arauding "machine-fish."]

"Full stop. Rest ready."

These words glowed in vivid red against the black background of the
_NX-1's_ control order-board. A wheel was spun over, a lever pulled
back, and in the hull of the submarine descended the peculiar silence
found only in mile-deep waters. Men rested at their posts, eyes alert.

Above, in the control room, Hemingway Bowman, youthful first officer,
glanced at the teleview screen and swore softly.

"Keith," he said, "between you and me, I'll be damned glad when this
monotonous job's over. I joined the Navy to see the world, but this
charting job's giving me entirely too many close-ups of the deadest
parts of it!"

Commander Keith Wells. U. S. N., grinned broadly. "Well," he remarked,
"in a few minutes we can call it a day--or night, rather--and then
it's back to the _Falcon_ while the day shift 'sees the world.'" He
turned again to his dials as Hemmy Bowman, with a sigh, resumed work.

"Depth, six thousand feet. Visibility poor. Bottom eight thousand," he
said into the phone hung before his lips, and fifty feet aft, in a
small cubby, a blue-clad figure monotonously repeated the observations
and noted them down in an official geographical survey report.

* * * * *

Such had been their routine for two tiring weeks, all part of the
_NX-l's_ present work of re-charting the Newfoundland banks.

As early as 1929 slight cataclysms had begun to tear up the sea-floor
of this region, and of late--1935--seismographs and cable companies
had reported titanic upheavals and sinkings of the ocean bed, changing
hundreds of miles of underwater territory. Finally Washington decided
to chart the alterations this series of sub-sea earthquakes had
wrought.

And for this job the _NX-1_ was detailed. A super-submarine fresh from
the yards, small, but modern to the last degree, she contained such
exclusive features as a sheathing of the tough new glycosteel,
automatic air rectifiers, a location chart for showing positions of
nearby submarines, the newly developed Edsel electric motors, and
automatic teleview screen. When below surface she was a sealed tube of
metal one hundred feet long, and possessed of an enormous cruising
radius. From the flower of the Navy some thirty men were picked, and
in company with the mother-ship _Falcon_ she put out to combine an
exhaustive trial trip with the practical charting of the newly changed
ocean floor.

Now this