Part 12 (1/2)

All day they rode, roughly following the sh.o.r.eline to the northward.

Whenever it got so deep that nothing was visible below but a vast green shadow Gerry headed inland until the tops of the sea gardens again came into view. Sarnak had told them that by the middle of the next day it should be safe for them to come above water and check their maps and put fresh chemical cartridges in the cylinders of their helmets. The Scaly Ones patrolled their coast line in shallow open boats, but they did not go beyond their own borders.

Once Gerry checked his dolphin and then headed downward as he caught sight of something big and dark lying on the sand. The others followed him. It was the broken and rusting hulk of a s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+p, a vessel of a strange type with a name in an unknown tongue still visible on the shattered stern. The wreck must have been there for a very long time, for the sand was heaped high about it and sea-weeds grew up through the open hatches.

”Leaping ray-blasts!” McTavish said softly. ”Yon craft never came from either Earth or Mars.”

”Probably from some far distant planet in outer s.p.a.ce that we've never heard of,” Gerry said. ”Some adventurous wanderer of the interstellar regions who came to grief in this lonely spot.”

It was desolate and forlorn, the sight of that wrecked vessel from so long ago. It made Gerry think of his own lost command. There were clean picked white bones of strange shape lying about on the sand. Gerry saluted, a tribute to those strange and forgotten wanderers of s.p.a.ce, and then urged his dolphin to a higher level again.

When the dimming light showed that it was dusk above the water they rode in to the four-fathom shallows and halted in a smooth patch of yellow sand. Gerry unsaddled the dolphins and tethered them to lumps of coral where they browsed contentedly on the short vegetation. Then the three exiles sat down in a circle on the sand. McTavish stretched his long legs, bouncing a few feet off the ground as he did so and then floating slowly down again.

”I'll never forget this journey if I live to be older than the whole Solar System itself!” he said. ”Also--I'm hungry.”

”There's nothing we can do about that until noon tomorrow,” Gerry grunted. ”Maybe the fasting will make you lose some of that surplus bulk of yours. But I'll admit I could do with some of that special coffee Portok used to brew in the ward room on the _Viking_ in the evenings.”

”I'd give a lot for a drink of plain water,” Closana said wistfully.

”Acres of water around us and nothing to drink!”

When the last of the light was gone they lit a small lamp that Sarnak had given them. It illumined a circle some twenty feet across, a little patch of light in the midst of the utter blackness of the depths of the sea. They sat there talking for a while, then Gerry stretched out on the sand with one arm hooked around a lump of coral to hold himself in place. He was thankful that the waters of Venus were always warm. It would scarcely have been possible to sleep at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans in this manner, even with the equipment with which Sarnak had supplied them.

For a while Gerry drowsed. The audiphones of his helmet picked up all the faint sounds of this watery world. A m.u.f.fled splash as Angus McTavish stirred restlessly ... the steady movement as their drowsing but apparently sleepless dolphins fed on the fields of sea-weed ... an occasional steady churning as some larger denizen of the deep swam past above them. Then he slept.

It was well past midnight by the illuminated dial of the waterproof chronometer that Sarnak had given Gerry when he awoke. Angus was shaking his shoulder. The light had been put out hours before, and there was no illumination at all except for an occasional flash of green phosph.o.r.esence where some fish sped by.

”Either I'm an over-grown sponge,” the big engineer muttered, ”or there's a light s.h.i.+ning through the water off to the west.”

Gerry yawned and sat up, instinctively starting to rub his eyes before his hands b.u.mped against the hard gla.s.s surface of his curving helmet.

Some of the bits of coral around them glowed with an eerie green radiance, and a tall frond of sea-weed had tiny specks of light on the tips of its constantly waving leaves. Then, far off to the left, Gerry caught a faint glow.

It was hard to tell what kind of a light it was, so great was the refraction of the water, but there was something there. It was little more than a lessening of the deep gloom that otherwise surrounded them on all sides. Gerry got to his feet and picked up his rubber saddle which he had been using as a pillow under his helmet.

”We'd better investigate,” he said. ”Wake Closana.”

They saddled their dolphins and rode out at an easy pace, holding the big fish down with a tight rein. As they rode the glow ahead of them became more definite. It seemed to come from a long row of twenty or more lights. Then they were near enough to see each other in the reflected glow.

”It's some kind of a s.h.i.+p,” Gerry said. ”Those lights are her port holes!”

”It's more than that!” snapped Angus. ”It's the _Viking_! I know the lines of her stern anywhere, even in this sunken and G.o.d forsaken spot!”

The s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+p lay quietly in the soft mud of this part of the ocean bottom. All her port holes of transparent duralite were glowing with the reflected light from inside. The twisted wrecks of her helicopters were still visible on top of the hull, but otherwise she did not appear to be damaged.

Gerry was in the middle as the three of them rode their dolphins up close to one of the big windows of the control room. The s.h.i.+p had evidently survived the fall into the water, for they could see dim figures moving about inside.

”I told you that duralite hull could stand a little thing like a fall into the ocean!” McTavish exulted.