The Tentacles from Below

Down to tremendous ocean depths goes Commander Keith Wells in his blind duel with marauding “machine-fish”


excerpt

“Full stop. Rest ready."


These words glowed in vivid red against the black background of the NX-1's control order-board. A wheel was spun over, a lever pulled back, and in the hull of the submarine descended the peculiar silence found only in mile-deep waters. Men rested at their posts, eyes alert.


Above, in the control room, Hemingway Bowman, youthful first officer, glanced at the teleview screen and swore softly.


"Keith," he said, "between you and me, I'll be damned glad when this monotonous job's over. I joined the Navy to see the world, but this charting job's giving me entirely too many close-ups of the deadest parts of it!"

Commander Keith Wells. U. S. N., grinned broadly. "Well," he remarked, "in a few minutes we can call it a day—or night, rather—and then it's back to the Falcon while the day shift 'sees the world.'" He turned again to his dials as Hemmy Bowman, with a sigh, resumed work.


"Depth, six thousand feet. Visibility poor. Bottom eight thousand," he said into the phone hung before his lips, and fifty feet aft, in a small cubby, a blue-clad figure monotonously repeated the observations and noted them down in an official geographical survey report.


Such had been their routine for two tiring weeks, all part of the NX-l's present work of re-charting the Newfoundland banks.

As early as 1929 slight cataclysms had begun to tear up the sea-floor of this region, and of late—1935—seismographs and cable companies had reported titanic upheavals and sinkings of the ocean bed, changing hundreds of miles of underwater territory. 


Finally Washington decided to chart the alterations this series of sub-sea earthquakes had wrought.


And for this job the NX-1 was detailed. A super-submarine fresh from the yards, small, but modern to the last degree, she contained such exclusive features as a sheathing of the tough new glycosteel, automatic air rectifiers, a location chart for showing positions of nearby submarines, the newly developed Edsel electric motors, and automatic teleview screen. When below surface she was a sealed tube of metal one hundred feet long, and possessed of an enormous cruising radius. From the flower of the Navy some thirty men were picked, and in company with the mother-ship Falcon she put out to combine an exhaustive trial trip with the practical charting of the newly changed ocean floor.