em, listing slightly to
port. Then began the cautious business of the descent. Under Wells'
rapid orders the men linked arms again and discharged more air from
their sea-suits. Slowly, thin chains of bubbles rising behind them,
they sank towards the dim shape of the _NX-1_ below. Wells' eyes kept
probing the thick gloom far beneath. Every moment he expected to see
it disgorge a swarm of octopi.

They neared the submarine, and saw numberless pitted spots in her
body, where the heat ray had stabbed for a moment. In their excitement
they missed their level by some feet, but clutching together they
admitted more air and soon rose even with the starboard exit port.

"Swim forward," Keith ordered. "Hurry!" The weird figures groped
clumsily, and very slowly neared the port. The commander, in the van,
at last reached out and gripped its jutting external controls. He
could not work them at first: his hands were numb and awkward.

As he tugged and struggled with them a shout rang in his headphone. It
was McKegnie, scared to death.

"Oh, hurry, Mr. Wells!" he yelled. "Quick! Quick, please! The octopis
ship's comin', sir! The red light's back!"

CHAPTER XI

_To the Death_

The emergency steadied Keith's fingers. He got the door open and
motioned Graham and six men inside the water chamber. The passage took
but a minute. Then he sent the rest of the crew in, being himself the
last to enter. When the chamber was finally empty, and Wells had
stepped through the inner door onto the lower deck of the _NX-1_, a
great sigh of relief broke from him. Never before had anything looked
so good as that brilliantly lit deck with its familiar maze of
machinery and bulkheads.

"Thank God," he said simply, and his joy was shared by the whole crew.
A new feeling had come over them. Back home--in their own submarine,
their own element--they had at least a fighting chance with the
octopi. But Keith let them waste no time. He knew that a final,
desperate duel to the death with their foe still was ahead. "Above to
the control room," he ordered. "Fast!"

They lumbered up the connecting ramp. A disheveled, wild-eyed form met
them. Keith couldn't help chuckling as he passed the now much thinner
and paler cook, with the arsenal handy at his waist. On the deck of
the control room lay a huge tentacled body, metal-scaled, with its
dome of glass shattered and its great cold eyes staring unseeingly
away. "I killed him," stammered McKegnie pridefull