Turned by the incident from his preoccupation, Tom rose, stretched himself thoroughly, and bent to peer out of the rain-swept porthole. “This certainly is a nasty night,” he said, as he resumed his original position. “She is rolling and pitching at a great rate. If it does not quit soon, this gale will send many a good ship to the bottom. We’re safe enough here, but this weather must be pretty hard on the small boats.” As Tom refilled his pipe, I sat musing on the images his words had roused of the strange and sudden plunge of a mighty ship down, down to the very depths of the sea, of that wonderful world that lies below the waves, upon whose sandy floor lie many navies whose gallant ships rest in their last anchorage, whose thousands of rugged sailors are buried in their last sleep, whose burdened, hoarded wealth is kept forever idle by that great miser, the deep. As I mused, I spoke unconsciously. “I wonder how this storm would seem on the bottom of the sea.” “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?”