_The Awakening_
He had no idea of how long he had been unconscious when, his full
senses returning, he eagerly peered ahead through the torpoon's
vision-plate. For some seconds he could see nothing; but he knew, at
least, that the torpoon had survived the shock, for he was dry and
snug in his harness. And then his eyes became accustomed to the
darkness, and he saw that he was outside the submarine. Sallorsen had
followed his orders; had opened the port-lock! The undersea reaches
lay ahead of him, and the way was clear.
Ken stared into a gray, silent sea, no longer shadowed with moving
brown-skinned bodies. He tried his motors. Their friendly, rhythmic
hum answered him, and carefully he slipped into gear and crept up off
the sea-floor. He did not dare use his lights.
The _Peary_ was a great, blurred shadow, a dead thing without glow or
movement, with no figures of sealmen around her. As Ken's eyes gained
greater vision, he was able to make out a wide, long rent running
clear across the top of the fourth compartment of the submarine. The
explosion had done that to her, but what had it done to her crew? What
had it done to the sealmen?
He saw the sealmen first. Some were quite close, but in the murk he
had missed them. Silent specters, they were apparently lifeless,
strewn all around at different levels, and most of them floating
slowly up toward the dim ice ceiling.
But up under the ice was movement! Living figures were there! And at
the sight Kenneth Torrance's lips spread in their first real grin for
days. The plan had worked! The sealmen had been destroyed, and already
some of the _Peary's_ men were up there and fumbling clumsily across
the hundred feet which separated them from the hole in the ice that
was the last step to the world above.
* * * * *
A ghostly gray haze of light filtered downward through the water from
the hole. Ken counted twelve figures making their way to it. As he
wondered about the rest of the crew, he saw three bulging, swaying
shapes suddenly emerge from the split in the top of the _Peary_, and
begin an easy rise toward the ice ceiling ninety feet above. There was
no apparent danger, and they went up quite slowly, with occasional
brief pauses to avoid the risk of the bends. Clasped together, the
group of three were, and when they were halfway to the glassy ceiling
of the ice, three more left the rent in the submarine and followed
likewise. Twelve men were at the top; six others were swimming up;
three more were yet to leave the submarine--and after they had
abandoned her, he, Ken, would follow with the torpoon and the food it
contained.
So he thought, watching from where he lay, down below, and there was
in him a great weariness after the triumph so bitterly fought for had
been achieved. He rested through minutes of quiet and relaxation,
watching what he had brought about; but only minutes--for suddenly
without warning all security was gone.
From out the murky shadows to the left a sleek shape came flashing
with great speed, to jerk Ken Torrance's eyes around and to widen them
with quick alarm.
A sealman! A sealman alive, and moving--and vengeful! A sealman which
the explosion of nitromite had not reached!
Doubtless the lone creature was surprised upon seeing all its fellows
motionless, drifting like corpses upward, and the men of the _Peary_
escaping. With graceful, beautiful speed, a liquid streak, it flashed
into the scene, eeling up and around and down, trying to understand
what extraordinary thing had happened. But finally it slowed down and
hovered some thirty feet directly above the dark hull of the _Peary_.
The men rising toward the ice had seen the sealman at the same time
Ken Torrance had, and at once increased their efforts, fearing
immediate attack. Quickly the two groups shot to the top where the
other twelve were, and began a desperate fumbling progress over toward
the hole that alone gave exit. But the sealman paid no attention to
them. It was looking at something below.
Ken saw what it was.
The last three men were leaving the _Peary_. Awkward, swaying objects,
they rose up directly in front of the hovering creature.
* * * * *
With an enraged thrust of flippers, it drove at them. The three
humans--Sallorsen, Lawson and one other, Ken knew they must be--were
clasped together, and the long, lithe, muscular body smote them
squarely, sent them whirling and helpless in different directions in
the sea-gloom. One of them was driven down by the force of the blow,
and that one the sealman chose to finish first. It lashed at him, its
strong teeth bared to rip the sea-suit, concentrating on him all the
rage and all the thirst for vengeance it had.
But by then, down below, the torpoon's motors were throbbing at full
power; the thin directional rudders were slanting; the torpoon was
turning and pointing its nose upward; and Ken Torrance, his face bleak
as the Arctic ice, was grasping the trigger of the nitro-shell gun.
He might perhaps have saved the doomed man had he swept straight up
then and fired, but a quick mounting of the odds distracted him for a
fatal second. Out of the deeper gloom at the left came a swiftly
growing shadow, and Ken, with a sinking in his stomach, knew it for a
second sealman.
Then another similar shadow brought his eyes to the right.
Two more sealmen! Three now--and how many more might come?
At once Ken knew what he must do before ever he fired a shell at one
of the brown-skinned shapes. The man just attacked had to be
sacrificed in the interests of the rest. The torpoon swerved, thrust
up toward the ice ceiling under the full force of her motors; and when
halfway to it, and her gun-containing bow was pointed at a spot in the
ice only twenty feet in front of the foremost of the men stroking
desperately towards the distant exit-hole, Ken pressed the trigger;
and again, and again and again....
Twelve shells, quick, on the same path, bit into the ice. Almost
immediately came the first explosion. It was swelled by the others.
The ice shivered and crumbled in jagged splinters--and then there was
a new column of light reaching down from the world of air and life
into the darkness of the undersea. A roughly circular hole gaped in
the ice sixty or seventy feet nearer the swimming men than the old
one.
"That'll give 'em a chance," muttered Kenneth Torrance. He plunged the
torpoon around and down. "And now for a fight!"
* * * * *
Without pause, now, there was, straight ahead, a hard, desperate duel,
a fitting last fight for any torpoon or any man riding one. Each of
the seven shells left in the nitro-gun's magazine had to count; and
the first of them gave a good example.
Ken turned down in time to see the death of the man first attacked.
His suit was ripped clean across, his air of life went up in bubbles,
and the water came in. The seal-creature lunged at its falling victim
a last time, and as it did so its smooth brown body crossed Ken's
sights. The torpooner fired, and saw his shell strike home, for the
body shuddered, convulsed, and the sealman, internally torn, went
sinking in a dark cloud after the human it had slain.
That sight gave pause to the other two creatures that had arrived, and
gave Ken Torrance a good second chance. Motor throbbing, the torpoon
turned like a thing alive. Its snout and gun-sights swerving straight
toward the next target. But, when just on the point of pressing the
trigger, Ken's torpoon was struck a terrific blow and tumbled over and
over. The whole external scene blurred to him, and only after a moment
was he able to bring the torpoon back to an even keel.
He saw what had happened. While he had been sighting on the second
seal-creature, the third had attacked the torpoon from the rear by
striking it with all the strength of its heavy, muscular body. But it
did not follow up its attack. For it had crashed in to the whirling
propeller, and now it was hanging well back, its head horribly gashed
by the steel blades.
For a moment the three combatants hung still, both sealmen staring at
the torpoon as if in wonder that it could strike both with its bow and
stern, and Ken Torrance rapidly glancing over the situation. The
remaining two of the last group of three men, he saw, had reached the
top, and the foremost of the _Peary's_ crew were within several feet
of the new hole in the ice. In a very short time all would be out and
safe. Until then he had to hold off the two sealmen.
Two? There were no longer only two, but five--ten--a dozen--and more.
The dead were coming to life!
Here and there in the various levels of drifting, motionless brown
bodies that he thought the explosion had killed, one was stirring,
awakening! The explosion had but stunned many or most of them, _and
now they were returning to consciousness_!