«What is your condition?»
«We're fit. March sends his love.» Pitt paused to increase his volume. «The Starbuck is not flooded. I repeat, the Starbuck is not flooded. If we had another ten men down here, we could sail her home.»
«The crew?»
«No trace. It's as though they never existed.»
Boland didn't answer immediately. He tried to digest the enormity of Pitt's words, vainly picturing in his mind a deserted and ghostly ship sitting unattended and ignored. He was conscious of nothing around him; he didn't even notice half of the crew of the Martha Ann standing in the passageway in stunned silence. First came the creeping wave of numbed disbelief, and then slowly, the agonizing, intolerable realization that it was true.
«Please repeat!»
«The vessel is totally deserted. At least from the forward torpedo room to the main control room amidships. We haven't searched the aft compartments yet. Somebody was kind enough to keep the electric bill paid up. We have power from the port reactor.»
Boland's knees felt unsteady. He hesitated, clearing his throat, and said: «You and March have done your bit for the cause. Make your way to the escape hatch and return to the Martha Ann. Ill have men with extra air tanks waiting for your ascent. Is Lieutenant March standing by?»
«Negative. He went aft to check for flooded compartments and to make sure the Hyperion Missiles are still snug in their cradles.»
«I guess you know you're broadcasting to every receiver within a thousand miles on this frequency.»
«Who'd believe a broadcast from a submarine that's been sunk for six months?»
«Our friends in the USSR, for one.» Boland paused to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. «I suggest we call it a day. Soon as March returns, head back topside. The admiral may call for a full report. And, just so you don't get your signals crossed again, that's an order!»
He could almost see the grin on Pitt's face.
«Okay, Father. Set up the bar. We'll be there in…»
Pitt's voice died in mid-sentence. The only sound that emitted from the speaker was the muted rasp that came between transmissions. Boland brought the mike to his lips again, his eyes narrowing from a growing, inner fear.
«I don't read you, Starbuck. Please repeat.»
Still the muted rasp from the speaker.
«Come in, Pitt. Dammit, why don't you acknowledge?»
Silence was his only reply.
Pitt sat there without moving, gaping speechlessly at the wild-eyed, heavily bearded apparition that stood in the doorway of the radio room. He sat there while he absorbed the shock, waiting for the repulsive and foul- smelling thing to dissolve back into the hallucination where it belonged. He blinked, hoping his mind would erase the image, but the thing simply blinked back.
Then the mouth moved and a hoarse voice whispered, «Who are you? You're not one of them.»
«What do you mean?» Pitt said quietly, controlling his voice.
«They'll kill you if they knew you used the radio.» The voice sounded remote and distant.
«They?»
Pitt's hand crept down to Barf and closed over the handgrip. The thing in the doorway took no notice.
«You don't belong here,» the apparition went on vacantly. «You're not dressed like the others.»
The man himself was clothed in dirty rags that resembled a naval noncom's dungarees, but there was no indication of rank. The eyes were dull and the body thin and wasted. Pitt decided to try a long shot.
«Are you Commander Dupree?»
«Dupree?» the man echoed. «No, Farris, Seaman First Class Farris.*'
«Where are the others, Farris? Commander Dupree, the officers, your shipmates?»
«I don't know. They said they would kill them if I touched the radio.»
«Is anyone else on board?»
«They keep two guards at all tunes.»
«Where?»
«They could be anywhere.»
«Oh, my God!» Pitt gasped, his body suddenly taut. «March!» He leaped to his feet and pulled Farris into the radio operator's chair. «Wait here. Do you understand me, Farris? Don't move.»
Farris nodded dully. «Yes, sir.»
Barf held in front of him, Pitt moved swiftly from compartment to compartment, stopping every few seconds to listen. There was no sign of Lieutenant March, and the only sound came from the humming of the duct fans. He stepped into what he immediately recognized as the sick bay. There was an operating table, cabinets filled with neatly labeled bottles, surgical instruments, an X-ray machine, and even a dentist's chair. There was also a crumpled shape lying between the beds that jutted from the far bulkhead. Pitt bent down, although he knew who the inert form had to be.
March was lying on his side, his arms and legs twisted in rubbery grotesqueness, his body fluid circling the body in a congealing pool. Two small round holes bled on a direct line from his chest to the back of his spine; he lay on the cold steel deck, the eyes open, staring unseeing at the blood that had emptied from his veins. Moved by an instinct as old as man, Pitt gently reached down and closed March's eyes.
As a shadow crept horizontally across the deck and then vertically up the bulkhead, Pitt snapped his body in a half arc and rammed the point of Barf into the stomach of the man standing behind him and pulled the trigger. The black outline against the white paint also betrayed the blurred shape of either a gun or a club in one of the intruder's hands, and, if Pitt had wasted a fraction of a second, he'd have been as dead as March. As it was, he barely had time to see that his assailant was a tall, hairy man, wearing only a brief green cloth around his loins. The face was intelligent, almost handsome, with blue eyes and a burled mass of blond hair. The features Pitt soon forgot. It was the next agonized moment in time that he carried to his grave.
The carbon dioxide hissed as it unleashed its immense pressure into pliant, human flesh. The man's body instantly bloated in a distorted monstrosity of ugliness, the stomach protruding together with the small balloonlike pieces of skin that formed between the ribs. The abject look of horror on the face was wiped out in half a second as his grayish-green innards shot from his nose and ears in a fine spray coating the deck for six feet in each direction, and the mouth contorted to twice its size as a great mass of bloody tissue and pieces of internal organs vomited forth in a cascade of red, slimy matter over the inflated torso in unison with the eyeballs which popped out of both sockets and hung swaying over the puffed cheeks. The arms went straight out to the sides and the hideously deformed figure fell backwards to the deck, slowly deflating to its previous size as the carbon dioxide escaped from the body's orifaces.
Pitt, the bile rising in his throat, turned from the sickening sight, leaned down, and picked up March, carefully laying him on one of the beds. He covered the young lieutenant with a blanket Pitt's eyes were sad and bitter. He knelt beside the still form as if to say: I shouldn't have let you die. Dammit to hell, March. I shouldn't have let you die.
Pitt stood up, his legs unsteady. The game had changed drastically now. The Vortex had scored close to home.
He turned again to the deformed body on the deck and realized that he was staring at his first tangible evidence. This was no supernatural being from outer space. This was a two-armed, two-legged human being that bled like everyone else.
Pitt didn't wait to see more. If there was another one of them lurking nearby, Pitt knew he wouldn't get another chance at killing them from the inside out The gas canister held only one shot Pitt felt helpless, but suddenly it came to him; the weapon he'd seen in the shadow on the wall, the weapon that had killed March. In two steps, he had found it under the surgical table. He hadn't noticed it before because it was shaped more like a small glove with the index finger pointing, than a standard pistol. The grip was the five-finger type in which each finger had its own special rest and support The hand fit the stock as though it had been poured in. Only a short two-inch barrel protruding above the thumb indicated a firing chamber. There was no trigger in the usual sense, but a small button set so that the tip of the finger rested on its sleeve, ready to fire with only an ounce or two of pressure.
Pitt didn't wait to test it Quickly he reached the radio room, grabbed a protesting Farris by the arm, and
