Creatures of the Abyss

Four

The next morning the Esperance headed southeast over a sunlit sea. First, of course, the crew examined the sea’s surface for miles around. As expected, there was nothing remarkable to be observed. Davis did point out that there were no fish jumping, which was an indication that there were not as many fish as usual in this part of the ocean. But it was hard to be sure. There is no normal number of times when fish will be seen to jump. They usually jump to escape larger fish that want to eat them. The number is pure chance. But there seemed to be almost no jumps at all this morning.

It was not discussed at length, however. All the ship’s company was curiously reluctant to refer to the events of the previous night. In broad daylight, a detached review was simply impractical. With gulls squawking all about, with seas glinting in the sunshine, with decks to be washed and breakfast to be eaten, and commonplace, routine ship-keeping to be done, the adventure of the patch of shining sea seemd highly improbable. Terry felt that it couldn’t really have happened. To discuss it seriously would be like a daylight ghost tale. One was unable to believe it in daylight. It was better ignored.

Terry, though, did get out his tools to make a minor modification in the underwater microphone. It had been designed to be directional, so that the sound of surf or fish could be located by turning the mike, but he hadn’t been able to point it vertically downward, and last night that had been the key direction—right under the yacht’s keel. So now he improvised gimbals for the microphone, and a mounting for it similar to that of a compass, so it could tilt in any desired direction, as well as turn.

Which, of course, was a tacit admission that something peculiar had happened. Presently, Deirdre came and watched him.

“What’s that for?” she asked, when he fitted the gimbals in place.

He told her. She said hesitantly, “Yesterday, when I asked you not to try the paddle until we got to shallow water, you got angry and said you’d ask to be put ashore. We’re headed for Barca now. Someone there is building something for my father, the same thing I had asked you to build—a fish-driving instrument. If you still want to go, you can get a bus from there to Manila. But I hope you have changed your mind.”

“I have,” said Terry dourly. “I told your father so. I was irritated because I couldn’t get any answers to the questions I asked. Now I’ve got some questions your father wants answers to. And I’m going to try to find them out.”

Deirdre sighed, perhaps in relief.

“I put some pictures and a clipping in a book on the cabin table,” she said. “Did you see them?”

He nodded.

“What did you think?”

“That you put them for me to see,” he said.

“It was to make you realize that we can’t answer every question, which you know now.”

“I still think you could answer a few more than you have,” he observed. “But let it go. Is the Barca harbor shallow?”

“Ten, fifteen feet at low tide,” she informed him. “We’re having a sort of dredge made there. Something to go down into the sea, take pictures, get samples of the bottom, and then come up again. There’s an oceanographic ship due in Manila shortly, by the way. It will have a bathyscaphe on board. Maybe that will help find out some answers.” Then she said uncomfortably, “I have a feeling the bathyscape isn’t… safe.”

He glanced up.

“Ellos?” He grinned as she looked sharply at him. Then he said, “This dredge: isn’t it pretty ambitious for a boat this size to try to dredge some thousands of fathoms down?”

“It’s a free dredge,” she said. “It will sink by itself and come up by itself. There’s no cable. What are you doing now?”

He’d put away the submarine microphone he’d just altered and was now taking out the still untested underwater horn.

“I’m going to try to make this directional, too,” he said. “In fact, I’m going to try to make it project sound in a beam shaped like a fan. A hollow cone may come later.”

She was silent. The Esperance sailed on. “Ever talk to the skipper of La Rubia?” he asked presently.

She shook her head.

“You should. He’s a stupendous, self-confident liar,” said Terry. “He lies automatically. Gratuitously. A completely amiable man, but he can’t tell the truth without stopping to think.”

“We found that out,” said Deirdre. “I didn’t. Someone else.”

“Is this another censored subject, or can I ask what happened?”

“I’d better see about lunch,” said Deirdre quickly. She got up and left. Terry shrugged. The day before yesterday, or even yesterday, he’d have been indignant. But then he’d known these people had secrets in which he had no share. Today he was beginning to share those secrets, and he had fabulously nonsensical material on which to work on his own. He had strange ideas about the event of last night. He did not quite believe them, but he thought he had devised some ways to see how much of truth they contained, if any. Deirdre could keep her secrets, so long as he did not have to disclose his own wildly imaginative ideas.

The routine of the yacht went on. It was in a way a very casual routine. Davis gave orders when the need arose, but there was no formal discipline; there was cooperation. Terry heard one of the crew-cuts ask Deirdre a question using her first name. It would have been highly improbable in a paid crew, but it was reasonable enough in a volunteer expedition. He heard Deirdre say, “Why don’t you ask him?”

The crew-cut, Tony, came to the part of the deck where Terry worked.

“We got into an argument,” he said without preface. “We were talking about that… ‘whale’ last night.”

Terry nodded. The use of the term “whale” was a deliberate pretense that the previous night’s events were natural and normal.

“How fast do you think it was traveling when it broached?” asked Tony. “I know a whale can jump clear of the water. I’ve seen it in the movies. But that one jumped awfully high!”

“I hadn’t tried to estimate it,” said Terry.

“You’ve got a tape of the noise,” said Tony. “Could you time the interval between the sound when it left the water, and the splash when it fell back?”

“Mmm. Yes,” said Terry. He looked up. “Of course.”

“It would be interesting to do it,” said Tony, semicasually. Then he added hastily, “I’ve read somewhere that whales have been clocked at pretty high speeds. If we can find out how long its leap lasted, we could know how fast it was going.”

Terry considered for a moment, and then got out the recorder. He played the tape for a moment, and skipped forward to later parts of the record until he came to the place where the unpleasant humming sound was loud, and finally reached the beginning of the rushing noise. That, in turn, had preceded the leap of the object photographed by the gun-cameras.

Terry glanced at his watch when the rushing started. He timed the period of ascent of the noise, while it grew louder and louder and became a booming sound, which was at its loudest the instant before it ceased. At that moment the mysterious object had leaped out of the sea. The splash of its re-entry came long seconds later.

Tony timed the leap. When the splash came he made his calculations absorbedly, while Terry switched off the recorder.

“It would take the same amount of time going up as it does coming down,” said Tony, scribbling numbers. “Since we know how fast things fall, when we know how long they fall we can tell how fast they were traveling when they landed, and therefore when they leaped.”

He multiplied and divided.

“Sixty miles an hour, roughly,” he pronounced. “The whale was going sixty miles an hour straight up when it left the water! What can swim that fast?”

“That’s your question,” said Terry. “Here’s one of mine. We heard it coming for five minutes ten seconds. How deep is the water where we were?”

“About forty-five hundred fathoms.”

“If we assume that it came from the bottom, it must have been traveling at least sixty miles an hour when it broke surface,” said Terry.

“But can a whale swim sixty miles an hour?”

“No,” said Terry.

Tony hesitated, opened his mouth, closed it, and went away.

Terry returned to the changing of the submarine horn. Sound has its own tricks underwater. If you know something about them you can produce some remarkable results. A deliberately made underwater signal can be heard through an unbelievable number of thousands of miles of seawater. But, except through a yet untested fish-driving paddle, Terry had never heard of fish being herded by sound. Still, fish can be stunned or killed by concussions. They have been known to be made unconscious by the noise of a very near submarine bell. It wasn’t unreasonable that a specific loud noise could make a barrier no fish would try to cross. But there were still some parts of last night’s events that did not fit into any rational explanation. Davis came over to Terry.

“I think,’” he said, “that we may have missed a lot of information by not having submarine ears before. There may have been all sorts of noises we could have heard.”

“Possibly,” agreed Terry.

“We’re more or less in the position of savages faced with phenomena they don’t understand,” said Davis vexedly. “The simple problems of savages range from what produces thunder to what makes people die of disease. Savages come up with ideas of gods or devils doing such things for reasons of their own. We can’t accept ideas of that sort, of course!”

“No,” agreed Terry, “we can’t.”

“But what happened last night,” said Davis, “is almost as mysterious to us as thunder to a savage. A savage would blame it on devils or whatnot”

“Or on ellos,” said Terry.

“He’d imagine a personality behind it, yes,” said Davis. “He does things because he wants to, so he thinks all natural phenomena occur because somebody wants them to. He has no idea of natural law, so he tries to imagine what kind of person—what kind of god or devil—does the things he notices. It’s a natural way to think.”

“Very likely,” admitted Terry. “But the point?”

“Is that we mustn’t fall into a savage’s way of thinking about last night’s affair.”

Terry said, “I couldn’t agree with you more. But just what are you driving at?”

“There’s a dredge being made for me in Barca. I’m afraid you may suspect that I’m trying to—stir up something with it. To poke something we know is somewhere but can’t identify. I didn’t want you to try the fish-paddle in deep water, that’s true. But… ”

“You’re explaining,” said Terry, “that you didn’t want me to whack a fish-driving paddle overside in deep water.”

Davis hesitated, and then nodded.

“The phenomena you’re interested in are under water?”

“Yes,” said Davis. “They are in the Luzon Deep area.”

“Then, to be cooperative, I’ll test this contrivance in ten to fifteen feet of water in the Barca harbor. And I will not get temperamental about your suggestions that I should not mess up your deep-water inquiries.”

“Thanks,” said Davis.

He went forward to meet Nick, just coming abovedecks with a slip of paper in his hand. It occurred to Terry, suddenly, that somebody went below down the forecastle hatch just about every hour on the hour. They must be in short-wave communication with Manila. It had been mentioned last night—a loran fix on the Esperance’s position. There were apparently frequent reports to somebody somewhere.

The afternoon went by. A tree-lined shore appeared to the eastward just when the gaudy colorings of a beautiful sunset filled all the western sky. The Esperance changed course and followed the coast line, some miles out. Night fell. The yacht sailed with a fine smooth motion over the ocean swells.

After dinner Davis was below, fiddling with the knobs to pick up short-wave music from San Francisco, and the muted sound of an argument came occasionally from the forecastle where the four crew-cuts resided. Terry and Deirdre went on deck.

“My father,” said Deirdre, “says you understand each other better, now. He doesn’t think you’re going to feel offended with us, and he’s really pleased. He says your mind doesn’t work like his, but you come to more or less the same conclusions, which makes it likely the conclusions are right.”

Terry grimaced.

“My conclusion,” he observed, “is that I haven’t enough facts yet to come to any conclusion.”

“Of course!” said Deirdre. “Just like my father!”

They sat in silence. It was not exactly a tranquil stillness. It was pleasant enough to be here on the slanting deck of a beautiful yacht, driving competently through dark seas under a canopy of stars. But now Terry realized he was constantly aware of Deirdre. He liked her.

But he’d liked other people, male and female, without being continually conscious of their existence. Girls are usually more conscious of such things than men. At least ninety-nine per cent of the time, a man does not modify his behavior because of the age, sex, and marital status of the people he comes in contact with. It isn’t relevant to most of what he says and does. But a girl frequently modifies her actions in just such circumstances. Deirdre was well aware of the slightly uneasy, extremely interested state of Terry’s mind. There was silence for a long time. Then a shooting star went across the sky. It went out.

“Would you like to hear something really wild?” asked Deirdre, ruefully. “That shooting star, just then. It used to be true that more meteorites—shooting stars—had fallen and been recovered in Kansas than any other place in the world. But it would be ridiculous to think they aimed for Kansas, wouldn’t it?”

Terry nodded, not following at all.

“At Thrawn Island,” said Deirdre, “since the satellite-tracking station has been built, space-radars have picked up more bolides—big meteors—coming in to fall in the Luzon Deep than ever in Kansas or anywhere else. I think my father frets over that, simply because he’s so concerned about the Luzon Deep.”

Terry heard himself saying irrelevantly, “I’d like to ask you a few strictly personal questions, Deidre. What’s your favorite food? What music do you like? Where would you like best to live? When… ”

Deirdre turned her head to smile at him.

“I’ve been wondering,” she said, “if you thought of me only as a fellow researcher or whether you’d noticed that I’m a person, too. Hmmmmm. There’s a restaurant in Manila where they still cut their steaks along the muscle instead of across it, but where they make some unheard-of dishes. That place has some of my favorite foods. And… ”

“Next time we’re in Manila we’ll try it,” said Terry. “Now, I know a place… ”

The Esperance went on. Presently, the moon rose and moonlight glinted on the waves while the stars looked cynically down on the small yacht upon the sea. And two people talked comfortably and absorbedly about things nobody else would have thought very interesting.

When Terry turned in for the night he realized pleasantly that he was very glad he’d let himself be persuaded to join the Esperance’s company.

Dawn came. Terry was already on deck when the Esperance threaded her way into a small harbor. There were palm trees along the shore, and there was a Philippine town with edifices ranging from burnt brick to stucco to mere nipa huts on its outskirts. Two-man fishing boats were making their way out from the shore on which they’d been beached. From somewhere came the staccato, back-firing noise of an old automobile-engine being warmed up for the day’s work. It would undoubtedly be the bus for Manila. But it was not thinkable that Terry should take it, now.

The yacht dropped anchor and lay indolently at rest while her crew breakfasted and the morning deck routine was being performed. Then Deirdre appeared in shore-going clothes of extreme femininity. Davis too was dressed otherwise than as usual.

“We’re going ashore to the shipyard,” he told Terry. “If you’d like to come—”

“I’ve something to do here,” said Terry.

Two of the crew-cuts got a boat overside and headed it for the shore. Terry got out the recorder and the submarine ear and horn. He set up his apparatus for a test. Tony came from belowdecks and watched. Then he came closer.

“If I can help,” he said tentatively.

“You can,” Terry told him. “But let’s listen to what the fish are saying, first.”

He dropped over the submarine ear and started the recorder to play what it picked up, but without recording it. Sounds from underwater came out of the speakers. The slappings of tiny harbor-waves against the yacht’s planking; the chunking, rhythmic sound of oars from a fishing boat which was rowing after the half-dozen that had gone out earlier; grunting sounds. Those were fish.

Terry listened critically, and Tony with interest. Then Terry brought out the fish-driving paddle. He turned on the tape, now, to have a record of the sound the paddle made.

“Whack this on the water,” he suggested, “and we’ll hear how it sounds.”

Tony went down the ladder and gave the water surface a few resounding whacks. There were tiny, violent swirlings. For thirty or forty feet from the Esperance’s side there were isolated, minute turmoils in the water. Three or four fish actually leaped clear of the surface.

“Not bad!” said Tony. “Shall I whack some more?”

Terry reeled back a few feet of the tape which contained the whacking sounds. He re-played them, listening critically as before. Tony had returned to the deck. The whackings, as heard underwater, were not merely impacts. There was a resonance to them. Almost a hum. Rather grimly, Terry substituted this tape-reel with the recording he’d made the night before. He started the instrument and found the exact spot where the object from the depths had fallen back into the sea. He stopped the recorder right there. He hauled up the submarine ear and plugged in the horn to the audio-amplifier, as yet untested, which should multiply the volume of sound from the tape. Then he put the horn overside.

He switched on the recorder again. The tape-reel began to spin. The sound went out underwater from the horn. Underwater it was much louder than when it had been received by the Esperance’s microphone. Here it was confined by the surface above and the harbor-bottom beneath. It must have been the equivalent of a loud shout in a closed room—only worse.

The fish in the harbor of Barca went mad. All the harbor-surface turned to spray. Creatures of all sizes leaped crazily above the surface, their fins flapping, only to leap again, more frantically still, when they fell back. A totally unsuspected school of very small flying fish flashed upward in such frenzied haste that some tried to climb too steeply and fell back and instantly flung themselves into the air again.

Terry turned off the playing recorder. The disorder at the top of the water ceased immediately. But he heard shrill outcries. Children had been wading at the edge of the shore. They stampeded for solid ground, shrieking. Where their feet and legs had been underwater they felt as if a million pins and needles had pricked them.

Something flapped heavily on the Esperance’s deck. Tony went to see. It was a three-pound fish which had leaped clear of the water and over the yacht’s rail to the deck.

Tony threw it back into the water.

“I guess there’s not much doubt,” he said painfully.

“Of what?” demanded Terry.

“Of what… I had guessed,” said Tony.

“And what did you guess?”

Tony hesitated.

“I guess,” he said unhappily, “that I’d better not say.”

He watched with a startled, uneasy expression on his face as Tony put the apparatus away.

Time passed. Davis and Deirdre had been ashore over an hour. Then Terry saw the small boat leave the shore and approach. It came deftly alongside, the two passengers climbed up to the deck, and all four crew-cuts hauled the boat back inboard and lashed it fast.

“Our dredge isn’t ready yet,” said Davis. “It looks good, but there’ll be a delay of a few days.” Deirdre examined Terry’s expression. “Something’s happened. What?”

Terry told her. Davis listened. Tony added what he’d seen, including the fish that had leaped high enough out of the water to land on the Esperance’s deck.

“After the fact,” said Davis, “I can see how it could happen. But… “ He hesitated for a long time and then said, “This is another case where I’ve been making guesses and hoping I was wrong. And like the others, proof that my early guess was wrong makes another guess necessary. And I dislike the later guess much more than the first.”

He moved restlessly.

“I’m glad you only tried it once, here,” he said unhappily. “We’re due up at Thrawn Island anyhow. You can work this trick out in the lagoon up there. If there’s no reaction to the dredge when we try it, we can try this. But it might be a very violent poke at something we don’t quite believe in. I’d rather try a gentle poke first.”

He turned away. In minutes Nick was belowdecks starting the yacht’s engine, two others of the crew-cuts were hauling up the anchor, and the fourth was at the wheel. Without haste, but with celerity, the Esperance headed for the harbor-mouth and the open sea.

They had their midday meal heading north by west. Late in the afternoon Deirdre found occasion to talk to Terry about Thrawn Island.

“It’s the China Sea tracking station for satellites,” she told him. “Some of the staff are friends of my father’s. It’s right on the edge of the Luzon Deep, and the island’s actually an underwater mountain that just barely protrudes above the surface. There are some hills, a coral reef and a lagoon. It’s also terrifically steep, and you can use the fish-driving device as much as you please without startling any Filipino fishermen.”

“You’ve been there before,” said Terry.

“Oh, yes! I told you a fish wearing a plastic object was caught in the lagoon there. That was when the station was being built. The men at the tracking station fish in the lagoon for fun, and now they’re naturally watching out for more… oddities.”

The Esperance sailed on. The crew-cuts went about their various chores and talked endlessly, among themselves and with Deirdre, when she joined in. Terry felt useless. He trailed the submarine ear overboard and set the recorder to work as an amplifier only. At low volume it played the sounds of things below. He kept half an ear cocked toward it for the mooing sound he’d picked up at the place where the ocean glittered. He heard it again now, and again found it difficult to imagine any cause for it. The sounds uttered by noise-making fish are usually produced in their swim-bladders. The purpose of fish cries is as obscure as the reason for some insect stridulations, or the song of many birds. But a long-continued fish noise would involve a swim-bladder of large size. At great depths, if a considerable cavity were filled with gas, under pressures running into tons to the square inch … Terry could not quite believe it.

He did not hear the mooing sound any more, as the yacht went on its way. Other underwater sounds became commonplace, and he tended not to hear them. From the deck around him, though, he heard arguments about wave mechanics, prospects in the World Series, the virtues of Dixieland jazz, ichthyology, Cope-land’s contribution to modern music, the possibility of life on other planets, and kindred topics. The crew-cuts were taking their summer vacations as able seamen on board the Esperance, but they had as many and as voluble opinions as any other undergraduates. They aired them on each other.

The afternoon passed. Night fell, and dinner was a session of learned discussion of different subjects, always vehemently argued. Later Terry took the yacht’s wheel, Deirdre sat comfortably nearby, and they discussed matters suitable to their more mature status. They were much less intellectual than the crew-cuts. In a few days they developed an interest in each other, but each of them believed this was just a very pleasant friendship.

Eventually, the moon rose. It was close to midnight when Nick bobbed belowdecks and came up with a report that they’d been picked up by the Thrawn Island radar and were proceeding exactly on course. Half an hour later a tiny light appeared at the edge of the sea. The Esperance headed for it, and presently there were breakers to port and starboard, the engine rumbled, down below, and the yacht lifted and fell more violently than ordinary. Then once more she was in glassy-smooth water; the air was very heavy with the smell of green vegetation. Certain rectangles of light became visible. They were the windows of the Thrawn Island satellite-tracking installation.

The Esperance’s sails were lowered and she moved toward the lights on engine power only. There was no movement ashore, though Nick had talked with the island on short-wave.

After a little while the searchlight was put in operation and began to reach out like a pencil of brilliant white light. It darted here and there and found a wharf reaching out from the shore to deep water. The Esperance floated toward it, her engine barely turning over. There was still no sign of activity, except for the lighted windows.

The engine stopped, then reversed, and the yacht drifted gently until it contacted the wharfs snubber-pilings. Jug and Tony jumped ashore with lines to fasten the yacht. Still no sign of life.

“Queer,” said Davis, staring ashore. “They knew we were coming!”

A moving light suddenly appeared in the sky. A fireball, which is an unusually lurid type of shooting star. It came over the tree-tops and crossed the zenith, leaving a trail of light behind it. It went on and on, seemingly slowing down, which meant that it was descending from a very high altitude. Its brilliance became more and more intense, then it dimmed. At this point the fireball seemed to plunge downward. Then its flame went out and only a faint, dull-red speck in motion could be seen.

It plunged down beyond the trees on the far side of the lagoon. Or so it seemed. Actually, it might have plunged into the sea, miles away. Then there was a faint noise which was something between a rumble and a hiss. The sound went back across the sky along the path the fireball had followed. It died away.

There was silence. Shooting stars as bright as this one are rare. Most meteors are very small, but they are visible because of the attrition produced by their falling bodies in the atmosphere that sets them on fire. They usually appear at around a seventy-mile height, but frequently they are vaporized before they have descended more than thirty miles. Sometimes they explode in midair and strew the earth with fragments. Sometimes they strike ground, leaving monstrous craters where they have fallen. Most meteors fall in the sea. But a meteor has to be at least down to twenty miles from sea level before its sound can be heard.

Someone came out of a building and moved toward the wharf, an electric lantern bobbing in his hand. Halfway out to the yacht he called, “Davis?”

“Yes,” said Davis. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing,” said the man ashore. “We were watching for that bolide. It was picked up by space radar a couple of hours ago, but then we figured it to land farther on than it did.”

It was an educated voice, a scholarly voice.

“Big?” asked Davis as the light drew nearer.

“We’ve seen them bigger, but not much.” The man with the lantern reached the end of the wharf. “Glad to see you. We’ve got some fish for you, by the way. We caught them in the lagoon. They’re waiting for you in the deep-freeze. There’s a Macrourus violaceus, if we read the books right, and a Gonostoma polypus. They match the pictures, anyhow. What do you make of that?”

“You haven’t got them!” said Davis incredulously. “You can’t have them! I’m no fish specialist, but those are abyssal fish! They can only be caught at a depth of two or more miles!”

“We caught ’em,” said the man cheerfully, “on a hook and line, in the lagoon, at night Come ashore! Everybody’ll be glad to see you.”

Davis protested, “I won’t believe you’ve got that kind of fish until I see them!”

The man with the lantern stepped down to the yacht’s deck.

“All you’ve got to do is look in the mess hall deepfreeze. The cook’s complaining that they take up space. Nobody wants to find out if they’re good to eat. Most unwholesome-looking creatures! And how are you, young lady?” he asked Deirdre. “We’ve missed you. Tony, Nick, Jug…”

Deirdre introduced Terry.

“Ha!” said the man. “They got you enlisted, eh? They were talking about it a month ago. You’ve solved the problem by now, I daresay. Including how these very queer fish happen to be in our lagoon instead of miles down in the Luzon Deep. When you find time, tell me!”

“I’ll try,” said Terry reservedly.

The man went down into the after-cabin and Davis followed him. Deirdre said amusedly:

“Dr. Morton’s a dear! Don’t take him seriously, Terry! He loves to tease. He’ll hound you to tell him how deep-sea fish got up here and into a shallow lagoon. Please don’t mind!”

“I won’t,” said Terry. “I’ll tell him tomorrow, I think. I believe now I know how it happened, but I want to check it first.”