The Sea-Story Megapack: 30 Classic Nautical Works Page 4

  When I woke, at the sound of feet upon the deck, Sharky Steve was gone.

  The circumstances were the same as before. The same line trailed from the taffrail, without other clue. As Harris and Cap Dorkin and I looked at each other, each knew the other’s thoughts. Who would be the next to go? We had given up asking how.

  If only we could have wind! Just a capful of air—

  * * * *

  It was morning. A breeze was coming up, very gently, and the Terrapin was beginning to forge ahead, very slowly and stodgily. Then Cap Dorkin sighted a sail.

  It was evident to me that we had somehow got far out of our course, for in three days we had not sighted more than the distant smoke of a vessel of any sort. But now, plainly enough, a schooner had come into sight, a ship of about our own tonnage, headed our way.

  Why Cap Dorkin wanted to take in all sail and put out the sea-anchor until the other vessel should come up I did not understand, but that is what we did. The breeze that early morning had promised did not increase, and all day long we lay waiting while the approaching vessel worked her way toward us. Slowly she drew nearer hour by hour; and at evening she answered our signal and lay to.

  Captain Graves, of the Molly Bruce, wore a face totally without expression, but his gray eyes were keen. The two captains greeted each other coolly as we three from the Terrapin came aboard.

  “I need men,” explained Dorkin briefly when we were in the cabin of the Molly Bruce. “What can you spare?”

  “Not a man,” answered Graves. “I’m short-handed myself.”

  “All right,” said Dorkin. “Will you take a passenger?”

  “No,” answered Graves. “I never take passengers.”

  “But I can pay!” Harris broke in. “I can pay well!”

  “I’m not interested,” said Graves again.

  “Look here,” cried Harris. “You don’t understand me. I tell you, I can pay almost anything!”

  Slowly Graves turned and surveyed the other man. The captain’s face was still as a mask, but his eyes were hard as steel.

  “I know you can,” he said.

  Harris appeared taken aback, and several moments of silence followed. “Then make me a proposition,” he presently suggested.

  “You know that I know who you are,” said Graves, “and yet you want a proposition from me?”

  Harris hesitated.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Your name is Singleton,” said Captain Graves. “You are probably under another name just now because you had to ship out of Maranhão on either the Terrapin or the Molly Bruce—or else lay over in Maranhão waiting for one of your own ships. You wouldn’t dare ship under your own name because your business methods and the ships you inherited from your father have killed the little-vessel trade in the small ports. You went out to get us, and you’ve done well at it. Yet you want a proposition from me?”

  “Yes,” said Harris again, his voice cold.

  Graves got out a pen and wrote for several moments, then handed the paper to the Terrapin’s passenger.

  “Will you sign that?” he asked.

  Harris’ face flushed as he read the sheet.

  “I’ll see you in hell first!” he said.

  Cap Dorkin had been staring gloomily through the porthole at the Terrapin lying deserted fifty yards away in the thick gloom.

  “My sidelights are out,” he remarked. “I’ve got to be getting back.”

  Then suddenly an oath burst from him.

  “Step here,” he said, his voice low, “and see do you see what I see!”

  I peered out of the porthole and saw nothing, save the Terrapin, floating lightless under bare poles in the twilight.

  “What was it?”

  “Lanterns! They’re gone now. No! There they are again! Look!”

  He sprang up the ladder. Yes, I saw the lanterns, two of them, moving rapidly and with a peculiar smoothness along the little schooner’s starboard rail. Then they disappeared, as quickly as if quenched in a bucket.

  Cap Dorkin’s hail roared from above. “Ahoy! The Terrapin, Ahoy! Answer, damn you!”

  There was no answer; except that I saw the two lanterns appear again at the forward rail of the Terrapin, and slide aft with that same strangely smooth movement. It was enough to send the shivers along any man’s spine. I thought, “Ghost lanterns, Sharky Steve would have called them.”

  “Kind of funny,” commented Graves, “that there’s no answer from your crew.”

  Harris was beside me, staring through the port. In the young light of the cabin-lantern his face was white as surf.

  “The crew?” he said in a strange voice. “There—isn’t any—crew.”

  Silence held while Harris and I stared across the still water at the Terrapin, lying lonely and deserted.

  “Your captain wants to leave,” said Graves. “You’d better stand by to go back to your ship.”

  “Go back? Go back to the Terrapin?”

  Captain Graves’ voice was like a saw on steel. “You are going back now,” he stated, “unless—you like my proposition!”

  “I can’t go back there!” cried Harris.

  “Then sign!” Graves shoved the paper toward him.

  “ It’s unreasonable—impossible—”

  “Sign!”

  “I can’t—”

  “Then get back to your ship!”

  Harris wavered, squinting through the port. “Ahoy! Ahoy, the Terrapin!” boomed Dorkin’s voice above, in a long wailing hail. But the ghost lanterns appeared no more. Unmanned and silent, the little ship looked even more hopeless than when those weird lights had slid along her rail.

  “For the last time, sign or go!”

  “I’ll sign,” said Harris at last.

  He signed and sat down weakly upon a locker. I witnessed the signature, then followed the captain up the ladder. Then, as the two skippers met, once more a peculiar thing happened. The two men gripped each other’s hands and shook heartily.

  “All O.K., Bob?” asked Cap Dorkin.

  “All set,” answered Graves. “Good boy, Sam!”

  I rowed Dorkin slowly back to the Terrapin.

  “Eight years,” said Cap, “eight years we’ve bucked that yellow-backed ship owner. Eight years of fighting upwind and losing. And now we’ve got him! That paper he signed turns the tables in the small-port trade! We’ve got him at last!”

  “But what about—” I began.

  “All that show? All for him! Why do you suppose I got clear off our course? Why do you suppose the Molly Bruce came up just at the right time? It was all planned out, you fool! I didn’t tip you off because you’re too young—you couldn’t have faked it right. The boys had a terrible time stowed away in the hold, though. Hot and stuffy like. I’ll sure have to make it up to them!”

  Jimmy the cook, and Bill Grimes, and Sharky Steve were playing poker in the cabin when we boarded the Terrapin again. And Joe Bates was complaining that he had burned his thumb on a “ghost lantern.”

  “It was a phony idea anyway,” he growled. “Why not stick a gun to the mucker’s head in the first place and be done with it?”

  But some of these old-timers do things in odd ways!

  THE DANGER FROM THE DEEP, by Ralph Milne Farley

  Within a thick-walled sphere of steel eight feet in diameter, with crystal-clear fused-quartz windows, there crouched an alert young scientist, George Abbot. The sphere rested on the primeval muck and slime at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, one mile beneath the surface.

  The beam from his 200-watt searchlight, which shot out through one of his three windows into the dark blue depths beyond, seemed faint indeed, yet it served to illuminate anything which crossed it, or on which it fell.

  For a considerable length of time since his descent to the ocean floor, young Abbot had clung to one of the thick windows of his bathysphere, absorbed by the marine life outside. Slender small fish with stereoscopic eyes, darted in and out of the beam of light. Swimming sna
ils floated by, carrying their own phosphorescent lanterns. Paper-thin transparent crustaceans swam into view, followed by a few white shrimps, pale as ghosts. Then a mist of tiny fish swept across his field of vision. Abbot cupped his face in his hands, and stared out.

  The incongruous thought flashed across his mind that he had often sat in exactly this position by the window of his club in New York City and gazed out at passing traffic.

  His searchlight cut a sharp swath through the blue muck. More than once he thought he saw large moving fish-like forms far away.

  “Speed up the generator,” he called into his phone.

  Immediately the shaft of light brightened. He set about trying to focus upon one of those dim, elusive shapes which had so intrigued him.

  But suddenly the searchlight went out. Abbot snapped the button-switch, which ought to have illuminated the interior of his diving-sphere, but the lights did not go on. Then he noticed that the electric fan, on which he depended to keep his air-supply properly mixed, had also stopped.

  He spoke into the telephone transmitter, which hung in front of his mouth: “Hi, there, up on the boat! My electric power is out. I’m down here with my fan stopped and my heat cut off. Hoist me up, and be quick about it!”

  “O.K., sir.”

  As the young man waited for the winch to get under way on the boat a mile above, he pulled out his pocket flashlight and sent its feeble ray out through his quartz-glass window into the dim royal-purple depths beyond, in one last attempt to get a look at those mysterious fish-shapes which had so intrigued him.

  And then he saw one of them distinctly.

  Evidently they had swum closer when the glow of his searchlight had stopped; and so the sudden flash of his pocket-light had taken them by surprise.

  For, as he snapped it on, he caught an instant’s glimpse of a grinning fish-face pressed close against the outside of his thick window-pane, as though trying to peer in at him. The fish-face somewhat resembled the head of a shark, except that the mouth was a bit smaller and not quite so leeringly brutal, and the forehead was rather high and domed.

  But what most attracted Abbot’s attention, in the brief instant before the startled fish whisked away in a swirl of phosphorescent foam, was the fact that, from beneath each of the two pectoral fins, there protruded what appeared to be a skinny human arm, terminating in three fingers and a thumb!

  Then the fish was gone. Abbot snapped off his little light.

  The diving-sphere quivered, as the hoisting-cable tautened. But suddenly the sphere settled back to the bottom of the sea with a jarring thud. “Cable’s parted, sir!” spoke a frantic voice in his ear-phones.

  For a moment George Abbot sat stunned with horror. Then his mind began to race, like a squirrel in a cage, seeking some way of escape.

  Perhaps he could manage to unscrew the 400-pound trap door at the top of the sphere, and shoot to the surface, with the bubbling-out of the confined air. But his scientifically trained mind made some rapid calculations which showed him this was absurd.

  At the depth of a mile, the pressure is roughly 156 atmospheres, that is to say, 156 times the air-pressure at the surface of the earth; and the moment that his sphere was opened to this pressure, he would be blown back inwardly away from the man-hole, and the air inside his sphere would suddenly be compressed to only 1/156 of its former volume.

  Not only would this pressure be sufficient to squash him to a pulp, but also the sudden compression of the air inside the sphere would generate enough heat to fry that mangled pulp to a crisp cinder almost instantly.

  As George Abbot came to a full realization of the horror of these facts, he recoiled from the trap-door as though it were charged with death.

  “For Heaven’s sakes, do something!” he cried into the transmitter.

  “Courage, sir,” came back the reply. “We are rigging up a grapple just as fast as we can. Long before your oxygen gives out, we shall slide it down to you along the telephone line.” Obviously the phone line was still connected. “When it settles about your sphere, and you can see its hooks outside your window by the light of your pocket-flash, let us know, and we’ll trip the grapple and haul you up.”

  “Thank you,” replied the young man.

  He was calm now, but it was an enforced and numb kind of calmness. Mechanically he throttled down his oxygen supply, so as to make it last longer. Mechanically he took out his notebook and pencil and started to write down, in the dark, his experiences; for he was determined to leave a full account for posterity, even if he himself should perish.

  After setting down a categorical description of the successive partings of the electric light cable and the hoist cable, and his thoughts and feelings in that connection, he described in detail the shark with hands, which he had seen through the window of his sphere. He tried to be very explicit about this, for he realized that his account would probably be laid, by everyone, to the disordered imagination of his last dying moments; being a true scientist, George Abbot wanted the world to believe him, so that another sphere would be built and sent down to the ocean depths, to find out more about these peculiar denizens of the deep.

  Of course, no one would believe him. This thought kept drumming in his ears. No one—except Professor Osborne. Old Osborne would believe!

  George Abbot’s mind flashed back to a conversation he had had with the old professor, just before the oil interests had sent him on this exploring trip to discover the source of the large quantities of petroleum which had begun to bubble up from the bottom of a certain section of the Pacific very near where Abbot now was.

  Osborne had said, “This petroleum suggests a gusher to me. And what causes gushers? Human beings, boring for oil, to satisfy human needs.”

  “But, Professor,” Abbot had objected, “there can’t be any human beings at the bottom of the sea!”

  “Why not?” Professor Osborne had countered. “Life is supposed to have originated spontaneously in the slime of the ocean depths; therefore that part of the earth has had a head-start on us in the game of evolution. May not this head-start have been maintained right down to date, thus producing at the bottom of the sea a race superior to anything upon the dry land?”

  “But,” Abbot had objected further, “if so, why haven’t they come up to visit or conquer us? And why haven’t we ever found any trace of them?”

  “Quite simple to explain,” the old professor had replied. “Any creature who can live at the frightful pressures of the ocean depths could never survive a journey even halfway to the surface. It would be like our trying to live in an almost perfect vacuum. We should explode, and so would these denizens of the deep, if they tried to come up here. Even one of their dead bodies could not be brought to the surface in recognizable form. No contact with them will ever be possible, nor will they ever constitute a menace to any one—for which we may thank the Lord!”

  George Abbot now reviewed this conversation as he crouched in his diving-sphere in the purple darkness of the marine depths. Yes, old Osborne would believe him. The diary must be written for Osborne’s eyes.

  Abbot sent another beam from his pocket light suddenly out into the water; and this time he surprised several of the peculiar fish. These, like the first, had arms and hands and high intelligent foreheads.

  Then suddenly Abbot laughed a harsh laugh. Old Osborne had been wrong in one thing, namely in saying that the super-race of the deep would never be a menace to anyone. They were being a menace to George Abbot, right now, for it was undoubtedly they who had cut his cables. Probably they were possessed of much the same scientific curiosity with regard to him as he was with regard to them, and so they had determined to secure him as a museum specimen.

  The idea was a weird one. He laughed again, mirthlessly.

  “What is the matter, sir?” came an anxious voice in his ear-phones.

  “Hurry that grapple!” was his reply. “I have found out what cut my cables. There are some very intelligent-looking fish down here, and I thin
k they want me for—”

  An ominous click sounded in his ears. Then silence.

  “Hello! Hello there!” he shouted. “Can you hear me up on the boat?”

  No answer came back. The line remained dead. The strange fish had cut George Abbot’s last contact with the upper world. The grapple-hooks could never find him now, for there was now not even a telephone cable to guide them down to his sphere.

  The realization that he was hopelessly lost, and that he had not much longer to live, came as a real relief to him, after the last few moments of frantic uncertainty.

  Hoping that his sphere would eventually be found, even though too late to do him any good, he set assiduously to work jotting down all the details which he could remember of those strange denizens of the deep, the man-handed sharks, which he was now firmly convinced were the cause of his present predicament.

  He stared out through one of his windows into the blue darkness, but did not turn on his flashlight. How near were these enemies of his?

  The presence of those menacing man-sharks, just outside the four-inch-thick steel shell, which withstood a ton of pressure for each square inch of its surface, began to obsess young Abbot. What were they doing out there in the watery-blue midnight? Perhaps, having secured his sphere as a scientific specimen, they were already preparing to cut into it so as to see what was inside. That these fish could cut through four inches of steel was not so improbable as it sounded, for had they not already succeeded in severing a rubber cable an inch and a half thick, containing two heavy copper wires, and also two inches of the finest, non-kinking steel rope!

  The young scientist flashed his pocket torch out through the thick quartz pane, but his enemies were nowhere in sight. Then he fell to calculating his oxygen supply. His normal consumption was about half a quart per minute, at which rate his two tanks would be good for thirty-six hours. His chemical racks contained enough soda-lime to absorb the excess carbon dioxide, enough calcium chloride to keep down the humidity, and enough charcoal to sweeten the body odors for much more than that period.