“Quiet enough there, I presume,” answered Tom, following, to my surprise, my spoken thought. “You know men who sought for sunken treasure ships have found things quite unmoved, after centuries have rolled away. Save for the covering of sand or silt, the boat which reaches the bottom may leave its bones for centuries unchanged.”
My mind travelled a step farther, from normal shipwrecks to abnormal ones, and then turned swiftly to those catastrophes which were never far from my mind, the beginning and in one sense the end of our mission, the battleships which disappeared. “If Dorothy’s belief is correct, and the engines of destruction used by ‘the man’ affect metal only, then I suppose the crews of the Alaska and the rest went to the bottom.”
“Undoubtedly,” answered Tom laconically.
One by one, as in a naval review, the Alaska, the Dreadnought Number 8, La Patrie Number 3, the Kaiserin Luisa and the Kaiser Charlemagne imaged themselves upon the tablets of my brain, and with the last appeared a film of Portsmouth Harbor where the great engine of war anchored for the last time. I straightened up suddenly and leaned across to Tom, who now sat gazing peacefully at space.
“Tom,” I exclaimed quietly, but earnestly, “I can tell you the next move. We’ll send down to the bottom of the sea, and find out what record remains there of the work done by ‘the man.’”
Quick as a flash Tom was all attention. “By George,” he ejaculated, lowering his voice an instant later, as he saw that his exclamation had startled the bridge players opposite. “I believe that is the scheme. It ought not to take us very long, and we might get a bully clue from it. How shall we go about it?”
Swiftly I unfolded my plan, the ideas rushing in upon me as I proceeded. “We land at Southampton, anyway, and it’s only an hour’s run down Southampton Water to Portsmouth. We won’t go up to London at all; we’ll go straight to Portsmouth and put up there. Then we’ll find out just where the Kaiser Charlemagne or the Kaiserin Luisa stood, and get some divers to go down and report.”
“That’s a great idea,” said Tom reflectively. “It resolves itself really into two parts,—finding out just exactly where one of the German ships stood, and getting down to the bottom there. It ought not to be so very difficult. I wonder nobody has thought of it. But if they had, I imagine, we should have heard of it, because the wireless newspaper on board is giving news of that kind pretty well in full. I’ll tell you one thing though,” he went on, “I wish Dorothy could have been with us instead of having to wait over a couple of boats to straighten out that Boy’s Club business of hers. I’d like mighty well to get her opinion.”
“Same here,” I remarked forcefully.
Two days later saw us safely through the English Customs and rolling along over the little line which runs past old Clausentrum, relic of the days when Rome with bloody hand made peace in Britain, to Portsmouth and its harbor, with the Isle of Wight forming the foreground to the broad blue reaches of the Channel.