Part 2

"At least you can save it until we get up from here," returned Lonny, brushing past the other and examining the instruments. "Depth indication--now four thousand feet. And sinking slowly."

With luck, they would be on the surface again in a few hours. Then he would either knock the tar out of Link Raeburn or kick him out in the mud. He felt a deepseated, lethargic contempt for the mud-fisher. The dapper man was a despicable murderer at heart, and now he felt only a distant sort of loathing for him.

Lana was different. In a way she might have been a good sort. He had a hunch that Uranus was affecting her much as it had him, bringing forth his irritable nature, sapping his energy, dulling his sensations in a sluggish, remote way. He had an idea that she would cut an amazingly attractive figure in one of the late translucent evening gowns, back in one of the live spots of the populated planets. At the moment, she was highly intolerable and self-centered. He would do well to be rid of both of them.

Baron Munchy was soaring up and down the room, catching midges, when Lonny descended to the lower decks. The atomic motors, he found, were in good condition for an emergency. The trouble with them was that they provided merely a horizontal propulsion. The natural buoyancy of the vessel, coupled with the lessening of surface pressure, would have to raise it from the murky depths.

The lower deck was almost hemispherical in shape, and fully occupied with power apparatus.

"They steal'm, Boss!" warned Baron Munchy vindictively. "Now you fight, huh?"

"Fighting wouldn't do any good," Lonny explained wearily. "People don't fight on Uranus. They're always fagged out, enervated."

"Fagged--" began the impish creature helplessly.

"I mean that life is too boring to be taken seriously," went on Lonny. "Otherwise, I'd have knocked the slats out of that smirking back-biter long ago. I may have to do it yet."

"You oughta fight'm," declared Baron Munchy angrily. "They steal house. Steal everything! Why no earthmen fight, Boss?"

"Because earthmen have to get mad to fight," returned Lonny, "and you can't get mad here somehow. Oh, shut up! I don't know how to explain it. Earthmen just don't feel violent emotions here on Uranus. They don't get mad at anything! They don't fall in love! They're just sapped dry of everything."

His head was aching. It was a good thing his body had recovered from its exposure to the heavy pressure area. He climbed the rampway for the upper deck, and stood motionless, breaking upon a surprising scene.

* * * * *

All of the compartments had been searched, and he saw his cache of Uranusian pearls open to view. The wall safe hung ajar--apparently the deft fingers of Link Raeburn had encountered no great difficulty in finding the combination. His eyes were glittering with fascination, and the girl, too, seemed unable to wrench her eyes from the inviting spectacle.

"That's enough," gasped Link Raeburn, "to set a fellow up for life."

"Yeh, and here we are," returned the girl hollowly, "stuck deep in the mud of Uranus."

"Maybe you forget who they belong to," snorted Lonny, stalking into their midst and slamming his treasure back into its hiding place. "The indicator says we're at six thousand five hundred and forty-one feet."

"Then we've stopped," said Raeburn. "It read the same five minutes ago."

Lonny stood watching the gauges and found that the other was right. The mud-submarine had indeed come to a halt. It meant that some sort of an equilibrium was being established in the barometric storm center that raged above.

"I'll start the motors and try jarring the ship around a little," he said, seating himself before the mechanisms. At a touch of his finger, dial bulbs lighted up, and from the lower depths came the whine of machinery. Almost instantly they felt a sidewise lurch, and then a slow climbing motion.

"It looks good, anyway," said Link Raeburn. "We're going up again."

"Thank Heaven for small favors," breathed Lana thankfully, and watched attentively as Lonny began juggling the controls alarmedly. Link's eyes watched the indicator, and began to show new amazement.

"We're not ascending now," said Lonny grimly. "I don't know what's the matter. The motor-drive is okay, but we're making a crazy circle, over and over, and not getting any higher."

"You're nuts!" burst out Raeburn, stalking forward, waving his arms. Yet the yellow pallor of his face showed that he too had noticed the mud-ship's erratic behavior. "It's just not possible! Uranus is all mud--just plain fluid mud!"

"Or that's what we've thought, up to now," said Lonny significantly.

"What do you mean?" demanded Lana. "You can't mean that we're trapped here with a fortune just in our grasp."

The whine of the lower motors mounted, and as a result the mud-submarine began spinning around like a top. Yet the depth pointer had not moved.

"It means that there's some sort of a skeletal core to Uranus after all," said Lonny with a vanquished sigh, snapping off the motors and pushing back from the controls. "Add what's more, it means that we've bumped into it."

"But how?" demanded Raeburn. "Even if there is a solid core, nothing would prevent our ship from floating up again."

"Unless our vessel happened to get caught under a ledge," returned Lonny pointedly. "We sank while the pressure was heavy, and then when it lessened, began to ascend. We climbed a short way and stopped. Then our horizontal screws sends the ship around in a short circle, indicating that we are in a shelving pocket. We can't descend unless the pressure storm gets violent again! And we can't climb through a shelving ledge of solid core. So our chances of getting out of here are rather slim."

Raeburn's furtive eyes were glowing, like those of a beast at bay. He whirled around, struck out wildly at the controls, started the engines and sent the mud-submarine spinning around again, but to no avail. Lana Hilton watched his every move, and she too was like a tigress at bay.

Like animals they glared around at the berylumin hulls, thinking of the millions of pounds per square inch waiting beyond--trying to press in upon them. An instant's exposure to that and a human body would be but a pulpy mass.

They felt helpless and insignificant. To the two who glared unbelievingly at the controls, the apparent unconcern of Lonny Higgens amounted to madness. He appeared not to be able to fully appreciate the true reasons for their violent perturbation. He was humming a tune through his teeth, and searching among tiny wall niches, from which he presently withdrew a tiny skillet.

"No use getting excited," he told them. "The chances are that the pressure storms won't come around soon enough to do us any good. At any rate, there's nothing to stop us from eating while we're hungry--that is, while the food supply holds out."

V

"You're not human," said Link Raeburn accusingly, and he shook a quivering finger at Lonny. "Here we are in the face of death, and all you think of is your stomach."

"There's not much choice," said Lonny Higgens, "when a fellow's empty. And the menu never changes here. Besides, eating might help you to think."

"You shouldn't think while you're eating," reprimanded Lana. "It'll give you indigestion."

"Great Space!" broke out Raeburn. "You too! Who gives a hang about indigestion? Listen, you pair of fools, we're snagged down here on the bottom of a sea of mud. Pearls won't mean a thing to us in this fix! We'll be lucky if we ever get out of this with a whole skin." He began pacing up and down the room, swinging his hands, while Lonny inspected the storage compartment.

"Looks like a fish dinner," he sighed. "Of course there are clams, of the mud-kelp variety, and Uranusian lobsters--they're really delicious at this time of the year. Then we've got a very good variety of that piscatorial wonder known here as a whirl-ray, whose steaks are rather tasty. But in the last analysis, just fish."

"I'll take the same," groaned Lana Hilton, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling with an attitude of unwilling acquiescence. "Between going nuts and getting the d. t.'s I'll take the nuts. Maybe I can forget a few trifles of life by just being in your company. At least it'll keep me from thinking over what a swell opportunity I had for being a good little girl. By the way, Lonny, do you think there's a Hereafter, here on Uranus?"

"Why not?" asked Lonny with a grimace as he laid thick white slices of whirl-ray in the skillet and turned on an electric grid. "I suppose they'd picture there as some sort of a glorified place where mud just couldn't exist."

"Yeh, probably with green fields, waterfalls, and mountains," returned Lana, leaning on her fist with a reminiscent sigh, "Gosh, sometimes I wonder why I ever left those good things, and then again--what's the diff?"

* * * * *

The fried steaks sent a not unpleasant aroma drifting through the control room. Lonny sat a tiny side plate on the table, and pulled up a high slender chair like a baby's high-chair, to which Baron Munchy soared. He tucked a napkin under his chin and sat waiting, with tiny knife and fork raised high. The sight was so amusing that somehow Lana found time to laugh.

"You really coddle the little rascal, don't you?" she asked, "and for some reason I never really considered these manlike dragon-flies with having any intelligence whatever."

"Oh, they're smart in a way," agreed Lonny between bites. "You know I've always had a theory that his race of beings came from one of the moons of Uranus. There are four of them, you know. I suspect he came from Umbriel."

"Well, little man," said Lana. "Maybe you're an Umbriellian. But where is your umbrella?"

"Or an Arielite," suggested Lonny. "Without a lantern."

"Or a Titanian, or an Oberonian," said Lana.

"Slap 'em down," sighed Baron Munchy in a flattered manner. "Give both barrels."

"Say, let up with that kind of chatter, won't you?" groaned Link Raeburn, after trying again and again to get the mud-ship from beneath the deep ledge. "I'm going batty, I tell you. Completely batty!"

"Probably it's the pressure," commented Lonny. "High blood pressure."

With the table cleared, Lana's good spirits had taken another slump. She went gloomily with Raeburn to check the air, food, and water supplies of the strange craft. When they returned Lonny Higgens was curled up on a couch, snoring lustily.

"I don't get it," said Raeburn, throwing up his hands in despair. "He isn't like a man any more. He isn't like anything living. It's his ship, and he ought to know more about it than anyone. Oh well, if everybody else is going to give up the ghost, why should I worry?"

"Sure," said Lana. "Why should we worry. Maybe his surmise wasn't true. Maybe it's something else holding us down. Maybe it's our imagination."

She sat down, her mind in a daze. How long she sat there in a trance-like state she didn't know, but a movement from Lonny Higgens aroused her. Link Raeburn was stretched out on the floor, his mouth wide open, eyes closed with complete exhaustion and utter relaxation.

"I think I've got an idea," said Lonny, stretching his arms and staggering to his feet. He looked at the controls and found that they were at the same depth. 6,541 feet. Their position had not altered a trifle. "We've been here over eight hours. No barometric storm ever lasted that long on Uranus. The pressure must have been released on the upper surface by now. And we've got to have a heavy pressure area again somewhere. It just occurred to me that we might create that heavy pressure on the roof of this ledge that we're under, which would suffice just as well."

"But how?" demanded Lana, and followed as he went to the berylumin hull at one end of the control room and pulled down a shutter. He had exposed a transparent plate of glassite, now black as ink with the outer mud, in whose center a pair of binoculars had been frozen into the vitreous substance.

"We'll use the field glass as a terminal," he explained, making disconnections at the control board and bringing two current wires in the direction of the wall. He affixed one wire to the binoculars and clamped the other against a rim of the porte. "This glassite will act as an insulator and we can force an electric current through the outer mud. There's a possibility that the current will react on the watery content to release hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis. I really don't think it will work, but it's a good way to occupy our minds."

* * * * *

She watched as he made the terminals secure, then stepped up the amperage on the desk instruments. Very faintly, blue lightning flashes of electricity could be seen streaking through the outer mud against the glassite. For long moments they watched as nothing happened.

Then he sighed disappointedly.

"No use, I guess," he said reluctantly. "Too much outer pressure for gases to form."

"You mean--it's the end?" she asked in a tiny voice. Her hands reached out and caught him by the shoulders abruptly. For a moment the outer mask of her face had slipped and her frightened soul stared through. When Lonny started to draw back, she held on.

"Gosh, Lonny," she said hurriedly. "Maybe I'm a little fool to break down like this. I think--I think I may even be going to cry. But I've seen what you're really like these last few hours--under the stress of everything, I mean. You're really pretty decent and brave. You needn't deny that you've got courage, and a lot of other admirable qualities. Your only trouble has been in letting the awful lethargy of Uranus get hold of you. That's all that's wrong, and what you need is something to jar you loose from this planet. Then you'd be a great guy. I really mean it, Lonny."

Her eyes were shining like stars. She was on the verge of a complete breakdown. Yet Lonny Higgens was held as though in a spell, for her words had done something that had not happened in a long time, had broken through his apathy.

Now, moving swiftly, she pressed her lips against his own, and they stood in a long silent embrace. Lonny's head was whirling, and he stumbled back, his hand crashing against a rheostat. A thunderous surge of high voltage crackled suddenly, kniving along the glassite, and the motors from the lower decks sang a mounting, thunderous song.

At the same time, everything shifted. Something had dealt the mud-submarine a tremendous blow from above. They were sent careening against the hull and then to the floor, which began to tilt. Link Raeburn had been thrown to his hands and knees. Now his eyes goggled up at the instrument panel. Lonny Higgens sat sprawled out with the girl a tumbled heap in his arms.

"Good going, Lonny!" cried Raeburn incredulously. "We're sinking again. How did you manage to do it?"

Lonny blinked through a cascade of tumbling russet curls and looked up wonderingly.

"I suppose the electrolysis worked after all," he answered weakly. "Under the pressure, the high voltage must have produced liquid oxygen, and then ignited it. And if the propellers are working we ought to be able to wriggle out into the clear some way."

"That puts a different light on the entire matter," said Raeburn, getting to his feet and drawing a ray pistol from his pocket. "I told you I would do you in for good the next time I made a try. Get up, Lonny, and start saying your prayers."

"My goodness," gasped Baron Munchy, crawling up over the edge of the control chair and looking on with glittering, faceted eyes.

VI

Lonny Higgens got up slowly, then glanced lazily toward the control instruments, where the depth indicator had dipped down noticeably.

"That's all very well in due time," he said, "but we're still under the ledge, and not out of danger by any means. If we don't shove from under it we'll land back in the same shape."

"Get over to those controls then," ordered Raeburn.

Lonny grinned and went to the familiar seat. The craft was making larger circles as it descended, indicating that his guess must have been correct, that they were in a pocket, and that the pocket was broadening. Somewhere at the bottom of that pocket was a tunnel opening upon the outer ocean and it was up to him to find that opening--blindfold. If they could only keep descending until the vessel entered the channel their main problem would be solved. But if the pressure generated from the explosion was dissipated too suddenly, his mud-ship would ascend into the trap and stay forever there on the muddy ocean floor.

He felt a lurch. The ship had paused and was sinking no longer. This then, was the limit. It would not go low enough. He saw the horror in Raeburn's eyes.

They would die from starvation here. The gun in Raeburn's hands would be merciful, if it relieved them from the more hideous death that was certain to come.

The hull shuddered, slipped against a rocky outer substance that seemed to give way suddenly. He felt the relaxation of the outer barrier through the controls, knew that the propellers were driving it out and into the true bed of the Uranusian ocean. The needle indicator paused uncertainly, started to rise. By the expression on Raeburn's face he knew that the other had not guessed that their trap was behind them.

It was his chance. Lonny's hands moved swiftly on the controls. A surge of power sent the rear-drive mud-propellers spinning. Too much power. The ship tilted swiftly and Raeburn lost his balance. The man at the controls left them in a flash.

Lonny seized the wrist that held the gun, wrenched it away. It went skidding across the floor. Then he stuck out fiercely at the sardonic features so close to him. Raeburn rocked backward, flailing out with both hands, as Lonny came in again, both fists landing solidly. His antagonist spun backward, then fell helplessly to the decking. Baron Munchy was jumping up and down in ecstacy.

"Hit'm, Boss! Sock 'im again!" he piped, but Lonny picked up the gun, slipped it into his pocket, and shook his head in the negative.

"There's to be no more fighting, Raeburn," he said. "I'll pick you off with the gun if you start anything. When we break the surface you can get your mud-shoes and go."

Four thousand feet. Three thousand. The mud-submarine was rising rapidly now, had passed the two thousand mark.

"You've really hurt the little fellow's feelings," said Lana Hilton, evading his eyes and gesturing toward Baron Munchy, who was beating his fists against the wall in sheer frustration. "He must have been praying for blood and thunder."

"I'll plaster 'im!" Munchy was squeaking. "I'll do him in!"

One thousand.

"He's a misfit here," said Lonny slowly. "He comes from Umbriel, or one of the other moons. On his own world he was used to great activity. Uranus hasn't affected him--acting upon his nerves--as it has the rest of us. But he's a misfit here. He expects the normal activity of his own satellite upon Uranus. That just isn't possible. I think he'd like it on earth."

"You mean--" began Lana, just as the mud-submarine broke the surface and began bobbing to a rest. Lonny followed Raeburn up the hatchway, watched him open it. The upper mists broke in damply, sending heavy white furlers about their faces. Link Raeburn looked glum and defeated as he donned the heavy mud-shoes and slogged away into the mist.

Lonny Higgens closed the hatchway and yawned. He was beginning to feel dog-tired again--a normal sensation on Uranus--but a grim decision had taken shape in his mind.

"Sure," he said, in answer to the question in her gleaming eyes. "I'm going to get out of here. I'm going to send an S. O. S. If that doesn't work I'll get a straight call through to earth, charter a space yacht, and have it sent to pick us up."

"Lonny, you mean, that--" began Lana, moving toward him with her lips invitingly close.

But Lonny Higgens evaded her. He turned his back and sat down in a chair, then yawned again. Uranus had him! Old rocking chair had him! Something had him, as long as he was on this blasted planet.

Lovely as Lana was, it would take more energy than he could assimilate to make love to her on this muddy world.

"I guess you'll have to save it," he sighed regretfully. "But you'd not be safe to try those tactics again--once we get back on earth."