Free Undersea City by Frederik & Williamson Pohl Page B

Why—it isn’t two months since the two of us were down in the Tonga Trench, fighting those giant saurians! I thought you were back in Marinia.”
    “Looks like we were both wrong,” he observed. “But come in, Jim. Come in! It’s not much of an office, but we might as well use it!”
    “All right, Gideon. But first—what about my uncle?” He stopped and looked at me gravely. “I thought you’d ask me that, Jim,” he said after a moment, in his warm, chuckling voice. “He’s not too well. I guess you know that. But he isn’t capsized yet! You can’t sink Stewart Eden, no, no matter who tries!”
    I hesitated, then said, remembering Father Tide: “Gide on, I heard something about my uncle’s sea-car being wrecked—out under the Indian Ocean, a few weeks ago. Was it true?”
    The question made him look very grave.
    He turned away from me, fussing with his brushes and cans of paint. Then he nodded toward the office door.
    “Come inside, Jim,” he said heavily. “Tell me what you know about that.”
    The offices of Eden Enterprises, Unlimited, consisted of two small bare rooms.
    They had been freshly painted, in the same sea-green that was smudged on Gideon’s black face; but the paint was the only thing about them that was fresh. The furni ture was a ramshackle desk and a couple of broken chairs—left by the previous tenants, I guessed, not worth the trouble to haul away. There was only one new item: a heavy steel safe. And on it the name of the firm, Eden Enterprises, Unlimited, had been painted by a hand more professional than Gideon’s.
    Gideon sat down and gestured me to the other chair; he listened while I told him about Father Tide’s visit. He said at last: “It’s true that we had a little accident. But we didn’t want the world to know about it. Your uncle minds his own business.”
    He leaned forward and scrubbed at a spot of paint on the floor.
    “Naturally Father Tide found out about it!” he said abruptly, grinning with obvious admiration. “That man, Jim, he’s always there! Whenever there’s trouble, you’ll find Father Tide—armored in his faith, and in the very best edenite.”
    Then he turned grave again. “But he worries me some times, Jim. You say he told you that someone had been causing artificial seaquakes?”
    I nodded.
    “And he thought that that someone might be your uncle?”
    “That’s right, Gideon.”
    He shook his head slowly.
    “But it can’t be true, Gideon!” I burst out. “Uncle Stewart simply isn’t capable of that sort of thing!”
    “Of course not, Jim! But still—”
    He got up and began pacing around.
    “Jim,” he said, “your uncle isn’t well. We were caught in that quake, all right, back in the Indian Ocean. The sea-car was damaged too badly to fix. We abandoned it. But we spent sixty hours in our survival gear, Jim, before a sub-sea freighter picked up our sonar distress signals. Sixty hours! Even a boy like yourself would take a little time to get over something like that—and your uncle isn’t a boy any more. He hadn’t really recovered.
    “But he’s here, in Krakatoa Dome. I left him resting this morning, back at our hotel.”
    “I want to see him, Gideon!”
    “Of course you do, Jim,” he said warmly. “And you shall. But wait until he comes in.”
    He sat down again, frowning worriedly at the freshly painted wall.
    “You know your uncle,” he said. “He has spent all of his long life taming the sea. I don’t have to tell you that. He invented edenite—oh, that, and a hundred other things, too; he’s a very great inventor, Jim. And not just a laboratory man. He has climbed the sea-mounts and explored the deeps. He has staked out mining claims on the floor of the sea, and launched floating sea-farms at the surface. And always, no matter what, he has helped others. Why, I can’t count the thousands of sea-prospectors he’s grubstaked! Or the men who came to him with a new invention, or a wild story they wanted to