seemed, the more I reflected upon it, utterly extinguished. It was with a dark and leaden heart that I pulled my thoughts from my predicament and studied the submarine's controls.
The curious features I had noticed in the engine room were borne out on the controls as well. The repeated intricate designs of ancient Britain decorated the corners and spaces of the panels, and the spokes of the several wheels were formed into intertwined snake shapes. As I looked closer at the gauges and dials I saw that their calibrations were marked off in runic letters and figures. A certain sadness crept into me at the thought that I would most likely be dead before I ever came to the bottom of this mystery surrounding the vessel's origin – a marvel of advanced technology apparently crafted by ancient Britons.
I could hear the Morlocks growing somewhat restless behind me, so I resolved to make some small experiments with the controls, hoping that I could learn a rough mastery over the vessel from whatever results ensued.
One of the large wheels seemed a good place to begin. I gave the most central of them a quarter turn, and one of the brass rods overhead moved correspondingly. Nothing else happened. Perhaps, I reasoned, the adjustment had been too slight to effect any change upon the submarine. I gave the wheel a full turn and was nearly toppled from my feet as the submarine tilted abruptly to one side. Only by retaining my grasp upon the wheel did I remain upright.
The general hubbub from the Morlocks became more threatening as they disentangled themselves from each other. I hastily turned the wheel back to its original position and the submarine slowly righted itself. At this rate, my value to the Morlocks as a pilot wouldn't last much longer. What I could understand of their comments on my performance was taking on a decidedly hostile tone.
My further attempts with the controls – turning wheels, pulling levers and the like in a frenzy of activity – met with little or confusing results. Either nothing happened when I manipulated one of the controls, or the submarine pitched and swayed in the water to no purpose. Either the Morlocks' neglect of the vessel's mechanisms had rendered most of them useless, or the mysterious corpse at my feet had somehow before his death managed to sabotage the workings.
During all this time I was aware of the MorIocks' patience with me running out. At any moment they might suspect the false colours under which I was running, and fall upon me. Not daring a glance behind me at the grimly muttering chorus, I reached up and pulled the first of an untried series of levers.
Just as with all the others, I thought disgustedly when no apparent result could be perceived. I was about to try something else when I noticed a finger of water inching across the floor toward my feet. The water was emerging from a doorway that opened onto a corridor running toward the front of the submarine. Through the Morlocks' continuous garbled chattering, I could hear the distantly gurgling noise of water splashing against metal.
An odd situation. Apparently the lever opened or shut some aperture that admitted the surrounding water directly into the submarine's interior. Perhaps the tanks that controlled the submarine's rising or descending by taking in or spewing out water had become disordered to allow this. I was about to return the lever to its original position and shut off the water's inflow when, in a flash, my mind leapt to the strategic possibilities contained in the situation. With a decisive motion I pulled the lever down all the way, then did likewise with the similar levers arranged next to it.
This time the results were satisfyingly immediate. Splashing and gurgling sounds echoed from every angle of the submarine. The acrid scent of the sewage-tainted ocean clogged the air as a low wave of dark water pulsed through the open doorways into the pilot room.
No sooner had the noisome flood washed across the feet of the Morlocks than the high-ranking pair, medals and insignia jangling, came rushing up behind me. Both jabbered ferociously at me while one gripped my shoulder in his clammy white hand, spun me around and gestured angrily at the rising water, now past our ankles as it rose.
With an expression of bewilderment and frantic movements, I made a great show of expressing an inability to stem the flood. I beat futilely upon the ranks of controls, wrung my hands piteously and tore at my hair, all while the dark water crept steadily upwards. At last the Morlocks comprehended the message I was pantomiming. Most of my adjustments to the controls had been hidden from them by my body, so they had no idea of what particular lever or wheel was responsible for the incoming water.
If my captors had been garrulous before, they were positively babbling now. As the water rose over our shins the whole troop of them engaged in a vocal uproar like the baying of panic-stricken animals. At some point in the general bedlam the consensus was apparently reached among them to abandon the submarine rather than to go down with it. With hurried rushing back and forth, colliding with each other, shouting dreadful gibberish imprecations at each knocking of heads as they splashed backwards into the rising water they sought to implement their plan of escape.
From some locker in the rear of the submarine a pair of small collapsible boats and a number of leather vests with large, balloon-like air bladders sewn into them were produced. The Morlocks scrambled for the latter, two or more often tugging at one vest until one managed to wrest it from his fellows, though at last all the brutes had managed to don them.
The collapsible boats were opened and set up, and rushed by all hands toward the ladder that led to an overhead hatchway. All the Morlocks scrabbled to be nearest the boats, as there was quite obviously not enough spaces in them for all, and those left over would have to take their chances on bobbing in the underground ocean supported solely by their air-filled vests. After much futile hoisting, straining, and dropping back into the water, it was discovered that the boats were too large when opened up to go through the hatchway. With the boats folded back into their original shape they tried again. This time they succeeded in pushing them up through the exit, and clambered after as packed together as a swarm of bees. I shouted after the last ones and rattled the chain connected to the banks of the submarine's controls. Through piteous gestures and sounds I implored them to release me. The last pair of Morlocks laughed scornfully at me and climbed after their fellows, leaving me to a death by drowning. Most likely they felt I deserved it due to my poor piloting of the submarine.
As soon as they had all vanished from the chamber, I stepped away from the controls and the corpse that the Morlocks had mistakenly re-shackled to the apparatus. For a second I let my expression dissolve into a frankly gloating smile of self-approval.
Thus far my hastily conceived plan had worked better than I could have hoped. Above my head, through the open hatchway, I could hear the Morlocks launching their two little boats into the underground ocean, the clamour of their struggle to gain places in the boats, and the splashing about of those who had already chosen or been forced to land in the water itself. I had been left sole master of the submarine. Though partially flooded, it remained buoyant enough to remain floating. Surely I could find means of remedying enough of its malfunctions in order for it to convey me to some safe landing. What I would do from that point on I left for the future and its chances to decide. I turned back to the controls in order to halt the inflowing water. Sharp, percussive noises that I couldn't quite identify sounded from outside the vessel, but I had no time to puzzle over them.
The levers were beyond my power to move. I tugged in growing desperation at them, losing my footing in the now waist-high water and hampered by the hobbled corpse washing against me in a grisly manner, but the controls remained stuck in their new positions. Either the controls or the mechanisms they operated had been frozen in place by the water pouring into the submarine.
My mind racing like a rat caught in a rain barrel, I saw that I too would have to follow the Morlocks and abandon the vessel. Perhaps I could yet swim to safety. I slogged through the chill, fetid water that was flooding the chamber and was halfway up the ladder that led to the open hatchway when I realised that the cloth-wrapped Excalibur was still somewhere in the engine room where I had originally been bound. If the precious weapon sank with the submarine to the well-nigh bottomless depths of this dark ocean, then all would be lost. There would be no point in my even escaping with my life, except to share in my fellow Mankind's eventual doom.
I lowered myself back into the water and halfswam through it toward the opening of the corridor that ran back to the engine room. The current pressing against my chest made my progress maddeningly slow. I was only a matter of several yards down the passageway when the submarine's interior went pitch dark, and the vessel itself began to tilt. The back section, made heavier by the weight of the engine, was pulling the submarine into a vertical position as it sank. How would I manage to find Excalibur in an unlit and submerged space filled with strange machinery? By now the brass control rods were close enough overhead for me to use in pulling myself down the corridor. Every panicking nerve in my body pulled me the other way, back toward air and light. I felt the passage
