The Kraken Wakes

Phase Two

We made an early start that morning. The car, ready loaded, had stood out all night, and we were away a few minutes after five, with the intention of putting as much of southern England behind us as we could before the roads got busy. It was two hundred and sixty-eight point eight (when it wasn't point seven or point nine) miles to the door of the cottage that Phyllis had bought with a small legacy from her Aunt Helen.

I had rather favoured the idea of a cottage a mere fifty miles or so away from London, but it was Phyllis's aunt who was to be commemorated with what was now Phyllis's money, so we became the proprietors of Rose Cottage, Penllyn, Nr Constantine, Cornwall, Telephone Number: Navasgan 333. It was a grey-stone, five-roomed cottage set on a south-easterly sloping, heathery hillside, with its almost eavesless roof clamped down tight on it in the true Cornish manner. Straight before us we looked across the Helford River, and on towards the Lizard where, by night, we could see the flashing of the lighthouse. To the left was a view of the coast stretching raggedly away on the other side of Falmouth Bay, and if we walked a hundred yards ahead, and so out of the lee of the hillside which protected us from the south-westerly gales, we could look across Mount's Bay, towards the Scilly Isles, and the open Atlantic beyond. Falmouth, 7 miles; Helston, 9; elevation 332 feet above sea-level; several, though not all, mod. con. When you did reach it you decided that it was worth travelling two hundred and sixty-eight point eight (or nine) miles, after all.

We used it in a migratory fashion. When we had enough commissions and ideas on hand to keep us going for a time we would withdraw there to drive our pens and bash our typewriters in pleasant, undistracting seclusion for a few weeks. Then we would return to London for a while, market our wares, cement relations, and angle for commissions until we felt the call to go down there again with another accumulated batch of work — or we might, perhaps, simply declare a holiday.

That morning, I made pretty good time. It was still only half past eight when I removed Phyllis's head from my shoulder and woke her up to announce: 'Yeovil, and breakfast, darling.' I left her trying to pull herself together to order breakfast intelligibly while I went to get some newspapers. By the time I returned she was functioning better, and had already started on the cereal. I handed over her paper, and looked at mine. The main headline in both was given to a shipping disaster. That this should be so when the ship concerned was Japanese suggested that there was little news from elsewhere.

I glanced at the 'story' below the picture of the ship. From a welter of human interest I unearthed the fact that the Japanese liner, Yatsushiro, bound from Nagasaki to Amboina, in the Moluccas, had sunk. Out of some seven hundred people on board, only five survivors had been found.

Now, in common with most of my fellow-countrymen, though independently of foundation, I have the feeling that in the Occident we construct, but in the Orient they contrapt. Thus the news of an oriental bridge collapsing, train leaving the rails, or, as in the present case, ship sinking, never impinges with quite the novelty its western counterpart would arouse, and the sense of concern is consequently less acute. I do not defend this phenomenon; I regard it as reprehensible. Nevertheless, it is so, and in consequence I turned the page with my sense of tragedy somewhat qualified by non-surprise. Before I could settle down to the leader, however, Phyllis interrupted with an exclamation. I looked across. Her paper carried no picture of the vessel; instead, it printed a small sketch-map of the area, and she was intently studying the spot marked 'X'.

'What is it?' I asked.

She put her finger on the map. 'Speaking from memory, and always supposing that the cross was made by somebody with a conscience,' she said, 'doesn't that put the scene of this sinking pretty near our old friend the Mindanao Trench?'

I looked at the map, trying to recall the configuration of the ocean floor around there.

'It can't be far off,' I agreed.

I turned back to my own paper, and read the account there more carefully. 'Women,' apparently, 'screamed when — ,' 'Women in night-attire ran from their cabins,' 'Women, wide-eyed with terror, clutched their children —,' 'Women' this and 'Women' that when 'death struck silently at the sleeping liner.' When one had swept all this woman jargon and the London Office's repertoire of phrases suitable for trouble at sea aside, the skeleton of a very bare Agency message was revealed — so bare that for a moment I wondered why two large newspapers had decided to splash it instead of giving it just a couple of inches. Then I perceived the real mystery angle which lay submerged among all the phoney dramatics. It was that the Yatsushiro had, without warning, and for no known reason, suddenly gone down like a stone.

I got hold of a copy of this Agency message later, and I found its starkness a great deal more alarming and dramatic than this business of dashing about in 'night-attire'. Nor had there been much time for that kind of thing, for, after giving particulars of the time, place, etc., the message concluded laconically: 'Fair weather, no (no) collision, no (no) explosion, cause unknown. Foundered less one (one) minute alarm. Owners state quote impossible unquote.'

So there can have been very few shrieks that night. Those unfortunate Japanese women — and men — had time to wake, and then, perhaps, a little time to wonder, bemused with sleep, and then the water came to choke them: there were no shrieks, just a few bubbles as they sank down, down, down in their nineteen-thousand-ton steel coffin.

When I had read what there was I looked up. Phyllis was regarding me, chin on hands, across the breakfast table. Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then she said:

'It says here: "— in one of the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean." Do you think this can be it, Mike — so soon?'

I hesitated. 'It's difficult to tell. So much of this stuff's obviously synthetic… If it actually was only one minute… No, I suspend judgement, Phyl. We'll see The Times to-morrow and find out what really happened — if anyone knows.'

We drove on, making poorer time on the busier roads, stopped to lunch at the usual little hotel on Dartmoor, and finally arrived in the late afternoon — two hundred and sixty-eight point seven, this time. We were sleepy and hungry again, and though I did remember, when I telephoned London, to ask for cuttings on the sinking to be sent, the fate of the Yatsushiro on the other side of the world seemed as remote from the concerns of a small grey Cornish cottage as the loss of the Titanic.

The Times noticed the affair the next day in a cautious manner which gave an impression of the staff pursing their lips and staying their hands rather than mislead their readers in any way. Not so, however, the reports in the first batch of cuttings which arrived on the afternoon of the following day. We put the stack between us, and drew from it. Facts were evidently still meagre, but there was plenty of comment. My first read:

'Mystery still shrouds the fate of the ill-starred Japanese liner, Yatsushiro, which plunged to her doom bringing sudden death to all but five of her seven hundred passengers, including women and children, on Monday night off the southern islands of the Philippine group. No mystery of the sea since the still unsolved riddle of the Marie Celeste has presented more baffling queries…'

The next one read:

'It seems likely that the fate of the Yatsushiro may well take a place in the long list of unsolved mysteries of the sea. Nothing quite so unaccountable has occurred since the schooner, Marie Celeste, was discovered adrift with…'

And the next:

'Statements made by the five Japanese sailors, the only survivors of the Yatsushiro disaster, serve only to deepen the mystery surrounding the ship's fate. Why did she sink? How could she sink so swiftly? Answers to these questions may never be forthcoming, any more than they were to the questions posed by the mystery of the Marie Celeste which have eluded solution…'

And the next:

'Even in these modern times of radio, etc., the sea can still produce mysteries to defeat us. The loss of the liner, Yatsushiro, presents puzzles as baffling as any in the annals of navigation, and to all appearance no more likely to be satisfactorily explained than were the problems aroused by the famous Marie Celeste, which, it will be recalled…'

I reached for another.

It says here,' Phyllis broke in, looking at the cutting in her hand, with a slight frown: '"The tragic loss of the Yatsusbiro bids fair to rank high among the unsolved problems of the high seas. It is, in its way, only a little less baffling than the still unanswered questions posed by the famous Marie Celeste…"'

'Yes, darling,' I agreed.

And the one before said:' "A mystery even deeper than that surrounding the celebrated Marie Celeste veils the fate of the vanished Yatsushiro…" Wasn't the whole point about the Marie Celeste that she didn't sink?'

'Roughly — yes, darling.'

'Well, then what is all this about her for?'

'It is what is known as an "angle", darling. It means in translation, that nobody has the ghost of an idea why the Yatsushiro sank. Consequently she has been classified as a Mystery-of-the Sea. This gives her a natural affinity with other Mysteries-of-the-Sea, and the Marie Celeste was the only specific M-of-the-S that anyone could call to mind in the white heat of composition. In other words, they are completely stumped.'

'It's not worth looking through the rest, then?'

'Scarcely. But we'd better. I'd like to know if anybody is speculating — and if not, why not? We can't be the only people who are putting two and two together. So just keep an eye out for guesses.'

She nodded, and we went on working through the pile, learning more about the Marie Celeste than we did about the Yatsushiro. There was only one check. Phyllis gave a 'Ha' of discovery.

'This one's different,' she said. 'Listen! "The full story behind the sinking of the Japanese vessel Yatsushiro, is not likely to be revealed. This luxury liner, lavishly decorated and furnished, was built in Japan, with capital emanating largely from Wall Street, at a time when the gap between uncontrolled wage-levels and the rising cost of living for the Japanese worker —" Oh, I see.'

'What do they work round to?' I asked.

She skimmed the rest. 'I don't think they do. There's just a kind of all through suggestion that it was too contaminated by capital to keep afloat.'

'Well, that's the only theory out of this lot,' I said. 'All got a strong dose of not-before-the-children this time. And not altogether surprising, seeing the hell the advertisers raised over the last global panic they pulled. But they're going to have to do better than this skulking behind the Marie Celeste; you can't just proclaim a thing a Mystery-of-the-Sea and stop all theories for long. For one thing, the more intelligent weeklies haven't such sensitive advertisers. Somehow I can't see Tribune or the —'

Phyllis cut me off:

'Mike, this isn't a game, you know. After all, a big ship has gone down, and seven hundred poor people have been drowned. That is a terrible thing. I dreamt last night that I was shut up in one of those little cabins when the water came bursting in,'

'Yesterday — ' I began, and then stopped. I had been about to say that yesterday Phyllis had poured a kettle of boiling water down a crack in order to kill a lot more than seven hundred ants, but thought better of it. 'Yesterday,' I amended, 'a lot of people were killed in road accidents, a lot will be to-day.'

'I don't see what that has to do with it,' she said.

She was right. It was not a very good amendment — but neither had it been the right moment to postulate the existence of a menace that might think no more of us than we of ants.

'As a race,' I said, 'we have allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the idea that the proper way to die is in bed. at a ripe age. It is a delusion. The normal end for all creatures comes suddenly. The —'

But that wasn't the right thing to say at that time, either. She withdrew, using those short, brisk, hard-on-the-heel steps. I was sorry. I was worried, too, but it takes me differently.

I was evidently not alone in thinking that a solution would have to be provided. The next day, it was. Almost every newspaper explained it, and on Friday the weeklies elaborated it. It could be compressed into two words — metal-fatigue.

Certain new alloys recently developed in Japanese laboratories had, it seemed, been used, for the first time on any considerable scale, in the construction of the Yatsushiro. Metallurgical experts conceded it as not impossible that some, or one, of these alloys might, if the ship's engines were to produce vibrations of a certain critical periodicity, become fatigued, and therefore brittle. A fracture of one member so affected would throw on others a sudden strain which, in their weakened state, they might be unable to take. Thus, the collapse of susceptible members might be rapidly successive and conducive to speedy disintegration of the whole. Or, one might put it that the whole ship was ready to fall apart at the drop of a hat.

This could not, at the moment, be positively established as the sole cause of the disaster since detailed examination of the structure was at present precluded by circumstances. Or, again, five or six miles of water.

It had been decided, however, that all work on the Yatsushiro's sister-ship, now on the stocks, would be suspended pending the application of exhaustive tests regarding the crystalline structure of the alloys intended for use in her construction.

'Ah! The blinding light of science,' I said after reading several closely similar versions in different papers. 'A bit hard on that shipyard, and not, perhaps, very consoling to the relatives, but a pretty piece of work, all the same. So reassuring for all the rest of us. Observe the nicer points: not just general metal-fatigue, nor even weld-fatigue, which might alarm people about welded ships in general; no, just the fatigue of an unspecified alloy or two used in one Japanese ship. No other ship is likely to suffer from this deciduous complaint: no need for the sea-faring public to feel the least concern lest any other ship should get a touch of this ague and shake itself to bits. And the sea …? Nothing to do with it. The sea is as safe as ever it was.'

'But it could be so, couldn't it?' said Phyllis.

'That's the beauty of it. It had to be something that could be — if only just. And I think they'll very likely get away with it. The general public will take it, and the technical men won't stand to gain anything by contesting it — in public, anyway.'

'I'd like to believe it,' said Phyllis. 'I think I even might, if I hadn't given myself to a cynic — and, of course, if the thing hadn't happened to happen just where it did.'

I pondered.

'I imagine,' I said, 'that marine insurance rates will be pegged at the moment, to preserve confidence — but we ought to keep an eye on the prices of shipping shares.'

Phyllis got up and went to the window. From where she stood, at the side of it, she had a view of the blue water stretching to the horizon.

'Mike,' she said, 'I'm sorry about yesterday. The thing — this ship going down like that — suddenly got me. Until now this has been a sort of guessing game, a puzzle. Losing the bathyscope with poor Wiseman and Trant was bad, and so was losing the naval ships. But this — well, it suddenly seemed to put it into a different category — a big liner full of ordinary, harmless men, women, and children peacefully asleep, to be wiped out in a few seconds in the middle of the night! It's somehow a different class of thing altogether. Do you see what I mean? Naval people are always taking risks doing their jobs — but these people on a liner hadn't anything to do with it. It made me feel that those things down there had been a working hypothesis that I had hardly believed in, and now, all at once, they had become horribly real. I don't like it, Mike. I suddenly started to feel afraid. I don't quite know why.'

I went over and put an arm round her.

'I know what you mean,' I said. 'I think it is part of it — the thing is not to let it get us down.'

She turned her head. 'Part of what?' she asked, puzzled.

'Part of the process we are going through — the instinctive reaction. The idea of an alien intelligence here is intolerable to us, we must hate and fear it. We can't help it — even our own kind of intelligence when it goes a bit off the rails in drunks and crazies alarms us not very rationally.'

'You mean I'd not be feeling quite the same way about it if I knew that it had been done by — well, the Chinese, or somebody?'

'Do you think you would?'

'I — I'm not sure.'

'Well, for myself, I'd say I'd be roaring with indignation. Knowing that it was somebody hitting well below the belt, I'd at least have a glimmering of who, how, and why, to give me focus. As it is, I've only the haziest impressions of the who, no idea about the how, and a feeling about the why that makes me go cold inside, if you really want to know.'

She pressed her hand on mine.

'I'm glad to know that, Mike. I was feeling pretty lonely yesterday.'

'My protective coloration isn't intended to deceive you, my sweet. It is intended to deceive me.'

She thought.

'I must remember that,' she said, with an air of extensive implication that I am not sure I have fully understood yet.

One of the grubs in the raspberry at Rose Cottage was that our guests almost invariably arrived in the middle of the night, having (a) over-estimated the average speed they would maintain, (b) spent longer over dinner on the way than they had intended, (c) developed in the course of the last few miles a compulsion towards bacon and eggs.

Harold and Tuny were no exception. Two-ten a.m. on Saturday was the time when I heard their car draw up. I went out into the moonlight and found Harold pulling things out of the boot, while Tuny who had not been there before looked about her with a doubtful expression which cleared somewhat as she recognized me.

'Oh, it is the right place,' she said. 'I was just telling Harold it couldn't be because —'

'I'm sorry,' I apologized, 'we shall really have to grow some. Everybody expects it of us — except the natives.'

'I've explained,' said Harold, 'but she won't have it.'

'All you kept on saying was that in Cornwall rose doesn't mean rose.'

'It doesn't,' I told her, 'it means "heath".'

'Well, then I don't see why you don't call it Heath Cottage, to make it plainer.'

'Let's go inside,' I suggested, laying hold of a case.

Wondering why one's friends chose to marry the people they did is unprofitable, but recurrent. One could so often have done so much better for them. For instance, I could think of three girls who would have been better for Harold, in their different ways; one would have pushed him, another would have looked after him, the third would have amused him. It is true that they were none of them quite as decorative as Tuny, but that's not — well, it's something like the difference between the room you live in and the one at the Ideal Home Exhibition. However, there it was, and, as Phyllis said, a girl who makes good with a name like Petunia must at least have something her parents didn't have.

The bacon and eggs made their appearance. Tuny admired the plates, which were part of a set that we had found in Milan, and presently she and Phyllis were well away. After a while I asked Harold how the metal-fatigue theory was going down. He held a public-relations job with a large engineering firm, so he'd be likely to know. He looked at me, and gave a quick glance at Tuny who was still chatting china.

'It's not pleasing our people a lot,' he said, briefly, and then switched over to telling me of some minor noise that his car had developed on the way down.

Untraceable noises in other people's cars tend to bore: this one was so mysterious in its habits that I suggested that we put it down to metal-fatigue, and leave it at that until the morning, at least. Across the table, Tuny caught the phrase. She gave a — well, there used to be something called a 'tinkling laugh'; this was probably it.

'Metal-fatigue!' she repeated, and tinkled again.

Harold said hurriedly: 'We were talking about the funny noise the car was making, dear.' Tuny paid him no attention.

'Metal-fatigue!' she repeated.

Since there is nothing intrinsically funny in metal-fatigue, we judged that her amusement was the kind that invites inquiry. In our lack of response we were not being wilfully unkind, merely contra-suggestible; besides, it was ten minutes to three a.m. Harold pushed back his chair.

'It's been a pretty long run,' he said, 'I think —' But Tuny was not to be stalled.

'Oh, my dears,' she said, 'you don't mean to say that people down here really believe all that stuff about metal-fatigue?'

I caught Phyllis's surprised eye. I was somewhat taken aback myself. Earlier I had been saying that it was well done, and that the general public would believe it because they would prefer to believe it. Now here was Tuny confuting me almost at once. I glanced at Harold who was looking at his plate. He would not, I decided, be the one who had enlightened Tuny. She belonged irretrievably to the class of woman who believes from the church-door that, having let her bring it off, her man must be a mental weakling, and that any views he may put forward should be treated accordingly.

'Why not?' asked Phyllis. 'There's nothing very new about the idea of metal-fatigue.'

'Of course not,' Tuny agreed, 'that's where they are being clever in putting this out. I mean, it's the kind of thing lots of quite sensible people will fall for,' she added kindly. 'But in this case it's all quite phoney, of course.'

I was about to speak when a look from Phyllis quenched me. It was the kind of look I sometimes get when she is doing her stuff.

'But it's practically official. It's in all the papers,' she said.

'Oh, my dear, surely you don't believe official statements any more,' said Tuny, indulgently. 'Of course they had to make some kind of statement, or else do something about it. And it being only a Japanese steamer made a difference. But it's pretty much like Munich over again.'

'Oh, come, I'd not go as far as that,' said Phyllis in mild expostulation, while I was still wondering how on earth we had arrived at Munich.

'Near enough,' Tuny told her, 'if they can do it once and have the whole thing explained away for them, they'll just be encouraged to do it again, and go on doing it. The only proper way of dealing with it is to take a firm stand. It's simply no good appeasing and dodging. We ought to have called their bluff months and months ago.'

'Bluff?' repeated Phyllis, raising her eyebrows.

'All this story about things in the sea, and those balloon things, and all that silly stuff about Martians, and so on.'

'Martians?' Phyllis said, bemusedly.

'Well, Neptunians — it's the same sort of thing. The rubbish that that Bocker man put about. I can't think why he wasn't arrested long ago. I happen to know from somebody who used to know him that he joined the Party when he first went up to the University, and of course he's been working for them ever since. He didn't invent it, I don't mean that. No, the whole thing was thought up in Moscow, and they just used him to put it across because he was influential. And he did it very well — that story about the things in the sea was all over the world, and a whole lot of people believed it for a bit, but of course he's quite done for now. That doesn't matter to them, they do that to people. He was just wanted to lay a foundation, you see.'

We had begun to see.

'But the Russians tried to explode the idea. They said at the time it was just a smokescreen to cover the preparations of warmongers,' I pointed out.

'That,' said Tuny, 'wasn't even subtle. It's their regular technique to get in the first accusation against someone else of what they are doing themselves.'

'You mean that the whole thing has been engineered by them right from the beginning?' asked Phyllis.

'But of course,' Tuny told her. 'Quite a long time ago now they had their first try with the flying-saucers, but that didn't come off because most people didn't believe in them, and nobody was really scared. So this time they improved it. First they sent out the red balloons to puzzle people. Then there was all this business about the bottom of the sea that Bocker helped to spread, and to make that more convincing they cut cables, and even sank a few ships —'

'Er — what with?' I inquired.

'With these new midget submarines of theirs, of course; the same kind that they used on this Japanese ship. And now they'll just be able to go on sinking ships because once people have seen through this metal-fatigue business they'll just say it's being done by the Bocker things in the sea. As long as people believe that, there'll be no popular backing for reprisals.'

'So the metal-fatigue idea was just put about to keep people quiet?' Phyllis asked.

'Exactly,' Tuny agreed. 'The Government doesn't want to admit that it's the Russians, because then there would be a demand that they should take action, and they can't afford to do that with all the Red influence there is. But if they officially pretend to think it's these Bocker things, well, then they'd have to pretend, too, that they were doing something about that, and that'd make them look pretty silly later when it is all exploded. So this is their way out, and as it's only a Japanese ship it's all right — for the moment. But it won't last long. We can't afford to have the Russians getting away with this kind of thing. People are starting to demand a strong line, and no more appeasement.'

'People —?' I put in.

'People in Kensington — and some other places,' Tuny explained.

Phyllis looked thoughtful as she collected the plates.

'It's shocking how out of touch one gets in a little place like this,' she said, with a slightly apologetic air, and for all the world as if she had been immured in Rose Cottage for several years.

Harold choked a little, and coughed. Then he yawned largely.

'More fresh air than I'm used to,' he explained, and helped to break the party up by carrying out the plates.

In the course of the week-end we learnt more about Russian intentions, though their reasons for sinking a harmless passenger-liner never emerged very clearly. The Sunday papers all had articles, informative in different degrees, on metal-fatigue, and Tuny had a nice day reading them with the smile of a cognoscenta.

Whatever might be the opinion in Kensington, and the lesser Kensingtons of other towns, it was clear that the official theory was being well received in Cornwall. The public bar of The Pick in Penllyn had its own expert on the crystalline structure of metals, with several tales to tell of mysterious collapses of mine machinery which could be attributed to nothing but brittleness induced by prolonged vibration. All old miners, he said, had known this by instinct, long before the scientists got at it. And also, since matters of the sea are of perennial interest to all Cornishmen, heads were knowledgeably shaken over the behaviour of certain Liberty-ships.

Harold looked a little worried as we left there to walk back to the cottage.

'I can see a busy time ahead,' he said, gloomily. 'Months of writing stuff to prove that none of our products can possibly suffer from metal-fatigue.'

'What's it matter? They'll have to use your products,' I said.

'Yes, but all our competitors will be saying how their goods aren't affected by it, so it'll look bad if we don't do the same. I'll have to put in for an extra allocation,' he grumbled. 'If only the damned ship had turned turtle nobody would have been greatly surprised, seeing its nationality, and there'd have been no need for all this. What's more,' he added, 'there's such a lot of trouble for so little result. A good many million people may be lapping it up, but it isn't going home in the places that matter. How much of that is due to Tuny's friends with their usual universal political solvent, and how much to other causes, I wouldn't know, but the fact remains that the number of passage-cancellations has risen well above average, and the number of extra airline bookings about balances it. Also, do you happen to have noticed the shipping shares?'

I said that I had.

'Well, that isn't good. It wouldn't be Tuny's friends selling just now. It points to a number of people who aren't satisfied with the metal-fatigue or the red-menace explanations.'

'Well, are you?' I asked.

'No, of course not, but that isn't the point. I'm not the kind of fellow who can make a difference to the price of shipping shares. The chaps who can are influential: if they start a scare, people start cancelling orders, and trade bogs down. It doesn't matter a hoot whether there are things at the bottom of the sea or not. What does matter is if people swing back to thinking there are — if they do, we'll have a worse trade recession than last time.' He paused. Then he added: 'And you people haven't helped a lot, either.'

'We've not been doing world-trade a lot of harm lately,' I told him. 'We've not had the chance. I don't say we haven't got a few scripts up our sleeves against the day when truth shall be more important than world-trade, but for the last few months now not a word about those things down there has gone out from any of our transmitters; the sponsors don't like it —'

'Good for them,' interrupted Harold.

' — any more than the advertisers liked mention of Hitler when we were on the brink of World War II,' I concluded.

'Implying — just what?' asked Harold.

'Well, roughly, that if you do happen to have any money in shipping, I should take it out, and put it into aircraft.'

Harold gave a disapproving grunt.

'I know you and Phyl have been specializing in this thing and following it along. What you've learnt seems to have convinced you — but have you any solution?'

I shook my head.

'Well, then, what good do you think you'll do to anybody by simply broadcasting: "Woe! Woe!"? All that happened in that scare after the first atomic depth-bomb was that a lot of people were worried, trade fell off, and everyone suffered, to no purpose. And then it took a lot of work to get them all soothed down again. If there is anything in it, then let them worry when they have to, but leave them in peace till then.'

'If — !' I repeated. 'What do you suppose sank that ship, Harold? When did any good come of burying your head in the sand?'

'It's safer for my neck than sticking it out,' said Harold, rather pleased with himself.

I found that Phyllis, when I recounted the gist of the conversation to her later, took a not dissimilar view.

'If we had come across a single practicable suggestion for countering the things it would have been worth campaigning for it, but we haven't,' she said. 'All my life I have been surrounded by things I'd rather not know too much about, so I have come to feel that truth made naked without purpose is really a wanton. It — I say, that was rather good, wasn't it? Where did I put my notebook?'

Tuny and Harold duly departed, and we settled again to our tasks — Phyllis to the search for something which had not already been said about Beckford of Fonthill. I, to the less literary occupation of framing a series on royal love-matches, to be entitled provisionally either, The Heart of Kings, or, Cupid Wears a Crown.

A pleasant month followed. The outer world intruded little. Phyllis finished the Beckford script, and two more, and picked up the threads of the novel that never seemed to get finished. I went steadily ahead with the task of straining the royal love-lives free from any political contaminations, and writing an article or two in between, to clear the air a bit. On days that we thought were too good to be wasted we went down to the coast and bathed, or hired a sailing dinghy. The newspapers forgot about the Yatsusbiro. Local parlance had adopted the term metal-fatigue as a useful cover for various misfortunes, and the terms china-fatigue and glass-fatigue were becoming current conveniences; The deep-sea, and all our speculations concerning it, seemed very far away.

Then, on a Wednesday night, the nine o'clock bulletin announced that the Queen Anne had been lost at sea

The report was very brief. Simply the fact, followed by: 'No details are available as yet, but it is feared that the list of the missing may prove to be very heavy indeed.' There was silence for fifteen seconds, then the announcer's voice resumed: 'The Queen Anne, the current holder of the Transatlantic record, was a vessel of ninety thousand tons displacement. She was built —'

I leant forward, and switched off. We sat looking at one another. Tears came into Phyllis's eyes. The tip of her tongue appeared, wetting her lips.

'The Queen Anne! Oh, God!' she said.

She searched for a handkerchief.

'Oh, Mike. That lovely ship!'

I crossed to sit beside her, and put my arm round her. For the moment she was seeing simply the ship as we had last seen her, putting out from Southampton. A creation that had been somewhere between a work of art and a living thing, shining and beautiful in the sunlight, moving serenely out towards the high seas, leaving a flock of little tugs bobbing behind. But I knew enough of her to realize that in a few minutes she would be on board, dining in the fabulous restaurant, or dancing in the ballroom, or up on one of the decks, watching it happen, feeling what they must have felt there. I put my other arm round her, and held her closer.

I am thankful that such imagination as I, myself, have is more prosaic, and seated further from the heart.

Half an hour later the telephone rang. I answered it, and recognized the voice with some surprise.

'Oh, hullo, Freddy. What is it?' I asked, for nine-thirty in the evening was not a time that one expected to be called by the EBC's Director of Talks & Features.

'Good. 'Fraid you might be out. You've heard the news?'

'Yes.'

'Well, we want something from you on this deep-sea menace of yours, and we want it quick. Half-hour length.'

'But, look here, the last thing I was told was to lay off any hint —'

'This has altered all that. It's a must, Mike. You don't want to be too sensational, but you do want to be convincing. Make 'em really believe there is something down there.'

'Look here, Freddy, if this is some kind of leg-pull —'

'It isn't. It's an urgent commission.'

'That's all very well, but for over a year now I've been regarded as the dumb coot who can't let go of an exploded crackpot theory. Now you suddenly ring me at about the time when a fellow might have made a fool bet at a party, and say —'

'Hell, I'm not at a party. I'm at the office, and likely to be here all night.'

'You'd better explain,' I told him.

'It's like this. There's a rumour running wild here that the Russians did it. Somebody launched that one off within a few minutes of the news coming through on the tape. Why the hell anybody'd think they would want to start anything that way, heaven knows, but you know how it is when people are emotionally worked up; they'll swallow anything for a bit. My own guess is that it is the let's-have-a-showdown-now school of thought seizing the opportunity, the damn fools. Anyway, it's got to be stopped. If it isn't, there might be enough pressure worked up to force the Government out, or make it send an ultimatum, or something. So stopped it's damned well going to be. Metal-fatigue isn't good enough this time, so the line is to be your deep-sea menace. To-morrow's papers are using it, the Admiralty is willing to play, we've got several big scientific names already, the BBC's next bulletin, and ours, will have good strong hints in order to start the ball roiling, the big American networks have started already, and some of their evening editions are coming on the streets with it. So if you want to put in your own pennyworth towards stopping the atom bombs falling, get cracking right away.'

'Okay. A half-hour feature. What angle?'

'It's to be a topical-special. Serious, but not blood-curdling. Not too technical. Intelligent man-in-the-street stuff. Above all, convincing. I suggest the line: Here is a menace more serious and more quickly developed than we had expected. A blow that has found us as unprepared as the Americans were at Pearl Harbour, but men of science are mobilizing already to give us the means to hit back, et cetera. Cautious but confident optimism. Okay?'

'I'll try — though I don't know what the optimism is to be founded on.'

'Never mind about that; just express it. Your primary job is to help fix the thing in their minds as a fact, so that it keeps out this anti-Russian nonsense. Once that is well established we can find ways to keep it going.'

'You think you'll need to?' I asked.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, after the Yatsu, and now this, it looks to me as if the things may have gone over to the offensive, and these won't be the only ones to suffer.'

'I'd not know about that. The thing is, will you get down to this right away? When you're through, ring us, and we'll have a recorder fixed ready for you. You'll give us a free hand to fiddle it around as necessary? The BBC are sure to have something along pretty similar lines.'

'Okay, Freddy. You shall have it,' I agreed, and hung up.

'Darling,' I said, 'work for us.'

'Oh, not to-night, Mike. I couldn't…'

'All right,' I said 'but it's work for me.' I handed on what Freddy Whittier had just told me. 'It looks,' I went on, 'as if the best way would be to decide the thesis and the style and approach, and then rake together the bits out of old scripts that will suit it. The devil of it is that most of the scripts and all the data are in London.'

'We can remember enough. It doesn't have to be intellectual — in fact, it mustn't,' Phyllis said. She thought for some moments. 'We've got all that organized scoffing to break down,' she added.

'If the papers really do their stuff to-morrow morning it ought to be cracked a bit. Our job is pressing home what they will have started.'

'But we need a line. The first thing people are going to ask is: "If this thing is so serious, why has nothing been done, and why have we been hoodwinked?" Well, why?'

I considered.

'I don't think that need be too difficult. Viz: the sober, sensible people of the West would have reacted wisely, and no doubt will; but the more emotional and excitable peoples elsewhere have less predictable reactions. It was therefore decided as a matter of policy that the Service Chiefs and scientists who have been studying the trouble should preserve discretion in the hope that it might be scotched before it became serious enough to cause public alarm. How's that?'

'Um — yes. As good as we're likely to get,' she agreed.

'Then we can use Freddy's unpreparedness angle as a challenge — the brains of the world getting together and turning the full force of modern science and technique on to the job of avenging the loss, and preventing any more. A duty to those who have been lost, and a crusade to make the seas safe.'

'That's what it is, Mike,' Phyllis said, quietly, and with a reproving note.

'Of course it is, darling. Why do you so often think that I say what I say by accident?'

'Well, you start off as if truth is going to be the first casualty, as usual, and then end up like that. It's kind of bewildering.'

'Never mind, my Sweet. I intend to write it the right way. Now, you run up to bed, and I'll get on with it.'

'To bed? What on earth —?'

'Well, you said you couldn't —'

'Don't be absurd, darling. Do you think I'm going to let you loose on this on your own? Now, which of us had the atlas last…?'

It was eleven o'clock the next morning when I made my mazy way into the kitchen and subconsciously got together coffee and toast and boiled eggs, and fumbled back upstairs with them.

It had been after five that morning when I had finished dictating our combined work in the recording machine in London, by which time we had both been too tired to know whether it was good or bad, or to care.

Phyllis lit a cigarette to accompany the second cup of coffee.

'I think,' she suggested, 'that we had better go into Falmouth this morning.'

So to Falmouth we went, and, in the course of duty, visited four of the most popular bars in that port.

Freddy Whittier had not exaggerated the need for swift action. The rumour of Russian responsibility for the loss of the Queen Anne was tentatively about already; noticeably stronger among the double-scotches than among the pints of beer. There could have been little doubt that it would have swept the field but for the unanimity with which the morning papers had laid responsibility on the things down below. In the circumstances, their solidarity succeeded in producing an impression that the anti-Russian talk must be an entirely local product sponsored by a few well-known local diehards and fire-eaters.

That did not mean, however, that the deep-sea menace was fully accepted. Too many people could recall their first uncritical alarm, followed by their swing to derision, to be able to make the new volte-face all at once. But the serious views in the morning's leaders had got as far as damping the derision and causing many to wonder whether there might not have been something in it after all. It looked to me as if, assuming that we had a fair sample, the first objective had been reached: the danger of a concerted popular demand for war on the wrong enemy had been averted. Undoing the effects of a year or more's propaganda, and establishing the reality of an enemy that could not even be described, were matters for steady perseverance.

'To-morrow,' said Phyllis, knocking back the fourth gin-and-lime occasioned by our researches, 'I think we ought to go back to London. You must have quite enough of those morganatic marriages in the bag to be going on with, and there'll probably be quite a lot of work for us to do on this business.' It was only in expressing the idea that she had forestalled me.

The next morning we made our customary early start.

When we arrived at the flat, and switched on the radio, we were just in time to hear of the sinkings of the aircraft-carrier Meritorious, and the liner Carib Princess.

The Meritorious, it will be recalled, went down in mid-Atlantic, eight hundred miles south-west of the Cape Verde Islands: the Carib Princess not more than twenty miles from Santiago de Cuba: both sank in a matter of two or three minutes, and from each very few survived. It is difficult to say whether the British were the more shocked by the loss of a brand-new naval unit, or the Americans by their loss of one of their best-found cruising liners with her load of wealth and beauty: both had already been somewhat stunned by the Queen Anne, for in the great Atlantic racers there was community of pride. Now, the language of resentment differed, but both showed the characteristics of a man who has been punched in the back in a crowd, and is looking round, both fists clenched, for someone to hit.

The American reaction appeared more extreme for, in spite of the violent nervousness of the Russians existing there, a great many found the idea of the deep-sea menace easier to accept than did the British, and a clamour for drastic, decisive action swelled up, giving a lead to a similar clamour at home.

In a pub off Oxford Street I happened across the whole thing condensed. A medium-built man who might have been a salesman in one of the large stores was putting his views to a few acquaintances.

'All right,' he said, 'say for the sake of argument they're right, say there are these whatsits at the bottom of the sea: then what I want to know is why we're not getting after 'em right away? What do we pay for a navy for? And we've got atom bombs, haven't we? Well, why don't we go out to bomb 'em to hell before they get up to more trouble? Sitting down here and letting 'em think they can do as they like isn't going to help.

Show 'em, is what I say, show 'em quick, and show 'em proper. Oh, thanks; mine's a light ale.'

Somebody raised the question of poisoning the ocean.

'Well, damn it, the sea's big enough. It'll get over it. Anyway, you could use H.E., too,' he suggested.

Somebody else agreed that the size of the sea was a point: indeed, there was an awful lot of it for games of blind man's buff. The first man wouldn't have that.

'They said the Deeps,' he pointed out. 'They've kept on talking about the Deeps. Then, for God's sake why don't they get cracking right away, and sock the Deeps good and hard. They do know where they are, anyway. Who bought this one? Here's luck.'

'I'll tell you why, chum,' said his neighbour, 'if you want to know. It's because the whole thing's a lot of bloody eyewash, that's why. Things in the frickin' Deeps, for crysake! Horse-marines, Dan Dare, and bloody Martians! Look, tell me this: we lose ships, the Yanks lose ships, the Japs lose ships — but do the Russians lose ships? Do they hell — and I'd like to know why not'

Somebody suggested that it might be because the Russians hadn't many ships, anyway.

Somebody else remembered that away back at the time when the Keweenaw was lost the Russians had lost a ship, and not quietly, either.

'Ah,' said the complainant, 'but where are the independent witnesses? That's just the kind of camouflage you could expect from them.'

The feeling of the meeting, however, was not with him. But neither was it altogether with the first speaker. A third man seemed to talk for most of them when he said:

'You got to plan for it, like for anything else, I s'pose; but I must say — well, thanks, old man, just one for the road — I must say it'd make you feel easier to know somebody was really doing something about it.'

Probably it was in deference to similar views, more vigorously expressed, that the Americans decided to make the gesture of depth-bombing the Cayman Trench close to the point where the Carib Princess had vanished — they can scarcely have expected any decisive result from the random bombing of a Deep some fifty miles wide and four hundred miles long.

The occasion was well publicized on both sides of the Atlantic. American citizens were proud that their forces were taking the lead in reprisals: British citizens, though vocal in their dissatisfaction at being left standing at the post when the recent loss of two great ships should have given them the greater incentive to swift action, decided to applaud the occasion loudly, as a gesture of reproof to their own leaders. The flotilla of ten vessels commissioned for the task was reported as carrying a number of H.E. bombs specially designed for great depth, as well as two atomic bombs. It put out from Chesapeake Bay amid an acclamation which entirely drowned the voice of Cuba plaintively protesting at the prospect of atomic bombs on her doorstep.

None of those who heard the broadcast put out from one of the vessels as the task-force neared the chosen area will ever forget the sequel. The voice of the announcer when it suddenly broke off from his description of the scene to say sharply: 'Something seems to be — my God! She's blown up!' and then the boom of the explosion. The announcer gabbling incoherently, then a second boom. A clatter, a sound of confusion and voices, a clanging of bells. Then the announcer's voice again; breath short, sounding unsteady, talking fast:

'That explosion you heard — the first one — was the destroyer, Cavort. She has entirely disappeared. Second explosion was the frigate, Redwood. She has disappeared, too. The Redwood was carrying one of our two atomic bombs. It's gone down with her. It is constructed to operate by pressure at five miles depth

'The other eight ships of the flotilla are dispersing at full-speed to get away from the danger area. We shall have a few minutes to get clear. I don't know how long. Nobody here can tell me. A few minutes, we think. Every ship in sight is using every ounce of power to get away from the area before the bomb goes off. The deck is shuddering under us. We're going flat out… Everyone's looking back at the place where the Redwood went down…. Hey, doesn't anybody here know how long it'll take that thing to sink five miles…? Hell, somebody must know…. We're pulling away, pulling away for all we're worth…. All the other ships, too. All getting the hell out of it, fast as we can make it…. Anybody know what the area of the main spout's reckoned to be…? For crysake! Doesn't anybody know any damn thing around here…? We're pulling off now, pulling of…. Maybe we will make it…. Wish I knew how long…? Maybe…. Maybe…. Faster, now, faster, for heaven's sake…. Pull the guts out of her, what's it matter?… Hell, slog her to bits… Cram her along….

'Five minutes now since the Redwood sank…. How far'll she be down in five minutes…? For God's sake, somebody: How long does that damn thing take to sink…?

'Still going…. Still keeping going…. Still beating it for all we're worth…. Surely to heaven we must be beyond the main spout area by now…. Must have a chance now…. We're keeping it up…. Still going…. Still going flat out…. Everybody looking astern…. Everybody watching and waiting for it…. And we're still going…. How can a thing be sinking all this time…? But thank God it is… Over seven minutes now…. Nothing yet…. Still going…. And the other ships, with great white wakes behind them…. Still going…. Maybe it's a dud…. Or maybe the bottom isn't five miles around here…. Why can't somebody tell us how long it ought to take…? Must be getting clear of the worst now…. Some of the other ships are just black dots on white spots now. …. Still going…. We're still hammering away…. Must have a chance now. ... I guess we've really got a chance now. …. Everybody still staring aft…. Oh, God! The whole sea's —'

And there it cut off.

But he survived, that radio announcer. His ship and five others out of the flotilla often came through, a bit radio-active, but otherwise unharmed. And I understand that the first thing that happened to him when he reported back to his office after treatment was a reprimand for the use of over-colloquial language which had given offence to a number of listeners by its neglect of the Third Commandment.

That was the day on which argument stopped, and propaganda became unnecessary. Two of the four ships lost in the Cayman Trench disaster had succumbed to the bomb, but the end of the other two had occurred in a glare of publicity that routed the sceptics and the cautious alike. At last it was established beyond doubt that there was something — and a highly dangerous something, too — down there in the Deeps.

Such was the wave of alarmed conviction spreading swiftly round the world that even the Russians sufficiently overcame their national reticence to admit that they had lost one large freighter and one unspecified naval vessel, both, again, off the Kuriles, and one more survey craft off eastern Kamchatka. In consequence of this, they were, they said, willing to co-operate with other powers in putting down this menace to the cause of world Peace.

The following day the British Government proposed that an International Naval Conference should meet in London to make a preliminary survey of the problem. A disposition among some of those invited to quibble about the locale was quenched by the unsympathetically urgent mood of the public. The Conference assembled in Westminster within three days of the announcement, and, as far as England was concerned, none too soon. In those three days cancellations of sea-passages had been wholesale, overwhelmed air-line companies had been forced to apply priority schedules, the Government had clamped down fast on the sales of oils of all kinds, and was rushing out a rationing system for essential services, the bottom had dropped out of the shipping market, the price of many foodstuffs had doubled, and all kinds of tobacco had vanished under the counters.

On the day before the Conference opened Phyllis and I had met for lunch.

'You ought to see Oxford Street,' she said. 'Talk about panic-buying! Cottons particularly. Every hopeless line is selling out at double prices, and they're scratching one another's eyes out for things they wouldn't have been seen dead in last week. Every decent piece of stuff has disappeared, presumably into store for later on. It's a better picnic than any of the Sales.'

'From what they tell me of the City,' I told her, 'it's about as good there. Sounds as if you could get control of a shipping-Line for a few bob, but you couldn't buy a single share in anything to do with aircraft for a fortune. Steel's all over the place; rubbers are, too; plastics are soaring; distilleries are down; about the only thing that's holding its own seems to be breweries.'

'I saw a man and a woman loading two sacks of coffee-beans into a Rolls, in Piccadilly. And there were — ' She broke off suddenly as though what I had been saying had just registered. 'You did get rid of Aunt Mary's shares in those Jamaican Plantations?' she inquired, with the expression that she applies to the monthly housekeeping accounts.

'Some time ago,' I reassured her. 'The proceeds went, oddly enough, into aero-engines, and plastics.'

She gave an approving nod, rather as if the instructions had been hers. Then another thought occurred to her:

'What about the Press Tickets for to-morrow?' she asked.

'There aren't any for the Conference proper,' I told her. 'There will be a statement afterwards.'

She stared at me. Aren't any? For heaven's sake! What do they think they're doing?'

I shrugged. 'Force of habit, I imagine. They are planning a campaign. When you plan a campaign, you tell the Press as much as it is good for it to know, later on.'

'Well, of all the —'

'I know, darling, but you can't expect a Service to change its spots overnight.'

'It's absolutely silly. More like Russia every day. Where's the telephone in this place?'

'Darling, this is an International Conference. You can't just go —'

'Of course I can. It's sheer nonsense!'

'Well, whatever VIP you have in mind will be out at lunch now,' I pointed out.

That checked her for a moment. She brooded. 'I never heard of such rubbish. How do they expect us to do our job?' she muttered, and brooded some more.

When Phyllis said 'our job' the words did not connote exactly what they would have implied a few days before. The job had somehow changed quality under our feet. The task of persuading the public of the reality of the unseen, indescribable menace had turned suddenly into one of keeping up morale in the face of a menace which everyone now accepted to the point of panic. EBC ran a feature called News-Parade in which we appeared to have assumed, as far as we understood the position, the roles of Special Oceanic Correspondents, without being quite sure how it had occurred. In point of fact, Phyllis had never been on the EBC staff, and I had technically left it when I ceased, officially, to have an office there some two years before; nobody, however, seemed to be aware of this except the Accounts Department which now paid by the piece instead of by the month. We had been briefed together on this change to a morale-sustaining angle by a director who was clearly under the impression that we were a part of his staff. The whole situation was anomalous, but not unrewarding. All the same, there was not going to be much freshness of treatment in our assignment if we could get no nearer to the sources than official handouts. Phyllis was still brooding about it when I left her to go back to the office I officially didn't have in EBC.

She rang me up there about five.

'Darling,' she said, 'you have invited Dr Matet to dine with you at your club at seven-thirty to-morrow evening. I shall be there, too. I explained how it was, and he quite agreed that it was a lot of nonsense. I tried to get Captain Winters to come as well, as he's a friend of his — he thought it was a lot of nonsense, too, but he said the Service was the Service, and he'd better not come, so I'm having lunch with him to-morrow. You don't mind?'

'I don't quite see why the Service should be less the Service tete-a-tete,' I told her, 'but I appreciate the Matet move. So, darling, you may pat yourself on the back because this town must now be full of assorted ographers that he's not set eyes on for years.'

'He'll be seeing plenty of them by day,' Phyllis said, modestly.

This time there was no need for Phyllis to coax Dr Matet. He started off like a man with a mission, over sherries in the bar.

'The Service makes its own rules, of course,' he said, 'but no pledges were required from the rest of us, so I choose to regard myself as at liberty to discuss the proceedings — I think it's a duty to let people know all the main facts. You've heard the official pronouncement, of course?'

We had. It amounted to little more than advice to all shipping to keep clear of the major Deeps when possible, until further notice. One imagined that many masters would already have taken this decision for themselves, but now they would at least have official advice to quote in any argument with their owners.

'Not very specific,' I told him: 'One of our draughtsmen for television has produced a work of bathymetric — or do I mean hydrographic? — art showing areas over twenty thousand feet. Very pleased with it, he was, but last seen tearing his hair because someone had told him that it's not technically a Deep unless it's over twenty-five thousand.'

'For present purposes the danger area is being reckoned as anything over four thousand,' said Dr Matet.

'What? I exclaimed, wildly.

'Fathoms,' added Dr Matet.

'Twenty-four thousand feet, darling. You multiply by six,' said Phyllis, kindly. She ignored my thanks, and went on to Dr Matet:

'And what depth did you advise as marking the danger area, Doctor?'

'How do you know I did not advise four thousand fathoms, Mrs Watson?'

'Use of the passive, Doctor Matet — "is being reckoned,"' Phyllis told him, smiling sweetly.

'And there are people who claim that French is the subtle language,' he said. 'Well, I'll admit that I recommended that three thousand five hundred should be regarded as the safe maximum, but the shipping interests were all for keeping the extra distances involved as low as possible.'

'Isn't this supposed to be a Naval Conference?' Phyllis asked.

'Oh, they have the real say on strategy, of course, but this was in the first general session. And, anyway, the Navies agreed. You see, the more sea they declare unsafe, the worse it is for their prestige.'

'Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Is it going to be one of those Conferences?' said Phyllis.

'Less so than most, I hope,' Dr Matet replied.

We went in to dinner. Phyllis prattled lightly through the soup, and then steered gracefully back to the topic.

'The first time I came to see you was about that ooze that was coming up into currents — and you were dreadfully careful. What did you really think then?'

He smiled. 'The same as I think now — that if you get yourself made a kind of mental outlaw, you also make your purposes very much harder to attain. Poor old Bocker — though everybody's had to come round to accepting the second part of his contention now, yet he's still out beyond the Pale. I could not afford to say it, but I believed then that he was right about the mining. One could think of nothing else that would account for it, so, as the genius of Baker Street once remarked to your husband's namesake —'

I headed him off: 'But you didn't want to join Bocker in the wilderness.'

'I did not. Nor have I been by any means the only one. Bocker's miscarriage warned us all to allow full gestation. Incidentally, I suppose you know that there have been further discolorations of currents, and that those first discoloured have returned to normal?'

'Yes, Captain Winters told me. What do you think would cause that?' Phyllis asked, just as one might who had not immediately rung up Bocker the moment she heard it, to demand an explanation.

'Well, pursuing the mining theory, one would suggest that all the loose sediment near the scene of operations would gradually be washed away. Imagine sticking the end of a suction-pipe into sand. At first you'd get sand coming through it, and you'd create a funnel-shaped depression. After a while you'd reach rock, but there'd still be some sand trickling down the sides of your depression, and having to be sucked clear. In time, however, your depression would be of such a shape that very little sand — which, of course, represents the sedimental ooze — would trickle down, and you would be able to work on the cleared rock-face without disturbing the surrounding sand, or ooze, at all.

'But, of course, on the sea-bed the scale of such an operation would be immense, and a colossal quantity of ooze would have to be shifted before you could get to a rock-face that would remain clear. It would certainly be better to mine horizontally where possible. Once work on the rock itself had begun, the detritus would be too heavy to rise more than a few hundred feet before it began to settle, so the surface-water would no longer be discoloured.'

No one observing Phyllis's rapt attention would have suspected that she had already made use of this theory in a script.

'I see. You make it easy to understand, Doctor. Then the various discolorations will have enabled you to locate quite closely where this mining is going on?'

'With reasonable accuracy, I think,' he agreed. 'And so, of course, those spots become priority targets — in fact, to be honest, the only closely-localized targets, so far.'

'There'll be an attack on them, then? Soon?' Phyllis asked.

He shook his head. 'Not my side of things, but I imagine that any delay will be due simply to technical reasons. How much of the sea can we afford to poison with atomic weapons? Are we to risk ships on the task? Or how long will it take to construct a depth-bomb light enough for air transport? The others have been exceedingly heavy, you know. There must be quite a number of points of that kind.'

'And that is all we can do as a counter-attack?' said Phyllis.

'All that I have heard of,' Dr Matet told her, cautiously. 'The emphasis at the moment is naturally defensive, and on securing safety for ships. There again, that's not my department at all: I can only give you what I have picked up.' And he went on to do so.

It was generally agreed, it seemed, that ships were liable to two forms of attack (three forms if one included electrification, but this had occurred only to ships using cables at considerable depths for grappling or other purposes, and could be disregarded as far as the rest were concerned). Neither of these weapons was explosive: the explosions suffered by some of the ships were almost certainly due to their own boilers blowing up when the stokeholds were flooded, for there had been no similar explosions with the motor-vessels that had been lost.

One of the weapons appeared to be vibratory and capable of setting up sympathetic vibrations of such intensity in the attacked craft that she literally shook herself to pieces in a, minute or two. The other was less obscure in its nature, but even more puzzling in its capacity. It was undoubtedly some contrivance which attacked the hull below the waterline. There were several obvious ways in which a device could be made to do this: what was less comprehensible was its method of assault, since the rapidity with which its victims sank, the fact that the air trapped in the hull blew the decks upwards, and various other effects, all tended to suggest some instrument that was capable, not simply of holing a ship, but of something that must be very like slicing the bottom clean off her.

Even before the Conference had begun Bocker had suggested that these devices might be found to form strategic barrages, or minefields, about certain deep areas, and might very well be regarded as perimeter defences. There would, he pointed out, be no great difficulty in constructing a mechanism to lurk inertly at any predetermined depth, and become active only on the approach of a ship — that, indeed, had been the principle of both the acoustic and magnetic mines. But on the means by which it could be made to slice through the hull of a ship with, apparently, the efficiency of a wire through cheese, even Bocker had no suggestions to make.

No one had disagreed with this, in general, but neither had anyone as yet been able to amplify it. The suddenness and success of the attacks, the small numbers of the survivors and the loose quality of their accounts gave very little data.

'To my mind,' said Dr Matet, 'the important thing at the moment is to get across to the public that the danger is not incomprehensible, and so stop this silly panicking — for which we may blame the Stock Exchanges more than any other persons or institutions. The attack comes from an utterly unexpected direction, it is true, but, like any other, it can and will be met, and the sooner people can be made to realize that it is simply a matter of finding a counter to a new kind of weapon, the sooner they'll cool off. I gather your job is to cool them off, so that is why I decided to tell you all this. In a few days I imagine there will be quite full and frank reports from the various Committees that are now being set up — once they have been brought to realize that here, at least, is one war in which there are no enemy spies listening.' And on that note we parted.

Phyllis and I did our best during the next few days to play our part in putting across the idea of firm hands steady on the wheel, and of the backroom boys who had produced radar, asdic, and other marvels nodding confidently, and saying in effect: 'Sure. Just give us a few days to think, and we'll knock together something that will settle this lot!' There was a satisfactory feeling that confidence was gradually being restored.

Perhaps the main stabilizing factor, however, emerged from a difference of opinion on one of the Technical Committees.

General agreement had been reached that a torpedo-like weapon designed to give submerged escort to a vessel could profitably be developed to counter the assumed mine-form of attack. The motion was accordingly put that all should pool information likely to help in the development of such a weapon.

The Russian delegation demurred. Remote control of missiles, they pointed out, was, of course, a Russian invention in any case; moreover, Russian scientists, zealous in the fight for Peace, had already developed such control to a degree greatly in advance of that achieved by the capitalist-ridden science of the West. It could scarcely be expected of the Soviets that they should make a present of their discoveries to warmongers.

The Western spokesman replied that, while respecting the intensity of the fight for Peace and the fervour with which it was being carried on in every department of Soviet science, except, of course, the biological, the West would remind the Soviets that this was a conference of peoples faced by a common danger and resolved to meet it by co-operation.

The Russian leader responded frankly that he doubted whether, if the West had happened to possess a means of controlling a submerged missile by radio, such as had been invented by Russian engineers working under the inspiration of the world's greatest scientist, the late Josef Stalin, they would care to share such knowledge with the Soviet people.

The Western spokesman assured the Soviet representative, that since the West had called the Conference for the purpose of co-operation, it felt in duty bound to state that it had indeed perfected such a means of control as the Soviet delegate had mentioned.

Following a hurried consultation, the Russian delegate announced that if he believed such a claim to be true, he would also know that it could only have come about through theft of the work of Soviet scientists by capitalist hirelings. And, since neither a lying claim nor the admission of successful espionage showed that disinterest in national advantage which the Conference had professed, his delegation was left with no alternative but to withdraw.

This action, with its reassuring ring of normality, exerted a valuable tranquillizing influence.

Concerning the less easily comprehensible vibratory weapon, it was announced that experiments with damping devices and counter-vibration fields had been begun, and were already showing hopeful results. The Conference appointed a Research and Co-ordination Committee to work in conjunction with Unesco, another for Naval Co-ordination, a Standing Committee for Action, several lesser Committees, and adjourned itself, pro tem.

Amid the widespread satisfaction and resuscitating confidence, the voice of Bocker, dissenting, rose almost alone: It was late, he proclaimed, but it still might not be too late for some kind of pacific approach to be made to the sources of the disturbance. They had already been shown to possess a technology equal to, if not superior to, our own. In an alarmingly short time they had been able not only to establish themselves, but to produce the means of taking effective action for their self-defence. In the face of such a beginning one was justified in regarding their powers with respect, and, for his part, with apprehension.

The very differences of environment that they required made it seem unlikely that human interests and those of these xenobathetic intelligences need seriously overlap. Before it should be altogether too late, the very greatest efforts should be made to establish communication with them in order to promote a state of compromise which would allow both parties to live peacefully in their separate spheres.

Very likely this was a sensible suggestion — though whether the attempt would ever have produced the desired result is a different matter. In circumstances where there was no will whatever to compromise, however, the only evidence that his appeal had been noticed at all was that the word, 'xenobathetic', and a derived noun, 'xenobath', began to be used in print.

'More honoured in the dictionary than in the observance,' remarked Bocker, with some bitterness. 'If it is Greek words they are interested in, there are others — Cassandra, for instance.'

The decision to avoid crossing the greater Deeps proved wise. For several weeks not a ship was reported lost. The markets settled down, confidence became convalescent, and the passenger lists began to fill up again, though slowly. Delays and higher freight-rates were continuing effects, nevertheless there presently arose a disposition to feel that the long-suffering public had once again been stampeded by sensationalism, and the advertising departments of all journals threatened falling revenues unless a note of sprightly plerophory were maintained.

Meanwhile, the brains moiled in the backrooms, and after some four months the Admiralty were able to announce that when certain naval craft had been equipped with the new counter-devices a test would be held over the series of Deeps south of Cape Race, in the neighbourhood where the Queen Anne had been lost.

It is possible that the omission of the Press from the test-party was due to a lukewarm enthusiasm in demanding its rights. Certainly no representative of my acquaintance was genuinely burning to be included — or, it may have been that the authorities were disinclined to take greater risks than necessary. Whatever the cause, there was no correspondent further forward than the reserve ships. For first-hand accounts we had to depend on a somewhat inexpert running commentary, and the descriptions given later by the personnel of the test vessels.

Phyllis got herself an introduction to a young Lieutenant Royde, and worked on him. When he came back, we took him out to dinner, gave him some drinks, and listened.

'It turned out to be a piece of cake,' he assured us. 'Though, mind you, most of us were feeling pretty windy about it beforehand, and didn't mind admitting it.

'We all sailed together, and then hove-to some fifty miles short of the Deeps, and our party got its stuff all set up.

'The anti-vibration gadget is a bit wearing at first. In fact, anti- isn't quite the word I'd use because it sets up a constant hum which you can half-feel, half hear; but you get used to it after a time.

'The other gimmick is a tin fish that you sling overboard — a dolphin, they're calling it. It promptly makes away forward, and then settles down to travel about two hundred feet ahead of the ship at about five fathoms. It's under control, of course, but when it spots anything it flashes a signal on a screen, and goes for it automatically. What its spotting range is, how it spots, and just why it doesn't lash about and go for the parent ship isn't my pigeon. You'll have to ask the boffins if you want to know about that — but, in the rough, that's the way it works.

'Well, when it was all fixed, and the boffins had finished tearing round and testing everything in sight, we set off with the whole ship buzzing like a beehive and the dolphin leading the way, and none of us feeling too good in our bellies — anyway, I wasn't. Everybody wore jackets, and orders were for all personnel who hadn't duty below to keep on deck, just in case.

'For about three hours nothing happened, and the sea looked just like any other sea. Then, while we were wondering whether the whole thing was going to turn out phoney, a voice from the hailer said:

'"Number One dolphin away! Make ready Number Two dolphin!"

'The dolphin party had just time to get Number Two swung out when Number One got home. And did it get home! By the record, it contacted whatever it was after at around thirty-five fathoms. When it blew, what we saw was several acres of sea going up in the air off the port bow. We raised a bit of a cheer. The hailer came through with:

'"Lower away there Number Two dolphin. Stand by Number Three dolphin."

'Dolphin Number Two went down in her sling, and ran away forward, and they hitched Number Three's sling ready.

'There was a boffin standing by me, looking pretty pleased with himself. He said:

'"Well, whatever it was, there was some pressure there. A dolphin going up on its own has about a quarter the punch of that."

'We kept steady on the same course, all looking out like hawks now, though there wasn't anything to be seen. After about five minutes the hailer said:

'"Dolphin away! Make ready Number Three dolphin!"

'It didn't take so long this time before another lot of sea went

up with a woomph, and Number Three dolphin was lowered away.

'After that nothing happened for quite a while. Then the pitch of the humming that we'd got so used to that we didn't notice it began to change so that we did notice it. The boffin beside me gave a grunt and whipped back like a streak into a kind of float-off instrument-room they had rigged up on deck. You could feel a sort of trembling in the deck, and the humming kept on changing pitch, and everybody gave a hitch to his life-jacket, and got ready for something to happen.

'The thing that did happen was that Number Three dolphin way ahead of us blew up. It was a far smaller blow than the others had been, and they reckon it was just the vibrations that set her off. She certainly didn't go for anything. The hailer started to order out Number Four dolphin, and in the middle of that an excited boffin bounced out of the instrument-room and ordered the depth-charge-thrower to work. It lobbed off a couple of spherical containers which just sank. We kept on waiting for a couple of bangs until we realized that they weren't going to come. And that was roughly that.

'After a bit the humming settled down to what it had been before, and there was a noise of uproarious boffins slapping one another on the back in the instrument-room.

'We altered course to the north. About an hour later Number Four dolphin went up with a thundering good wham. The boffins, all of them pretty tight by this time, tumbled out on deck to cheer and sing Steamboat Bill, and that was about the end of it. We still had Number Five dolphin running serenely ahead of us when we reckoned we were clear of the area.'

A nice lad, Lieutenant Royde, but not, perhaps, a source of technical information. However, it was eye-witness stuff we were after. We knew in a general way how the 'dolphins' worked, and we had heard that the spheres launched by the mine-thrower were intended to home on the source of the vibrations, and were capable of reaching far greater depths than the dolphins. Even if it had been explained to us exactly how they did it we should probably not have understood.

The effects of the successful tests were immediate. There was an overwhelming demand for the defensive gear, and shipping shares began to rally. Freights, however, remained high. There was the cost of the gear to be covered, consumption of dolphins to be offset, and it would take some time before all cargo vessels could be equipped and revert to their normal courses. Meanwhile, the price of everything went up.

Progress in equipment was such, however, that six months later it was possible for London and Washington to speak optimistically. The Prime Minister announced to the House:

'The Battle of the Deeps has been won. Our ships, which we had to divert, are able once more to ply upon their usual courses.

'But we have seen before, and we must remember, that to win a battle is not of necessity to win a war. These menaces that have for a time played the highwayman upon our vital sea-lanes and caused us such grievous losses, these menaces still remain. And, as long as they remain, they are a potential danger.

'We cannot afford, therefore, any slackening of effort in combating them. We must use all our capacities and our wits to find out more, everything we can, about this peril that is lurking beneath our seas. For still, and in spite of the fact that we have won this battle, we know virtually nothing of it, save that it exists. No one — no one can describe these creatures — if creatures they are; no one, so far as we know, has ever seen them. To us, here in the sunlight, these creatures of the darkness and the depths, are still, anonymously and amorphously, "those things down there".

'When we know more about them, their nature, their strength, and, most importantly, their weaknesses: when, in fact, we have a full view of what we are about, then we shall be able to launch our attack upon this pestilence so that, with its utter destruction, our ships and our seamen shall be free to sail upon the high seas of the world facing only such perils as their gallant fathers faced before them.'

But, a month later, a dozen ships of various sizes were sunk in a week, four of them while attempting to rescue survivors of earlier disasters. The few men who were brought safely back could tell little, but from their accounts it appeared that the dolphins had operated successfully; the other gear for some reason had failed to prevent the ships shaking to pieces under their feet.

Official advice once more recommended that the neighbourhoods of all the greater Deeps should be avoided pending further investigations.

Hard on that, but with a significance that was not immediately recognized, came the news first from Saphira, and then from April Island.

Saphira, a Brazilian island in the Atlantic, lies a little south of the Equator and some four hundred miles south-east of the larger island of Fernando de Noronha. In that isolated spot a population of a hundred or so lived in primitive conditions, largely on its own produce, content to get along in its own way, and little interested in the rest of the world. It is said that the original settlers were a small party who, arriving on account of a shipwreck some time in the eighteenth century, remained perforce. By the time they were discovered they had settled to the island life and already become interestingly inbred. In due course, and without knowing or caring much about it, they had ceased to be Portuguese and become technically Brazilian citizens, and a token connexion with their foster-mother country was maintained by a ship which called at roughly six-monthly intervals to do a little barter.

Normally, the visiting ship had only to sound its siren, and the Saphirans would come hurrying out of their cottages down to the minute quay where their few fishing boats lay, to form a reception committee which included almost the entire population. On this occasion, however, the hoot of the siren echoed emptily back and forth in the little bay, and set the sea-birds wheeling in flocks, but no Saphiran appeared at the cottage doors. The ship hooted again, but still there was no sign of anyone making for the quay. There was no response whatever, save from the sea-birds.

The coast of Saphira slopes steeply. The ship was able to approach to within a cable's length of the shore, but there was nobody to be seen — nor, still more ominously, was there any trace of smoke from the cottages' chimneys.

A boat was lowered and a party, with the mate in charge, rowed ashore. They made fast to a ringbolt and climbed the stone steps up to the little quay. They stood there in a bunch, listening and wondering. There was not a sound to be heard but the cry of the sea-birds and the lapping of the water.

'Must've made off, the lot of 'em. Their boats's gone,' said one of the sailors, uneasily.

'Huh,' said the mate. He took a deep breath, and gave a mighty hail, as though he had greater faith in his own lungs than in the ship's siren.

They listened for an answer, but none came, save the sound of the mate's voice echoing faintly back to them across the bay.

'Huh,' said the mate again. 'Better take a look.'

The uneasiness which had come over the party kept them together. They followed him in a bunch as he strode towards the nearest of the small, stone-built cottages. The door was standing half-open. He pushed it back.

'Phew!' he said.

Several putrid fish decomposing on a dish accounted for the smell. Otherwise the place was tidy and, by Saphiran standards, reasonably clean. There were no signs of disorder or hasty packing-up. In the inner room the beds were made up, ready to be slept in. The occupant might have been gone only a matter of a few hours, but for the fish and the lack of warmth in the turf-fire ashes.

In the second and third cottages there was the same air of unpremeditated absence. In the fourth they found a dead baby in its cradle in the inner room. The party returned to the ship, puzzled and subdued.

The situation was reported by radio to Rio. Rio in its reply suggested a thorough search of the island. The crew started on the task with reluctance and a tendency to keep in close groups, but, as nothing fearsome revealed itself, gradually gained confidence.

On the second day of their three-day search they discovered a party of four women and six children in two caves on a hillside. All had been dead for some weeks, apparently from starvation. By the end of the third day they were satisfied that if there were any living person left, he must be deliberately in hiding. It was only then, on comparing notes, that they realized also that there could not be more than a dozen sheep and two or three dozen goats left out of the island's normal flocks of some hundreds.

They buried the bodies they had found, radioed a full report to Rio, and then put to sea again, leaving Saphira, with its few surviving animals, to the sea-birds.

In due course the news came through from the agencies and won an inch or two of space here and there. Two newspapers bestowed on Saphira the nickname of Marie Celeste Island, but failed at the time to inquire further into the matter.

The April Island affair was set in quite a different key, and might have continued undiscovered for some time but for the coincidence of official interest in the place.

The interest stemmed from the existence of a group of Javanese malcontents variously described as smugglers, terrorists, communists, patriots, fanatics, gangsters, or merely rebels who, whatever their true affiliations, operated upon a troublesome scale. In due course the Indonesian police had tracked them down and destroyed their headquarters, with which loss went much of the prestige which had enabled them to dominate and extort support from several square miles of territory. In the dispersal which resulted, most of the rank and file following melted swiftly away into more conventional occupations: but, for two dozen moving spirits with varying prices on their heads, disappearance was less easy.

In difficult terrain and with small forces at their disposal the Indonesian authorities did not pursue them, but awaited the arrival of the informer who, sooner or later, would be tempted by easy money. In the course of a few months several informers applied; none, however, collected the rewards, for on each occasion the government party arrived only to find that the outlaws had moved on. After several such expeditions, informing fell off. No more was heard of the trouble-makers, who seemed to have vanished for good.

About a year after the dispersal, a trading-steamer put in to Jakarta carrying a native who had an interesting tale to tell the authorities there. He came, it appeared, from April Island which lies south of the Sunda Strait, and at no great distance from the British possession of Christmas Island. According to him, April Island had been pursuing its normal and not very arduous life in its immemorial manner until some six months previously when a party of eighteen men had arrived in a small motor-vessel. They had immediately introduced themselves as the new administration of the island, taken charge of the only small radio transmitter, posted up new laws and regulations, ordered that houses should be built for them, and helped themselves to wives. After the salutary shooting of a few persons who raised objections, a regime of a severely feudal type set in and was, so far as the informant knew, still in operation. Possible trouble with infrequently visiting ships was forestalled by coralling a number of the inhabitants under the muzzles of rifles as hostages. This, since the invaders' trigger-fingers were well known to work with very slight provocation, had been effective, and the vessels had left again without suspecting that anything was amiss.

The informant himself had succeeded in hiding a canoe and getting away by night. He had been trying to reach the mainland in order to question the authenticity of this unpopular form of administration when he had been picked up by the steamer.

A few questions and his descriptions of the invaders satisfied the Jakarta authorities that they were once more on the track of their malcontents, and a small gunboat, flying the flag of the Indonesian Republic, was commissioned to deal with them.

In order to minimize the risk of a number of innocent people dying by the hostage technique the approach to April Island was made by night. Under starlight the gunboat stole stealthily into a little-used bay which was masked from the main village by a headland. There, a well-armed party, accompanied by the informant who was to act as their guide, was put ashore with the task of taking the village by surprise. The gunboat then drew off. moved a little way along the coast, and lay in lurk behind the point of the headland until the landing party should summon her to come in and dominate the situation.

Three-quarters of an hour had been the length of time estimated for the party's crossing of the isthmus, and then perhaps another ten or fifteen minutes for its disposal of itself about the village. It was, therefore, with concern that after only forty minutes had passed the men aboard the gunboat heard the first burst of automatic fire, succeeded presently by several more.

With the element of surprise lost, the Commander ordered full speed ahead, but even as the boat surged forward the sound of firing was drowned by a dull, reverberating boom. The crew of the gunboat looked at one another with raised eyebrows: the landing-party had carried no higher forms of lethalness than automatic rifles and grenades. There was a pause, then the automatic rifles started hammering again. This time, it continued longer in intermittent bursts until it was ended again by a similar boom.

The gunboat rounded the headland. In the dim light it was impossible to make out anything that was going on in the village two miles away. For the moment all there was dark. Then a twinkling broke out, and another, and the sound of firing reached them again. The gunboat, continuing at full speed, switched on her searchlight. The village and the trees behind it sprang into sudden miniature existence. No figures were visible among the houses. The only sign of activity was some froth and commotion in the water, a few yards out from the edge. Some claimed afterwards to have seen a dark, humped shape showing above the water a little to the right of it.

As close inshore as she dared go the gunboat put her engines astern, and hove-to in a flurry. The searchlight played back and forth over the huts and their surroundings. Everything Lit by the beam had hard lines, and seemed endowed with a curious glistening quality. The man on the Oerlikons followed the beam, his fingers ready on the triggers. The light made a few more slow sweeps and then stopped. It was trained on several sub-machine-guns lying on the sand, close to the water's edge.

A stentorian voice from the hailer called the landing-party from cover. Nothing stirred. The searchlight roved again, prying between the huts, among the trees. Nothing moved there. The patch of light slid back across the beach and steadied upon the abandoned arms. The silence seemed to deepen.

The Commander refused to allow landing until daylight. The gunboat dropped anchor. She rode there for the rest of the night, her searchlight making the village look like a stage-set upon which at any moment the actors might appear, but never did.

When there was full daylight the First Officer, with a party of five armed men, rowed cautiously ashore under cover from the ship's Oerlikons. They landed close to the abandoned arms, and picked them up to examine them. All the weapons were covered with a thin slime. The men put them in the boat, and then washed their hands clean of the stuff.

The beach was scored in four places by broad furrows leading from the water's edge towards the huts. They were something over eight feet wide, and curved in section. The depth in the middle was five or six inches; the sand at the edges was banked up a trifle above the level of the surrounding beach. Some such track, the First Officer thought, might have been left if a large boiler had been dragged across the foreshore. Examining them more closely he decided from the lie of the sand that though one of the tracks led towards the water, the other three undoubtedly emerged from it. It was a discovery which caused him to look at the village with increased wariness. As he did so, he became aware that the scene which had glistened oddly in the searchlight was still glistening oddly. He regarded it curiously for some minutes without learning more. Then he shrugged. He tucked the butt of his sub-machine-gun comfortably under his right arm, and slowly, with his eyes flicking right and left for the least trace of movement, he led his party up the beach.

The village was formed of a semi-circle of huts of various sizes fringing upon an open space, and as they drew closer the reason for the glistening look became plain. The ground, the huts themselves, and the surrounding trees, too, all had a thin coating of the slime which had been on the guns.

The party kept steadily, slowly on until they reached the centre of the open space. There they paused, bunched together, facing outwards, examining each foot of cover closely. There was no sound, no movement but a few fronds stirring gently in the morning breeze. The men began to breathe more evenly.

The First Officer removed his gaze from the huts, and examined the ground about them. It was littered with a wide scatter of small metal fragments, most of them curved, all of them shiny with the slime. He turned one over curiously with the toe of his boot, but it told him nothing. He looked about them again, and decided on the largest hut.

'We'll search that,' he said.

The whole front of its glistened stickily. He pushed the unfastened door open with his foot, and led the way inside. There was little disturbance; only a couple of overturned stools suggested a hurried exit. No one, alive or dead, remained in the place.

They came out again. The First Officer glanced at the next hut, then he paused, and looked at it more closely. He went round to examine the side of the hut they had already entered. The wall there was quite dry and clear of slime. He considered the surroundings again.

'It looks,' he said, 'as if everything had been sprayed with this muck by something in the middle of the clearing.'

A more detailed examination supported the idea, but took them little further.

'But how?' the officer asked, meditatively. 'Also what? And why?'

'Something came out of the sea,' said one of his men, looking back uneasily towards the water.

'Some things — three of them,' the First Officer corrected him.

They returned to the middle of the open semi-circle. It was clear that the place was deserted, and there did not seem to be much more to be learned there at present.

'Collect a few of these bits of metal — they may mean something to somebody,' the officer instructed.

He himself went across to one of the huts, found an empty bottle, scraped some of the slime into it, and corked it up.

'This stuff's beginning to stink now the sun's getting at it,' he said, on his return. 'We might as well clear out. There's nothing we can do here.'

Back on board, he suggested that a photographer should take pictures of the furrows on the beach, and showed the Commander his trophies, now washed clean of the slime.

'Queer stuff,' he said, holding a piece of the thick, dull metal. 'A shower of it around.' He tapped it with a knuckle. 'Sounds like lead; weighs like feathers. Cast, by the look of it. Ever seen anything like that, sir?'

The Commander shook his head. He observed that the world seemed to be full of strange alloys these days.

Presently the photographer came rowing back from the beach. The Commander decided:

'We'll give 'em a few blasts on the siren. If nobody shows up in half an hour we'd better make a landing some other place and find a local inhabitant who can tell us what the hell goes on.'

A couple of hours later the gunboat cautiously nosed her way into a bay on the north-east coast of April Island. A similar though smaller village stood there in a clearing, close to the water's edge. The similarity was uncomfortably emphasized by an absence of life as well as by a beach displaying four broad furrows to the water's edge.

Closer investigation, however, showed some differences: of these furrows, two had been made by some objects ascending the beach; the other two by, apparently, the same objects descending it. There was no trace of the slime either in or about the deserted village.

The Commander frowned over his charts. He indicated another bay.

'All right. We'll try there, then,' he said.

This time there were no furrows to be seen on the beach, though the village was just as thoroughly deserted. Again the gunboat's siren gave a forlorn, unheeded wail. They examined the scene through glasses, then the First Officer, scanning the neighbourhood more widely, gave an exclamation.

'There's a fellow up on that hill there, sir. Waving a shirt, or something.'

The Commander turned his own glasses that way.

'Two or three others, a bit to the left of him, too.'

The gunboat gave a couple of hoots, and moved closer inshore. The boat was lowered.

'Stand off a bit till they come,' the Commander directed. 'Find out whether there's been an epidemic of some kind before you try to make contact.'

He watched from his bridge. In due course a party of natives, eight or nine strong, appeared from the trees a couple of hundred yards east of the village, and hailed the boat. It moved in their direction. Some shouting and counter-shouting between the two parties ensued, then the boat went in and grounded on the beach. The First Officer beckoned the natives with his arm, but they hung back in the fringe of the trees. Eventually the First Officer jumped ashore and walked across the strand to talk to them. An animated discussion took place. Clearly an invitation to some of them to visit the gunboat was being declined with vigour. Presently the First Officer descended the beach alone, and the landing-party headed back.

'What's the trouble there?' the Commander inquired as the boat came alongside.

The First Officer looked up.

'They won't come, sir.'

'What's the matter with them?'

'They're okay themselves, sir, but they say the sea isn't safe.'

'They can see it's safe enough for us. What do they mean?'

'They say several of the shore villages have been attacked, and they think theirs may be at any moment.'

'Attacked! What by?'

'Er — perhaps if you'd come and talk to them yourself, sir —?'

'I sent a boat so that they could come to me — that ought to be good enough for them.'

'I'm afraid they'll not come, short of force, sir.'

The Commander frowned. 'That scared are they? What's been doing this attacking?'

The First Officer moistened his lips; his eyes avoided his commander's.

'They — er, they say — whales sir.'

The Commander stared at him.

'They say — what?' he demanded.

The First Officer looked unhappy.

'Er — I know, sir But that's what they keep on saying. Er — whales, and er — giant jelly-fish. I really think that if you'd speak to them yourself, sir —?'

The news about April Island did not exactly 'break' in the accepted sense. A curious going-on on an atoll which could not even be found in most atlases had, on the face of it, little news value, and the odd line or two which recorded the matter was allowed to slip past. Possibly it would not have attracted attention or been remembered until much later, if at all, but for the chance that an American journalist who happened to be in Jakarta discovered the story for himself, took a speculative trip to April Island, and wrote the affair up for a weekly magazine.

A pressman, reading it, recalled the Saphira incident, linked the two, and splashed a new peril across a Sunday newspaper. It happened that this preceded by one day the most sensational communique yet issued by the Standing Committee for Action, with the result that the Deeps had the big headlines once more. Moreover the term 'Deeps' was more comprehensive than formerly, for it was announced that shipping losses in the last month had been so heavy, and the areas in which they had occurred so much more extensive that, pending the development of a more efficient means of defence, all vessels were strongly advised to avoid crossing deep water and keep, as far as was practicable, to the areas of the Continental Shelves.

It was obvious that the Committee would not have dealt such a blow to recovering confidence in shipping without the gravest reasons. Nevertheless, the answering outburst of indignation from the shipping interests accused it of everything from sheer alarmism to a vested interest in air-lines. To follow such advice, they protested, would mean routing transatlantic liners into Iceland and Greenland waters, creeping coastwise down the Bay of Biscay and the West African coast, etc. Transpacific commerce would become impossible, and Australia and New Zealand, isolated. It showed a shocking and lamentable lack of a sense of responsibility that the Committee should be allowed to advise, in this way, and without full consultation with all interested parties, these panic-inspired measures which would, if heeded, bring the maritime commerce of the world virtually to a stop. Advice which could never be implemented should never have been given.

The Committee hedged slightly under the attack. It had not ordered, it said. It had simply suggested that wherever possible vessels should attempt to avoid crossing any extensive stretch of water where the depth was greater than two thousand fathoms and thus avoid exposing itself to danger unnecessarily.

This, retorted the shipowners, curtly, was virtually putting the same thing in different words; and their case, though not their cause, was upheld by the publication in almost every newspaper of sketch-maps showing hurried and somewhat varied impressions of the two-thousand fathom line.

Before the Committee was able to re-express itself in still different words the Italian liner, Sabina, and the German liner, Vorpommern, disappeared on the same day — the one in mid-Atlantic, the other in the South Atlantic — and reply became superfluous.

The news of the latest sinking was announced on the 8 a.m. news bulletin on a Saturday. The Sunday papers took full advantage of their opportunity. At least six of them slashed at official incompetence with almost eighteenth-century gusto, and set the pitch for the Dailies. The Times screwed down rebukes to make the juice run out. The Guardian's approach was similar in intention, but more like an advancing set of circular-saws in manner. The News-Chronicle's was not unlike, though with the teeth set slightly wider apart. The Express turned its hammer from the forging of imperial links to flailing those whose ineptitudes were now weakening them. The Mail denounced the failure to rule the seas as supreme treachery, and demanded the impeachment of the saboteurs, omissive and commissive. The Herald told the housewife that the price of food would rise. The Worker, after pointing out that in a properly ordered society such tragedies would have been impossible since luxury liners would not exist and therefore could not be sunk, rounded upon owners who drove seamen into danger in unprotected ships at inadequate wages.

On the Wednesday I rang up Phyllis.

It used to come upon her periodically when we had had a longer spell than usual in London that she could not stand the works of civilization any longer without a break for refreshment. If it happened that I were free, I was allowed along, too; if not, she withdrew to commune with nature on her own. As a rule, she returned spiritually refurbished in the course of a week or so. This time, however, the communion had already been going on for almost a fortnight, and there was still no sign of the postcard which customarily preceded her return by a short head, when it did not come on the following day.

The telephone down in Rose Cottage rang forlornly for some time. I was on the point of giving up when she answered it.

'Hullo, darling!' said her voice.

'I might have been the butcher, or the income-tax,' I reproved her.

'They'd have given up more quickly. Sorry I was so long answering. I was busy outside.'

'Digging the garden?' I asked, hopefully.

'No, as a matter of fact. I was bricklaying.'

'This line's not good. It sounded like bricklaying.'

'It was, darling.'

'Oh,' I said. 'Bricklaying.'

'It's very fascinating when you get into it. Did you know there are all kinds of bonds and things; Flemish Bond, and English Bond, and so on? And you have things called "headers" and other things called —'

'What is this, darling? A tool-shed, or something?'

'No. Just a wall, like Balbus and Mr Churchill. I read somewhere that in moments of stress Mr Churchill used to find that it gave him tranquillity, and I thought that anything that could tranquillize Mr Churchill was probably worth following up.'

'Well, I hope it has cured the stress.'

'Oh, it has. It's very soothing. I love the way when you put the brick down the mortar squudges out at the sides and you —'

'Darling, the minutes are ticking up. I rang you up to say that you are wanted here.'

'That's sweet of you, darling. But leaving a job half —'

'It's not me — I mean — it is me, but not only. The EBC wants a word with us.'

'What about?'

'I don't really know. They're being cagey, but insistent.'

'Oh. When do they want to see us?'

'Freddy suggested dinner on Friday. Can you manage that?'

There was a pause.

'Yes. I think I'll be able to finish. All right. I'll be on that train that gets into Paddington about six.'

'Good. I'll meet it. There is the other reason, too, Phyl.'

'It being?'

'The running sand, darling. The unturned coverlet. The tarnished thimble. The dull, unflavoured drops from life's clepsydra. The —'

'Mike, you've been rehearsing.'

'What else had I to do?'

'Couldn't you have taken Mildred out to dinner?'

'I tried that. And she does begin to grow on one as one sees more of her. It's surprising, really. All the same — '

'Mike, I happen to know that Mildred has been in Scotland for the last three weeks.'

'Oh, did you say Mildred? I thought —'

'Come off it, darling. See you Friday.'

'I shall hold my breath until then,' I assured her.

We were only twenty minutes late, but Freddy Whittier might have been desiccating for some hours from the urgency with which we were swept into the bar. He disappeared into the mob round the counter with a nicely-controlled violence and presently emerged with a selection of double and single sherries on a tray.

'Doubles first,' he said.

Soon his mind broadened out of the single track. He looked more himself, and noticed things. He even noticed Phyllis's hands; the abraded knuckles on the right, the large piece of plaster on the left. He frowned and seemed about to speak, but thought better of it. I observed him covertly examining my face and then my hands.

'My wife,' I explained, 'has been down in the country. The start of the bricklaying season, you know.'

He looked relieved rather than interested.

'Nothing wrong with the old team spirit?' he inquired with a casual air.

We shook our heads.

'Good,' he said, 'because I've got a job for you two.'

He went on to expound. It seemed that one of EBC's favourite sponsors had put a proposition to them. This sponsor had apparently been feeling for some time that a description, some photographs, and definite evidence of the nature of the Deeps creatures was well overdue.

'A man of perception,' I said. 'For the last five or six years —'

'Shut up, Mike,' said my dear wife, briefly.

'Things,' Freddy went on, 'have in his opinion now reached a pass where he might as well spend some of his money while it still has value, and might even bring in some valuable information. At the same time, he doesn't see why he shouldn't get some benefit out of the information if it is forthcoming. So he proposes to fit out and send out an expedition to find out what it can — and of course the whole thing will be tied up with exclusive rights and so on. By the way, this is highly confidential: we don't want the BBC to get on to it first.'

'Look, Freddy,' I said. 'For several years now everybody has been trying to get on to it, let alone the BBC. What the —?'

'Expedition where to?' asked Phyllis, practically.

'That,' said Freddy, 'was naturally our first question. But he doesn't know. The whole decision on a location is in Bocker's hands.'

'Bocker!' I exclaimed. 'Is he becoming un — untouchable, or something?'

'His stock has recovered quite a bit,' Freddy admitted: 'And, as this fellow, the sponsor, said: If you leave out all the outer-space nonsense, the rest of Bocker's pronouncements have had a pretty high score — higher than anyone else's, anyway. So he went to Bocker, and said: "Look here. These things that came up on Saphira and April Island; where do you think they are most likely to appear next — or, at any rate, soon?" Bocker wouldn't tell him, of course. But they walked; and the upshot was that the sponsor will subsidize an expedition led by Bocker to a region to be selected by Bocker. What is more, Bocker also selects the personnel. And part of the selection, the EEC's blessing and your approval, could be you two.'

'He was always my favourite ographer,' said Phyllis. 'When do we start?'

'Wait a minute,' I put in. 'Once upon a time an ocean voyage used to be recommended for the health. Recently, however, so far from being healthy —'

'Air,' said Freddy. 'Exclusively air. People have doubtless got a lot of persona] information about the things the other way, but we would prefer you to be in a position to bring it back.'

'Such thoughtfulness is greatly appreciated,' I assured him.

'Good. Well, go and talk it over with Bocker to-morrow, and then come round to my office and we'll go into contracts and all the rest of it.'

Phyllis wore an abstracted air at intervals during the evening. When we got home I said:

'If you'd rather not take this up —'

'Nonsense. Of course we're going,' she said. 'But do you think "subsidize" means we can get suitable clothes and things on expenses?'

'Even,' I said, surveying the scene, 'even a diet of lotuses can pall.'

'I like idleness — in the sun,' said Phyllis.

I reflected. 'I think it is more than that, more than just "like". I mean,' I suggested, 'twentieth-century woman appears to regard sunlight as a kind of cosmetic effulgence with a light aphrodisiac content — which makes it a funny thing that none of her female ancestors are recorded as seeing it the same way. Men, of course, just go on sweating in it from century to century.'

'Yes,' said Phyllis.

'You can't answer a whole observation like that with simply "yes",' I pointed out.

'I have reached a comfortable stage of enervation where I can say "yes" to practically anything. It is a well-known effect of the tropics, often underlined by Mr Maugham.'

'Darling, Mr Maugham depends very largely on the wrong people saying "yes", even outside the tropics. It is not so much a matter of temperature as his system of triangulation, in which he is second only to Euclid, another best-seller, by the way, makes one wonder whether a trinitarian approach to literature —'

'Mike, you're rambling — that's probably the heat, too. Let's just contemplate idly, shall we?'

So we resumed the occupation which had been the leading feature of the last few weeks.

From where we sat at an umbrellaed table in front of the mysteriously named Grand Hotel Britannia y la Justicia it was possible to direct this contemplation on tranquillity or activity. Tranquillity was on the right. Intensely blue water glittered for miles until it was ruled off by a hard, straight horizon line. The shore, running round like a bow, ended in a palm-tufted headland which trembled mirage-wise in the heat. A backcloth which must have looked just the same when it formed a part of the Spanish Main.

To the left was a display of life as conducted in the capital, and only town, of the island of Escondida.

The island's name derived, presumably, from erratic seamanship in the past which had caused ships to arrive mistakenly at one of the Caymans, but through all the vicissitudes of those parts it had managed to retain it, and much of its Spanishness, too. The houses looked Spanish, the temperament had a Spanish quality, in the language there was more Spanish than English, and, from where we were sitting at the corner of the open space known indifferently as the Plaza or the Square, the church at the far end with the bright market-stalls in front of it looked positively picture-book Spanish. The population, however, was somewhat less so, and ranged from sunburnt-white to coal-black. Only a bright-red British pillar-box prepared one for the surprise of learning that the place was called Smithtown — and even that took on romance when one learnt also that the Smith commemorated had been a pirate in a prosperous way.

Behind us, and therefore behind the hotel, one of the two mountains which make Escondida climbed steeply, emerging far above as a naked peak with a scarf of greenery about its shoulders. Between the mountain's foot and the sea stretched a tapering rocky shelf, with the town clustered on its wider end.

And there, also, had clustered for five weeks the Bocker Expedition.

Bocker had contrived a probability-system all his own. Eventually his eliminations had given him a list of ten islands as likely to be attacked, and the fact that four of them were in the Caribbean area settled our course.

That was about as far as he cared to go simply on paper, and it landed us all at Kingston, Jamaica. There we stayed a week in company with Ted Jarvey, the cameraman; Leslie Bray, the recordist; and Muriel Flynn, one of the technical assistants; while Bocker himself and his two male assistants flew about in an armed coastal-patrol aircraft put at his disposal by the authorities, and considered the rival attractions of Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, Cayman Brac, and Escondida. The reasoning which led to their final choice of Escondida was no doubt very nice, so that it seemed a pity that two days after the aircraft had finished ferrying us and our gear to Smithtown it should have been a large village on Grand Cayman which suffered the first visitation in those parts.

But if we were disappointed, we were also impressed. It was clear that Bocker really had been doing something more than a high-class eeny-meany-miny-mo, and had brought off a very near miss.

The plane took four of us over there as soon as we had the news. Unfortunately we learnt little. There were grooves on the beach, but they had been greatly trampled by the time we arrived. Out of two hundred and fifty villagers about a score had got away by fast running. The rest had simply vanished. The whole affair had taken place in darkness, so that no one had seen much. Each survivor felt an obligation to give any inquirer his money's worth, and the whole thing was almost folklore already.

Bocker announced that we should stay where we were. Nothing would be gained by dashing hither and thither; we should be just as likely to miss the occasion as to find it. Even more likely, for Escondida in addition to its other qualities had the virtue of being a one-town island so that when an attack did come (and he was sure that sooner or later it would) Smithtown must almost certainly be the objective.

We hoped he knew what he was doing, but in the next two weeks we doubted it. The radio brought reports of a dozen raids — all, save one small affair in the Azores, were in the Pacific. We began to have a depressed feeling that we were in the wrong hemisphere.

When I say 'we', I must admit I mean chiefly me. The others continued to analyse the reports and go stolidly ahead with their preparations. One point was that there was no record of an assault taking place by day; lights, therefore, would be necessary. Once the town council had been convinced that it would cost them nothing we were all impressed into the business of fixing improvised floods on trees, posts, and the corners of buildings all over Smithtown, though with greater proliferation towards the waterside, all of which, in the interests of Ted's cameras, had to be wired back to a switchboard in his hotel room.

The inhabitants assumed that a fiesta of some kind was in preparation; the council considered it a harmless form of lunacy but were pleased to be paid for the extra current we consumed, most of us were growing more cynical, until the affair at Gallows Island which, though Gallows was in the Bahamas, put the wind up the whole Caribbean, nevertheless.

Port Anne, the chief town on Gallows, and three large coastal villages there were raided the same night. About half the population of Port Anne, and a much higher proportion from the villages disappeared entirely. Those who survived had either shut themselves in their houses or run away, but this time there were plenty of people who agreed that they had seen things like tanks — like military tanks, they said, but larger — emerge from the water and come sliding up the beaches. Owing to the darkness, the confusion, and the speed with which most of the informants had either made off or hidden themselves, there were only imaginative reports of what these tanks from the sea had then done. The only verifiable fact was that from the four points of attack more than a thousand people in all had vanished during the night.

All around there was a prompt change of heart. Every islander in every island shed his indifference and sense of security, and was immediately convinced that his own home would be the next scene of assault. Ancient, uncertain weapons were dug out of cupboards, and cleaned up. Patrols were organized, and for the first night or two of their existence went on duty with a fine swagger. Talks on an inter-island flying defence system were proposed.

When, however, the next week went by without trace of further trouble anywhere in the area, enthusiasm waned. Indeed, for that week there was a pause in sub-sea activity all over. The only report of a raid came from the Kuriles, for some Slavonic reason, undated, and therefore assumed to have spent some time under microscope examination from every security angle.

By the tenth day after the alarm Escondida's natural spirit of manana had fully reasserted itself. By night and siesta it slept soundly; the rest of the time it drowsed, and we with it. It was difficult to believe that we shouldn't go on like that for years, so we were settling down to it, some of us. Muriel explored happily among the island flora; Johnny Tallton, the pilot, who was constantly standing-by, did most of it in a cafe where a charming senorita was teaching him the patois; Leslie had also gone native to the extent of acquiring a guitar which we could now hear tinkling through the open window above us; Phyllis and I occasionally told one another about the scripts we might write if we had the energy; only Bocker and his two closest assistants, Bill Weyman and Alfred Haig, retained an air of purpose. If the sponsor could have seen us he might well have felt dubious about his money's worth.

While we still contemplated idly, Leslie's voice up above started on its repertoire with 0 Sole Mio. The other part of the repertoire, La Paloma, would undoubtedly follow. I groaned, and sipped at my gin-sling.

'I think,' said Phyllis, 'that while we are here we really ought to dig up — oh, dear —!'

Out of the street leading to the waterfront came a din with which the mere human voice could not compete. Presently a very small, coffee-coloured boy almost eclipsed by a very large hat emerged leading a yoke of rhythmically swaying oxen. Behind them a steel-shod mountain sledge clattered, squealed, and rasped on the cobbles. When it had descended, loaded with bananas, we had thought it noisy; now that it was unladen the row was fiendish. One could only wait while the oxen made their unhurried way across the Plaza. Presently it became possible to hear Leslie again, now dealing with La Paloma.

'I think,' Phyllis began once more, 'that we ought to find out what we can about this Smith while we are here. I mean, he might turn out to be a kind of illegitimate Hornblower, or we might be able to turn him into one. How much do you know about square-rigged ships?'

'Me? Why should I know anything about square-rigged ships?'

'Well, nearly all men seem to feel it incumbent upon them to appear to know something about ships, so I thought — ' She broke off. La Paloma had just finished with a triumphant chord, and the guitar pranced off on an entirely different rhythm. Leslie's voice rose:

Oh, I'm burning my brains in the backroom,

Almost setting my cortex alight

To find a new thing to go crack-boom!

And blow up a xenobathite.

Oh, I've pondered the nuclear thermals

And every conceivable ray.

I've mugged up on technical journals,

And now I'm just starting to pray.

What I'd like is the germ of the know-how

To live at five tons per square inch,

Then to bash at the bathies below now

Would verge on the fringe of a cinch.

I've scouted above ultra-violet,

I've burrowed around infra-red,

And the —

'Poor Leslie,' I said. 'You see what happens in a climate like this, Phyl. We are being warned. Backroom — crackboom! — For heaven's sake! Softening sets in without the victim being aware of it. We must give Bocker a time limit — a week from now to produce his phenomena. If not, he'll have had it, as far as we are concerned. Any longer, and real deterioration will get us. We, too, shall start composing songs in outdated rhythms. Our moral fibres will rot so that we shall find ourselves going around doing dreadful things like rhyming "thermals" with "journals". What do you say, one week's grace?'

'Well —' Phyllis began, doubtfully.

A step sounded behind us as Leslie came out of the hotel door.

'Hullo, you two,' he said, cheerfully. 'Time for a quick one before el almuerzo? Hear the new song? A smasher, isn't it? Phyllis called it "The Boffin's Lament", but I suggest "The Lay of the Baffled Boffin!" Three gin-slings? Okay.' And he departed to fetch them.

Phyllis was studying the view.

'So?' I remarked grimly. 'Well, I said a week, and I'll stand by it — though it'll very likely be fatal.'

Which was truer than I knew.

Less than a week nearly was fatal.

'Darling, stop worrying that moon now, and come to bed.'

'No soul — that's the trouble. I often wonder why I married you.'

'It's by no means impossible to have too much soul. Look at Laurence Hope.'

'Pig! I hate you!'

'Darling, it's late. Nearly one o'clock.'

'On Escondida, life laughs at clocksmiths.'

'Wasted, darling. You mislaid your notebook this afternoon. Remember?'

'Oh, I do hate you. Sweet, sweet Diana, take me from this man!'

I got up and joined her at the window.

'See?' she said. ' "A ship, an isle, a sickle moon…" So fragile, so eternal… Isn't it lovely?'

We gazed out, across the empty Plaza, past the sleeping houses, over the silvered sea.

'I want it. It's one of the things I'm putting away to remember,' she said.

Faintly from behind the opposite houses, down by the waterfront, came the tinkling of a guitar.

'El amor tonto – y dulce,' she sighed. 'Why don't you see and hear what I see and hear, Mike? You don't, you know.'

'Mightn't it be a little dull for us if I did — both of us crying upon Diana, for instance? I have my own gods.'

She turned to look at me. 'I suppose you have. But they are rather obscure ones, aren't they?'

'You think so? I don't find them difficult. I'll quote Flecker back to you. "And some to Mecca turn to pray, and I toward thy bed, Yasmin."'

'Oh!' she said. 'Oh, Mike!'

And then, suddenly, the distant player dropped his guitar, with a clang.

Down by the waterfront a voice called out, unintelligible, but alarming. Then other voices. A woman screamed. We turned to look at the houses that screened the little harbour.

'Listen!' said Phyllis. 'Mike, do you think —?'

She broke off at the sound of a couple of shots.

'It must be! Mike, they must be coming!'

There was an increasing hubbub in the distance. In the Square itself windows were opening, people calling questions from one to another. A man ran out of a door, round the corner, and disappeared down the short street that led to the water. There was more shouting now, more screaming, too. Among it the crack of three or four more shots. I turned from the window and thumped on the wall which separated us from the next room.

'Hey, Ted!' I shouted. 'Turn up your lights! Down by the waterfront, man. Lights!'

I heard his faint okay. He must have been out of bed already, for almost as I turned back to the window the lights began to go on in batches.

There was nothing unusual to be seen except a dozen or more men pelting across the Square towards the harbour.

Quite abruptly the noise which had been rising in crescendo was cut off. Ted's door slammed. His boots thudded along the corridor past our room. Beyond the houses the yelling and screaming broke out again, louder than before, as if it had gained force from being briefly dammed.

'I must — ' I began, and then stopped when I found that Phyllis was no longer beside me.

I looked across the room, and saw her in the act of locking the door. I went over.

'I must go down there. I must see what's —'

'No!' she said.

She turned and planted her back firmly against the door. She looked rather like a severe angel barring a road, except that angels are assumed to wear respectable cotton night-dresses, not nylon.

'But, Phyl — it's the job. It's what we're here for.'

'I don't care. We wait a bit.'

She stood without moving, severe angel expression now modified by that of mutinous small girl. I held out my hand.

'Phyl. Please give me that key.'

'No!' she said, and flung it across the room, through the window. It clattered on the cobbles outside. I gazed after it in astonishment. That was not at all the kind of thing one associated with Phyllis. All over the now floodlit Square people were now hurriedly converging towards the street on the opposite side. I turned back.

'Phyl. Please get away from that door.'

She shook her head.

'Don't be a fool, Mike. You've got a job to do.'

That's just what I — '

'No, it isn't. Don't you see? The only reports we've had at all were from the people who didn't rush to find out what was happening. The ones who either hid, or ran away.'

I was angry with her, but not too angry for the sense of that to reach me and make me pause. She followed up: 'It's what Freddy said — the point of our coming at all is that we should be able to go back and tell them about it.'

'That's all very well, but —'

'Not Look there.' She nodded towards the window.

People were still converging upon the street that led to the waterside; but they were no longer going into it. A solid crowd was piling up at the entrance. Then, while I still looked, the previous scene started to go into reverse. The crowd backed, and began to break up at its edges. More men and women came out of the street, thrusting it back until it was dispersing all over the Square. '

I went closer to the window to watch. Phyllis left the door and came and stood beside me. Presently we spotted Ted, turret-lensed cine-camera in hand, hurrying back.

'What is it?' I called down.

'God knows. Can't get through. There's a panic up the street there. They all say it's coming this way, whatever it is. If it does, I'll get a shot from my window. Can't work this thing in that mob.' He glanced back, and then disappeared into the hotel doorway below us.

People were still pouring into the Square, and breaking into a run when they reached a point where there was room to run. There had been no further sound of shooting, but from time to time there would be another outbreak of shouts and screams somewhere at the hidden far end of the short street.

Among those headed back to the hotel came Dr Bocker himself, and the pilot, Johnny Tallton. Bocker stopped below, and shouted up. Heads popped out of various windows. He looked them over.

'Where's Alfred?' he asked.

No one seemed to know.

'If anyone sees him, call him inside,' Bocker instructed. 'The rest of you stay where you are. Observe what you can, but don't expose yourselves till we know more about it. Ted, keep all your lights on. Leslie —'

'Just on my way with the portable recorder, Doc,' said Leslie's voice.

'No, you're not. Sling the mike outside the window if you like, but keep under cover yourself. And that goes for everyone, for the present.'

'But, Doc, what is it? What's —'

'We don't know. So we keep inside until we find out why it makes people scream. Where the hell's Miss Flynn? Oh, you're there. Right. Keep watching, Miss Flynn.'

He turned to Johnny, and exchanged a few inaudible words with him. Johnny nodded, and made off round the back of the hotel. Bocker himself looked across the Square again, and then came in, shutting the door behind him.

Running, or at least hurrying, figures were still scattering over the Square in all directions, but no more were emerging from the street. Those who had reached the far side turned back to look, hovering close to doorways or alleys into which they could jump swiftly if necessary. Half a dozen men with guns or rifles laid themselves down on the cobbles, their weapons all aimed at the mouth of the street. Everything was much quieter now. Except for a few sounds of sobbing, a tense, expectant silence held the whole scene. And then, in the background, one became aware of a grinding, scraping noise; not loud, but continuous.

The door of a small house close to the church opened. The priest, in a long black robe, stepped out. A number of people nearby ran towards him, and then knelt round him. He stretched out both arms as though to encompass and guard them all.

The noise from the narrow street sounded like the heavy dragging of metal upon stone.

Three or four rifles fired suddenly, almost together. Our angle of view still stopped us from seeing what they fired at, but they let go a number of rounds each. Then the men jumped to their feet and ran further back, almost to the inland side of the Square. There they turned round, and reloaded.

From the street came a noise of cracking timbers and falling bricks and glass.

Then we had our first sight of a 'sea-tank'. A curve of dull, grey metal sliding into the Square, carrying away the lower corner of a housefront as it came.

Shots cracked at it from half a dozen different directions. The bullets splattered or thudded against it without effect. Slowly, heavily, with an air of inexorability, it came on, grinding and scraping across the cobbles. It was inclining slightly to its right, away from us and towards the church, carrying away more of the corner house, unaffected by the plaster, bricks, and beams that fell on it and slithered down its sides.

More shots smacked against it or ricochetted away whining, but it kept steadily on, thrusting itself into the Square at something under three miles an hour, massively undeflectible. Soon we were able to see the whole of it.

Imagine an elongated egg which has been halved down its length and set flat side to the ground, with the pointed end foremost. Consider this egg to be between thirty and thirty-five feet long, of a drab, lustreless leaden colour, and you will have a fair picture of the 'sea-tank' as we saw it pushing into the Square.

There was no way of seeing how it was propelled; there may have been rollers beneath, but it seemed, and sounded, simply to grate forward on its metal belly with plenty of noise, but none of machinery. It did not jerk to turn, as a tank does, but neither did it sheer like a car. It simply moved to the right on a diagonal, still pointing forwards. Close behind it followed another, exactly similar contrivance which slanted its way to the left, in our direction, wrecking the housefront on the nearer corner of the street as it came. A third kept straight ahead into the middle of the Square, and then stopped.

At the far end, the crowd that had knelt about the priest scrambled to its feet, and fled. The priest himself stood his ground. He barred the thing's way. His right hand held a cross extended against it, his left was raised, fingers spread, and palm outward, to halt it. The thing moved on, neither faster nor slower, as if he had not been there. Its curved flank pushed him aside a little as it came. Then it, too, stopped.

A few seconds later the one up our end of the Square reached what was apparently its appointed position and also stopped.

'Troops will establish themselves at first objective in extended order,' I said to Phyllis, as we regarded the three evenly spaced out in the Square. 'This isn't haphazard. Now what?'

For almost half a minute it did not appear to be now anything. There was a little more sporadic shooting, some of it from windows which, all round the Square, were full of people hanging out to see what went on. None of it had any effect on the targets, and there was some danger from ricochets.

'Look!' said Phyllis suddenly. 'This one's bulging.'

She was pointing at the nearest. The previously smooth fore-and-aft sweep of its top was now disfigured at the highest point by a small, dome-like excrescence. It was lighter-coloured than the metal beneath; a kind of off-white, semi-opaque substance which glittered viscously under the floods. It grew as one watched it.

'They're all doing it,' she added.

There was a single shot. The excrescence quivered, but went on swelling. It was growing faster now. It was no longer dome-shaped, but spherical, attached to the metal by a neck, inflating like a balloon, and swaying slightly as it distended.

'It's going to pop. I'm sure it is,' Phyllis said, apprehensively.

'There's another coming further down its back,' I said. 'Two more, look.'

The first excrescence did not pop. It was already some two foot six in diameter and still swelling fast.

'It must pop soon,' she muttered.

But still it did not. It kept on expanding until it must have been all of five feet in diameter. Then it stopped growing. It looked like a huge, repulsive bladder. A tremor and a shake passed through it. It shuddered jellywise, became detached, and wobbled into the air with the uncertainty of an overblown bubble.

In a lurching, amoebic way it ascended for ten feet or so. There it vacillated, steadying into a more stable sphere. Then, suddenly, something happened to it. It did not exactly explode. Nor was there any sound. Rather, it seemed to split open, as if it had been burst into instantaneous bloom by a vast number of white cilia which rayed out in all directions.

The instinctive reaction was to jump back from the window away from it. We did.

Four or five of the cilia, like long white whiplashes, flicked in through the window, and dropped to the floor. Almost as they touched it they began to contract and withdraw. Phyllis gave a sharp cry. I looked round at her. Not all of the long cilia had fallen on the floor. One of them had flipped the last six inches of its length on to her right forearm. It was already contracting, pulling her arm towards the window. She pulled back. With her other hand she tried to pick the thing off, but her fingers stuck to it as soon as they touched it.

'Mike!' she cried. 'Mike!'

The thing was tugging hard, looking tight as a bow-string. She had already been dragged a couple of steps towards the window before I could get after her in a kind of diving tackle. The force of my jump carried her across to the other side of the room. It did not break the thing's hold, but it did move it over so that it no longer had a direct pull through the window, and was forced to drag round a sharp corner. And drag it did. Lying on the floor now, I got the crook of my knee round a bed-leg for better purchase, and hung on for all I was worth. To move Phyllis then it would have had to drag me and the bedstead, too. For a moment I thought it might. Then Phyllis screamed, and suddenly there was no more tension.

I rolled her to one side, out of line of anything else that might come in through the window. She was in a faint. A patch of skin six inches long had been torn clean away from her right forearm, and more had gone from the fingers of her left hand. The exposed flesh was just beginning to bleed.

Outside in the Square there was a pandemonium of shouting and screaming. I risked putting my head round the side of the window. The thing that had burst was no longer in the air. It was now a round body no more than a couple offset in diameter surrounded by a radiation of cilia. It was drawing these back into itself with whatever they had caught, and the tension was keeping it a little off the ground. Some of the people it was pulling in were shouting and struggling, others were like inert bundles of clothes.

I saw poor Muriel Flynn among them. She was lying on her back, dragged across the cobbles by a tentacle caught in her red hair. She had been badly hurt by the fall when she was pulled out of her window, and was crying out with terror, too. Leslie dragged almost alongside her, but it looked as if the fall had mercifully broken his neck.

Over on the far side I saw a man rush forward and try to pull a screaming woman away, but when he touched the cilium that held her his hand became fastened to it, too, and they were dragged along together.

As the circle contracted, the white cilia came closer to one another. The struggling people inevitably touched more of them and became more helplessly enmeshed than before. They struggled like flies on a fly-paper. There was a relentless deliberation about it which made it seem horribly as though one watched through the eye of a slow-motion camera.

Then I noticed that another of the misshapen bubbles had wobbled into the air, and drew back hurriedly before it should burst.

Three more cilia whipped in through the window, lay for a moment like white cords on the floor, and then began to draw back. When they had vanished across the sill I leaned over to look out of the window again. In several places about the Square there were converging knots of people struggling helplessly. The first and nearest had contracted until its victims were bound together into a tight ball out of which a few arms and legs still flailed wildly. Then, as I watched, the whole compact mass tilted over and began to roll away across the Square towards the street by which the sea-tanks had come.

The machines, or whatever the things were, still lay where they had stopped, looking like huge grey slugs, each engaged in producing several of its disgusting bubbles at different stages.

I dodged back as another was cast off, but this time nothing happened to find our window. I risked leaning out for a moment to pull the casement windows shut, and got them closed just in time. Three or four more lashes smacked against the glass with such force that one of the panes was cracked.

Then I was able to attend to Phyllis. I lifted her on to the bed, and tore a strip off the sheet to bind up her arm.

Outside, the screaming and shouting and uproar was still going on, and among it the sound of a few shots.

When I had bandaged the arm I looked out again. Half a dozen objects, looking now like tight round bales, were rolling over and over on their way to the street that led to the waterfront. I turned back again and tore another strip off the sheet to put round Phyllis's left hand.

While I was doing it I heard a different sound above the hubbub outside. I dropped the cotton strip, and ran back to the window in time to get a glimpse of a plane coming in low. The cannon in the wings started to twinkle, and I threw myself back, out of harm's way. There was a dull woomph! of an explosion. Simultaneously the windows blew in, the light went out, bits of something whizzed past, and something else splattered all over the room.

I picked myself up. The outdoor lights down our end of the Square had gone out, too, so that it was difficult to make out much there, but up the other end I could see that one of the sea-tanks had begun to move. It was sliding back by the way it had come. Then I heard the sound of the aircraft returning, and went down on the floor again.

There was another woomph! but this time we did not catch the force of it, though there was a clatter of things falling outside.

'Mike?' said a voice from the bed, a frightened voice.

'It's all right, darling. I'm here,' I told her.

The moon was still bright, and I was able to see better now.

'What's happened?' she asked.

'They've gone. Johnny got them with the plane — at least, I suppose it was Johnny,' I said. 'It's all right now.'

'Mike, my arms do hurt'

'I'll get a doctor as soon as I can, darling.'

'What was it? It had got me, Mike. If you hadn't held on —'

'It's all over now, darling.'

'I —' She broke off at the sound of the plane coming back once more. We listened. The cannon were firing again, but this time there was no explosion.

'Mike, there's something sticky — is it blood? You're not hurt?'

'No, darling. I don't know what it is, it's all over everything.'

'You're shaking, Mike.'

'Sorry. I can't help it. Oh, Phyl, darling Phyl… So nearly … If you'd seen them — Muriel and the rest… It might have been…'

'There, there,' she said, as if I were aged about six. 'Don't cry, Micky. It's over now.' She moved. 'Oh, Mike, my arm does hurt.'

'Lie still, darling. I'll get that doctor,' I told her.

I went for the locked door with a chair, and relieved my feelings on it quite a lot.

It was a subdued remnant of the expedition that foregathered the following morning — Bocker, Ted Jarvey, and ourselves. Johnny had taken off earlier with the films and recordings, including an eye-witness account I had added later, and was on his way to Kingston with them.

Phyllis's right arm and left hand were swathed in bandages. She looked pale, but had resisted all persuasions to stay in bed. Bocker's eyes had entirely lost their customary twinkle. His wayward lock of grey hair hung forward over a face which looked more lined and older than it had on the previous evening. He limped a little, and put some of his weight on a stick. Ted and I were unscathed. He looked questioningly at Bocker.

'If you can manage it, sir,' he said. 'I think our first move ought to be to get out of this stink.'

'By all means,' Bocker agreed. 'A few twinges are nothing compared with this. The sooner, the better,' he added, and got up to lead the way to windward.

The cobbles of the Square, the litter of metal fragments that

lay about it, the houses all around, the church, everything in

sight glistened with a coating of slime, and there was more of

it that one did not see, splashed into almost every room that fronted on the Square. The previous night it had been simply

a strongly fishy, salty smell, but with the warmth of the sun at work upon it it had begun to give off an odour that was already fetid and rapidly becoming miasmic. Even a hundred yards made a great deal of difference, another hundred, and we were clear of it, among the palms which fringed the beach on the opposite side of the town from the harbour. Seldom had I known the freshness of a light breeze to smell so good.

Bocker sat down, and leant his back against a tree. The rest of us disposed ourselves and waited for him to speak first. For a long time he did not. He sat motionless, looking blindly out to sea. Then he sighed.

'Alfred,' he said, 'Bill, Muriel, Leslie. I brought you all here. I have shown very little imagination and consideration for your safety, I'm afraid.'

Phyllis leaned forward.

'You mustn't think like that, Dr Bocker. None of us had to

come, you know. You offered us the chance to come, and we took

it. If — if the same thing had happened to me I don't think

Michael would have felt that you were to blame, would you, Mike?'

'No,' I said. I knew perfectly well whom I should have blamed — for ever, and without reprieve.

'And I shouldn't, and I'm sure the others would feel the same way,' she added, putting her uninjured right hand on his sleeve.

He looked down at it, blinking a little. He closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, and laid his hand on hers. His gaze strayed beyond her wrist to the bandages above.

'You're very good to me, my dear,' he said.

He patted the hand, and then sat straight, pulling himself together. Presently, in a different tone:

'We have some results,' he said. 'Not, perhaps, as conclusive as we had hoped, but some tangible evidence at least. Thanks to Ted the people at home will now be able to see what we are up against, and thanks to him, too, we have the first specimen.'

'Specimen?' repeated Phyllis. 'What of?'

'A bit of one of those tentacle things,' Ted told her.

'How on earth?'

'Luck, really. You see, when the first one burst nothing came in at my particular window, but I could see what was happening in other places, so I opened my knife and put it handy on the sill, just in case. When one did come in with the next shower it fell across my shoulder, and I caught up the knife and slashed it just as it began to pull. There was about eighteen inches of it left behind. It just dropped off on to the floor, wriggled a couple of times, and then curled up. We posted it off with Johnny.'

'Ugh!' said Phyllis.

'In future,' I said, 'we, too, will carry knives.'

'Make sure they're sharp. It's mighty tough stuff,' Ted advised.

'If you can find another bit of one I'd like to have it for examination,' said Bocker. 'We decided that one had better go off to the experts. There's something very peculiar indeed about those things. The fundamental is obvious enough, it goes back to some type of sea-anemone — but whether the things have been bred, or whether they have in some way been built-up on the basic pattern —?' He shrugged without finishing the question. 'I find several points extremely disturbing. For instance, how are they made to clutch the animate even when it is clothed, and not attach themselves to the inanimate? Also, how is it possible that they can be directed on the route back to the water instead of simply trying to reach it the nearest way?

'The first of those questions is the more significant. It implies specialized purpose. The things are used, you see, but not like weapons in the ordinary sense, not just to destroy, that is. They are more like snares.'

We thought that over for a moment.

'You mean,' said Phyllis, 'the purpose was to catch and collect people, like — well, as if they were sort of — shrimping for us?'

'Something of the kind. Clearly the primary intention was capture — though whether as a means to something, or as an end in itself, one cannot say, of course.'

We digested that thought. I could have wished that Phyllis had dropped on some analogy other than shrimping. Presently Bocker went on:

'Ordinary rifle-fire doesn't appear to trouble either the "sea-tanks" or these millibrachiate things — unless there are vulnerable spots that were not found. Explosive cannon-shells can, however, fracture the covering. The manner in which it then disintegrates suggests that it is already under very strong stress, and not very far from breaking-point. We may deduce from that that in the April Island affair there was either a lucky shot, or a grenade was used. What we saw last night certainly explains the natives' talk of whales and jellyfish. These "sea-tanks" might easily, at a distance, be taken for whales. And regarding the "jellyfish" they weren't so far out — the things must almost without doubt be closely related to the coelenterates.

'As to the "sea-tanks" the contents seem to have been simply gelatinous masses confined under immense pressure — but it is hard to credit that this can really be so. Apart from any other consideration it would seem that there must be a mechanism of some kind to propel those immensely heavy hulls. I went to look at their trails this morning. Some of the cobblestones have been ground down and some cracked into flakes by the weight, but I couldn't find any track-marks, or anything to show that the things dragged themselves along by grabs as I thought might be the case. I think we are stumped there for the present.

'Intelligence of a kind there undoubtedly is, though it appears not to be very high, or else not very well co-ordinated. All the same, it was good enough to lead them from the waterfront to the Square which was the best place for them to operate.'

'I've seen army tanks carry away house-corners in much the same way as they did,' I observed.

'That is one possible indication of poor co-ordination,' Bocker replied, somewhat crushingly. 'Now have we any observations to add to those I have made?' He looked round inquiringly.

Ted said, hesitantly:

'Well, I did have the impression that these jellyfish things were not all quite the same type. The later ones had a rather shorter range, and they didn't contract so quickly, either. One on the other side of the Square lay there for quite twenty seconds with the tentacles curling and twisting about before it started to pull in at all.'

Bocker turned to him.

'You're suggesting that the cilia were actually searching?'

'I'd not go as far as that. But, anyway, I got a picture of it on the hand-camera, so we'll be able to study it.'

'Yes. It's to be hoped we shall get quite a lot from those films. Anything else? Did anyone notice whether the shots appeared to have any effect at all on these tentacular forms?'

'As far as I could see, either the shooting was rotten, or the bullets went through without bothering them,' Ted told him.

'H'm,' said Bocker, and lapsed into reflection for a while.

Presently I became aware of Phyllis muttering.

'What?' I inquired.

'I was just saying "millibrachiate tentacular coelenterates",' she explained.

'Oh,' I said.

'The recorder kept on going to the end,' Ted observed to me, 'but I don't know that we shall get a lot from that. It's a pity we didn't have more of a plan. We ought to have had a mike fixed for you to give a running commentary.'

'I'm sure that's what EBC will say, too,' I agreed, 'but as it happened I was rather busy at the time. What I want to do now is to make a rather fuller and less hurried recording than this morning's version, but I'm damned if I can face Smithtown yet. Never under heaven was there such a concentrated pong.'

We continued to sit where we were, each of us mostly occupied with his own thoughts. It was quite a long time later that Bocker said reflectively:

'You know, I think that if I believed in God I should now be a very frightened man. Luckily, however, I am rather old-fashioned, so I don't, thank God.'

Phyllis's eyebrows rose.

'Why?' she said. 'I mean, why would you be frightened?'

'Because I should be a superstitious man — and superstitious men are always frightened when they are out of their depth with something new. I should be tempted to think that God proposed to teach me a lesson. That He was saying: "H'm. You think you're so clever. Little gods yourselves with all your atom-splitting and microbe-conquering. You think you rule the world, and possibly heaven, too. Very well, you conceited little mites, there's a lot about life and nature that you don't know. I'll just show you one or two new things and see how your conceit stands up to them. I have had to do it before."'

'However, as you don't believe that —?' prompted Phyllis.

'I don't know. There have been lords of the earth before us. Some of them in a sounder position, too There was a great variety of dinosaur types — which should have given them a broad chance of survival. All the human eggs, on the other hand, are pretty nearly in one basket.'

Nobody made any further comment. The four of us continued to sit on, looking out across a blandly innocent azure sea

Among the other papers I bought at London Airport was the current number of The Beholder. Though it is, I am aware, not without its merits and even well thought of in some circles, it leaves me with an abiding sense that it is more given to expressing its first prejudices than its second thoughts. Perhaps if it were to go to press a day later . . . However, the discovery in this issue of a leader entitled doctor bocker rides again, did nothing to alter my impression. The text ran something after this fashion:

'Neither the courage of Dr Alastair Bocker in going forth to meet a submarine dragon, nor his perspicacity in correctly deducing where the monster might be met, can be questioned.

148

The gruesome and fantastically repulsive scenes to which the EBC treated us in our homes last Tuesday evening make it more to be wondered at that any of the party should have survived than that four of its members should have lost their lives. Dr Bocker himself is to be congratulated on his escape at the cost merely of a sprained ankle when his sock and shoe were wrenched off, and another member of the party on her even narrower escape.

'Nevertheless, horrible though this affair was, and valuable as some of the Doctor's observations may prove in suggesting counter-measures, it would be a mistake for him to assume that he has now been granted an unlimited licence to readopt his former role as the world's premier Fat Boy.

'We are alarmed, reasonably alarmed, at the damaging blows that attacks from beneath the sea have dealt to world trade, but we are confident that scientific research will before long find a means to restore to us the freedom of the seas. We are also distressed by the calamities that have fallen upon the inhabitants of certain islands, and we protest a disgust at its form which increases our sympathy for those who have experienced it. We do not, however, have any intention of responding to Dr Bocker's latest attempt to set our editorial flesh creeping; neither, we imagine, have our readers; nor, we hope, have any of the more thoughtful part of the population of this long-suffering island.

'It is our inclination to attribute his suggestion that we should proceed forthwith to embattle virtually the entire western coastline of the United Kingdom to the effect of recent unnerving experiences upon a temperament which has never shunned the sensational, rather than to the conclusions of mature consideration.

'Let us consider the cause of this panic-stricken recommendation. It is this: a number of small islands, all but one of them lying within the tropics, have been raided by some marine agency of which we as yet know little. In the course of these raids some hundreds of people — to an estimated total no larger than that of the number of persons injured on the roads in a few days — have lost their lives. This is unfortunate and regrettable, but scarcely grounds for the suggestion that we, thousands of miles from the nearest incident of the kind, should, at the taxpayer's expense, proceed to beset our whole shoreline with weapons and guards. This is a line of argument which would have us erect shockproof buildings in London on account of an earthquake in Tokio....'

And so on. There wasn't a lot left of poor Bocker by the time they had finished with him. I did not show it to him. He would find out soon enough, for The Beholder's readership had no use for the unique approach: it liked the popular view, bespokenly tailored.

Presently the helicopter set us down at the terminus, and Phyllis and I slipped away while pressmen converged on Bocker.

Dr Bocker out of sight, however, was by no means Dr Bocker out of mind. The major part of the Press had divided into pro- and anti- camps, and, within a few minutes of our getting back to the flat, representatives of both sides began ringing us up to put leading questions to their own advantage. After about five of these I seized on an interval to ring the EBC and tell them that as we were about to remove our receiver for a while they would probably, suffer, and would they please keep a record of callers. They did. Next morning there was quite a list. Among those anxious to talk to us I noticed the name of Captain Winters, with the Admiralty number against it.

'Here's one that ought to have priority, I think,' I suggested. 'Would you like to deal with it?'

'Oh, dear! Can't I just be an invalid?' asked Phyllis. 'I really don't —' then she saw where my finger was pointing. 'Oh, I see — well the Navy's a bit different, of course.'

She reported a little later:

'One of the Lordships wants to see us, and Captain Winters would be delighted if he may have the privilege of rewarding and reviving us with dinner afterwards. I said he should.'

'All right,' I agreed, and then took myself off to face a thirsty day of discussing and planning at EBC.

The Admiral, when we reached him, turned out to be a great deal more human and less awe-inspiring than his further approaches suggested. His greeting to Phyllis was, indeed, little short of avuncular. He asked concernedly after her injuries, and congratulated her upon her escape in a most protective manner. Then we all sat down. He glanced at a paper on his desk.

'Er — we have of course had Dr Bocker's report on the Escondida affair. It raises a large number of controversial points. In fact, he shows, if I may say so without offence, a generosity of hypothesis which appears to exceed the warrants of the observed facts to a degree quite remarkable in a scientist. I thought that a little talk with others who were present at the incident might — er — help to clarify the picture for us.'

I assured him that I understood the position well.

'All day long,' I told him, 'there has been a battle raging at EBC between the sponsor who backed the expedition, a government representative, EBC's Policy Panel, EBCs Audio-Assessment Department, the Director of Talks and Features, and several other people, about what Dr Bocker shall and shall not be allowed to say over the air. It's been heated, but a bit academic because Dr Bocker himself wasn't there and will certainly fight any amendments to his scripts that anybody tries to make, whatever they are.'

'There can be very little doubt of that, I think,' agreed the Admiral. He looked down at his paper again. 'Now he says here that these "sea-tank" things and the exuded objects which it pleases him to call "pseudo-coelenterata" are unaffected by rifle-fire, but that the "sea-tanks" completely disintegrate when hit by explosive cannon shell. You support that?'

'They explode — almost as thoroughly as a broken light-bulb implodes,' I told him.

'Leaving no identifiable fragments?'

'A lot of metal splinters and pieces which might have been anything. That's all.'

'Except the slime?'

'Yes. Except that, of course.'

Phyllis wrinkled her nose at the recollection of it

'By the afternoon the sun had baked that dry, and it was like a hard varnish over everything,' she told him.

He nodded. 'Now these "pseudo-coelenterata" things. I'll read you what he says about them.' He did so, ending: 'Would you call that a fair description? Is there anything you would add?'

'No. It's accurate to my memory,' I said.

'I didn't see much, but the first part's accurate,' Phyllis agreed.

'Now would you say that both these forms were sentient?' he asked.

I frowned. 'That's a very difficult one, sir. In the most elementary sense of the word they both were — that is, they responded to certain external stimuli, and very strongly. But if you are meaning, did they show any degree of intelligence? — well, I simply can't tell you. There was intelligent direction of both forms undoubtedly. The sea-tanks followed an intelligent route into the Square, and disposed themselves advantageously when they got there. The other things took the same route back to the water when the straight line was obstructed by houses. But it would not be very difficult to make remote-control mechanisms that would obey directions of that kind.'

'Then you are aware of Dr Bocker's theory that these forms were, in fact, agents only; that is that the controlling mind was elsewhere and directed them by some means of communication at present unknown to us? What is your opinion on that?'

'Not very definite, sir. But I think Dr Bocker's theory is tenable. If you don't mind an analogy, the whole operation struck one as having more the style of trawling than of harpooning. My wife places it somewhat lower than that; she said "shrimping".'

'An undiscriminating instrument rather than a precise one?'

'Exactly, sir. It discriminated no further than to select the animate from the inanimate.'

'H'm,' said the Admiral. 'And neither of you has formed any idea how these sea-tanks may be propelled?'

We shook our heads. He looked down at his paper again for a moment.

'Very rarely, in my experience of him,' he observed, 'has Dr Bocker failed to equip himself with a brand-new cat when approaching pigeons. We now come to it. It is implicit in his use of the term 'pseudo-coelenterata.".

'If I understand him rightly, he suggests that these coelenterate forms are not only not coelenterates, but not animals, and probably not, in the accepted sense, living creatures at all.'

He raised questioning eyebrows. I nodded.

'It is his opinion that they may well be artificial organic constructions, built for a specialized purpose. He — let me see now, how does he put it? — ah, yes: "It is far from inconceivable that organic tissues might be constructed in a manner analogous to that used by chemists to produce plastics of a required molecular structure. If this were done and the resulting artifact rendered sensitive to stimuli administered chemically or physically, it could, temporarily at least, produce a behaviour which would, to an unprepared observer, be scarcely distinguishable from that of a living organism.

'"My observations lead me to suggest that this is what has been done: the coelenterate form being chosen, out of many others that might have served the purpose, for its simplicity of construction. It seems probable that the sea-tanks may be a variant of the same device. In other words, we were being attacked by organic mechanisms under remote, or predetermined, control. When this is considered in the light of the control which we ourselves are able to exercise over inorganic materials; remotely, as with guided missiles, or predeterminedly, as with torpedoes, it should be less startling than it at first appears. Indeed, it may well be that once the technique of building up a natural form synthetically has been discovered, control of it would present less complex problems than many we have had to solve in our control of the inorganic."

'Now, Mr Watson, did you receive any impressions that would support such a view?'

I shook my head. 'Right out of my field, sir. Surely the report on the specimen ought to help there?'

'I have a copy of that — all jargon to me, but our advisers tell me that everything in it is so qualified and cautious as to be practically useless — except in so far as it shows that it is strange enough to baffle the experts.'

'Perhaps I'm being stupid,' Phyllis put in, 'but does it really matter a lot? From a practical point of view, I mean? The things have to be tackled the same way whether they are really living or pseudo-living, surely?'

'That's true enough,' the Admiral agreed. 'All the same, a speculation of that kind, if unsupported, has the effect of putting the whole report in a dubious light.'

We went on talking for a while, but little more of importance emerged, and shortly afterwards we were ushered from the presence.

'Oh — oh — oh!' said Phyllis painedly, as we got outside. 'I've a good mind to go straight round and shake Dr Bocker. He promised me. he wouldn't say anything yet about that "pseudo" — business. He's just a kind of natural-born enfant terrible, it'd do him good to be shaken. Just wait till I get him alone.'

'It does weaken his whole case,' Captain Winters agreed.

'Weaken it! Somebody is going to hand this to the newspapers. They play it up hard as another Bockerism, the whole thing will become just a stunt — and that will put all the sensible people against whatever he says. And just as he was beginning to live some of the other things down, tool Oh, let's go and have dinner before I get out of hand.'

A bad week followed. Those papers that had already adopted The Beholder's scornful attitude to coastal preparations pounced upon the pseudo-biotic suggestions with glee. Writers of editorials filled their pens with sarcasm, a squad of scientists who had trounced Bocker before was now marched out again to grind him still smaller. Almost every cartoonist discovered simultaneously why his favourite political butts had somehow never seemed quite human.

The other part of the Press, already advocating effective coastal defences, let its imagination go on the subject of pseudo-living structures that might yet be created, and demanded still better defence against the horrific possibilities thought up by its staffs.

Then the sponsor informed EBC that his fellow directors considered that their product's reputation would suffer by being associated with this new wave of notoriety and controversy that had arisen around Dr Bocker, and proposed to cancel arrangements. Departmental Heads in EBC began to tear their hair. Time-salesmen put up the old line about any kind of publicity being good publicity. The sponsor talked about dignity, and also the risk that purchase of the product might be regarded as tacit endorsement of the Bocker theory, which, he feared, might have the effect of promoting sales-resistance in the upper income brackets. EBC parried with the observation that buildup publicity had already tied the names of Bocker and the product together in the public mind. Nothing would be gained from reining-in in midstream, so the firm ought to go ahead and get the best of its money's worth.

The sponsor said that his firm had attempted to make a serious contribution to knowledge and public safety by promoting a scientific expedition, not a vulgar stunt. Just the night before, for instance, one of EBC's own comedians had suggested that pseudo-life might explain a long-standing mystery concerning his mother-in-law, and if this kind of thing was going to be allowed, etc… etc… EBC promised that it would not contaminate their air in future, and pointed out that if the series on the expedition were dropped after the promises that had been made, a great many consumers in all income-brackets were likely to feel that the sponsor's firm was unreliable

Members of the BBC displayed an infuriatingly courteous sympathy to any members of our staff whom they chanced to meet.

People kept on popping their heads into the room where I was trying to work, and giving me the latest from the front; usually advising me to omit or include this or that aspect according to the way the battle was going at the moment. Through everything ran a nervous realization that the arch-rivals might come out with an eye-witness at any moment and ruin our thunder — the courteousness seemed suspiciously urbane. After a couple of days of the atmosphere there I decided to stay at home and do the work there.

But there was still the telephone bringing suggestions and swift changes of policy. We did our best. We wrote and rewrote, trying to satisfy all parties. Two or three hurried conferences with Bocker himself were explosive. He spent most of the time threatening to throw the whole thing up because EBC too obviously would not trust him near alive microphone, and was insisting on recordings.

At last, however, the scripts were finished. We were too tired of them to argue any more. When the first of them did get on the air at last, it sounded to us like something misplaced from Mummy's Angel's Half-Hour. We packed hurriedly and departed blasphemously for the peace and seclusion of Cornwall.

The first noticeable thing as we approached Rose Cottage, 268.6 miles this time, was an innovation.

'Good heavens!' I said. 'We've got a perfectly good one indoors. If I am expected to come and sit out in a draught there just because a lot of your compost-minded friends —'

'That,' Phyllis told me, coldly, 'is an arbour.'

I looked at it more carefully. The architecture was unusual. One wall gave an impression of leaning a little.

'Why do we want an arbour?' I inquired.

'Well, one of us might like to work there on a warm day. It keeps the wind off, and stops papers blowing about.'

'Oh,' I said.

With a defensive note, she added:

'After all, when one is bricklaying one has to build something.'

Logical enough, I supposed, but there was a haunting feeling that it did not start from quite the right premiss. I assured her that as arbours went, it was a very nice arbour. I had just not been expecting an arbour, that was all.

'It was not a kind conclusion to jump to,' she said, huffily.

There are times when I wonder whether the two of us are quite as well en rapport as I like to hope. The use of the word 'kind', for instance, in the circumstances… But I was able to assure her that I thought it very clever of her: and I did; I don't suppose I myself could have got one brick to stick to another.

It was a relief to be back. Hard to believe that such a place as Escondida existed at all. Still harder to believe in sea-tanks and giant coelenterates, pseudo or not. Yet, somehow, I did not find myself able to relax as I had hoped.

On the first morning Phyllis dug out the fragments of the frequently neglected novel and took them off, with a faintly defiant air, to the arbour. I pottered about, wondering why the sense of peace wasn't seeping in upon me quite as I had hoped. The Cornish sea still lapped immemorially at the rocks. It could thunder, it could menace, it could wreck good ships when it had a mind to; but these were old, natural hazards. They made places like Escondida seem frivolous, even in conception; such places belonged to a different world, one where it was not altogether surprising that freakish things should happen. But Cornwall was not frivolous. It was real and solid. The centuries passed over it unsensationally. The waves gnawed steadily at it, but slowly. When the sea killed its inhabitants it was because they had challenged it: not because it challenged them. It was hard indeed to imagine our home sea spawning such morbid novelties as had slid up the Caribbean beaches of Escondida. Bocker seemed, in recollection, like an impish sprite who had had a power of hallucination. Out of his range, the world was a more sober, better-ordered place. At least, so it appeared for the moment, though the extent to which it was not was increasingly borne in upon me during the next few days as I emerged from our particular concern to take a more general look at it.

The national air-lift was working now, though on a severe schedule of primary necessities. It had been discovered that two large air-freighters working on a rapid shuttle-service could bring in only a little less than the average cargo boat could carry in the same length of time, but the cost was high. In spite of the rationing system the cost of living had already risen by about two hundred per cent. The aircraft factories were working all round the clock to produce the craft which would bring the overheads down, but the demand was so great that the schedule of priorities was unlikely to be relaxed for a considerable time, possibly several years. Harbours were choked with the ships that were laid up either because the crews refused to work them, or the owners refused to pay the insurance rate. Dockers deprived of work were demonstrating and fighting for the guaranteed wages, while their union temporized and vacillated. Seamen, out of work through no fault of their own, joined them in demanding basic pay as a right. Airport staff pressed for higher pay. Cancellation of shipyard work brought thousands more demanding continuation of pay. Aircraft workers were threatening to come out in support. Reduced demand for steel reduced the demand for coal. It was proposed to close certain impoverished pits, whereat the entire industry struck, in protest.

The petrels of Muscovy, finding the climate bracing, declared through their accustomed London mouthpiece, and disseminated by all the usual channels, their view that the shipping crisis was largely a put-up job. The West, they declared, had seized upon and magnified a few maritime inconveniences as an excuse to carry out a vastly enlarged programme of air-power.

With trade restricted to essentials, half a dozen financial conferences were in almost permanent session. Ill-feeling and tempers were rising here and there where a disposition to make the delivery of necessities conditional on the acceptance of a proportion of luxuries was perceptible. There was undoubtedly some hard bargaining going on, and there would, equally without doubt, be some far-sighted concessions that the public would only learn about later on.

A few ships could still be found in which crews, at fortune-making wages, would dare the deep water, but the insurance rate pushed cargo prices up to a level at which only the direst need would pay, so that they were largely voyages of bravado.

Somebody somewhere had perceived in an enlightened moment that every vessel lost had been power-driven, and a ramp in sailing craft of every size and type had gone into operation all round the world. There was a proposal to mass-produce clipper ships, but little disposition to believe that the emergency would last long enough to warrant the investment.

In the backrooms of all maritime countries the boys were still hard at work. Every week saw new devices being tried out, some with enough success for them to be put into production — though only to be taken out of production again when it was shown that they had been rendered unreliable in some way, if not actually countered. Nevertheless, it was being recognized by a scientifically-minded age that even magicians may have sticky relays sometimes. That the boffins would come through with the complete answer one day was not to be doubted — and, always, it might be to-morrow.

From what I had been hearing, the general faith in boffins was now somewhat greater than the boffins' faith in themselves. Their shortcomings as saviours were beginning to oppress them. Their chief difficulty was not so much infertility of invention as lack of information. They badly needed more data, and could not get them. One of them had remarked to me: 'If you were going to make a ghost-trap, how would you set about it? — particularly if you had not even a small ghost to practise on.' They had become ready to grasp at any straw — which may have been the reason why it was only among a section of the boffins that Bocker's theory of pseudo-biotic forms received any serious consideration.

As for the sea-tanks, the more lively papers were having a great time with them, so were the news-reels. Selected parts of the Escondida films were included in our scripted accounts on EBC. A small footage was courteously presented to the BBC for use in its news-reel, with appropriate acknowledgement. In fact, the tendency to play the things up to an extent which was creating alarm puzzled me until I discovered that in certain quarters almost anything which diverted attention from the troubles at home was considered worthy of encouragement. Sea-tanks were particularly suitable for this purpose; their sensation value was high, and unattended by those embarrassments which sometimes result from the policy of directing restive attention abroad.

Their depredations, however, were becoming increasingly serious. In the short time since we had left Escondida raids had been reported from ten or eleven places in the Caribbean area, including a township on Puerto Rico. A little further afield, only rapid action by Bermudan-based American aircraft had scotched an attack there. But this was small-scale stuff compared with what was happening on the other side of the world. Accounts, apparently reliable, spoke of a series of attacks on the east coasts of Japan. Raids by a dozen or more sea-tanks had taken place on Hokkaido and Honshu. Reports from further south, in the Banda Sea area, were more confused, but obviously related to a considerable number of raids upon various scales. Mindanao capped the lot by announcing that four or five of its eastern coastal towns had been raided simultaneously, an operation which must have employed at least sixty sea-tanks.

For the inhabitants of Indonesia and the Philippines, scattered upon innumerable islands set in deep seas, the outlook was very different from that which faced the British, sitting high on their Continental shelf with a shallow North Sea, showing no signs of abnormality, at their backs. Among the Islands, reports and rumours skipped like a running fire until each day there were more thousands of people forsaking the coasts and fleeing inland in panic. A similar trend, though not yet on the panic scale, was apparent in the West Indies.

Catching up on the news, the gravity of it came home to me more strongly. I began to feel that I had been taking it all rather as the readers of the more irresponsible papers were still taking it. I started to see a far larger pattern than I had ever imagined. The reports argued the existence of hundreds, perhaps thousands of these sea-tanks — numbers that indicated not simply a few raids, but a campaign.

'They must provide defences, or else give the people the means to defend themselves,' I said. 'You can't preserve your economy in a place where everybody is scared stiff to go near the seaboard. You must somehow make it possible for people to work and live there.'

'Nobody knows where they will come next, and you have to act quickly when they do,' said Phyllis. 'That would mean letting people have arms.'

'Well, then, they should give them arms. Damn it, it isn't a function of the State to deprive its people of the means of self-protection.'

'Isn't it?' said Phyllis, reflectively.

'What do you mean?'

'Doesn't it sometimes strike you as odd that all our governments who loudly claim to rule by the will of the people are willing to run almost any risk rather than let their people have arms? Isn't it almost a principle that a people should not be allowed to defend itself, but should be forced to defend its Government? The only people I know who are trusted by their Government are the Swiss, and being landlocked they don't come into this.'

I was puzzled. The response was off her usual key. She was looking tired, too.

'What's wrong, Phyl?'

She shrugged. 'Nothing, except that at times I get sick of putting up with all the shams and the humbug, and pretending that the lies aren't lies, and the propaganda isn't propaganda, and the dirt isn't dirt. I'll get over it again… Don't you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age of Reason, instead of into the Age of the Ostensible Reason? I think that they are going to let thousands of people be killed by these horrible things rather than risk giving them powerful enough weapons to defend themselves. And they'll have rows of arguments why it is best so. What do a few thousands, or a few millions of people matter? Women will just go on making the loss good. But Governments are important — one mustn't risk them.'

'Darling —'

'There'll be token arrangements, of course. Small garrisons in important places, perhaps. Aircraft standing-by on call — and they will come along after the worst of it has happened — when men and women have been tied into bundles and rolled away by those horrible things, and girls have been dragged over the ground by their hair, like poor Muriel, and people have been pulled apart, like that man who was caught by two of them at once — then the aeroplanes will come, and the authorities will say they were sorry to be a bit late, but there are technical difficulties in making adequate arrangements. That's the regular kind of get-out, isn't it?'

'But, Phyl, darling —'

'I know what you are going to say, Mike, but I am scared. Nobody's really doing anything. There's no realization, no genuine attempt to change the pattern to meet it. The ships are driven off the deep seas; goodness knows how many of these sea-tank things are ready to come and snatch people away. They say: "Dear, dear! Such a loss of trade," and they talk and talk and talk as if it'll all come right in the end if only they can keep on talking long enough. When anybody like Bocker suggests doing something he's just howled down and called a sensationalist, or an alarmist. How many people do they regard as the proper wastage before they must do anything?'

'But they are trying, you know, Phyl —'

'Are they? I think they're balancing things all the time. What is the minimum cost at which the political set-up can be preserved in present conditions? How much loss of life will the people put up with before they become dangerous about it? Would it be wise or unwise to declare martial law, and at what stage? On and on, instead of admitting the danger and getting to work. Oh, I could —' She stopped suddenly. Her expression changed. 'Sorry, Mike. I shouldn't have gone off the handle like that. I must be tired, or something.' And she took herself off with a decisive air of not wanting to be followed.

The outburst disturbed me badly. I hadn't seen her in a state anything like that for years. Not since the baby died.

The next morning didn't do anything to reassure me. I came round the corner of the cottage and found her sitting in that ridiculous arbour. Her arms lay on the table in front of her, her head rested on them, with her hair straying over the littered pages of the novel. She was weeping forlornly, steadily.

I raised her chin, and kissed her.

'Darling — darling, what is it —?'

She looked back at me with the tears still running down her cheeks. She said, miserably:

'I can't do it, Mike. It won't work.'

She looked mournfully at the written pages. I sat down beside her, and put an arm round her.

'Never mind, Sweet, it'll come…'

'It won't, Mike. Every time I try, other thoughts come instead. I'm frightened.' She gave me a curiously intense look. I tightened my arm.

'There's nothing to be frightened about, darling.'

She kept on looking at me closely. 'You're not frightened?' she said, oddly.

'We're stale,' I said. 'We stewed too much over those scripts. Let's go over to the north coast, it ought to be good for surfboards to-day.'

She dabbed at her eyes. 'All right,' she said, with unusual meekness.

It was a good day. The wind and the waves and the exercise brought more colour into her cheeks, and neither of us pecked at our lunch. We reached the stage where I felt that I could hopefully suggest that she should see a doctor. Her refusal came pat. She was feeling a whole lot better. Everything would be all right in a day or two.

We idled the rest of the day away on a leisurely course which brought us back to Rose Cottage about nine-thirty in the evening. While Phyllis went to warm up some coffee, I turned on the radio. With a touch of disloyalty I tried the BBC first and got in on the early lines of a play in which it seemed likely that Gladys Young was going to be a possessive mother, so I turned to the EBC. I found it engaged in putting forth one of those highly monotonous programmes that it unblushingly calls variety. However, I let it run.

A plugged number finished. Somebody I had never heard of was introduced as my ever-popular old friend, So-and-So. There were a few preliminary runs on a guitar, then a voice began to sing:

Oh, I'm burning my brains in the backroom,

Almost setting my cortex alight —

It was a moment before my surprise registered, then I turned and stared incredulously at the set:

To find a new thing to go crack-boom!

And blow up a xenobathite!

There was a crash behind me. I turned to see Phyllis in the doorway, the coffee things on the floor at her feet. Her face was puckering, and she sagged. I caught her, and helped her to a chair. The radio was still going:

… technical journals,

And now I'm just starting to pray.

I leaned over and switched it off. They must have got the song somehow from Ted. Phyllis wasn't crying. She just sat there shaking all over.

'I've given her a sedative, so she'll sleep now. What she must have is a complete rest and a change,' said the doctor.

'That's what we're having,' I pointed out.

He regarded me thoughtfully.

'You, too, I think,' he said.

'I'm all right,' I told him. 'I don't understand this. She had a shock, and she was hurt, but that was right at the beginning of it. After that, she was unconscious. She seemed to get over it quite soon, and she really knows no more of the rest than anyone else who has seen the films. Though, of course, we have been rather steeping in it.'

He continued to look at me seriously.

'You saw it all,' he remarked. 'You dream about it, don't you?'

'It has given me a few bad nights,' I admitted.

He nodded. 'More than that. You've been going over it again and again in your sleep?' he suggested. 'Particularly you have been concerned with somebody called Muriel, and with a man who was torn to pieces?'

'Well, yes,' I agreed. 'But I haven't talked to her about it. I'd rather forget it.'

'Some people don't easily forget things like that. They are apt to break through when one is asleep.'

'You mean I've been talking in my sleep?'

'A lot, I gather.'

'I see. You mean that's why she —?'

'Yes. Now I'm going to give you the address of a friend of mine in Harley Street. I want you both to go up to London to-morrow, and see him the next day. I'll fix it up for you.'

'Very well,' I agreed. 'You know, it wasn't the thing itself that worried me so much as the pressure of getting the scripts out afterwards. That's relaxed now.'

'Possibly,' he said. 'All the same, I think you should go and see him.'

There was something wrong, and I knew it. I didn't admit to the doctor, though I did to the Harley Street man, that it was more often Phyllis than Muriel that I saw being dragged along by her hair, and more often her than an unknown man that I saw being pulled to pieces. As a quid pro quo he told me that Phyllis had been spending most of her nights listening to me and dissuading me from jumping out of the window to interfere in these imaginary happenings.

So I agreed to go out of circulation for a time.

Nirvana is for the few; nevertheless, the old manor house in Yorkshire to which my advice led me managed to induce a passable temporary substitute. The first few days without newspapers, without radio, without letters, had a purgatorially fretful quality, but after that came an almost physical sense of taut springs relaxing. As the feeling of urgency receded my values and perspective shifted. Exercise, open air, a complete change of pattern led to a feeling of having changed gear; the engine began to settle down to a more comfortable running-speed. There was a great simplification. One seemed to grow fresher and cleaner within, larger, too, and less pushable-around. There was a new sense of stability. A very comfortable, easy pattern it was; habit-forming, I imagine.

Certainly, in six weeks I had become addicted and might have continued longer had a twenty-mile thirst not happened to take me into a small pub close upon six o'clock one evening.

While I was standing at the bar with the second pint the landlord turned on the radio, the arch-rival's news-bulletin. The very first item shattered the ivory tower that I had been gradually building. The voice said:

'The roll of those missing in the Oviedo-Santander district is still incomplete, and it is thought by the Spanish authorities that it may never be completely definitive. Official spokesmen admit that the estimate of 3,200 casualties, including men, women, and children, is conservative, and may be as much as fifteen or twenty per cent below the actual figure.

'Messages of sympathy from all parts of the world continue to pour into Madrid. Among them are telegrams from San Jose, Guatemala, from Salvador, from La Serena, Chile, from Bunbury, Western Australia, and from numerous islands in both the East and West Indies which have themselves suffered attacks no less horrible, though smaller in scale, than those inflicted upon the north Spanish coast.

'In the House to-day, the Leader of the Opposition, in giving his party's support for the feelings of sympathy with the Spanish people expressed by the Prime Minister, pointed out that the casualties in the third of this series of raids, that upon Gijon would have been considerably more severe had the people not taken their defence into their own hands. The people, he said, were entitled to defence. It was a part of the business of government to provide them with it. If a government neglected that duty, no one could blame a people for taking steps for its self-protection.

'It would be much better, however, to be prepared with an organized force. Since time out of mind we had maintained armed forces to deal with threats by other armed forces. Since 1829 we had maintained an efficient police-force to deal with internal threats. But it appeared that we had now become so administratively barren, so inventively infertile, so corporately costive that we were unable to produce the means of giving the dwellers upon our coasts that security to which their membership of this great nation entitled them.

'It seemed to the members of the Opposition that the Government, having failed to fulfil its election pledges, was now about to belie the very name of its party by its reluctance to consider means which would conserve even the lives of its electors. If this were not so, then it would appear that the policy of conservation was being carried to a length which scarcely distinguished it from niggardliness. It was high time that measures were taken to ensure that the fate which had overtaken dwellers upon the littorals, not only in Spain, but in many other parts of the world as well, could not fall upon the people of these islands.

'The Prime Minister, in thanking the Opposition for its expression of sympathy, would assure them that the Government was actively watching the situation. The exact steps that would, if necessary, be taken would have to be dictated by the nature of the emergency, if one should arise. These, he said, were deep waters: there was much consolation to be found in the reflection that the British Isles lay in shallow waters.

'The name of Her Majesty the Queen headed the list of subscribers to the fund opened by the Lord Mayor of London for the relief —'

The landlord reached over, and switched off the set.

'Cor!' he remarked, with disgust. 'Makes yer sick. Always the bloody same. Treat you like a lot of bloody kids. Same during the bloody war. Bloody Home Guards all over the place waiting for bloody parachutists, and all the bloody ammunition all bloody well locked up. Like the Old Man said one time: his bloody-self, "What kind of a bloody people do they think we are?"'

I offered him a drink, told him I had been away from any news for days, and asked what had been going on. Stripped of its adjectival monotony, and filled out by information I gathered later, it amounted to this:

In the past weeks the scope of the raids had widened well beyond the tropics. At Bunbury, a hundred miles or so south of Fremantle in Western Australia, a contingent of fifty or more sea-tanks had come ashore and into the town before any alarm was given. A few nights later La Serena, in Chile, was taken similarly by surprise. At the same time in the Central American area the raids had ceased to be confined to islands, and there had been a number of incursions, large and small, upon both the Pacific and Gulf coasts. In the Atlantic, the Cape Verde Islands had been repeatedly raided, and the trouble spread northward to the Canaries and Madeira. There had been a few small-scale assaults, too, on the bulge of the African coast.

Europe remained an interested spectator. Ex Africa semper aliquid novi may be translated, with a touch of freedom, as: 'Funny things happen in other places,' conveying that Europe, in the opinion of its inhabitants, is the customary seat of stability. Hurricanes, tidal waves, serious earthquakes, et cetera, are extravagances divinely directed to occur in the more exotic and less sensible parts of the earth, all important European damage being done traditionally by man himself in periodical frenzies. It was not, therefore, to be seriously expected that the danger would come any closer than Madeira — or, possibly, Rabat or Casablanca.

Consequently, when, five nights before, the sea-tanks had come crawling through the mud, across the shore, and up the slipways at Santander, they had entered a city that was not only unprepared, but also largely uninformed about them.

From the moment they were observed opinion split into two parties; roughly the modern and the classical. Someone in the former telephoned the garrison at the cuartel with the news that foreign submarines were invading the harbour in force; someone else followed up with the information that the submarines were landing tanks; yet another somebody contradicted that the submarines themselves were amphibious. Since something was certainly, if obscurely, amiss, the soldiery turned out to investigate.

Meanwhile, the sea-tanks had entered the streets. It was immediately clear to the more classically-minded citizens that, since the advancing objects were no known form of machine, their origin was likely to be diabolic, and they aroused their priests. The visitants were conjured in Latin to return to their Captain, the Father of Lies, in the Pit whence they had come.

The sea-tanks had continued their slow advance, driving the exorcising priests before them. The military, on their arrival, had to force their way through throngs of praying townspeople. In each of several streets patrols came to a similar decision: if this were foreign invasion, it was their duty to repel it; if it were diabolical, the same action, even though ineffective, would put them on the side of Right. They opened fire.

In the comisaria of police a belated and garbled alarm gave the impression that the trouble was due to a revolt by the troops. With this endorsed by the sound of firing in several places, the police went forth to teach the military a lesson.

After that, the whole thing had become a chaos of sniping, counter-sniping, partisanship, incomprehension, and exorcism, in the middle of which the sea-tanks had settled down to exude their revolting coelenterates. Only when daylight came and the sea-tanks had withdrawn had it been possible to sort out the confusion, by which time over two thousand persons were missing.

'How did there come to be so many? Did they all stay out praying in the streets?' I asked.

The innkeeper reckoned from the newspaper accounts that the people had not realized what was happening. They were not highly literate or greatly interested in the outer world, and until the first coelenterate sent out its cilia they had no idea what was going to happen. Then there was panic, the luckier ones ran right away, the others bolted for cover into the nearest houses.

'They ought to have been all right there,' I said.

But I was, it seemed, out of date. Since we had seen them in Escondida the sea-tanks had learnt a thing or two; among them, that if the bottom storey of a house is pushed away the rest will come down, and once the coelenterates had cleared up those trampled in the panic, demolition had started. The people inside had had to choose between having the house come down with them, or making a bolt for safety.

The following night, watchers at several small towns and villages to the west of Santander spotted the half-egg shapes crawling ashore at mid-tide. There was time to arouse most of the inhabitants and get them away. A unit of the Spanish air-force was standing-by, and went into action with flares and cannon. At San Vicente they blew up half a dozen sea-tanks with their first onslaught, and the rest stopped. Several more were destroyed on the second run; the rest started back to the sea. The fighters got the last of them when it was already a few inches submerged. At the other four places where they landed the defence did almost as well. Not more than three or four coelenterates were released at all, and only a dozen or so villagers caught by them. It was estimated that out of fifty or so sea-tanks engaged, not more than four or five could have got safely back to deep water. It was a famous victory, and the wine flowed freely to celebrate it.

The night after that there were watchers all along the coast ready to give the alarm when the first dark hump should break the water. But all night long the waves rolled steadily on to the beaches, with never an alien shape to break them. By morning it was clear that the sea-tanks, or those who sent them, had learnt a painful lesson. The few that had survived were reckoned to be making for parts less alert.

During the day the wind dropped. In the afternoon a fog came up, by the evening it was thick, and visibility no more than a few yards. It was somewhere about ten-thirty in the evening when the sea-tanks came sliding up from the quietly lapping waters at Gijon, with not a sound to betray them until their metal bellies started to crunch up the stone ramps. The few small boats that were already drawn up there they pushed aside or crushed as they came. It was the cracking of the timbers that brought men out from the waterside posadas to investigate.

They could make out little in the fog. The first sea-tanks must have sent coelenterate bubbles wobbling into the air before the men realized what was happening, for presently all was cries, screams, and confusion. The sea-tanks pressed slowly forward through the fog, crunching and scraping into the narrow streets, while, behind them, still more climbed out of the water. On the waterfront there was panic. People running from one tank were as likely to run into another. Without any warning a whip-like cilium would slash out of the fog, find its victim, and begin to contract. A little later there would be a heavy splash as it rolled with its load over the quayside, back into the water.

Alarm, running back up the town, reached the comisaria. The officer in charge put through the emergency call. He listened then hung up slowly.

'Grounded,' he said, 'and wouldn't be much use even if they could take off.'

He gave orders to issue rifles and turn out every available man.

'Not that they'll be much good, but we might be lucky. Aim carefully, and if you do find a vital spot, report at once.'

He sent the men off with little hope that they could do more than offer a token resistance. Presently he heard sounds of firing. Suddenly there was a boom that rattled the windows, then another. The telephone rang. An excited voice explained that a party of dockworkers was throwing fused sticks of dynamite and gelignite under the advancing sea-tanks. Another boom rattled the windows. The officer thought quickly.

'Very well. Find the leader. Authorize him from me. Put your men on to getting the people clear,' he directed.

The sea-tanks were not easily discouraged this time, and it was difficult to sort out claims and reports. Estimates of the number destroyed varied between thirty and seventy; of the numbers engaged, between fifty and a hundred and fifty. Whatever the true figures, the force must have been considerable, and the pressure eased only a couple of hours before dawn.

When the sun rose to clear the last of the fog it shone upon a town battered in parts, and widely covered with slime, but also upon a citizenry which, in spite of some hundreds of casualties, felt that it had earned battle honours.

The account, as I had it first from the innkeeper, was brief, but it included the main points, and he concluded it with the observation:

'They reckons as there was well over a bloody 'undred of the damn things done-in them two nights. And then there's all those that come up in other places, too — there must be bloody thousands of the bastards a-crawlin' all over the bloody sea-bottom. Time something was bloody done about 'em, I say. But no. "No cause for alarm," says the bloody Government. Huh, we've had a basinful of that before. It'll go on being no bloody cause for bloody alarm until a few hundred poor devils somewhere 'as got their bloody selves lassoed by flying jellyfish. Then it'll be all emergency orders and bloody panic. You watch.'

'The Bay of Biscay's pretty deep,' I pointed out. 'A lot deeper than anything we've got around here.'

'So what?' said the innkeeper.

And when I came to think of it, it was a perfectly good question. The real sources of trouble were without doubt way down in the greater Deeps, and the first surface invasions had all taken place close to the big Deeps. But there were no grounds for assuming that sea-tanks must operate close to a Deep. Indeed, from a purely mechanical point of view, a slowly shelving climb should be easier for them than a steep one — or should it? There was also the point that the deeper they were the less energy they had to expend in shifting their weight… Again the whole thing boiled down to the fact that we still knew too little about them to make any worthwhile prophecies at all. The innkeeper was as likely to be right as anyone else.

I told him so, and we drank to the hope that he was not. When I left, the spell had been rudely broken. I stopped in the village to send a telegram, and then went back to the Manor to pack my things, and tell them that I should be leaving the following day.

To occupy the journey by catching up on the world I bought a selection of daily and weekly newspapers. The urgent topic in most of the dailies was 'coast preparedness' — the Left demanding wholesale embattlement of the Atlantic seaboard, the Right rejecting panic-spending on a probable chimera. Beyond that, the outlook had not changed a great deal. The boffins had not yet produced a panacea (though the usual new device was to be tested), the merchant-ships still choked the harbours, the aircraft factories were working three shifts and threatening to strike, the C.P. was pushing a line of Every Plane is a Vote for War.

Mr Malenkov, interviewed by telegram, had said that although the intensified programme of aircraft construction in the West was no more than a part of a bourgeois-fascist plan by warmongers that could deceive no one, yet so great was the opposition of the Russian people to any thought of war that the production of aircraft within the Soviet Union for the Defence of Peace had been tripled. War was not inevitable.

Long analyses of this statement by the regular Kremlinologists conveyed the impression that the tripod, as well as a touch of the conversational style, of Delphi, had been transferred to Moscow.

The first thing I noticed when I let myself into the flat was a number of envelopes on the mat, a telegram, presumably my own, among them. The place immediately felt forlorn.

In the bedroom were signs of hurried packing, in the kitchen sink, some unwashed crockery. A half-written page in the typewriter in the sitting-room presented some cross-talk; as one of the speakers was called Perpetua, I recognized it for a part of the stand-by novel. I looked in the desk-diary, but the last entry was a week old, and said simply: 'Lamb chops.'

The precious notebook was there beside it. I don't usually look at that: it has a status slightly lower than personal letters, but still private. However, this was an exceptional occasion, and I wanted a clue if there was one, so I opened it. The last two entries read:

Ever since the phi etymological Mr Nash

Turned the dictionary into a polysyllabical hit of hash,

'S'no longer the lingo

The Bard used to sing-oh.

And:

Even if I should live a very, very long time

I still shouldn't be very likely to find the rhyme

That Ogden

Got bogged on.

More plaintive than constructive, I thought; certainly not instructive. I picked up the telephone.

It was nice of Freddy Wittier to sound genuinely pleased that I was about again. After the greetings and congratulations:

'Look,' I said, 'I've been so strictly incomunicado that I seem to have lost my wife. Can you elucidate?'

'Lost your what?' said Freddy, in a startled tone.

'Wife — Phyllis,' I explained.

'Oh, I thought you said "life". Oh, she's all right. She went off with Bocker a couple of days ago,' he announced cheerfully.

'That,' I told him, 'is not the way to break the news. Just what do you mean by "went off with Bocker"?'

'Spain,' he said, succinctly. 'They're laying bathy-traps there, or something. Matter of fact, we're expecting a dispatch from her any moment.'

'So she's pinching my job?'

'Keeping it warm for you — it's other people that'd like to pinch it. Good thing you're back.'

In the subsequent course of the conversation I learnt that Phyllis had stood her rest-cure for just one week, and then showed up again in London.

The flat was depressing, so I went round to the Club and spent the evening there.

The telephone jangling by the bedside woke me up. I switched on the light. Five a.m. 'Hullo,' I said to the telephone, in a five a.m. voice. It was Freddy. My heart gave a nasty knock inside as I recognized him at that hour.

'Mike?' he said. 'Good. Grab your hat and a recorder. There's a car on the way for you now.'

My needle was still swinging a bit.

'Car?' I repeated. 'It's not Phyl —?'

'Phyl —? Oh, Lord, no. She's okay. Her call came through about nine o'clock. Transcription gave her your love, on my instructions. Now get cracking, old man. That car'll be outside your place any minute.'

'But look here. — Anyway, there's no recorder here. She must have taken it.'

'Hell. I'll try to get one to the plane in time.'

'Plane —?' I said, but the line had gone dead.

I rolled out of bed, and started to dress. A ring came at the door before I had finished. It was one of EBC's regular drivers. I asked him what the hell, but all he knew was that there was a special charter job laid on at Northolt. I grabbed my passport, and we left.

It turned out that I didn't need the passport. I discovered that when I joined a small, blear-eyed section of Fleet Street that was gathered in the waiting-hall drinking coffee. Bob Humbleby was there, too.

'Ah, the Other Spoken Word,' said somebody. 'I thought I knew my Watson.'

'What,' I inquired, 'is all this about? Here am I routed out of a warm though solitary bed, whisked through the night — yes, thanks, a drop of that would liven it up.'

The Samaritan stared at me.

'Do you mean to say you've not heard?' he asked.

'Heard what?'

'Bathies. Place called Buncarragh, Donegal,' he explained, telegraphically. 'And very suitable, too, in my opinion. Ought to feel themselves really at home among the leprechauns and banshees. But I have no doubt that the natives will be after telling us that it's another injustice that the first place in England to have a visit from them should be Ireland, so they will.'

It was queer indeed to encounter that same decaying, fishy smell in a little Irish village. Escondida had in itself been exotic and slightly improbable; but that the same thing should strike among these soft greens and misty blues, that the sea-tanks should come crawling up on this cluster of little grey cottages, and burst their sprays of tentacles here, seemed utterly preposterous.

Yet, there were the ground-down stones of the slipway in the little harbour, the grooves on the beach beside the harbour wall, four cottages demolished, distraught women who had seen their men caught in the nets of the cilia, and over all the same plastering of slime, and the same smell.

There had been six sea-tanks, they said. A prompt telephone-call had brought a couple of fighters at top speed. They had wiped out three, and the rest had gone sliding back into the water — but not before half the population of the village, wrapped in tight cocoons of tentacles, had preceded them.

The next night there was a raid further south, in Galway Bay

By the time I got back to London the campaign had begun. This is no place for a detailed survey of it. Many copies of the official report must still exist, and their accuracy will be more useful than my jumbled recollections.

Phyllis and Bocker were back from Spain, too, and she and I settled down to work. A somewhat different line of work, for day-to-day news of sea-tank raids was now Agency and local correspondent stuff. We seemed to be holding a kind of EBC relations job with the Forces, and also with Bocker — at least, that was what we made of it. Telling the listening public what we could about what was being done for them.

And a lot was. The Republic of Ireland had suspended the past for the moment to borrow large numbers of mines, bazookas, and mortars, and then agreed to accept the loan of a number of men trained in the use of them, too. All along the west and south coasts of Ireland squads of men were laying minefields above the tidelines wherever there were no protecting cliffs. In coastal towns pickets armed with bomb-firing weapons kept all-night watch. Elsewhere, planes, jeeps, and armoured cars waited on call.

In the south-west of England, and up the more difficult west coast of Scotland similar preparations were going on.

They did not seem greatly to deter the sea-tanks. Night after night, down the Irish coast, on the Brittany coast, up out of the Bay of Biscay, along the Portuguese seaboard they came crawling in large or small raids. But they had lost their most potent weapon, surprise. The leaders usually gave their own alarm by blowing themselves up in the minefields; by the time a gap had been created the defences were in action and the townspeople had fled. The sea-tanks that did get through did some damage, but found little prey, and their losses were not infrequently one hundred per cent.

Across the Atlantic serious trouble was almost confined to the Gulf of Mexico. Raids on the east coast were so effectively discouraged that few took place at all north of Charleston; on the Pacific side there were few higher than San Diego. In general, it was the two Indies, the Philippines, and Japan that continued to suffer most; but they, too, were learning ways of inflicting enormous damage for very small returns.

Bocker spent a great deal of time dashing hither and thither trying to persuade various authorities to include traps among their defences. He had little success. It was agreed that a full knowledge of the enemy's nature would be a useful asset, but there were practical difficulties. Scarcely any place was willing to contemplate the prospect of a sea-tank, trapped on its foreshore, but still capable of throwing out coelenterates for an unknown length of time, nor did even Bocker have any theories on the location of traps beyond the construction of enormous numbers of them on a hit-or-miss basis. A few of the pitfall type were dug, but none ever made a catch. Nor did the more hopeful-sounding project of preserving any stalled or disabled sea-tank for examination turn out any better. In a few places the defenders were persuaded to cage them with wire-netting instead of blowing them to pieces, but that was the easy part of the problem. The question what to do next was not solved. Any attempt at broaching invariably caused them to explode in geysers of slime. Very often they did so before the attempt was made — the effect, Bocker maintained, of exposure to bright sunlight, though there were other views. Whatever the cause, it could not be said that anyone knew any more about their nature than when we first encountered them on Escondida.

It was the Irish who took almost the whole weight of the north-European attack which was conducted, according to Bocker, from a base somewhere in the Deep, south of Rockall. They rapidly developed a skill in dealing with them that made it a point of dishonour that even one should get away. Scotland suffered only a few minor visitations in the Outer Isles, with scarcely a casualty. England's only raids occurred in Cornwall, and they, too, were small affairs for the most part — the one exception was an incursion in Falmouth Harbour where a few did succeed in advancing a little beyond high-tide mark before they were destroyed; but much larger numbers, it was claimed, were smashed by depth-charges before they could even reach the shore.

Then, only a few days after the Falmouth attack, the raids ceased. They stopped quite suddenly, and, as far as the larger land-masses were concerned, completely.

A week later there was no longer any doubt that what someone had nicknamed the Low Command had called the campaign off. The continental coasts had proved too tough a nut, and the attempt had flopped. The sea-tanks withdrew to less dangerous parts, but even there their percentage of losses mounted and their returns diminished.

A fortnight after the last raid came a proclamation ending the state of emergency. A day or two later Bocker made his comments on the situation over the air:

'Some of us,' he said, 'some of us, though not the more sensible of us, have recently been celebrating a victory. To them I suggest that when the cannibal's fire is not quite hot enough to boil the pot, the intended meal may feel some relief, but he has not, in the generally accepted sense of the phrase, scored a victory. In fact, if he does not do something before the cannibal has time to build a better and bigger fire, he is not going to be any better off.

'Let us, therefore, look at this "victory". We, a maritime people who rose to power upon shipping which plied to the furthest corners of the earth, have lost the freedom of the seas. We have been kicked out of an element that we had made our own. Our ships are only safe in coastal waters and shallow seas — and who can say how long they are going to be tolerated even there? We have been forced by a blockade, more effective than any experienced in war, to depend on air-transport for the very food by which we live. Even the scientists who are trying to study the sources of our troubles must put to sea in sailing-ships to do their work. Is this victory?

'What the eventual purpose of these coastal raids may have been, no one can say. It may be that those who referred to them as "shrimping" were not so far from the mark — that they have been trawling for us as we trawl for fish — it may be, though I do not think so myself; there is more to be caught more cheaply in the sea than on the land. But it may even have been part of an attempt to conquer the land — an ineffectual and ill-informed attempt, but, for all that, rather more successful than our attempts to reach the Deeps. If it was, then its instigators are now better informed about us, and therefore potentially more dangerous. They are not likely to try again in the same way with the same weapons, but I see nothing in what we have been able to do to discourage them from trying in a different way with different weapons. Do you?

'The need for us to find some way in which we can strike back at them is therefore not relaxed, but intensified.

'It may be recalled by some that when we were first made aware of activity in the Deeps I advocated that every effort should be made to establish understanding with them. That was not tried, and very likely it was never a possibility, but there can be no doubt that the situation which I had hoped we could avoid now exists — and is in the process of being resolved. Two intelligent forms of life are finding one another's existence intolerable. I have now come to believe that no attempt at rapprochement could have succeeded. Life in all its forms is strife; the better matched the opponents, the harder the struggle. The most powerful of all weapons is intelligence; any intelligent form dominates by, and therefore survives by, its intelligence: a rival form of intelligence must, by its very existence, threaten to dominate, and therefore threaten extinction. Any intelligent form is its own absolute; and there cannot be two absolutes.

'Observation has shown me that my former view was lamentably anthropomorphic; I say now that we must attack as swiftly as we can find the means, and with the full intention of complete extermination. These things, whatever they may be, have not only succeeded in throwing us out of their element with ease, but already they have advanced to do battle with us in ours. For the moment we have pushed them back, but they will return, for the same urge drives them as drives us — the necessity to exterminate, or be exterminated. And when they come again, if we let them, they will come better equipped…. 'Such a state of affairs, I repeat, is not victory….'

I ran across Pendell of Audio-Assessment the next morning. He gave me a gloomy look.

'We tried,' I said, defensively. 'We tried hard, but the Elijah mood was on him.'

'Next time you see him just tell him what I think of him, will you?' Pendell suggested. 'It's not that I mind his being right — just that I never did know a man with such a gift for being right at the wrong time, and in the wrong manner. When his name comes on our programme again, if it ever does, they'll switch off in their thousands. As a bit of friendly advice, tell him to start cultivating the BBC

As it happened, Phyllis and I were meeting Bocker for lunch that same day. Inevitably he wanted to hear reactions to his broadcast. I gave the first reports gently. He nodded:

'Most of the papers take that line,' he said. 'Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's? If all the energy that is put into diddling mugs for their votes could be turned on to useful work, what a nation we could be! As it is, at least three national papers are agitating for a cut in "the millions squandered on research" so that the taxpayer can buy himself another packet of cigarettes a week, which means more cargo-space wasted on tobacco, which means more revenue from tax, which the government then spends on something other than research — and the ships go on rusting in the harbours. There's no sense in it.'

'But those things down there have taken a beating,' Phyllis pointed out.

'We ourselves have a tradition of taking beatings, and then winning wars,' said Bocker.

'Exactly,' said Phyllis. 'We have taken a beating at sea, but in the end we shall get back.'

Bocker groaned, and rolled his eyes. 'Logic —' he began, but I put in:

'You spoke as if you thought they might actually be more intelligent than we are. Do you?'

He frowned. 'I don't see how one could answer that. My impression is that they think in a quite different way — along other lines from ours. If they do, no comparison would be possible, and any attempt at it misleading.'

'You were quite serious about their trying again? I mean, it wasn't just propaganda to stop interest in the protection of shipping from falling off?' Phyllis asked.

'Did it sound like that?'

'No, but —'

'I meant it, all right,' he said. 'Consider their alternatives. Either they sit down there waiting for us to find a means to destroy them, or they come after us. Oh, yes, unless we find it very soon, they'll be here again — somehow…'