Chapter 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.