The water is only about eighty feet deep.
We can’t move the vessel, but we can get out—
“Get out!” echoed gigantic Hal Samdu.
“How?”
“Through the air-lock.
We’ll have to swim to the surface, and try for the shore—with the water only eighty feet, it’s likely enough that we’re just off some coast. We’ll have to strip for it. And we won’t be able to burden ourselves with weapons or supplies.
“We could exist indefinitely here on board. Plenty of air and supplies.
Perhaps we can survive only a few minutes outside.
We may not even reach the surface. If we do, it will be only to meet the dangers of a world where even the air is slow poison.”
“My precious eye!” broke in Giles Habibula.
“Here we’re all stuck to die of slow starvation at the bottom of a fearful sea of evil.
And that isn’t enough!
You want us to swim out like mortal fishes at the bottom of this wicked yellow ocean?”
“Precisely,” agreed John Star.
“You want poor old Giles to drown himself like a brainless rat, when he’s still got plenty of victuals and wine?
Poor old Giles Habibula———”
“You’re a fool, John,” said Adam Ulnar, with dull and savage emphasis.
“You’ll never get ashore.
You never heard the tales that Eric’s men brought back.
You don’t know the sort of life—plant as well as animal—that fights for survival in the long, red days.
How can you live through the nights?
You were born on a kind world, John.
You weren’t evolved to survive on this one.”
“Any of you may stay on board, who wish,” Jay Kalam interrupted quietly.
“John is going.
And I am.
Hal?”
“Of course I’ll go!” rumbled the giant, reddening with a slow anger.
“Did you think, with Aladoree at the mercy of those monsters, that I’d stay behind?”
“Of course not, Hal.
And you, Giles?”
The fishy eyes of Giles Habibula rolled anxiously; he trembled spasmodically; sweat came out on his face; in a dry voice he spoke, with a sudden effort:
“Mortal me!
Do you want to go away and leave poor wretched old Giles Habibula here to starve and rot on the bottom of this wicked ocean?
Life’s precious sake!” he rasped convulsively.
“I’ll go!
But first old Giles must have a taste of food to put strength in his feeble old body, and a nip of wine to steady his torn and tortured nerves.”
He rolled unsteadily away toward the galley.
“And you, Commander?” demanded Jay Kalam.
“Are you going?”
“No.” Adam Ulnar shook his head.
“It’s no use.
Competition has bred some very successful life forms in the seas here, I believe, as well as on the land.”
The four entered the air-lock, stripped to the skin, carrying their clothing, proton guns, a few pounds of concentrated food, and—on Giles Habibula’s insistence—a bottle of wine; all wrapped in a big water-tight bundle.
They sealed the heavy inner valve and John Star opened the equalization tube through the outer; a thick stream of water roared into the little chamber, flooding it, rising ice-cold about their bodies, compressing the air above them.
Merciless pressure squeezed them.
The inrush stopped, with water about their shoulders.
John Star spun the control-wheel of the outer valve, but the armored door stuck fast.
“Jammed!” he gasped.
“We must try it by hand.”