tell exactly what the radio-operated relay unit he had located could do, but he did not doubt that it had an interesting repertory. It could certainly cut off the motor, blow or flood the buoyancy tanks, and reverse the rudder and elevator controls. Franklin suspected that compass and depth gauge could also be sabotaged if required. Someone had obviously spent a great deal of loving care making this torpedo a suitable steed for overconfident pupils.…

  He replaced the panel and reported his safe return to the officer on duty. “Visibility’s very poor,” he said, truthfully enough. “Don and I lost each other out there, so I thought I’d better come in. I guess he’ll be along later.”

  There was considerable surprise in the mess when Franklin turned up without his instructor and settled quietly down in a corner to read a magazine. Forty minutes later, a great slamming of doors announced Don’s arrival. The warden’s face was a study in relief and perplexity as he looked around the room and located his missing pupil, who stared back at him with his most innocent expression and said: “What kept you?”

  Burley turned to his colleagues and held out his hand.

  “Pay up, boys,” he ordered.

  It had taken him long enough to make up his mind, but he realized that he was beginning to like Franklin.

  CHAPTER V

  THE TWO MEN leaning on the rails around the main pool of the aquarium did not, thought Indra as she walked up the road to the lab, look like the usual run of visiting scientists. It was not until she had come closer and was able to get a good look at them that she realized who they were. The big fellow was First Warden Burley, so the other must be the famous mystery man he was taking through a high-pressure course. She had heard his name but couldn’t remember it, not being particularly interested in the activities of the training school. As a pure scientist, she tended to look down on the highly practical work of the Bureau of Whales—though had anyone accused her outright of such intellectual snobbery she would have denied it with indignation.

  She had almost reached them before she realized that she had already met the smaller man. For his part, Franklin was looking at her with a slightly baffled, “Haven’t we seen each other before?” expression.

  “Hello,” she said, coming to a standstill beside them. “Remember me? I’m the girl who collects sharks.”

  Franklin smiled and answered: “Of course I remember: it still turns my stomach sometimes. I hope you found plenty of vitamins.”

  Yet strangely enough, the puzzled expression—so typical of a man straining after memories that will not come—still lingered in his eyes. It made him look lost and more than a little worried, and Indra found herself reacting with a sympathy which was disconcerting. She had already had several narrow escapes from emotional entanglements on the island, and she reminded herself firmly of her resolution: “Not until after I’ve got my master’s degree…”

  “So you know each other,” said Don plaintively. “You might introduce me.” Don, Indra decided, was perfectly safe. He would start to flirt with her at once, like any warden worthy of his calling. She did not mind that in the least; though big leonine blonds were not precisely her type, it was always flattering to feel that one was causing a stir, and she knew that there was no risk of any serious attachment here. With Franklin, however, she felt much less sure of herself.

  They chattered pleasantly enough, with a few bantering undertones, while they stood watching the big fish and porpoises circling slowly in the oval pool. The lab’s main tank was really an artificial lagoon, filled and emptied twice a day by the tides, with a little assistance from a pumping plant. Wire-mesh barriers divided it into various sections through which mutually incompatible exhibits stared hungrily at each other; a small tiger shark, with the inevitable sucker fish glued to its back, kept patrolling its underwater cage, unable to take its eyes off the succulent pompano parading just outside. In some enclosures, however, surprising partnerships had developed. Brilliantly colored crayfish, looking like overgrown shrimps that had been sprayed with paint guns, crawled a few inches away from the incessantly gaping jaws of a huge and hideous moray eel. A school of fingerlings, like sardines that had escaped from their tin, cruised past the nose of a quarter-ton grouper that could have swallowed them all at one gulp.

  It was a peaceful little world, so different from the battlefield of the reef. But if the lab staff ever failed to make the normal feeding arrangements, this harmony would quickly vanish and in a few hours the population of the pool would start a catastrophic decline.

  Don did most of the talking; he appeared to have quite forgotten that he had brought Franklin here to see some of the whale-recognition films in the lab’s extensive library. He was clearly trying to impress Indra, and quite unaware of the fact that she saw through him completely. Franklin, on the other hand, obviously saw both sides of the game and was mildly entertained by it. Once, Indra caught his eye, when Don was holding forth about the life and hard times of the average warden, and they exchanged the smiles of two people who share the same amusing secret. And at that moment Indra decided that, after all, her degree might not be the most important thing in the world. She was still determined not to get herself involved—but she had to learn more about Franklin. What was his first name? Walter. It was not one of her favorites, but it would do.

  In his calm confidence that he was laying waste another susceptible female heart, Don was completely unaware of the undercurrents of emotion that were sweeping around him yet leaving him utterly untouched. When he suddenly realized that they were twenty minutes late for their appointment in the projection room, he pretended to blame Franklin, who accepted the reproof in a good-natured but
slightly absent-minded manner. For the rest of the morning, indeed, Franklin was rather far away from his studies; but Don noticed nothing at all.

  The first part of the course was now virtually completed; Franklin had learned the basic mechanics of the warden’s profession and now needed the experience that only time would give. In almost every respect, he had exceeded Burley’s hopes, partly because of his original scientific training, partly because of his innate intelligence. Yet there was more to it even than this; Franklin had a drive and determination that was sometimes frightening. It was as if success in this course was a matter of life and death to him. True, he had been slow in starting; for the first few days he had been listless and seemingly almost uninterested in his new career. Then he had come to life, as he awoke to the wonder and challenge—the endless opportunity—of the element he was attempting to master. Though Don was not much given to such fancies, it seemed to him that Franklin was like a man awakening from a long and troubled sleep.

  The real test had been when they had first gone under water with the torpedoes. Franklin might never use a torp again—except for amusement—during his entire career; they were purely shallow-water units designed for very short-range work, and as a warden, Franklin would spend all his operational time snug and dry behind the protective walls of a sub. But unless a man was at ease and confident—though not overconfident—when he was actually immersed in water, the service had no use for him, however qualified he might be in other respects.

  Franklin had also passed, with a satisfactory safety margin, the decompression, CO2, and nitrogen narcosis tests. Burley had put him in the station’s “torture chamber”, where the doctors slowly increased the air pressure and took him down on a simulated dive. He had been perfectly normal down to 150 feet; thereafter his mental reactions became sluggish and he failed to do simple sums correctly when they were given to him over the intercom. At 300 feet he appeared to be mildly drunk and started cracking jokes which reduced him to tears of helpless laughter but which were quite unfunny to those outside—and embarrassingly so to Franklin himself when they played them back to him later. Three hundred and fifty feet down he still appeared to be conscious but refused to react to Don’s voice, even when it started shouting outrageous insults. And at 400 feet he passed out completely, and they brought him slowly back to normal.