they never knew. Justus Miles was
the first to come to, and he found himself in Stygian blackness.
"Rusty!" he called, feeling terribly sick and giddy. Only silence
answered him. "Good God!" he thought, "what has happened?" His hand
went out and recoiled from something soft and sticky. Gingerly he sat
up. There was a lump on his head. His body felt bruised and sore but
it was evidently sound. He recollected the small but powerful
flashlight in his pocket, and drew it forth and pressed the button. A
reassuring pencil of light pierced through the gloom. Even as it did
so, someone groaned, and Ward's voice uttered his name.

"Is that you, Kid?"

"It's me, all right."

"You ain't hurt?"

"Nothing to speak of. How about you?"

"O. K., I guess. An awful headache."

"Can you stand up?"

"Yes."

Ward's face appeared in the ray of light, pale and blood-streaked.

"I wonder what happened."

"It sounded like a collision."

They stared at one another with fearful eyes. A collision while
underseas in a submarine is a serious matter.

"Where's Solino?"

Justus Miles ran the beam of his torch this way and that, and saw that
the room was in a fearful confusion. The gyroscopic mechanism had
broken from its fastenings and rolled forward. Somewhere beneath its
crushing weight lay the control board and the swarthy operator. Then
they saw Solino, still in his overturned wheelchair, the cloak drawn
tightly about himself and it; but the top of his head was crushed in
like an eggshell. Justus Miles had touched that head when he stretched
out his hand in the darkness.

He and Ward had been saved from death as by a miracle. Over their
heads the great piston had hurtled, killing Solino and tearing through
the steel partition into the chamber beyond, visiting it with death
and destruction. One hasty examination of that place was enough. The
men in there were dead.

* * * * *

Sick with horror, the two survivors faced the stark reality of their
terrible plight. Trapped in an underwater craft, they saw themselves
doomed to perish even more miserably than their companions. As the
horrible thought sank home, a cool breath of air, suggesting the smell
of stagnant salt water, blew through an opening created by the
crushing of the plates in the vessel's hull--an opening larger than
the body of a man. Miles and Ward stared at it with puzzled eyes. With
such a hole in her hull, the boat should have been