Or should they try to ride out the storm in spite of being crippled by the drag of us?
"I think if I were up there I'd cut us adrift," said Stanley grimly. Both the Professor and myself nodded. "Though," he added hopefully, "my captain is a good gambler...."
The cable quivered like a live thing under the terrific strain. At each downward swoop, before the upswing began, there was a sickening sag.
"We no longer have a decision to make," said the Professor. "Press the key, Martin, and God grant we can rise with all this dead weight."
And at that instant the crew of the Rosa were also relieved of the necessity for making a decision.
At the bottom of one of those long, sickening falls there was a jerk—and we continued on down to the ocean floor!
The sphere rolled over, jumbling the equipment in a tangled mess with the three of us in the center, bruised and cut. The light snapped off as the battery connections were torn loose.
There we lay at the bottom of Penguin Deep, in an inert sphere that was dead and dark in the surrounding blackness—a coffin of glass to hold us through the centuries....