It would take us fifty to get to Port Sandor, running submerged. The
wind wouldn't even begin to fall in less than twenty.

"We can go south, to the coast of Hermann Reuch's Land," Abe Clifford,
the navigator, said. "Let me figure something out."

He dug out a slide rule and a pencil and pad and sat down with his
back to the back of the pilot's seat, under the light. Everybody
watched him in a silence which Joe Kivelson broke suddenly by
bellowing:

"Dumont! You light that pipe and I'll feed it to you!"

Old Piet Dumont grabbed the pipe out of his mouth with one hand and
pocketed his lighter with the other.

"Gosh, Joe; I guess I just wasn't thinking..." he began.

"Well, give me that pipe." Joe put it in the drawer under the charts.
"Now you won't have it handy the next time you don't think."

After a while, Abe Clifford looked up. "Ship's position I don't have
exactly; somewhere around East 25 Longitude, South 20 Latitude. I
can't work out our present position at all, except that we're
somewhere around South 30 Latitude. The locator signal is almost
exactly north-by-northeast of us. If we keep it dead astern, we'll
come out in Sancerre Bay, on Hermann Reuch's Land. If we make that,
we're all right. We'll be in the lee of the Hacksaw Mountains, and we
can surface from time to time to change air, and as soon as the wind
falls we can start for home."

Then he and Abdullah and Joe went into a huddle, arguing about
cruising speed submerged. The results weren't so heartening.

"It looks like a ten-hour trip, submerged," Joe said. "That's two
hours too long, and there's no way of getting more oxygen out of the
gills than we're getting now. We'll just have to use less. Everybody
lie down and breathe as shallowly as possible, and don't do anything
to use energy. I'm going to get on the radio and see what I can
raise."

Big chance, I thought. These boat radios were only used for
communicating with the ship while scouting; they had a strain-everything
range of about three hundred miles. Hunter-ships don't crowd that close
together when they're working. Still, there was a chance that somebody
else might be sitting it out on the bottom within hearing. So Abe took
the controls and kept the signal from the wreck of the _Javelin_ dead
astern, and Joe Kivelson began speaking into the radio:

"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Captain Kivelson, _Javelin_, calling.
My ship was wrecked by an explosion; all hands now in scou