re the door could not stand more than two or three blows at the
most. Two or three minutes, that meant--but all the sea-suits had to
go back into the fourth compartment!

He was in torment as he worked. For him, the conditions were just as
bad as for the men who had lived below in the submarine for a month;
the poisonous, foul air racked him just as much; what breath he got he
fought for just as painfully. But in his body was a greater store of
strength, and fresher muscles; and he taxed his body to its very
limit.

Panting, his head seeming on the point of splitting, Ken Torrance
stumbled through into the last compartment laden with a pile of
sea-suits. He dropped them clattering in a pile around his feet and
forced himself back again. Another trip; and another....

It would never have been done had not Sallorsen and Lawson, the
scientist, come to his aid. The help they offered was meager, and
slow, but it sufficed. Laden for the fifth time, Ken heard what he had
been anticipating for every second of the all too short, agonizing
minutes: a sharp, grinding crack, and the following reverberation. He
snatched a glance around to see the torpoon falling to the deck of the
second compartment--the sealmen lifting it swiftly again--and a thin
but definite sliver in the quarsteel of the door.

But the last suit was gotten into the fourth compartment, and the
connecting door closed and carefully locked and bolted. The removal of
the suits, had been achieved--but what now?

Panting, completely exhausted, Ken forced his brain to the question.
From every side he attacked the problem, but nowhere could he find the
loophole he sought. Everything, it seemed, had been tried, and had
failed, during the _Peary's_ long captivity. There was nothing left.
True, he had his torpoon, and its nitro-shell gun with a clip of
nineteen shells; but what use were shells? Even if each one accounted
for one of the sealmen, there would still remain a swarm.

And the sea-suits. He had struggled for them and had saved them, but
what use could he put them to? Go out leading a desperate final sally
for the hole in the ice above? Death in minutes!

No hope. Nothing. Not even a fighting chance. These seal-creatures,
strange seed of the Arctic ice, had trapped the _Peary_ all too well.
On the roll of mysteriously missing ships would her name go down; and
he, Ken Torrance, would be considered a lunatic who had sought
suicide, and found it....