Creatures of the Abyss

Seven

As the Esperance sailed northward, she looked almost unreal. From a distance she might have been an artist’s picture of an imaginary yacht heeled over in the wind, sailing splendidly over a non-existent ocean. The sky was a speckless blue, the sun was high.

But she was real enough, and the China Sea around her was genuine, and what had taken place where the Pelorus lay now hull-down, stowing a ruined bathyscaphe in her hold, had unquestionably taken place.

Something monstrous and terrible was hidden in the dark abyss below the yacht. The ferocity of its attack on the bathyscaphe was daunting. And ferocity has always, somehow, a suggestion of madness about it. But the humming sound in the sea was not the product of madness. It was a technical achievement. And plastic objects with metal inclusions …

Davis joined Deirdre and Terry. Before Davis could speak she said, “I can’t imagine any guess that will add everything together, Terry.” Davis made a jerky gesture.

“Today’s business is beyond all reason,” he said unhappily, “and if there ever was an understatement, that’s it! If there can be any conceivable motive for the plastic objects, which the Pelorus dismisses as hoaxes, the motive is to use them to find out something about surface conditions; that is, for surface conditions to be reported back. And that’s not easy to imagine. But try to think of something easier! And yet, such mindless ferocity as attacked the bathyscape… that wouldn’t be curious about the surface!”

“No-o-o-o,” agreed Terry. “It wouldn’t. But we’d set off a bomb down below to stir things up. A couple of hours later the bathyscaphe went down. A stupid and merely ferocious thing of the depths wouldn’t associate a bomb that exploded with a bathyscaphe that came down two hours later. It took intelligence to make the association of two falling objects with danger.”

Deirdre beamed suddenly.

“Of course! That’s it! Go on!”

“Curiosity implies intelligence,” said Terry carefully, “and intelligence is a substitute for teeth or claws. We don’t assume that the fish that carry the plastic gadgets made them. Why assume that whatever attacked the bathyscaphe did it of its own accord? We believe that something else makes the deep-sea fish come up into the Thrawn Island lagoon, don’t we? Or do we?”

“We pretend we don’t,” said Deirdre.

Davis nodded reluctantly.

“Yes, we pretend we don’t,” he agreed. “But if intelligence is involved, I find myself getting frightened! We humans are always terrified of strange types of intelligence, anyhow. If it’s intelligence that isn’t human …”

Nick came up from below.

“Thrawn Island calling,” he reported. “They say the hum at the lagoon opening stopped for some forty-odd hours and then started again. They ask if we’re coming. I said we were on the way. They’re standing by. Anything we should tell them?”

“We’ll get there some time after sunset,” said Davis.

“And maybe you should tell them about the Pelorus and the bathyscaphe.”

Nick grinned briefly. “I did. And the guy on Thrawn Island said ‘Hooray’ and then explained that he said that because he couldn’t think of anything that fitted the idea of something biting holes in three-inch steel.” He added, “I can’t think of a proper comment, either.”

“We’ll get to Thrawn Island after sunset,” repeated Davis. “Then we’ll see what we find in the lagoon—if anything.”

Nick started back toward the bow. He stopped.

“Oh, yes! It wasn’t a scientific guy talking, just the short-wave operator. The science staff is all busy. He said they heard an hour ago that another possible bolide’s been spotted by a space-radar back in the US. It was picked up farther out than one’s ever been spotted before. Five thousand miles high.”

Davis nodded without comment. Nick went forward and disappeared below.

A school of porpoises appeared astern. They caught up with the Esperance. They went rocketing past, leaping exuberantly for no reason whatever. They cut across the yacht’s bow and zestfully played around her two or three times, then went on, toward a faraway horizon. They managed somehow to give the impression of creatures who have done something they consider important.

“It’s said,” said Terry, “that porpoises have brains as good as men’s. I wish I could get one or two to talk! They might answer everything! I’m getting obsessed by this infernal business!”

“I’ve been at it for months,” said Davis. “In the past week, though, with you on board, I have found out more things I don’t understand than I believed existed!”

He walked away. Deirdre smiled at Terry.

“My father paid you a tribute,” she said. “I think we’ve been wasting time, you and I. We do a lot of talking to each other, but we haven’t been applying our massive brains to matters of real importance.”

“Such as what?” asked Terry dourly.

“Foam,” said Deirdre. “Big masses of foam seen to be floating on the sea. Always over the Luzon Deep. Photographed by a plane less than a month ago. Reported by fishermen much more often than you’d suspect. At least once a ship sailed into a foam-patch and dropped out of sight, exactly as if there were a hole in the sea there. Let’s talk about that.”

They settled down on the after-cabin roof and began a discussion on the foam-patches, for which there was no hint of an explanation. Then Deirdre mentioned that when she was a little girl she’d always been fascinated by the sight of her father shaving. The foam—the lather—entranced her. And somehow that led to something else, and that to something else still. A full hour later they were talking enjoyably about matters of no conceivable relationship to large patches of foam seen floating on the ocean’s surface where the water was forty-five hundred fathoms deep.

Davis came to a halt beside them.

“Morton’s just been talking to me from Thrawn Island,” he said abruptly. “He’s very much upset. It’s about that prospective bolide that was spotted from Palomar. It’s been night there for two hours.”

Terry waited.

“Morton,” said Davis, “would like us to try to photograph it when it comes in, back where the Pelorus was this morning.”

Terry stared. Shooting stars are not rare. On an average summer night anybody can see at least three in an hour’s watch of any one quarter of the sky. Bolides are a rare kind of shooting star. Still, many people have seen one or two in their lifetime. But nobody plans ahead of time to observe a bolide, and still less does anybody ever plan in advance to watch a meteorite arrive on the earth’s surface, whether on land or sea. It is simply not thinkable.

“We’ll go back and try,” said Davis. He seemed embarrassed. “Morton says there’s no sense to it at all, and that if we do get photographs they’ll be considered fakes. He’s really wrought up. But he asked if I thought I could get a plane out from Manila to watch it fall—if it comes. I’m going to try that too.” He added, more embarrassed still, “Of course nobody’d pay attention if I explained why the plane should go there. I’ll have to say that I’m just looking for something else peculiar to happen at that spot. The Pelorus must have already reported that one peculiar thing has happened.”

Terry opened his mouth, and closed it again. Davis went away.

“You had an idea,” said Deirdre accusingly. “What?”

“I was thinking of Horta,” said Terry. “Police Captain Horta. A very honest man with no scientific knowledge at all. Nobody with a scientific education would pay any attention, but I could get him to tell a few others who know as little as he does, and if the damned thing does turn up, there’ll be proof it was foretold. If it doesn’t arrive—” Terry shrugged, “I’ve no scientific reputation to lose.”

“Wonderful!” said Deirdre warmly. “But you wouldn’t have proposed it but for me! I’ll put things in motion!”

She vanished. Within minutes the Esperance came about in a wide semicircle and headed in the direction from which she had just come. Deirdre stayed out of sight for a long while. When she came up it was to tell Terry that Nick was calling on the short-wave set. He’d raised the flattop in Manila Bay. The flattop had raised the shore. Telephone calls were being made to here and there and everywhere to get Horta to a shortwave station to take a call from Terry.

It was near sunset when the complicated call was ready and Horta’s voice came into a pair of headphones Terry was wearing in the Esperance’s radio room.

“I need,” said Terry slowly, “to have a number of people in Manila know now of something that’s going to happen out at sea tonight. They’ll be needed to testify that they knew of the prediction before the event. Can you arrange it?”

“Por supuesto,” said Horta’s voice cheerfully. “Are we not amigos? What is the prediction and who should know?”

“The prediction,” said Terry doggedly, anticipating disbelief and protest, “is that at twelve minutes after nine o’clock tonight a large meteorite will fall into the sea where—hmm—where La Rubia catches her fish. No, you’d better not locate it that way. I’ll give you the position.”

Davis, standing by, wrote the position in latitude and longitude and handed it to him. He read it into the transmitter.

“Have you got it?” he demanded. “Is it written down?”

“Ah, yes,” said Horta tranquilly. “I will see that they make a memorandum of the matter. Shall I tell three or four persons, or more? I have news for you also. Jimenez …”

“Look here!” said Terry sharply. “I want this thing to be past all doubt! Everybody who’s ever been worried about La Rubia should know about this! There should be no possible doubt about it! But there should be disbelief, so people who don’t believe will try to verify that it didn’t happen, so they can crow over the people who thought it would, or might.”

“Ah!” said Horta. “You wish you stick out the neck! It is serious! Now tell me again!”

“At twelve minutes after nine tonight,” said Terry doggedly, “A shooting star will fall into the sea at… “ He named the latitude and longitude Davis had given him. “That is where La Rubia catches her fish.”

“A shooting star will fall there?” protested Hora. “But who knows where they fall?”

“You do,” said Terry. “This one, anyhow. Now, will you see that a number of people know about it?”

“It is cr-azy!” objected Horta. Then he said, “I will do it.”

The short-wave call ended, with Horta too much disturbed to refer again to Jimenez.

By sunset Doug had gotten out the gun-cameras. Doug held an impromptu class on deck, showing the other crew-cuts exactly how to aim the cameras and expose the films, and what button to press to change film automatically between shots. He was unhappy because he did not know how bright the object to be photographed would be, for his lens-settings. He was even more unhappy because the bolide might travel at practically any angular velocity, so he didn’t know how to set the shutters. But the focus would be infinity, and if he used the fastest possible film, he could stop most motion with a hundredth second exposure.

Instead of reaching Thrawn Island shortly after sunset, then, the Esperance was back above the place where the dredge had been dropped and the bathyscaphe wrecked. The Pelorus was gone. The people on board that ship must have been very upset. The bathyscaphe had cost more money than is usually allotted to most scientific researchers, and now it was smashed. How would they justify themselves? They could hardly blame the Esperance.

The yacht sailed in a closed pattern over this area of the Luzon Deep. Deirdre served dinner on deck. Stars shone down almost instantly after a sunset of unusual magnificence, even for the China Sea. Tony brought his guitar aft, and a contagious feeling of exhilaration spread about the Esperance and an improvised party took place on deck. Maybe the mood for festivity arose from the realization that at least nine-tenths of the world’s population would have graded them as lunatics, had it known their project for the evening.

It would have been unjust, of course. Terry reflected that it had not been their idea to make an appointment with a shooting star. They were doing it out of some sort of professional courtesy, “from one set of crackpots to another,” Terry phrased it in his own mind. It was a wild attempt to secure proof of the starkly impossible. So there was chatter, singing, and some dancing. The high spot was perhaps the time when Jug bashfully serenaded the rigging and the stars above it with howling melodies he’d learned in college.

Eventually, Nick went down to the short-wave set. Doug passed out the gun-cameras again, after checking each one. Nick popped his head out of the hatch.

“Dr. Morton’s been calling like crazy,” he reported. “The bolide’s made four orbital turns, coming in all the while. It ought to touch the atmosphere next time around. ETO is nine-twelve-seventeen-seconds. I told him we’re all set.”

His head disappeared.

“Don’t forget!” Doug said anxiously. “The cameras will feel like shotguns but don’t lead your target! And don’t forget to press the film-changer!”

Terry lifted his gun-camera experimentally. It did feel like a shotgun. And then, suddenly, he disbelieved everything: the purpose of the Esperance’s original investigation; the phenomena that had been observed; the guesses that had been made. It was pure insanity! He felt a quick impatience with himself for becoming entangled in anything so ridiculous.

Deirdre leaned toward him and whispered forlornly, “Terry! It’s dreadful! I’ve just had an attack of common sense! What are we doing here? We’re crazy!”

He put his hand consolingly over hers. The act was unpremeditated and the sensation was startling. He found that they were staring at each other intently in the starlight.

“I think …” said Terry, unsteadily, “that it’s very sensible to be crazy. We’ve got to… talk this over.” Deirdre smiled at him shakily. “Y-yes, we will.”

Then Davis pointed out positions for the camera operators. The bolide’s course should be three hundred fifty degrees, not quite on a north-south line. It might land short of, or beyond, the Esperance. Or it might pass many miles to the east or west. Dr. Morton needed as many pictures of it against recognizable stars as could possibly be secured.

Suddenly, there was a faint, dull rumbling in the heavens. It grew louder. Presently, cruising lights appeared in the sky. They maintained a fixed relationship to each other. They looked like moving stars, flying in formation from star-cluster to star-cluster.

Nick popped abovedecks again.

“The planes just called us,” he reported. “They’ve just had a Loran position-check and they’re on the mark. They’ve got orders to observe any unusual phenomena occurring around nine-twelve P.M., Manila time. Using civilian terminology, it sounds like they’re saying the Philippine Government asked them to come out and take a look.”

“It’s five after nine now,” said Davis.

The Esperance headed into the wind. Her bow rose and fell. Waves washed past, and roarings trundled about under the stars overhead, and very tiny fights moved in a compact group across the firmament.

Time passed.

At twenty-two seconds after nine-twelve—which is to say at twenty-one hours, twelve minutes, twenty-two seconds—a light appeared in the sky from the north. It grew steadily brighter. It suddenly flared very brightly indeed, then dimmed, and continued to rise above the horizon. Seconds later it flared again, very briefly.

Terry found himself aiming the gun-camera. He pulled trigger and changed film and pulled trigger and changed film.

The bright light ceased to climb. It grew steadily brighter and brighter, and then it flared for the third time—Terry’s mind asked skeptically, ‘Braking rockets?’—and the light was so intense that the cracks in the yacht’s deck-planking could be seen. Then the extra brilliance vanished, and suddenly the moving light was no longer white, but reddish.

Terry aimed again and fired the gun-camera.

The light passed almost directly overhead. Terry had the impression that he felt its heat upon his skin.

It plunged into the sea two miles beyond the Esperance. The shock-wave caused by the impact tapped on the yacht’s side-planking a few seconds later. Starlight shone upon a plume of steam.

Then there was nothing but the noise of the circling planes above. Then a sound, as of thunder. It disappeared northward. It was the sound of the bolide’s passage, arriving after the object itself had dived into the sea.

The people on the Esperance were dumfounded. Nick went below and came up again a few minutes latter.

“The planes were calling,” he reported. “They say they noted the unusual phenomenon. They ask if they should stay around for something else.”

“I think,” said Davis caustically, “that that’s all that’s scheduled just now. Tell them so.”

The Esperance went on steadily again, a trifle west of north. Davis was below, talking via radio to Dr. Morton at the satellite tracking base.

Terry and Deirdre went to look for a place where they could talk over something privately. It was of enormous importance to them, but it was not connected with fish or meteorites or plastic objects or anything at all but the two of them. And to them the yacht seemed crowded with people, even though there was nobody else abovedecks but one of the crew-cuts at the wheel.

When the Esperance entered the lagoon the next morning, though, their private talk had evidently come to a satisfactory conclusion. Deirdre smiled at Terry without any reason whatever, and he looked at once smug and embarrassed and uneasy, as if he possessed a new status to which he was still unaccustomed.

The recorder, trailing a submarine ear overboard, had duly reported the presence of the hum in the water, just outside the lagoon. It had not been operating for forty hours or thereabouts. During that time the fish inside could go out of the lagoon, if they chose. And other fish could come in. Terry said suddenly, as the yacht went under power toward the tracking station wharf, “Suppose there was a cone of noise just outside the lagoon, and the flanks of the submarine mountain under us were included in the cone? And suppose the cone grew smaller, like the other one. What would happen?”

Deirdre shook her head, smiling at him.

“The fish,” said Terry, “could escape into the lagoon.”

“Probably,” agreed Deirdre.

“And if fish could be driven downward along a certain path,” said Terry, “the way we saw it happen, why, fish could be driven up in a certain path, too.”

“Obviously,” said Deirdre.

“So if something wanted to replace the fish in the lagoon, or to add to their number, why, it would puncture their swim bladders far, far down, and then drive them up to the surface and into the lagoon, and then keep the noise going to keep them inside.”

“Is this a new idea?” asked Deirdre.

“N-n-o,” admitted Terry. “I’ve had it for some time.”

“So,” said Deirdre, “have I.”

The Esperance’s engine stopped, and she floated to gentle contact with the wharf. Members of the tracking station staff made the yacht fast. With others, Dr. Morton came on board. His expression was the picture of unrelieved gloom.

“I’m in a nice spot!” he told Davis. “I predicted a second bolide correctly! Ihad to use a different retardation factor to make the math come out right. Now I’m asked to explain that! How can I tell them I knew where it would fall, and only had to compute when?”

“Come below and look at the pictures we got,” said Davis.

They disappeared down the after-cabin hatch. Terry knew about the pictures. Doug had developed them with sweating care, developing each negative separately and adjusting the development-time to the varying exposures of the bright object.

There was a total of twenty reasonably good pictures of the bolide, from its first appearance to its plunge into the ocean, two miles from the Esperance. Doug had enlarged some of them. There were distinct star-patterns in most. In nearly all, though, the object was more or less blurred by its own motion. In those taken when it flared most brightly, the blurriness was especially marked. There was only one picture of professional, if accidental, quality, and it was the least convincing of all. It showed the fore-part of a conical shape traveling point-first. Nobody would conceivably believe that it was a meteorite. It looked artificial.

Terry and Deirdre, as it happened, stayed on deck. The people of the tracking station made a babbling uproar. It appeared that the most important event in history, as history was viewed on Thrawn Island, had taken place the night before. It was revealed—Terry had not suspected his own success—that in asking Horta to see that there was foreknowledge of a meteoric fall, Terry had arranged for the matter to be taken immediately to high Philippine Government officials. The American flattop, at their request had sent planes to the place of the fall, with orders which were enigmatic only until the descending object appeared. Then every man in every plane knew that he’d been sent there to see it.

So there could be no question but that Dr. Morton had predicted it. That meant that he knew more about meteoric objects than anybody else in the world. What he had to say was of vast importance, and Thrawn Island shared in his achievement. But it was a strictly professional triumph. The news would not break in the newspapers. No ordinary reader would believe in it. And nobody anywhere would believe in Morton’s knowledge of the place of the fall before he began to calculate.

Terry observed that the people of Thrawn Island were definitely no longer interested in fish. They’d kept their eyes open for oddities because a deep-sea fish with a plastic object attached had been caught in the lagoon a long while before. They’d been intensely interested when Terry herded all the lagoon fish into one small inner bay, and they speared sixty fish that had no business being at the surface. They’d found eight more plastic objects. Such things had been interesting, if not important. But now the head of the Thrawn Island staff had computed the place and time of arrival of a meteoric mass from space! And he did it when that mass was five thousand miles out! From a professional standpoint, this was stupendous! They tried to make Terry see how important it was.

Davis and Morton came up from below. They headed for the shore. The crew-cuts trailed off to the land with most of the visitors. Only Deirdre and Terry remained on the yacht, with a mere short-wave operator from the island.

“We’re going to have a fancy lunch, with champagne and speeches,” the operator said hopefully. “You’ll come?”

“Naturally!” said Terry. “But first we’re going swimming. We haven’t had a chance to be overboard since the last time we were here.”

“We’ll be back in time for ranch,” Deirdre assured the operator, “but swimming here is so wonderful! We’ve been talking about it for days!”

She went below to change. The operator shrugged. After a further attempt to interest Terry in the celebration of an astronomical first, he went ashore. Terry went with him to get the outboard motorboat he and Deirdre had used before. He was already wearing swimming trunks.

A little later the small boat putt-putted away from the Esperance upon the glassy-rippled waters of the lagoon. There was a very great tranquillity everywhere. The booming roar of the surf came from unseen rollers on the reef outside. Seabirds squawked. Palms along the edge of the lagoon waved their fronds very, very gently.

“How far will you go before we swim?” asked Deirdre. “All the lagoon’s perfect. One place is as good as another.”

He cut off the motor.

“Hmmm. There’s a deep place yonder,” he observed. That’s where I went with the aqualung and speared the freak fish. Stay away from it.”

She jumped over in a clean dive. He joined her in the water. She came up, blowing bubbles.

“All right, Terry. What are your troubles?”

“That bolide bothers me,” he told her. “It had a specific destination! It was meant to hit the water over the Luzon Deep!”

She dived again. This time Terry followed her. The underwater world was beautifully bright, with ripplings making everything seem to shimmer because of the changing light. When they came up again Deirdre said, “Funny!”

“It had a purpose!” insisted Terry. “There were others before it, and they had a purpose tool That’s not funny!”

“I didn’t mean that,” said Deirdre. “I meant … just now, under the water… What’s that?”

There was a swirling at the surface, some tens of yards away. It was not the curling eddy made by a fish about to break surface. It was too big a disturbance for that. It looked as if something stirred, barely submerged, but something very large. Terry, staring, thought of a porpoise cavorting just below the ripples. Or perhaps a shark. But sharks and porpoises are too small to have made this eddying. It reappeared.

“Get in the boat!” snapped Terry. “Quick!”

While she climbed in he let himself sink, his eyes open. There was a clouding of the water underneath, where the surface-disturbance had been. It was mud from the bottom which had been stirred up. He could see nothing clearly through it, though nearby and around him he could easily see the colorings of coral and fan sponges, and he could see small fish darting here and there.

He broke surface. Deirdre bent anxiously over the gunwale.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said curtly. “But give me a fish spear.”

“You won’t… ”

“I just want to have something in my hand,” he told her impatiently, “while I look.”

He took the spear she handed him, and sank once more. Again something moved in the deeper part of the lagoon. It was a fretful motion, as if a creature or creatures tried to burrow away from the light shining through the water. Whatever moved, a thick cloud of debris from the bottom floated all the way up to the surface.

Terry came up for air.

“There’s something queer there,” he said shortly. “I don’t know what.”

He went under and swam cautiously nearer to the disturbance. He was within a few feet of the curling cloud of obscurity when something like a gigantic worm came out of it. Or maybe it was like an elephant’s trunk, only no elephant ever had a trunk so huge. It was a dull and glistening writhing object. Its end was rounded. The tip of the worm-like thing must have been a foot in diameter, and it came out of the mud cloud for four feet, then six, then, fifteen feet. It thickened only slightly in that length. It groped blindly in the brightness.

Terry swam back quickly, and the object reared up and made a groping sweep through the clear water. Some peculiar white disks suddenly appeared on the underside of the long tentacle. They looked like sucker-disks, able to grip anything at all. The monstrous tentacle fumbled for Terry, as if guided by the pressure-waves his movements generated.

Terry froze. Deirdre moved in the boat almost directly overhead. Something clanked in the boat and he heard it. The boat was probably rocking, making the pressure-waves that a creature from the abyss would depend upon for guidance where eyes would not serve at all.

The thick, bulging tentacle reached toward the sound at the surface, now ignoring Terry, though he was nearer. He was still. The white sucker-disks on its under side had several rings of a horny, tooth-like substance at their rims. The smallest were about four inches wide. The fumbling object felt blindly in the water. Deirdre stirred again in the boat. The visible portion of the groping monstrosity was already longer than the boat. The whole creature would be enormous! If this groping arm rested upon the gunwale of the boat, it could easily swamp it.

It groped for the boat, coming horribly out of a cloud of mud. It reached out. In another instant it would touch…

Terry plunged his fish spear into the worm. It jerked violently. There were enormous thrashings. Other similar white-disked arms thrust into view, fumbling somehow angrily for the creature—Terry—which had dared to attack it.

He darted for the surface. Something unspeakably horrible touched him, but it was the smooth and not the suckered side of the groping worm. Terry’s head was now above water. He grasped the gunwale to pull himself in, in a fever of haste. But the thing that had touched him before came back. It grazed his leg, for just a second. Where it touched, his flesh burned like fire.

“Start… motor!” gasped Terry. “Get away!”

Something touched the stern-board of the boat. Deirdre pulled the starter of the motor.

“Get in!” she said tensely. “Quickly!”

She saw him, straining every muscle by pure, agonized instinct against the irresistible force of whatever clung to his skin. The horrible tentacle stretched, and part of its length took a new grip. It crawled upon him… Deirdre saw the look on his face.

She snatched up the second spear and stabbed past him, into the crawling beast. There was a most violent jerking. She stabbed again. She panted. She gasped. She stabbed and stabbed, sobbing with fear and horror. And Terry tumbled in over the gunwale, released. As soon as he fell onto the floor-boards he painfully dragged himself toward the motor at the stern. Something bumped the boat underneath. Terry pulled the starter and the motor suddenly roared. But the boat didn’t start immediately, and it jerked once more. The whirling propeller-blades had touched one of the groping tentacles and cut it. Tumult arose.

The boat surged into motion and Terry, with clenched teeth, sent it into a crazy, skidding turn to avoid a surface swirl, and then another frantic swerve when something showed momentarily above the surface. The boat zig-zagged along. A grisly, writhing object rose above the water, flailing, a fish-spear sticking in it. The small, skimming boat dodged and twisted at its topmost speed… It suddenly straightened out and almost flew across the water toward the land.