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."