“Let me!” cried Hal Samdu, surging forward through the chill water, his voice oddly shrill in the dense air.
He set his great back against the metal valve, braced himself, strained. His muscles snapped.
Agony of effort twisted his face into a strange mask.
His swift breath was harsh and gasping.
John Star and Jay Kalam added their strength, all of them struggling in cold water that came to their chins, fighting for breath in the hot, stale air.
The valve gave abruptly.
A rush of water swept them back.
Air gurgled out.
They filled their lungs out of the trapped air-pocket, dragged themselves out through the opening, and swam desperately for the surface.
Dark water, numbingly cold, weighed on them crushingly.
John Star fought the relentless, overwhelming pressure of it; he fought a savage urge to empty his tortured lungs and breathe.
He struggled upward through grim infinities of time.
Then suddenly, surprisingly, he was upon the surface of the yellow sea, sobbing for his breath.
Flat and glistening, an oily yellow-red under the cold red sky, the unknown sea stretched away into murky crimson distance.
It lifted and fell in long, slow swells.
At first he was alone.
Jay Kalam’s head burst up beside him, dripping, panting.
Then Hal Samdu’s red hair.
They waited, gasping for life, too breathless for speech.
They waited a long time, and at last Giles Habibula’s bald dome came up, fringed with thin white hair.
They swam on the yellow sea, and breathed deeply, gratefully— forgetful that every breath was slow poison.
The blank surface lay away from them, a waste of silent desolation.
The sky was a cold lowering dome of sullen crimson; the sun burned low in it, an incredibly huge disk of deeper, sinister scarlet.
A dying dwarf, old when the Sun of Earth was born, it seemed too cold to warm them.
“Our next problem!” panted John Star. “The shore!”
“The bundle,” muttered Hal Samdu. “With the guns.
Didn’t float!”
Indeed, it had not appeared.
“My blessed bottle of wine!” wept Giles Habibula.
Then they were all silent.
Some large, unseen body had plunged above the yellow surface near them; had fallen back with a noisy splash.
16 Black Continent to Cross
They waited, treading water, getting back their breath, while they watched for the precious package which held their clothing and weapons and food, and Giles Habibula’s bottle of wine.
“It isn’t coming up,” John Star despaired at last.
“We must strike out for the shore without it.”
“It leaked, I suppose,” said Jay Kalam.
“Or hung in the valve.”
“Or it may have been swallowed,” wheezed Giles Habibula, “by the monster that made that fearful splash.
Ah, my precious wine———”
“Which way is the shore?” demanded Hal Samdu.
Away from their bobbing heads reached the oily, heaving yellow sea, unbroken by any landmark.
Oppressively low overhead hung the gloomy sky, thick with the murk of that red poison gas.
Far across the sea burned the vast, sullen sun, a blood-red ball.
A light breeze touched their faces, so faint it hardly scarred the yellow surface.
“We’ve two possible guides,” observed Jay Kalam, keeping afloat with a calm, unhurried efficiency of motion.
“The sun, and the wind.”
“How———?”
“The sun is low but rising.
It must, then, be in the east.
That tells us direction.