They had been climbing slowly for nearly an hour, and had reached the three-thousand-foot level, when Percy showed signs of life. The two long arms, terminating in their great sucker-covered palps, began to writhe purposefully; the monstrous eyes, into which Franklin had been staring half hypnotized from a distance of no more than five feet, began to light once more with intelligence. Quite unaware that he was speaking in a breathless whisper, he swiftly reported these symptoms to Dr. Roberts.
The doctor’s first reaction was a hearty sigh of relief: “Good!” he said. “I was afraid we might have killed him. Can you see if he’s breathing properly? Is the siphon contracting?”
Franklin dropped a few feet so that he could get a better view of the fleshy tube projecting from the squid’s mantle. It was opening and closing in an unsteady rhythm which seemed to be getting stronger and more regular at every beat.
“Splendid!” said Dr. Roberts. “He’s in fine shape. As soon as he starts to wriggle too hard, give him one of the small bombs. But leave it until the last possible moment.”
Franklin wondered how that moment was to be decided. Percy was now beginning to glow a beautiful blue; even with the searchlights switched off he was clearly visible. Blue, he remembered Dr. Roberts saying, was a sign of excitement in squids. In that case, it was high time he did something.
“Better let go that bomb. I think he’s getting lively,” he told Don.
“Right—here it is.”
A glass bubble floated across Franklin’s screen and swiftly vanished from sight.
“The damn thing never broke!” he cried. “Let go another one!”
“O.K.—here’s number two. I hope this works; I’ve only got five left.”
But once again the narcotic bomb failed. This time Franklin never saw the sphere; he only knew that instead of relaxing into slumber once more Percy was becoming more active second by second. The eight short tentacles—short, that is, compared with the almost hundred-foot reach of the pair carrying the grasping palps—were now beginning to twine briskly together. He recalled Melville’s phrase: “Like a nest of anacondas.” No; somehow that did not seem to fit. It was more like a miser—a submarine Shylock—twisting his fingers together as he gloated over his wealth. In any event, it was a disconcerting sight when those fingers were a foot in diameter and were operating only two yards “You’ll just have to keep on trying,” he told Don. “Unless we stop him soon, he’ll get away.”
An instant later he breathed a sigh of relief as he saw broken shards of glass drifting by. They would have been quite invisible, surrounded as they were by water, had they not been fluorescing brilliantly under the light of his ultraviolet searchlight. But for the moment he was too relieved to wonder why he had been able to see something as proverbially elusive as a piece of broken glass in water; he only knew that Percy had suddenly relaxed again and no longer appeared to be working himself into a rage.
“What happened?” said Dr. Roberts plaintively from above.
“These confounded knockout drops of yours. Two of them didn’t work. That leaves me with just four—and at the present rate of failure I’ll be lucky if even one goes off.”
“I don’t understand it. The mechanism worked perfectly every time we tested it in the lab.”
“Did you test it at a hundred atmospheres pressure?”
“Er—no. It didn’t seem necessary.”
Don’s “Huh!” seemed to say all that was needful about biologists who tried to dabble with engineering, and there was silence on all channels for the next few minutes of slow ascent. Then Dr. Roberts, sounding a little diffident, came back to the subject.
“Since we can’t rely on the bombs,” he said, “you’d better come up more quickly. He’ll revive again in about thirty minutes.”
“Right—I’ll double speed. I only hope this collar doesn’t slip off.”
The next twenty minutes were perfectly uneventful; then everything started to happen at once.
“He’s coming around again,” said Franklin. “I think the higher speed has waked him up.”
“I was afraid of that,” Dr. Roberts answered. “Hold on as long as you can, and then let go a bomb. We can only pray that one of them will work.”
A new voice suddenly cut into the circuit. “Captain here. Lookout has just spotted some sperm whales about two miles away. They seem to be heading toward us; I suggest you have a look at them—we’ve got no horizontal search sonar on this ship.”
Franklin switched quickly over to the long-range scanner and picked up the echoes at once.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said. “If they come too close, we can scare them away.” He glanced back at the TV screen “Let go your bomb,” he told Don, “and keep your fingers crossed.”
“I’m not betting on this,” Don answered. “Anything happen?”
“No; another dud. Try again.”
“That leaves three. Here goes.”
“Sorry—I can see that one. It isn’t cracked.”
“Two left. Now there’s only one.”
“That’s a dud too. What had we better do, Doc? Risk the last one? I’m afraid Percy will slip off in a minute.”
“There’s nothing else we can do,” replied Dr. Roberts, his voice now clearly showing the strain. “Go ahead, Don.”
Almost at once Franklin gave a cry of satisfaction.
“We’ve made it!” he shouted. “He’s knocked cold again! How long do you think it will keep him under this time?”
“We can’t rely on more than twenty minutes, so plan your ascent accordingly. We’re right above you—and remember what I said about taking at least ten minutes over that last two hundred feet. I don’t want any pressure damage after all the trouble we’ve been to.”
“Just a minute,” put in Don. “I’ve been looking at those whales. They’ve put on speed and they’re coming straight toward us. I think they’ve detected Percy—or the beacon we put in him.”
“So what?” said Franklin. “We can frighten them with— oh.”
“Yes—I thought you’d forgotten that. These aren’t patrol subs, Walt. No sirens on them. And you can’t scare sperm whales just by revving your engines.”
That was true enough, though it would not have been fifty years ago, when the great beasts had been hunted almost to extinction. But a dozen generations had lived and died since then; now they recognized the subs as harmless, and certainly no obstacle to the meal they were anticipating. There was a real danger that the helpless Percy might be eaten before he could be safely caged.
“I think we’ll make it,” said Franklin, as he anxiously calculated the speed of the approaching whales. This was a hazard that no one could have anticipated; it was typical of the way in which underwater operations developed unexpected snags and complications.
“I’m going straight up to the two-hundred-foot level,” Don told him. “We’ll wait there just as long as it’s safe, and then run for the ship. What do you think of that, Doc?”
“It’s the only thing to do. But remember that those whales can make fifteen knots if they have to.”
“Yes, but they can’t keep it up for long, even if they see their dinner slipping away. Here we go.”
The subs increased their rate of ascent, while the water brightened around them and the enormous pressure slowly relaxed. At last they were back in the narrow zone where an unprotected man could safely dive. The mother ship was less than a hundred yards away, but this final stage in the climb back to the surface was the most critical of all. In this last two hundred feet, the pressure would drop swiftly from eight atmospheres to only one—as great a change in ratio as had occurred in the previous quarter of a mile. There were no enclosed air spaces in Percy which might cause him to explode if the ascent was too swift, but no one could be certain what other internal damage might occur.
“Whales only half a mile away,” reported Franklin. “Who said they couldn’t keep up that speed? They’ll be here in two minutes.”
“You’ll have to hold them off somehow,” said Dr. Roberts, a note of desperation in his voice.
“Any suggestions?” asked Franklin, a little sarcastically.
“Suppose you pretend to attack; that might make them break off.”
This, Franklin told himself, was not his idea of fun. But there seemed no alternative; with a last glance at Percy, who was now beginning to stir again, he started off at half-speed to meet the advancing whales.
There were three echoes dead ahead of him—not very large ones, but he did not let that encourage him. Even if those were the relatively diminutive females, each one was as big as ten elephants and they were coming toward him at a combined speed of forty miles an hour. He was making all the noise he could, but so far it seemed to be having no effect.