Alaska Whaling Company's officials at the time of its suggestion, but
the _Narwhal_ after her first two months of service had decisively
proved her worth. She was not restricted to the open seas, now swept
almost clean of the highly prized killers; she could follow them to
their last refuge, right beneath the floe-edges of the Arctic Circle;
and as a result she could bring back more oil than any four surface
whalers.

With a cruising radius of twenty-five hundred miles, she stayed out from
the base until her torpoons had accounted for anywhere from sixty to
eighty killers. One by one these sea-animals would be taken to the
surface and there cut up and boiled down, until her tanks were full of
the precious blubber oil. Ever farther she pressed in her quest for the
fish schools, dipping for leagues into a silent sea that for ages had
been known only to the whale and the seal and their kindred; a sea
always dark and mysterious beneath its sheath of ice.

The inner catapult door closed behind Kenneth Torrance, and he slid into
his torpoon. Twelve feet long, and resembling in miniature a dirigible,
was this weapon that made practical an underwater whaling craft. The
tapered stern bore long directional rudders, which curved round the
squat high-speed propeller: its smooth flanks of burnished steel were
marked only by the lines of the entrance port, which the torpooner now
drew tight and locked. Twin eyes of light-beam projectors were set in
the bow, which was cut also by a vision-plate of fused quartz and the
nitro-shell gun's tube, successor to the gun-cast harpoon.

Ken lay full-length in the padded body compartment, his feet resting on
the controlling bars of the directional planes, hands on the torpoon's
engine levers. A harness was buckled all around him, to keep him in
place. His gray eyes, level and sober, peered through the vision-plate
at the outer catapult door.

Suddenly a spot of red light glowed in it; the door quivered, swung out.
A black tide swirled into the chamber. There came the hiss of released
air-pressure, and the slim undersea steed rocketed out into the exterior
gloom, her light-beams flashing on and propeller settling into a blur of
speed as she was flung.

* * * * *

Ken turned on her full twenty-four knots, zoomed above the dark bulk of
the slower mother ship, whose light-beams flashed across him for a
second, and then straightened out in a long, slight-angled dive a