"I hope we can," Abe Clifford, the navigator, said. "Shall we take her up, Joe?" "Yes, see what it's like on top," the skipper replied. Going up, we passed a monster at about thirty fathoms. It stuck its neck out and started for us. Monnahan tilted the boat almost vertical and put on everything the engines had, lift and drive parallel. An instant later, we broke the surface and shot into the air. The wind hit the boat as though it had been a ping-pong ball, and it was several seconds, and bad seconds at that, before Monnahan regained even a semblance of control. There was considerable bad language, and several of the crew had bloody noses. Monnahan tried to get the boat turned into the wind. A circuit breaker popped, and red lights blazed all over the instrument panel. He eased off and let the wind take over, and for a while we were flying in front of it like a rifle bullet. Gradually, he nosed down and submerged. "Well, that's that." Joe Kivelson said, when we were back in the underwater calm again. "We'll have to stay under till the wind's over. Don't anybody move around or breathe any deeper than you have to. We'll have to conserve oxygen." "Isn't the boat equipped with electrolytic gills?" Murell asked. "Sure, to supply oxygen for a maximum of six men. We have sixteen in here." "How long will our air last, for sixteen of us?" I asked. "About eight hours." 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.