Worm Submarine And Freedom

: Triplanetary

Since both Costigan and Bradley had often watched their captors at work

during the long voyage from the Solar System to Nevia, they were quite

familiar with the machine tools of the amphibians. Their stolen

lifeboat, being an emergency craft, of course carried full repair

equipment; and to such good purpose did the two officers labor that even

before their air-tanks were fully charged, all the damage had been

repaired.
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The lifeboat lay motionless upon the mirror-smooth surface of the ocean.

Captain Bradley had opened the upper port and the three stood in the

opening, gazing in silence toward the incredibly distant horizon, while

powerful pumps were forcing the last possible ounces of air into the

practically unbreakable storage cylinders. Mile upon strangely flat mile

stretched that waveless, unbroken expanse of water, merging finally into

the violent redness of the Nevian sky. The sun was setting; a vast ball

of purple flame dropping rapidly toward the horizon. Darkness came

suddenly as that seething ball disappeared, and the air became bitterly

cold, in sharp contrast to the pleasant warmth of a moment before. And

as suddenly clouds appeared in blackly banked masses and a cold, driving

rain began to beat down in torrents.



"Br-r-r, it's cold! Let's go in--Oh! Shut the door!" Clio shrieked,

and leaped wildly down into the compartment below, out of Costigan's

way, for he and Bradley also had seen slithering toward them the

frightful arm of the Thing.



Almost before the girl had spoken Costigan had leaped to the levers, and

not an instant too soon; for the tip of that horrible tentacle flashed

into the rapidly narrowing crack just before the door clanged shut. As

the powerful toggles forced the heavy screw threads into engagement and

drove the massive disk home into its bottle-tight, insulated seat, that

grisly tip fell severed to the floor of the compartment and lay there,

twitching and writhing with a loathsome and unearthly vigor. Two feet

long the piece was, and larger than a strong man's leg. It was armed

with spiked and jointed metallic scales, and instead of sucking disks it

was equipped with a series of mouths--mouths filled with sharp

metallic teeth which gnashed and ground together furiously, even though

sundered from the horrible organism which they were designed to feed.



The little submarine shuddered in every plate and member as monstrous

coils encircled her and tightened inexorably in terrific, rippling

surges eloquent of mastodonic power; and a strident vibration smote

sickeningly upon Terrestrial eardrums as the metal spikes of the

monstrosity crunched and ground upon the outer plating of their small

vessel. Costigan stood unmoved at the plate, watching intently; hands

ready upon the controls. Due to the artificial gravity of the lifeboat

it seemed perfectly stationary to its occupants. Only the weird

gyrations of the pictures upon the lookout screens showed that the craft

was being shaken and thrown about like a rat in the jaws of a terrier;

only the gauges revealed that they were almost a mile below the surface

of the ocean already, and were still going downward at an appalling

rate. Finally Clio could stand no more.



"Aren't you going to do something, Conway?" she cried.



"Not unless I have to," he replied, composedly. "I don't believe that he

can really hurt us, and if I use a ray of any kind I'm afraid that it

will kick up enough disturbance to bring Nerado down on us like a hawk

after a chicken. However, if he takes us much deeper I'll have to go to

work on him. We're getting down pretty close to our limit, and the

bottom's a long way down yet."



Deeper and deeper the lifeboat was dragged by its dreadful opponent,

whose spiked teeth still tore savagely at the tough outer plating of the

craft until Costigan reluctantly threw in his power switches. Against

the full propellant thrust the monster could draw them no lower, but

neither could the lifeboat make any headway toward the surface. The

Terrestrial then turned on his rays, but found that they were

ineffective. So closely was the creature wrapped around the submarine

that his weapons could not be brought to bear upon it without melting

the vessel's own outer skin.



"What can it possibly be, anyway, and what can we do about it?" Clio

asked.



"I thought at first it was something like a devilfish, or possibly an

overgrown starfish, but it's too flat, and has no body that I can see,"

Costigan made answer. "It must be a kind of flat worm. That doesn't

sound reasonable--the thing must be all of a hundred meters long--but

there it is. The only thing left to do now, as I see it, is to try to

boil him alive."



He closed other circuits, diffusing a terrific beam of pure heat, and

the water all about them burst into furious clouds of steam. The boat

leaped upward as the metallic fins of the gigantic worm fanned vapor

instead of water, but the creature neither released its hold nor ceased

its relentlessly grinding attack. Minute after minute went by, but

finally the worm dropped limply away--cooked through and through;

vanquished only by death.



"Now we've put our foot in it, clear to the knee!" Costigan exclaimed,

as he shot the lifeboat upward at its maximum power. "Look at that! I

knew that Nerado could trace us, but I didn't have any idea that they

could. It's a good thing these ultra-vision plates don't need light to

see by or we'd be 'spurlos versenkt' in a hurry!"



Staring with Costigan into the plate, Bradley and the girl saw, not the

Nevian sky-rover they had expected, but a fast submarine cruiser, manned

by the frightful fishes of the greater deeps. It was coming directly

toward the lifeboat, and even as Costigan hurled the little vessel off

at an angle and then upward into the air one of the deadly offensive

rods, tipped with its glowing ball of pure destruction, flashed through

the spot where they would have been had they held their former course.



But powerful as were the propellant forces and fiercely though Costigan

applied them, the denizens of the deep clamped a tractor ray upon the

flying vessel before it had gained a mile of altitude. Costigan aligned

his every driving projector as his vessel came to an abrupt halt in the

invisible grip of the beam, then experimented with various dials.



"There ought to be some way of cutting that beam," he pondered audibly,

"but I don't know enough about their system to do it, and I'm afraid to

monkey around with things too much, because I might accidentally release

the screens we've already got out, and they're stopping altogether too

much stuff for us to do without them right now."



He frowned as he studied the flaring defensive screens, now radiating an

incandescent violet under the concentration of the forces being hurled

against them by the warlike fishes, then stiffened suddenly.



"I thought so--they can shoot 'em!" he exclaimed, throwing the

lifeboat into a furious corkscrew turn, and the very air blazed into

flaming splendor as a dazzlingly scintillating ball of energy sped past

them and high into the air beyond.



Then for minutes a spectacular battle raged. The twisting, turning,

leaping airship, small as she was agile, kept on eluding the explosive

projectiles of the fishes, and her screens neutralized and re-radiated

the full power of the attacking beams. More--since Costigan did not need

to think of sparing his iron, the ocean around the great submarine began

furiously to boil under the full-driven offensive beams of the tiny

Nevian ship. But escape Costigan could not. He could not cut that

tractor beam and the utmost power of his drivers could not wrest the

lifeboat from its tenacious clutch. And slowly but inexorably the ship

of space was being drawn downward toward the ship of ocean's depths.

Downward, in spite of the utmost possible effort of every projector and

penetrator, and the two Terrestrial spectators, sick at heart, looked

once at each other. Then they looked at Costigan, who, jaw hard set and

eyes unflinchingly upon his plate, was concentrating his attack upon one

turret of the green monster as they settled lower and lower.



"If this is ... if our number is going up, Conway," Clio began,

unsteadily.



"Not yet, it isn't!" he snapped. "Keep a stiff upper lip, girl. We're

still breathing air, and the battle's not over yet!"



Nor was it; but it was not Costigan's efforts, mighty though they were,

that ended the attack of the fishes of the greater deeps. The tractor

beam snapped without warning, and so prodigious were the forces being

exerted by the lifeboat that, as it hurled itself away, the three

passengers were thrown violently to the floor, in spite of the powerful

gravity controls. Scrambling up on hands and knees, bracing himself as

best he could against the terrific forces, Costigan managed finally to

force a hand up to his panel. He was barely in time; for even as he cut

the driving power to its normal value the outer shell of the lifeboat

was blazing at white heat from the friction of the atmosphere through

which it had been tearing with such an insane acceleration!



"Oh, I see--Nerado to the rescue," Costigan commented, after a glance

into the plate. "I hope that those fish blow him clear out of the

Galaxy!"



"Why?" demanded Clio. "I should think that you'd...."



"Think again," he advised her. "The worse Nerado gets licked the better

for us. I don't really expect that, but if they can keep him busy long

enough, we can get far enough away so that he won't bother about us any

more."



As the lifeboat tore upward through the air at the highest permissible

atmospheric velocity Bradley and Clio peered over Costigan's shoulders

into the plate, watching in absorbed interest the scene which was being

kept in focus upon it. The Nevian ship of space was plunging downward in

a long, slanting dive, her terrific beams of force screaming out ahead

of her. The rays of the little lifeboat had boiled the waters of the

ocean; those of the parent craft seemed literally to blast them out of

existence. All about the green submarine there had been volumes of

furiously-boiling water and dense clouds of vapor; now water and fog

alike disappeared, converted into transparent superheated steam by the

blasts of Nevian energy. Through that tenuous gas the enormous mass of

the submarine fell like a plummet, her defensive screens flaming an

almost invisible violet, her every offensive weapon vomiting forth solid

and vibratory destruction toward the Nevian cruiser so high in the

angry, scarlet heavens.



For miles the submarine dropped, until the frightful pressure of the

depth drove water into Nerado's beam faster than his forces could

volatilize it. Then in that seething funnel there was waged desperate

conflict. At that funnel's wildly turbulent bottom lay the submarine,

now apparently trying to escape, but held fast by the tractor rays of

the space-ship; at its top, smothered almost to the point of

invisibility by billowing masses of steam, hung poised the Nevian

cruiser.



As the atmosphere had grown thinner and thinner with increasing altitude

Costigan had regulated his velocity accordingly, keeping the outer shell

of the vessel at the highest temperature consistent with safety. Now

beyond measurable atmospheric pressure, the shell cooled rapidly and he

applied full touring acceleration. At an appalling and constantly

increasing speed the miniature space-ship shot away from the strange,

red planet; and smaller and smaller upon the plate became its picture.

Long since the great vessel of the void had plunged beneath the surface

of the sea, more closely to come to grips with the vessel of the fishes;

for a long time nothing of the battle had been visible save immense

clouds of steam, blanketing hundreds of square miles of the ocean's

surface. But just before the picture became too small to reveal details

a few tiny dark spots appeared above the banks of cloud, now brilliantly

illuminated by the rays of the rising sun--dots which might have been

fragments of either vessel, blown bodily from the depths of the ocean

and, riven asunder, hurled high into the air by the incredible forces at

the command of the other.



Nevia a tiny moon and the fierce blue sun rapidly growing smaller in the

distance, Costigan swung his visiray beam into the line of travel and

turned to his companions.



"Well, we're off," he said, scowling. "I hope it was Nerado that got

blown up back there, but I'm afraid it wasn't. He whipped two of those

submarines that we know of, and probably half their fleet besides.

There's no particular reason why that one should be able to take him, so

it's my idea that we should get ready for great gobs of trouble.



"They'll chase us, of course; and I'm afraid that with their immense

power, they'll catch us."



"But what can we do, Conway?" asked Clio.



"Several things," he grinned. "I managed to get quite a lot of dope on

that paralyzing ray and some of their other stuff, and we can install

the necessary equipment in our suits easily enough."



They removed their armor, and Costigan explained in detail the changes

which must be made in the Triplanetary field generators. All three set

vigorously to work--the two officers deftly and surely; Clio uncertainly

and with many questions, but with undaunted spirit. Finally, having done

all they could do to strengthen their position, they settled down to the

watchful routine of the flight, with every possible instrument set to

detect any sign of the pursuit they so feared.



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