Suddenly she called George's attention to two bobbing heads some distance away in the path of light the rising sun made on the ocean.
"Hakin and Romehl!" he exclaimed. Long since they had given them up for dead; but evidently fate had treated them in much the same way as themselves.
And a moment later his own salt-stung eyes noticed a long gray shape to one side.
As the day brightened, Abbot suddenly noticed a large bulking shape nearby.
It was his own boat!--the one which had lowered him into the depths in his bathysphere so many weeks and weeks ago! Evidently it was still sticking around, grappling for his long dead body.
"Come on, dear," said he, and side by side they swam over to it.
He helped her up the ship's ladder. The ship's cook sleepily stuck his head out of the galley door.
"Hullo, Mike," sang out George Abbot merrily to the astonished man. "I've brought company for breakfast. And there'll be two more when we can lower a boat."
[Illustration: _He landed one blow on the nearest face._]
[Sidenote: Once more Chet, Walt and Diane are united in a wild ride to the Dark Moon--but this time they go as prisoners of their deadly enemy Schwartzmann.]
In a hospital in Vienna, in a room where sunlight flooded through ultra-violet permeable crystal, the warm rays struck upon smooth walls the color of which changed from hot reds to cool yellow or gray or to soothing green, as the Directing Surgeon might order. An elusive blending of tones, now seemed pulsing with life; surely even a flickering flame of vitality would be blown into warm livingness in such a place.
Even the chart case in the wall glittered with the same clean, brilliant hues from its glass and metal door. The usual revolving paper disks showed white beyond the glass. They were moving; and the ink lines grew to tell a story of temperature and respiration and of every heart-beat.
On the identification-plate a name appeared and a date: "Chet Bullard--23 years. Admitted: August 10, 1973." And below that the ever-changing present ticked into the past in silent minutes: "August 15, 1973; World Standard Time: 10:38--10:39--10:40--"
For five days the minutes had trickled into a rivulet of time that flowed past a bandaged figure in the bed below--a silent figure and unmoving, as one for whom time has ceased. But the surgeons of the Allied Hospital at Vienna are clever.