[See scan notes at the
end of the file]
First there were the fiery red balls plunging from the sky into the sea.
Then ships began to sink mysteriously.
Then islands were attacked by
beings, the like of which had never been seen before.
But this was only the beginning of a
relentless horror that was as difficult to stop as it was to identify.
Mike and Phyllis Watson, reporters
and broadcasters, were in on the matter from the start, since they saw the
first evidence of it on their honeymoon. Through these two well-drawn and vivid
characters, we watch the course of an invasion of our world that changes not
only history and governments but the face of the earth itself.
This book was recently published in
BY JOHN WYNDHAM
The Day of the Triffids
Out of the Deeps
This is an original novel—not a
reprint-published by Ballantine Books, Inc. A hardbound edition of this book,
priced at $2.00, is available at your local bookstore.
JOHN WYNDHAM
Out of the Deeps
BALLANTINE BOOKS •
This novel was published in
•
Copyright, 1953, by John Wyndham
•
Library of Congress Catalogue Card
No.: 53-12491
Printed in the
•
BALLANTINE BOOKS
404
____________________________________________________
PHASE ONE 1
____________________________________________________
PHASE TWO
53
____________________________________________________
PHASE THREE
131
____________________________________________________
PHASE 1
I'm a reliable witness, you're a
reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable
witnesses in their own estimation—which makes it funny how such
different ideas of the same affair get about. Almost the only people I know who
agree word for word on what they saw on the night of July
15th are Phyllis and I. And as Phyllis happens to be my wife, people
said, in their kindly way behind our backs, that I "overpersuaded"
her, a thought that could proceed only from someone who did not know Phyllis.
The time was 11:15 P.M.; the place,
latitude 35, some 24 degrees west of
"I'm so glad I don't feel like
him; it must be devastating," Phyllis said. "Why, do you suppose, do
people keep on mass-producing these dreary moanings?"
I had no answer ready for that one,
but I was saved the trouble of trying to find one when her attention was
suddenly caught elsewhere.
"Mars is looking pretty angry
tonight, isn't he? I hope it isn't an omen," she said.
I looked where she pointed at a red
spot among myriads of white ones, and with some surprise. Mars does look red, of course, though I had never seen him look quite as
red as that—but then, neither were the stars, as seen at home, quite as bright
as they were here. Being practically in the tropics might account for it.
"Certainly a little
inflamed," I agreed.
We regarded the red point for some
moments. Then Phyllis said:
"That's funny. It seems to be
getting bigger."
I explained that that was obviously an hallucination formed by staring at it. We went on
staring, and it became quite indisputably bigger.
Moreover:
"There's another one. There
can't be two Marses," said Phyllis.
And sure enough there was. A smaller red point, a little up from, and to the right of, the
first. She added:
"And another. To the left.
See?"
She was right about that, too, and
by this time the first one was glowing as the most noticeable thing in the sky.
"It must be a flight of jets of
some kind, and that's a cloud of luminous exhaust we're seeing," I
suggested.
We watched all three of them slowly
getting brighter and also sinking lower in the sky until they were little above
the horizon line, and reflecting in a pinkish pathway across the water toward
us.
"Five now," said Phyllis.
We've both of us been asked many
times since to describe them, but perhaps we are not gifted with such a precise
eye for detail as some others. What we said at the time, and what we still say,
is that on this occasion there was no real shape visible. The center was
solidly red, and a kind of fuzz round it was less so. The best suggestion I can
make is that you imagine a brilliantly red light as seen in a fairly thick fog
so that there is a strong halation, and you will have something of the effect.
Others besides ourselves
were leaning over the rail, and in fairness I should perhaps mention that
between them they appear to have seen cigar-shapes, cylinders, discs, ovoids,
and, inevitably, saucers. We did not. What is more, we did not see
eight, nine, or a dozen. We saw five.
The halation may or may not have
been due to some kind of jet drive, but it did not indicate any great speed.
The things grew in size quite slowly as they approached. There was time for
people to go back into the saloon and fetch their friends out to see, so that
presently a line of us leaned all along the rail, looking at them and guessing.
With no idea of scale we could have no judgment of their size or distance; all
we could be sure of was that they were descending in a long glide which looked
as if it would take them across our wake.
When the first one hit the water a
great burst of steam shot up in a pink plume. Then, swiftly, there was a lower,
wider spread of steam which had lost the pink tinge, and was simply a white
cloud in the moonlight. It was beginning to thin out when the sound of it reached
us in a searing hiss. The water round the spot bubbled and seethed and frothed.
When the steam drew off, there was nothing to be seen there but a patch of
turbulence, gradually subsiding. Then the second of them came in, in just the
same way, on almost the same spot. One after another all five of them touched
down on the water with great whooshes and hissings of steam. Then the vapor
cleared, showing only a few contiguous patches of troubled water.
Aboard the Guinevere, bells clanged, the beat of the engines changed, we
started to change course, crews turned out to man the boats, men stood by to
throw lifebelts.
Four times we steamed slowly back
and forth across the area, searching. There was no trace whatever to be found.
But for our own wake, the sea lay all about us in the moonlight, placid, empty,
unperturbed ....
The next morning I sent my card in
to the captain. In those days I had a staff job with the E.B.C., and I
explained to him that they would be pretty sure to take a piece from me on the
previous night's affair. He gave the usual response:
"You mean B.B.C.?"
The E.B.C. was comparatively young
then. People long accustomed to the B.B.C.'s monopoly of the British air were
still finding it difficult to become used to the idea of a competitive radio
service. Life would have been a great deal simpler, too, if somebody had not
had the idea in the early days of sailing as near the wind as possible by
calling us the English Broadcasting Company. It was one of those pieces of
foolishness that becomes more difficult to undo as time goes on, and led
continually to one's explaining as I did now:
"Not the B.B.C.; the E.B.C. Ours is the largest all-British commercial radio
network..." etc. And when I was through
with that I added:
"Our news-service is a stickler
for accuracy, and as every passenger has his own version of this business, I
hoped you would let me check mine against your official one."
He nodded approval of that.
"Go ahead and tell me
yours," he invited me.
When I had finished, he showed me
his own entry in the log. Substantially we were agreed; certainly in the view
that there had been five, and on the impossibility of attributing a definite
shape to them. His estimates of speed, size, and position were, of course,
technical matters. I noticed that they had registered on the radar screens, and
were tentatively assumed to have been aircraft of an unknown type.
"What's your own private
opinion?" I asked him. "Did you ever see anything at all like them
before?"
"No, I never did," he
said, but he seemed to hesitate.
"But
what—?" I
asked.
"Well, but not for the
record," he said, "I've heard of two instances, almost exactly
similar, in the last year. One time it was three of the things by night; the
other, it was half a dozen of them by daylight—even so, they seem to have
looked much the same; just a kind of red fuzz. They were in the Pacific,
though, not over this side."
"Why 'not for the
record'?" I asked.
"In both cases there were only
two or three witnesses— and it doesn't do a seaman any good to get a reputation
for seeing things, you know. The stories just get around professionally, so to
speak—among ourselves we aren't quite as skeptical as landsmen: some funny
things can still happen at sea, now and then."
"You can't suggest an
explanation I can quote?"
"On professional grounds I'd
prefer not. I'll just stick to my official entry. But reporting it is a
different matter this time. We've a couple of hundred witnesses and more."
"Do you think it'd be worth a
search? You've got the spot pin-pointed."
He shook his head. "It's deep there—over three thousand fathoms. That's a long way down."
"There wasn't any trace of
wreckage in those other cases, either?"
"No. That would have been
evidence to warrant an inquiry. But they had no evidence."
We talked a little longer, but I
could not get him to put forward any theory. Presently I went away, and wrote
up my account. Later, I got through to
So it was by chance that I was a
witness of that early stage—almost the beginning, for I have not been able to
find any references to identical phenomena earlier than those two spoken of by
the captain. Even now, years later, though I am certain enough in my own mind
that this was the beginning, I can still offer no proof that it was not an unrelated phenomenon. What the end that
will eventually follow this beginning may be, I prefer not to think too closely.
I would also prefer
not to dream about it, either, if
dreams were within my control.
It began so unrecognizably. Had it
been more obvious —and yet it is difficult to see what could have been done
effectively even if we had recognized the danger. Recognition and prevention
don't necessarily go hand in hand. We recognized the potential dangers of
atomic fission quickly enough—yet we could do little about them.
If we had attacked immediately—well,
perhaps. But until the danger was well established we had no means of knowing
that we should attack—and then it was
too late.
However, it does no good to cry over
our shortcomings. My purpose is to give as good a brief account as I can of how
the present situation arose—and, to begin with, it arose very scrappily...
In due course the Guinevere docked at
"Except," she added,
"that I don't see why we shouldn't have one nearly as good, now and
then."
So we disembarked, sought our
brand-new home in Chelsea, and I turned up at the E.B.C. offices the following
Monday morning to discover that in absentia
I had been rechristened Fireball Watson. This was on account of the
correspondence. They handed it to me in a large sheaf, and said that since I
had caused it, I had better do something about it. One letter, referring to a
recent experience off the Philippines, I identified with fair certainty as
being a confirmation of what the captain of the Guinevere had told me. One or two others seemed worth following up,
too—par-icularly a rather cagey approach which invited me to meet the writer at
I kept that appointment a week
later. My host turned out to be a man two or three years older than myself who
ordered four glasses of Tio Pepe, and then opened up by admitting that the name
under which he had written was not his own, and that he was a Flight
Lieutenant, R.A.F.
"It's a bit tricky, you
see," he said. "At the moment I am considered to have suffered some
kind of hallucination, but if enough evidence turns up to show that it was not a hallucination, then they're almost
certain to make it an official secret. Awkard, you see."
I agreed that it must be.
"Still," he went on,
"the thing worries me, and if you're collecting evidence, I'd like you to
have it—though maybe not to make direct use of it. I mean, I don't want to find
myself on the carpet."
I nodded understandingly. He went
on:
"It was about three months ago.
I was flying one of the regular patrols, a couple of hundred miles or so east
of
"I didn't know we—" I began.
"There are a number of things
that don't get publicity, though they're not particularly secret," he
said. "Anyway, there I was. The radar picked these things up when they
were still out of sight behind me, but coming up fast from the west."
He had decided to investigate, and climbed
to intercept. The radar continued to show the craft on a straight course behind
and above him. He tried to communicate, but couldn't raise them. By the time he
was getting the ceiling of them they were in sight, as three red spots, quite
bright, even by daylight, and coming up fast though he was doing close to five
hundred himself. He tried again to radio them, but without success. They just
kept on coming, steadily overtaking him.
"Well," he said, "I
was there to patrol. I told base that they were a completely unknown type of
craft—if they were craft at all—and as they wouldn't talk I proposed to have a
pip at them. It was either that, or just let 'em go— in which case I might as
well not have been patrolling at all. Base agreed, kind of cautiously.
"I tried them once more, but
they didn't take a damn bit of notice of either me or my signals. And as they
got closer I was doubtful whether they were craft at all. They were just as you
said on the radio—a pink fuzz, with a deeper red center: might have been
miniature red suns for all I could tell. Anyway, the more I saw of them the
less I liked 'em, so I set the guns to radar-control, and let 'em get on ahead.
"I reckoned they must be doing
seven hundred or more as they passed me. A second or two later the radar picked
up the foremost one, and the guns fired.
"There wasn't any lag. The
thing seemed to blow up almost as the guns went off. And, boy, did it blow! It
suddenly swelled immensely, turning from red to pink to white, but still with a
few red spots here and there—and then my aircraft hit the concussion,
and maybe some of the debris too. I lost quite a lot of seconds, and probably
had a lot of luck, because when I got sorted out I found that I was coming down
fast. Something had carried away three-quarters of my starboard wing, and messed
up the tip of the other. So I reckoned it was time to try the ejector, and
rather to my surprise it worked."
He paused reflectively. Then he
added:
"I don't know that it gives you
a lot besides confirmation, but there are one or two points. One is that they
are capable of traveling a lot faster than those you saw. Another is that,
whatever they are, they are highly vulnerable."
And that, as we talked it over in
detail, was about all the additional information he did provide—that, and the
fact that when they hit they did not disintegrate into sections, but exploded
completely, which should, perhaps, have conveyed more than it seemed to at the
time.
During the next few weeks several
more letters trickled in without adding much, but then it began to look as if
the whole affair were going the way of the Loch Ness Monster. What there was
came to me because it was generally conceded at E.B.C. that fireball stuff was
my pigeon. Several observatories confessed themselves
puzzled by detecting small red bodies traveling at high speeds, but were
extremely guarded in their statements. None of the newspapers really played it
because, in editorial opinion, the whole thing was suspect in being too similar
to the flying saucer business, and their readers would prefer more novelty in
their sensations. Nevertheless, bits and pieces did slowly accumulate—though it
took nearly two years before they acquired serious publicity and attention.
This time it was a flight of
thirteen. A radar station in the north of
There was a sudden spate of fireball
observation after that. Reports came in from so far and wide that it was
impossible to do more than sort out the more wildly imaginative and put the
rest aside to be considered at more leisure, but I noticed that among them were
several accounts of fireballs descending into the sea that tallied well with my
own observation—so well, indeed, that I could not be absolutely sure that they
did not derive from my own broadcast. All in all, it appeared to be such a
muddle of guesswork, tall stories, thirdhand impressions, and thoroughgoing
invention that it taught me little. One negative point, however, did strike
me—not a single observer claimed to have seen a fireball descend on land.
Ancillary to that, not a single one of those descending on water had been
observed from the shore: all had been noticed from ships,
or from aircraft well out to sea.
For a couple of weeks reports of
sightings in groups large or small continued to pour in. The skeptics were
weakening; only the most obstinate still maintained that they were
hallucinations. Nevertheless, we learned nothing more about them than we had
known before. No pictures. So often it seemed to be a case of the things you
see when you don't have a gun. But then a flock of them came up against a
fellow who did have a gun—literally.
The fellow in this case happened to
be the U.S.S. Tuskegee, a carrier.
The message from Curacao that a flight of eight fireballs was headed directly
toward her reached her when she was lying off
Through his glasses he watched six
of the red dots change as they burst, one after another, into big white puffs.
"Well, that's settled
them," he observed, complacently. "Now it's going to be mighty
interesting to see who beefs," he added, as he watched the two remaining
red dots dwindle away to the northward.
But the days passed, and nobody
beefed. Nor was there any decrease in the number of fireball reports.
For most people such a policy of
masterly silence pointed only one way, and they began to consider the
responsibility as good as proved.
In the course of the following week,
two more fireballs that had been incautious enough to pass within range of the
experimental station at Woomera paid for that temerity, and three others were
exploded by a ship off Kodiak after flying across
Washington, in a note of protest to
Moscow regarding repeated territorial violations, ended by observing that in
several cases where drastic action had been taken it regretted the distress
that must have been caused to the relatives of the crews aboard the craft, but
that responsibility lay at the door not of those who dealt with the craft, but
with those who sent them out under orders which transgressed international
agreements.
The Kremlin, after a few days of
gestation, produced a rejection of the protest. It proclaimed itself
unimpressed by the tactics of attributing one's own crime to another, and went
on to state that its own weapons, recently developed by Russian scientists for
the defense of peace, had now destroyed more than twenty of these craft over Soviet
territory, and would, without hesitation, give the same treatment to any others
detected in their work of espionage...
The situation thus remained
unresolved. The non-Russian world was, by and large, divided sharply into two
classes—those who believed every Russian pronouncement, and those who believed
none. For the first class no question arose; their faith was firm. For the
second, interpretation was less easy. Was one to deduce, for instance, that the
whole thing was a lie? Or merely that when the Russians claimed to have
accounted for twenty fireballs, they had only, in fact, exploded five or so?
An uneasy situation, constantly
punctuated by an exchange of notes, drew out over months. Fireballs were
undoubtedly more numerous than they had been, but just how much more numerous,
or more active, or more frequently reported was difficult to assess. Every now
and then a few more were destroyed in various parts of the world, and from time
to time, too, it would be announced that numbers of capitalistic fireballs had
been effectively shown the penalties that awaited those who conducted espionage
upon the territory of the only true People's Democracy.
Public interest must feed to keep
alive; and as novelty waned, an era of explaining-away set in.
Nevertheless, in Admiralty and Air
Force Headquarters all over the world these notes and reports came together.
Courses were plotted on charts. Gradually a pattern of a kind began to emerge.
At E.B.C. I was still regarded as the natural
silting place for anything to do with fireballs, and although the subject was
dead mutton for the moment, I kept up my files in case it should revive.
Meanwhile, I contributed in a small way to the building up of the bigger
picture by passing along to the authorities such snippets of information as I thought
might interest them.
In due course I found myself invited
to the Admiralty to be shown some of the results.
It was a Captain Winters who
welcomed me there, explaining that while what I should be shown was not exactly
an official secret, it was preferred that I should not make public use of it
yet. When I had agreed to that, he started to bring out maps and charts.
The first one was a map of the world
hatched over with fine lines, each numbered and dated
in minute figures. At first glance it looked as if a spider's web had been
applied to it; and, here and there, there were clusters of little red dots,
looking much like the money spiders who had spun it.
Captain Winters picked up a
magnifying glass and held it over the area southeast of the
"There's your first
contribution," he told me.
Looking through it, I presently
distinguished one red dot with a figure 5 against it, and the date and time
when Phyllis and I had leaned over the Guinevere's
rail watching the fireballs vanish in steam. There were quite a number of other
red dots in the area, each labeled, and more of them were strung out to the
northeast.
"Each of these dots represents
the descent of a fireball?" I asked.
"One or more," he told me.
"The lines, of course, are only for those on which we have had good enough
information to plot the course. What do you think of it?"
"Well," I told him,
"my first reaction is to realize that there must have been a devil of a
lot more of them than I ever imagined. The second is to wonder why in thunder
they should group in spots, like that."
"Ah!" he said. "Now
stand back from the map a bit. Narrow your eyes, and get a light and shade
impression."
I did, and saw what he meant.
"Areas of concentration,"
I said.
He nodded. "Five
main ones, and a number of lesser. A dense one to the southwest
of
I shook my head, not seeing what he
was getting at. He produced a bathymetric chart, and laid it beside the first.
I looked at it.
"All the concentrations are in
deep water areas?" I suggested.
"Exactly. There aren't many reports of
descents where the depth is less than four thousand fathoms,
and none at all where it is less than two thousand."
I thought that over, without getting
anywhere.
"So—just
what?" I
inquired.
"Exactly," he said again. "So what?"
We contemplated the proposition
awhile.
"All descents," he
observed. "No reports of any coming up."
He brought out maps on a larger
scale of the various main areas. After we had studied them a bit I asked:
"Have you any idea at all what
all this means—or wouldn't you tell me if you had?"
"On the first part of that, we
have only a number of theories, all unsatisfactory for one reason or another,
so the second doesn't really arise."
"What about the Russians?"
"Nothing to
do with them. As
a matter of fact, they're a lot more worried about it than we are. Suspicion of
capitalists being part of their mother's milk, they simply can't shake
themselves clear of the idea that we must be at the bottom of it somehow, and
they just can't figure out, either, what the game can possibly be. But what
both we and they are perfectly satisfied about is that
the things are not natural phenomena, nor are they random."
"And you'd know if it were any
other country pulling it?"
"Bound to—not
a doubt of it."
We considered the charts again in
silence.
"The other obvious question is,
of course; what do they seem to be doing?"
"Yes," he said.
"Meaning, no
clue?"
"They come," he said.
"Maybe they go. But certainly they come. That's about all."
I looked down at the maps, the
crisscrossing lines, and the red-dotted areas.
"Are you doing anything about
it? Or shouldn't I ask?"
"Oh, that's why you're here. I
was coming round to that," he told me. "We're going to try an
inspection. Just at the moment it is not considered to be a matter for a direct
broadcast, nor even for publication, but there ought to be a record of it, and
we shall need one ourselves. So if your people
happened to feel interested enough to send you along with some gear for the
job..."
"Where would it be?" I
inquired.
He circled his finger round an area.
"Er—my wife has a passionate
devotion to tropical sunshine, the West Indian kind in particular," I
said.
"Well, I seem to remember that
your wife has written some pretty good documentary scripts," he remarked.
"And it's the kind of thing E.B.C.
might be very sorry about afterwards if they'd missed it," I reflected.
* * * *
Not until we had made our last call
and were well out of sight of land were we allowed to see
the large object which rested in a specially constructed cradle aft. When the
Lieutenant Commander in charge of technical operations ordered the shrouding
tarpaulin to be removed, there was quite an unveiling ceremony. But the mystery
revealed was something of an anticlimax: it was simply a sphere of metal some
ten feet in diameter. In various parts of it were set circular, porthole-like
windows; at the top it swelled into a protuberance which formed a massive lug.
The Lieutenant Commander, after regarding it a while with the eye of a proud
mother, addressed us in the manner of a lecturer.
"This instrument that you now
see," he said, impressively, "is what we call the Bathyscope."
He allowed an interval for appreciation.
"Didn't Beebe—?" I
whispered to Phyllis.
"No," she said. "That
was the bathysphere."
"Oh," I said.
"It has been constructed,"
he went on, "to resist a pressure approaching two tons to the square inch,
giving it a theoretical floor of fifteen hundred fathoms. In practice we do not
propose to use it at a greater depth than twelve hundred fathoms, thus
providing for a safety factor of something over six hundred pounds to the
square inch. Even at this it will considerably surpass the achievements of Dr.
Beebe who descended a little over five hundred fathoms,
and Barton who reached a depth of seven hundred and fifty fathoms..." He
continued in this vein for a time, leaving me somewhat behind. When he seemed
to have run down for a bit I said to Phyllis,
"I can't think in all these
fathoms. What is it in God's feet?"
She consulted her notes.
"The depth they intend to go to
is seven thousand, two hundred feet; the depth they could go to is nine thousand feet."
"Either of them sounds an awful
lot of feet," I said.
Phyllis is, in some ways, more
precise and practical.
"Seven thousand, two hundred
feet is just over a mile and a third," she informed me. "The pressure
will be a little more than a ton and a third."
"That's my
continuity-girl," I said. "I don't know where I'd be without you."
I looked at the bathyscope. "All the same—"I added doubtfully.
"What?" she asked.
"Well, that chap at the
Admiralty, Winters; he was talking in terms of four or five tons
pressure—meaning, presumably, four or five miles down." I turned to the
Lieutenant Commander. "How deep is it where we're bound for?" I asked
him.
"It's an area called the Cayman
Trench, between
"But, —" I began,
frowning.
"Fathoms, dear," said
Phyllis. "Getting on for twenty-four thousand
feet."
"Oh," I said.
"That'll be—er—something like four and a half miles?"
"Yes," she said.
"Oh," I said, again.
He returned to his public address
manner.
"That," he told the
assembled crowd of us, "is the present limit of our ability to make direct
visual observations. However—" He paused to make a gesture somewhat in the
manner of a conjuror towards a party of sailors, and watched while they pulled
the tarpaulin from another, similar, but smaller sphere. "—here," he
continued, "we have a new instrument with which we hope to be able to make
observations at something like twice the depth attainable by the bathyscope,
perhaps even more. It is entirely automatic. In addition to registering pressures,
temperature, currents, and so on, and transmitting the readings to the surface,
it is equipped with five small television cameras, four of them giving all
round horizontal coverage, and one transmitting the view vertically beneath the
sphere."
"This instrument,"
continued another voice in good imitation of his own, "we
call the telebath."
Facetiousness could not put a man
like the Commander off his stroke. He continued his lecture. But the instrument
had been christened, and the telebath it remained.
The three days after we reached our
position were occupied with tests and adjustments of both the instruments. In
one test Phyllis and I were allowed to make a dive of three hundred feet or so,
cramped up in the bathyscope, "just to get the feel of it." It gave
us no envy of anyone making a deeper dive. Then, with all the gear fully
checked, the real descent was announced for the morning of the fourth day.
Soon after sunrise we were
clustering round the bathyscope where it rested in its cradle. The two naval
technicians, Wiseman and Trant, who were to make the descent, wriggled
themselves in through the narrow hole that was the entrance. The warm clothing
they would need in the depths
was handed in after them, for they
could never have squeezed in wearing it. Then followed the
packets of food and the vacuum flasks of hot drinks. They made their
final checks, gave their
"Okay," said a voice from
the loudspeaker, "lower away now."
The winch began to turn. The
bathyscope descended, and the water lapped at it. Presently it had disappeared
from sight beneath the surface.
The descent was a long business
which I do not propose to describe in detail. Frankly, as seen on the screen in
the ship, it was a pretty boring affair to the noninitiate. Life in the sea
appears to exist in fairly well-defined levels. In the better-inhabited strata
the water is full of plankton which behaves like a continuous dust storm and
obscures everything but creatures that approach very closely. At other levels where
there is no plankton for food, there are consequently few fish. In addition to
the tediousness of very limited views or dark emptiness, continuous attention
to a screen that is linked with a slightly swinging and twisting camera has a
dizzying effect. Both Phyllis and I spent much of the time during the descent
with our eyes shut, relying on the loud-speaking telephone to draw our
attention to anything interesting. Occasionally we slipped on deck for a
cigarette.
There could scarcely have been a
better day for the job. The sun beat fiercely down on decks that were
occasionally sluiced with water to cool them off. The ensign hung limp, barely
stirring. The sea stretched out flat to meet the dome of the sky which showed
only one low bank of cloud, to the north, over
The group sitting in the mess
scarcely spoke; they left that to the men now far below.
At intervals, the Commander would
ask:
"All in
order, below there?"
And, simultaneously two voices would
reply:
"Aye, aye,
sir!"
Once a voice inquired:
"Did Beebe have an electrically
heated suit?"
Nobody seemed to know.
"I take my hat off to him if he
didn't," said the voice.
The Commander was keeping a sharp
eye on the dials as well as watching the screen.
"Half-mile
coming up.
Check," he said.
The voice from below counted:
"Four
thirty-eight . . . Four thirty-nine . . . Now! Half mile,
sir."
The winch went on turning. There
wasn't much to see. Occasional glimpses of schools of fish hurrying off into
the murk. A voice complained:
"Sure as I get the camera to
one window a damn great fish comes and looks in at another."
"Five hundred
fathoms. You're
passing Beebe now," said the Commander.
"Bye-bye, Beebe," said the
voice. "But it goes on looking much the same."
Presently the same voice said:
"More life
around just here.
Plenty of squid, large and small. You can probably see
'em. There's something out this way, keeping on the edge of the light. A big thing. I can't quite—might be a giant squid—no! my God! It can't
be a whale! Not down here!"
"Improbable, but not
impossible," said the Commander.
"Well, in that case—oh, it's
sheered off now, anyway. Gosh! We mammals do get around a bit, don't we?"
In due course the moment arrived
when the Commander announced:
"Passing Barton now," and
then added with an unexpected change of manner. "From now on it's all
yours, boys. Sure you're quite happy there? If you're not perfectly
satisfied you've only to say."
"That's all right, sir. Everything functioning okay. We'll go on."
Up on deck the winch droned
steadily.
"One mile coming up,"
announced the Commander. When that had been checked he asked, "How are you
feeling now?"
"What's the weather like up
there?" asked a voice.
"Holding
well. Flat calm. No swell."
The two down below conferred.
"We'll go on, sir. Could wait weeks for conditions like this again."
"All right—if you're both
sure."
"We are, sir."
"Very good. About three
hundred fathoms more to go then."
There was an interval. Then:
"Dead," remarked the voice
from below. "All black and dead now. Not a thing
to be seen. Funny thing the way these levels are quite separate. Ah, now we can
begin to see something below . . . Squids again . . . luminous fish . . . Small shoal there, see? .
. . There's . . . Gosh! Gosh------"
He broke off, and simultaneously a
nightmare fishy horror gaped at us from the screen.
"One of nature's careless
moments," he remarked.
He went on talking, and the camera
continued to give us glimpses of unbelievable monstrosities, large and small.
Presently the Commander announced:
"Stopping you
now. Twelve hundred fathoms." He picked up the telephone and
spoke to the deck. The winch slowed and then ceased to turn.
"That's all, boys," he
said.
"Huh," said the voice from
below, after a pause. "Well, whatever it was we came here to find, we've
not found it."
The Commander's face was
expressionless. Whether he had expected tangible results or not
I couldn't tell. I imagined not. In fact, I wondered if any of us there
really had. After all, these centers of activity were all Deeps. And from that
it would seem to follow that the reason must lie at the bottom. The echogram
gave the bottom hereabouts as still three miles or so below where the two men
now dangled ...
"Hullo, there,
bathyscope," said the Commander. "We're going to start you up now.
Ready?"
"Aye, aye,
sir! All
set," said the two voices.
The Commander picked up his
telephone.
"Haul away there!"
We could hear the winch start, and
slowly gather speed.
"On your way
no. All
okay?"
"All correct, sir."
There was an interval without talk
for ten minutes or more. Then a voice said:
"There's something out there.
Something big—can't see it properly. Keeps just on the fringe
of the light. Can't be that whale again—not at this depth.
Try to show you."
The picture on the screen switched
and then steadied.
We could see the light-rays
streaming out through the water, and the brilliant speckles of small organisms
caught in the beam. At the very limits there was a suspicion of a faintly
lighter patch. It was hard to be sure of it.
"Seems to be
circling us.
We're spinning a bit, too, I think. I'll try—ah, got a bit better glimpse of it
then. It's not the whale, anyway. There, see it now?"
This time we could undoubtedly make
out a lighter patch. It was roughly oval, but indistinct, but there was nothing
to give it scale.
"Hm," said the voice from
below. "That's certainly a new one. Could be a fish—or
maybe something else kind of turtle-shaped. Monstrous-sized
brute, anyway. Circling a bit closer now, but I still can't make out any
details. Keeping pace with us."
Again the camera showed us a glimpse
of the thing as it passed one of the bathyscope's ports, but we were little
wiser; the definition was too poor for us to be sure of anything about it.
"It's going up now. Rising faster than we are. Getting beyond
our angle of view. Ought to be a window in the top of this thing. . . . Lost it now. Gone somewhere up above us. Maybe it'll—"'
The voice cut off dead.
Simultaneously, there was a brief, vivid flash on the screen, and it, too, went
dead. The sound of the winch outside altered as it speeded up.
We sat looking at one another
without speaking. Phyllis's hand sought mine, and tightened on it.
The Commander started to stretch his
hand towards the telephone, changed his mind, and went out without a word.
Presently the winch speeded up still more.
It takes quite a time to reel in
more than a mile of heavy cable. The party in the mess dispersed awkwardly.
Phyllis and I went up into the bows and sat there without talking much.
After what seemed a very long wait
the winch slowed down. By common consent we got up, and moved aft together.
At last, the end came up. We all, I
suppose, expected to see the end of the wire rope unraveled, with the strands
splayed out, brushlike.
They were not. They were melted
together. Both the main and the communication cables ended in a blob of fused
metal.
We all stared at them, dumbfounded.
In the evening the Captain read the
service, and three volleys were fired over the spot.
* * * *
The weather held, and the glass was
steady. At noon the next day the Commander assembled us in the mess. He looked
ill, and very tired. He said, briefly, and unemotionally:
"My orders are to proceed with
the investigation, using our automatic instrument. If our arrangements and
tests can be completed in time, and providing the weather remains favorable, we
shall conduct the operation tomorrow morning, commencing as soon after dawn as
possible. I am instructed to lower the instrument to the point of destruction,
so there will be no other opportunity for observation."
The arrangement in the mess the
following morning was different from that on the former occasion. We sat facing
a bank of five television screens, four for the quadrants about the instrument,
and one viewing vertically beneath it. There was also a movie camera
photographing all five screens simultaneously for the record.
Again we watched the descent through
the ocean layers, but this time instead of a commentary we had an astonishing
assortment of chirrupings, raspings, and gruntings picked up by
externally-mounted microphones. The deep sea is, in its lower inhabited strata,
it seems, a place of hideous cacophony. It was
something of a relief when at about three-quarters of a mile down silence fell,
and somebody muttered: "Huh! Said those mike'd never take the
pressure."
The display went on. Squids sliding
upwards past the cameras, shoals of fish darting nervously away, other fish
attracted by curiosity—monstrosities, grotesques, huge monsters dimly seen. On and on. A mile
down, a mile and a half, two miles, two and a half . . . And then, at about
that point, something came into view which quickened all attention on the
screens. A large, uncertain, oval shape at the extreme of visibility that moved
from screen to screen as it circled round the descending instrument. For three
or four minutes it continued to show on one screen or another, but always
tantalizingly ill-defined, and never quite well enough illuminated for one to
be certain even of its shape. Then, gradually, it drifted towards the upper
edges of the screen, and presently it was left behind.
Half a minute later all the screens
went blank ...
* * * *
Why not praise one's wife? Phyllis
can write a thundering good feature script—and this was one of her best. It was
too bad that it was not received with the immediate enthusiasm it deserved.
When it was finished, we sent it
round to the Admiralty for checking. A week later we were asked to call. It was
Captain Winters who received us. He congratulated Phyllis on the script, as well he might, even if he had not been so taken
with her as he so obviously was. Once we were settled in our chairs, however,
he shook his head regretfully.
"Nevertheless," he said,
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to hold it up for a while."
Phyllis looked understandably
disappointed; she had worked hard on that script. Not just for cash, either.
She had tried to make it a tribute to the two men, Wiseman and Trant, who had
vanished with the bathyscope. She looked down at her
toes.
"I'm sorry," said the
Captain, "but I did warn your husband that it wouldn't be for immediate
release."
Phyllis looked up at him.
"Why?" she asked.
That was something I was equally
anxious to know about. My own recordings of the preparations, of the brief
descent we had both made in the bathyscope, and of various aspects that were
not on the official tape record of the dive, had been put into cold storage,
too.
"I'll explain what I can. We
certainly owe you that," agreed Captain Winters. He sat down and leaned
forward, elbows on knees, fingers interlaced between them, and looked at us both
in turn.
"The crux of the thing—and of
course you will both of you have realized that long ago—is those fused
cables," he said. "Imagination staggers a bit at the thought of a creature capable of snapping through
steel hawsers—all the same, it might just conceivably admit the possibility. When,
however, it comes up against the suggestion that there is a creature capable of
cutting through them like an oxyacetylene flame, it recoils. It recoils, and
definitely rejects.
"Both of you saw what had
happened to those cables, and I think you must agree that their condition opens
a whole new aspect. A thing like that is not just a hazard of deep-sea
diving—and we want to know more about just what kind of a hazard it is before
we give a release on it."
We talked it over for a little time.
The Captain was apologetic and understanding, but he had his orders.
"Honestly, Captain Winters—and
off the record, if you like—have you any idea what can have done it?"
He shook his head. "On or off
the record, Mrs. Watson, I can think of no explanation that approaches being
possible—and, though this is not for publication, I doubt whether anyone else
in the Service has an idea, either."
And so, with the affair left in that
unsatisfactory state, we parted.
The prohibition, however, lasted a
shorter time than we expected. A week later, just as we were sitting down to
dinner, he telephoned. Phyllis took the call.
"Oh, hullo,
Mrs. Watson. I'm
glad it's you. I have some good news for you," Captain Winters' voice
said. "I've just been talking to your E.B.C. people, and giving them the
okay, so far as we are concerned, to go ahead with that feature of yours, and
the whole story."
Phyllis thanked him for the news.
"But what's happened?" she added.
"The story's broken, anyway.
You'll hear it on the nine o'clock news tonight, and see it in tomorrow's
papers. In the circumstances it seemed to me that you ought to be free to take
your chance as soon as possible. Their Lordships saw the point—in fact, they would like your feature to go out as soon as
possible. So there it is. And the best of luck to you."
Phyllis thanked him again, and hung
up.
"Now what do you suppose can
have happened?" she inquired.
We had to wait until nine o'clock to
find that out. The notice on the news was scanty, but sufficient from our point
of view. It reported simply that an American naval unit conducting research
into deep-sea conditions somewhere off the
Almost immediately afterwards E.B.C.
came through on the telephone with a lot of talk about priorities, and altered
program schedules, and available cast.
Audio-assessment told us later that
the feature had rated an excellent reception figure. Coming so soon after the
American announcement, we hit the peak of popular interest. Their Lordships
were pleased too. It gave them the opportunity of showing that they did not
always have to follow the American lead—though I still think there was no need
to make the
Phyllis rewrote a part of the
script, making greater play with the fusing of the cables than before. A flood
of correspondence came in, but when all the tentative explanations and
suggestions had been winnowed none of us was any wiser than before.
Perhaps it was scarcely to be
expected that we should be. Our listeners had not even seen the maps, and at
this stage it had not occurred to the general public that there could be any link
between the diving catastrophes and the somewhat demode topic of fireballs.
But if, as it seemed, the Royal Navy
was disposed simply to sit still for a time and ponder the problem
theoretically, the U.S. Navy was not. Deviously we heard that they were preparing
to send a second expedition to the same spot where their loss had occurred. We
promptly applied to be included, and were refused. How many other people
applied, I don't know, but enough for them to allocate a second small craft. We
couldn't get a place on that either. All space was reserved for their own
correspondents and commentators who would cover
for
Well, it was their
own show. They were paying for it. All the same, I'm sorry we missed it
because, though we did think it likely they would lose their apparatus again,
it never crossed our minds that they might lose their ship as well ...
About a week after it happened one
of the N.B.C. man who had been covering it came over. We more or less
shanghaied him for lunch and the personal dope.
"Never saw anything like
it," he said, "but if ever lightning were to strike upwards from the
sea, I guess that'd be about the way it'd look. The sparks ran around all over
the ship for a few seconds. Then she blew up."
"I never heard of anything like
that," Phyllis said.
"It certainly isn't on the
record," he agreed. "But there has to be a first time."
"Not very satisfactory,"
Phyllis commented.
He looked us over.
"Seeing that you two were on
that British fishing party, do I take it you know why we were there?"
"I'd not be surprised," I
told him.
He nodded. "Well, look,"
he said, "I'm told it isn't possible to persuade a high charge, say a few
million volts to run up an uninsulated hawser in sea water, so I must accept
that; it's not my department. All I say is that if it were possible, then I guess the effect might be quite a bit
like what we saw."
"There'd be insulated cables,
too—to the cameras, microphones, thermometers and things," Phyllis said.
"Sure. And there was an
insulated cable relaying the TV to our ship; but it couldn't carry that charge,
and burned out—which was a darned good thing for us. That would make it look to
me like it followed the main hawser —if it didn't so happen that the physics
boys won't have it."
"They've no alternative suggestions?"
I asked.
"Oh, sure. Several.
Some of them could sound quite convincing—to a fellow who hadn't seen it
happen."
"If you are right, this is very
queer indeed," Phyllis said, reflectively.
The N.B.C. man looked at her.
"A nice British understatement—but it's queer
enough, even without me," he said, modestly. "However they explain this
away, the physics boys are still stumped on those fused cables, because,
whatever this may be, those cable severances couldn't have been accidental."
"On the other hand, all that
way down, all that pressure . . .?" Phyllis said.
He shook his head. "I'm making
no guesses. I'd want more data than we've got, even for that. Could be we'll
get it before long."
We looked questioning.
He lowered his voice. "Seeing
you're in this, too, but strictly under your hats, they've got a couple more
probes lined up right now. But no publicity this time—the last lot had a nasty
taste."
"Where?"
we asked, simultaneously.
"One off the
"We don't know," we said
honestly.
He shook his head. "Always
kinda close, your people," he said, sympathetically.
And close they remained. During the
next few weeks we kept our ears uselessly wide open for news of either of the
two new investigations, but it was not until the N.B.C. man was passing through
"Off
* *
* *
Official cognizance of these matters
remained underground—if that can be considered an acceptable term for their
deep-sea investigations. Every now and then we would catch a rumor which showed
that the interest had not been dropped, and from time to time a few apparently
isolated items could, when put in conjunction, be made to give hints. Our naval
contacts preserved an amiable evasiveness, and we found that our opposite
numbers across the
Public interest in fireballs was
down to zero, and few people troubled to send in reports of them any more. I
still kept my files going though they were not so unrepresentative that I could
not tell how far the apparently low incidence was real.
As far as I knew, the two phenomena
had never so far been publicly connected, and presently both were allowed to
lapse unexplained, like any silly-season sensation.
In the course of the next three years
we ourselves lost interest almost to vanishing point. Other matters occupied
us. There was the birth of our son, William—and his death, eighteen months
later. To help Phyllis to get over that I wangled myself a
traveling-correspondent series, sold the house, and for a time we roved.
In theory, the appointment was
simply mine; in practice, most of the gloss and finish on the scripts which
pleased the E.B.C., were Phyllis's, and most of the time when she wasn't
dolling up my stuff she was working on scripts of her own. When we came back
home, it was with enhanced prestige, a lot of material to work up, and a
feeling of being set on a smooth, steady course.
Almost immediately, the Americans
lost a cruiser off the
The report was scanty, an Agency
message, slightly blown up locally; but there was a something about it—just a
kind of feeling. When Phyllis read it in the newspaper, it struck her, too. She
pulled out the atlas, and considered the
"It's pretty deep round three
sides of them," she said.
"That report's not handled
quite the regular way. I can't exactly put my finger on it. But the approach is
a bit off the line, somehow," I agreed.
"We'd better try the
grapevine," Phyllis decided.
We did, without result. It wasn't
that our sources were holding out on us; there seemed to be a blackout somewhere.
We got no further than the official handout: this cruiser, the Keweenaw, had, in fair weather, simply
gone down. Twenty survivors had been picked up. There would be an official
inquiry.
Possibly there was: I never heard
the outcome. The incident was somehow overlayed by the inexplicable sinking of
a Russian ship, engaged on some task never specified, to eastward of the
Kurils, that string of islands to the south of Kamchatka. Since it was axiomatic
that any Soviet misadventure must be attributable in some way to capitalist
jackals or reactionary fascist hyenas, this affair assumed an importance which quite
eclipsed the American loss, and the acrimonious innuendoes went on echoing for
some time. In the noise of vituperation the mysterious disappearance of the
survey vessel Utskarpen, in the
Southern Ocean, went almost unnoticed outside her native
Several others followed, but I no
longer have my records to give me the details. It is my impression that quite
half a dozen vessels, all seemingly engaged in ocean research in one way or
another had vanished before the Americans suffered again, off the
The ingenuous announcement that
since the water about Bikini was too shallow for a contemplated series of
deep-water atomic-bomb tests the locale of these experiments would be shifted
westwards by a little matter of a thousand miles or so, may possibly have
deceived a portion of the general public, but in radio and newspaper circles it
touched off a scramble for assignments.
Phyllis and I had better standing
now, and we were lucky, too. We flew out there, and a few days later we formed
part of the complement of a number of ships lying at a strategic distance from
the point where the Keweenaw had gone
down off the
I can't tell you what that specially
designed depth bomb looked like, for we never saw it. All we were allowed to
see was a raft supporting a kind of semispherical, metal hut which contained
the bomb itself, and all we were told was that it was much like one of the more
regular types of atomic bomb, but with a massive casing that would resist the
pressure at five miles deep, if necessary.
At first light on the day of the
test a tug took the raft in tow, and chugged away over the horizon with it.
From then on we had to observe by means of unmanned television cameras mounted
on floats. In this way we saw the tug cast off the raft, and put on full speed.
Then there was an interval while the tug hurried out of harm's way and the raft
pursued a calculated drift towards the exact spot where the Keweenaw had disappeared. The hiatus
lasted for some three hours, with the raft looking motionless on the screens.
Then a voice through the loudspeakers told us that the release would take place
in approximately thirty minutes. It continued to remind us at intervals until
the time was short enough for it to start counting in reverse, slowly and
calmly. There was a complete hush as we stared at the screens and listened to
the voice:
"—three—two—one—/NOW!"/
On the last word a rocket sprang
from the raft, trailing red smoke as it climbed.
"Bomb away!" said the
voice.
We waited.
For a long time, as it seemed,
everything was intensely still. Around the vision screens no one spoke. Every
eye was on one or another of the frames which showed the raft calmly afloat on
the blue, sunlit water. There was no sign that anything had occurred there,
save the plume of red smoke drifting slowly away. For the eye and the ear there
was utter serenity; for the feelings, a sense that the whole world held its
breath.
Then it came. The placid surface of
the sea suddenly belched into a vast white cloud which spread, and boiled as it
writhed upwards. A tremor passed through the ship.
We left the screens, and rushed to
the ship's side. Already the cloud was above our horizon. It still writhed and convolved
upon itself in a fashion that was somehow obscene as it climbed monstrously up
the sky. Only then did the sound reach us, in a buffeting roar. Much later,
amazingly delayed, we saw the dark line
which was the first wave of turbulent
water rushing toward us.
That night we shared a dinner table
with Mallarby of The Tidings and Bennell
of The Senate. This was Phyllis's
show, and she had them more or less where she wanted them between the entree
and the roast. They argued awhile along familiar lines, but after a while the
name Bocker began to crop up with increasing frequency and some acrimony.
Apparently this Bocker had some theory about deep-sea disturbances which had
not come our way, and did not seem to be held in great repute by either party.
Phyllis was on it like a hawk. One
would never have guessed that she was utterly in the dark, from the judicial
way she said: "Surely the Bocker line can't be altogether dismissed?"
frowning a little as she spoke.
It worked. In a little time we were
adequately briefed on the Bocker view, and without either of them guessing that
as far as we were concerned we had come into it for the first time.
The name of Alastair Bocker was not,
of course, entirely unknown to us: it was that of an eminent geographer, a name
customarily followed by several groups of initials. However, the information on
him that Phyllis now prompted forth was something quite new to us. When
reordered and assembled it amounted to this:
Almost a year earlier Bocker had
presented a memorandum to the Admiralty in
The fused cables and electrification
of certain ships must be regarded as indisputable evidence of intelligence at
work in certain deeper parts of the oceans.
Conditions, such as pressure,
temperature, perpetual darkness, etc., in those regions made it inconceivable
that any intelligent form of life could have evolved there—and this statement
he backed with several convincing arguments.
It was to be assumed that no nation
was capable of constructing mechanisms that could operate at such depths as
indicated by the evidence, nor would they have any purpose in attempting to do
so.
But, if the intelligence in the
depths were not indigenous, then it must have come from elsewhere. Also, it
must be embodied in some form able to withstand a pressure of tons to the
square inch—two tons certainly from present evidence, probably five or six
tons, even seven tons if it was capable of existing in the very deepest Deeps.
Now, was there anywhere else on Earth where a mobile form could find conditions
of such pressure to evolve in? Clearly, there was not.
Very well, then if it could not have
evolved on Earth, it must have evolved somewhere else—say, on a large planet
where the pressures were normally very high. If so, how did it cross space and
arrive here?
Bocker then recalled attention to
the fireballs which had aroused so much speculation a few years ago, and were
still occasionally to be seen. None of these had been known to descend on land;
none, indeed, had been known to descend anywhere but in areas of very deep
water. Moreover, such of them as had been struck by missiles had exploded with such
violence as to suggest that they had been retaining a very high degree of
pressure.
It was significant, also, that these
fireball globes invariably sought the only regions of the Earth in which
high-pressure conditions compatible with movement were available.
Therefore, Bocker deduced, we were
in the process, while almost unaware of it, of undergoing a species of
interplanetary immigration. If he were to be asked the source of it, he would
point to Jupiter as being most likely to fulfill the conditions of pressure.
His memorandum had concluded with
the observation that such an incursion need not necessarily be regarded as
hostile. It seemed to him that the interests of a type of creation which
existed at fifteen pounds to the square inch were unlikely to overlap seriously
with those of a form which required several tons per square inch. He advocated,
therefore, that the greatest efforts should be made to develop some means of
making a sympathetic approach to the new dwellers in our depths, with the aim of
facilitating an exchange of science, using the word in its widest sense.
The views expressed by Their
Lordships upon these elucidations and suggestions are not publicly recorded. It
is known, however, that no long interval passed before Bocker withdrew his
memorandum from their unsympathetic desks, and shortly afterwards presented it
for the personal consideration of the Editor of The Tidings. Undoubtedly The Tidings,
in returning it to him, expressed itself with its usual tact. It was only for
the benefit of his professional brethren that the Editor
remarked:
"This newspaper has managed to
exist for more than one hundred years without a comic strip, and I see no
reason to break that tradition now."
In due course, the memorandum
appeared in front of the Editor of The Senate,
who glanced at it, called for a synopsis, lifted his eyebrows, and dictated an
urbane regret.
Subsequently it ceased to circulate,
and was known only by word of mouth within a small circle.
"The best you can say of
it," said Mallarby, "is that he does include more factors than anyone
else has— and that anything that includes even most of the factors is bound to
be fantastic. We may decry it but, for all that, until something better turns
up, it's the best we have."
"That's true," said
Bennell. "But whatever the top naval men may think about Bocker, it is
clear enough that they too must have been assuming for some time that there is
something intelligent down there. You don't design and make a special bomb like
that all in five minutes, you know. Anyway, whether the Bocker theory is sheer
hot-air or not, he's lost his main point. This bomb was not the amiable and
sympathetic approach that he advocated."
Mallarby paused, and shook his head.
"I've met Bocker several times.
He's a civilized, liberal-minded man—with the usual trouble of liberal-minded
men; that they think others are, too. He has an interested, inquiring mind. He
has never grasped that the average mind when it encounters something new is
scared, and says: "Better smash it, or suppress it, quick." Well,
he's just had another demonstration of the average mind at work."
"But," Bennell objected,
"if, as you say, it is officially believed that these ship losses have
been caused by an intelligence, then there's something to be scared about, and
you can't put today's affair down as nothing
stronger than retaliation."
Mallarby shook his head again.
"My dear Bennell, I not only
can, but I do. Suppose, now, that something were to come dangling down to us on
a rope out of space; and suppose that that thing was emitting rays on a wave
length that acutely discomforted us, perhaps even caused us physical pain. What
should we do? I suggest that the first thing we should do would be to snip the rope,
and put it out of action. Then we should examine the strange object and find
out what we could about it. And if more of the same followed, we should
forthwith take what steps we could to discourage them. This might be done
simply in the spirit of ending a nuisance, or it might be done with some
animosity, and regarded as—retaliation. Now, would it be we, or the thing
above, that was to blame?
"It is difficult to imagine any
kind of intelligence that would not resent what we've just done. If this were
the only Deep where trouble has occurred, there might
well be no intelligence left to resent it—but this isn't the only place, as you know; not by any means. So, what form
that very natural resentment will take remains for us to see."
"You think there really will be
some kind of response, then?" Phyllis asked.
He shrugged. "To take up my
analogy again: suppose that some violently destructive agency were to descend
from space upon one of our cities. What should we do?"
"Well, what could we do?" asked Phyllis,
reasonably enough.
"We could turn the backroom
boys on to it. And if it happened a few times more, we should soon be giving
the backroom boys full priorities. No," he shook his head, "no, I'm
afraid Bocker's idea of fraternization never had the chance of a flea in a
furnace."
* *
* *
That was, I think, very likely as
true as Mallarby made it sound; but if there ever had been any chance at all,
it was gone by the time we reached home. Somehow, and apparently overnight, the
public had put several twos together at last. The halfhearted attempt to
represent the depth bomb as one of a series of tests had broken down
altogether. The vague fatalism with which the loss of the Keweenaw and the other ships had been received was succeeded by a
burning sense of outrage, a satisfaction that the first step in vengeance had
been taken, and a demand for more.
The atmosphere was similar to that
at a declaration of war. Yesterday's phlegmatics and skeptics were, all of a
sudden, fervid preachers of a crusade against the—well, against whatever it was
that had had the insolent temerity to interfere with the freedom of the seas.
Agreement on that cardinal point was virtually unanimous, but from that hub speculation
radiated in every direction, so that not only fireballs, but every other
unexplained phenomenon that had occurred for years was in some way attributed
to, or at least connected with, the mystery in the Deeps.
The wave of world-wide excitement
struck us when we stopped off for a day at
They told me that others had had the
same idea, and that Bocker would be giving a restricted press conference on
Friday. They would do their best to get us in on it. They did, and we arrived
back in
Alastair Bocker was recognizable
from his photographs, but they had not done him justice. The main facial
architecture, with its rather full, middle-aged-infant quality; the broad
eyebrows; the lock of gray hair tending to stray forward; the shapes of the
nose and mouth, were all familiar: but the camera by its inability to convey
the liveliness of his eyes, the mobility of the mouth and the whole face, the
sparrow-like quality of his movements, had falsified him.
"One of those
so unrestful small-boys-grown-up," observed Phyllis, studying him
before the affair began.
For some minutes longer people
continued to arrive and settle down, then Bocker stepped up to the table in
front. The way he did it managed to convey that he had not come there to
conciliate. When the babble had died he stood looking us over for some seconds.
Then he spoke, without script or notes.
"I don't suppose for a moment
that this meeting is going to be useful," he began. "However I did
not call it, and I am not concerned now whether I get a good press or not.
"A couple of years ago I should
have welcomed the chance of this publicity. One year ago I attempted to achieve
it, though my hopes that we might be able to deflect the probable course of
events were no more than slight, even then. I find it somewhat ironical, therefore, that you should honor me in this way
now that they have become nonexistent.
"A version of my arguments,
very likely a garbled one, may have reached you, but I will summarize them now
so that at least we shall know what we are talking about."
The summary differed little from the
version we had already heard. At the end of it he paused.
"Now. Your questions," he said.
At this distance in time I cannot
pretend to remember who asked what questions, but I recall that the few first
fatuous ones were slapped down pretty sharply. Then someone asked:
"Doctor Bocker, I seem to
recall that originally you made some deliberate play with the word
"immigration," but just now you spoke of "invasion." You
have changed your mind?"
"It has been changed for
me," Bocker told him. "For all I know, it may have been, in
intention, just a peaceful immigration—but the evidence is that it is not so
now."
"So," said somebody else,
"you are telling us that this is our old blood-chiller, the interplanetary
war, come at last."
"It might be put that way—by
the facetious," agreed Bocker, calmly. "It is certainly an invasion,
and from some place unknown." He paused. "Almost equally
remarkable," he went on, "is the fact that in this sensation-seeking
world it has managed to take place almost unrecognized for what it is. Only
now, several years after its inception, is it starting to be taken
seriously."
"It doesn't look like an
interplanetary war to me now, whatever it is," a voice remarked.
"That," remarked Bocker,
"I would ascribe to two main causes. First, constipation
of the imagination; and, secondly, the influence of the late Mr. H. G. Wells.
"One of the troubles about
writing a classic is that it sets a pattern of thinking. Everybody reads it,
with the result that everybody thinks he knows exactly the form which an
interplanetary invasion not only ought to, but must, take. If a mysterious
cylinder were to land close to
"There could be quite a large
variety of invasions against which it would be no good to call out the marines.
This one is much more difficult to come to grips with than Mr. Wells' Martians
were. It still remains to be seen whether the weapons we shall have to face
will be more or less effective than those he imagined."
Somebody put in: "All right.
Say, for purposes of discussion, that this is an invasion. Now why, would you
say, have we been invaded?"
Bocker regarded him for a long
moment, then he said:
"I imagine that 'Why?' to have
been the cry of every invaded party throughout history."
"But there must be some
reason," the questioner persisted.
"Must there?—Well, I suppose,
in the widest sense there must. But it does not follow from that that it is a
reason we should understand, even if we knew it. I do not suppose the original Americans
had much understanding of the reasons why they were being invaded by the
Spaniards . . .
"But what you are, in fact,
asking is that I should explain to you the motives that are animating an alien
form of intelligence. In modesty I must decline to make that much of a fool of
myself. The way to have found out, if not to have understood perhaps, would
have been to get into communication with these things in our Deeps. But it
would appear that whatever chance there may once have been of that, we have now
very surely spoiled it."
The questioner was not satisfied
with that.
"But if we can't assign a
reason," he said, "then surely the whole thing becomes very little
different from a natural disaster—something like, say, an earthquake or a
cyclone?"
"True enough," agreed
Bocker. "And why not? I imagine that it is just
so that the bird appears to the insect. Also, for the common people involved in
a great war its distinction from a natural disaster is not very sharp. I know
that you have all taught your readers to expect oversimplified explanations of
everything, not excluding God Himself, in words of one syllable, so go ahead,
and satisfy their lust for wisdom; no one can contradict you. But if you try to
hang your explanations on
me, I'll sue you.
"I'll go just as far as this: I
can think of just two human motives for
migration across space, if it were possible, on any scale. One would be simple
expansion and aggrandizement; the other, flight from intolerable conditions on
the home planet. But those things in the Deeps are certainly not human,
whatever they may be; therefore, their reasons and motives may, but much more
likely will not, be similar to human motives."
He paused and looked round again.
"You know," he said,
"this 'Why?' business is a waste of breath. If we were to go to another
planet, and the people we found there promptly threw bombs at us, the 'Why?' of
our going there wouldn't make the least difference; we should simply assume that
if we did not take steps to stop it, we should be exterminated. And there,
possibly, we do have some common ground with these things in the Deeps—the
life-force, in whatever shape it is embodied, must have, collectively or
individually, the will to survive, or it will soon cease to be."
"Then it is definitely your
opinion that this is a hostile
invasion?" someone asked.
Bocker regarded him with interest.
"You know, you'd better stay
after class. What I say is that it is
an invasion, that it is hostile now,
but it may not have been hostile in
intention."
"And now," he concluded,
"all I ask is that you convince your readers that this is no stunt, but a
very serious matter—those of you whom editorial and proprietorial policies
permit, of course."
What happened, in point of fact, was
that almost all reports presented Bocker as a crackpot, with the kind of
implied comment: "This is the sort of thing you might believe if you were
a crackpot, too—but of course you are not, you are a sensible man."
There were signs that the
playing-down was not accidental. The public was in a mood in which it would
have taken anything, but there was pointed neglect of the opportunity to
exploit the situation. Nor, just then, did anything sensational occur to
interrupt the soothing process.
Then, by degrees, a feeling got about
that this was not at all the way anyone had expected an interplanetary war to
be; so very likely it was not an interplanetary war after all. From there, of
course, it was only a step to deciding that it must be the Russians.
The Russians had all along
encouraged, within their dictatorate, suspicion of capitalistic warmongers.
When whispers of the interplanetary notion did in some way penetrate their
curtain, they were countered by the statements that, (a) it was all a lie, a
verbal smoke screen to cover the preparations of warmongers, (b) that it was
true; and the capitalists, true to type, had immediately attacked the
unsuspecting strangers with atom bombs, and, (c) whether it was true or not,
the U.S.S.R. would fight unswervingly for Peace with all the weapons it
possessed, except germs.
The swing continued. People were
heard to say: "Huh —that interplanetary stuff? Don't mind telling you that
I very nearly fell for it at the time. But, of course, when you start to
actually think about it—! Wonder what
the Russian game really is? Must've been something pretty big
to make '
* * * *
A couple of weeks later we had a
little dinner party—with Captain Winters sitting at Phyllis's right hand. They
looked to be getting on very well. Afterward, in our domestic privacy, I
inquired: "If you aren't too sleepy, how did it go? What did the Captain
have to say?"
"Oh, lots of nice things. Irish
blood there, I think."
"But, passing from the really
important to matters of mere world-wide interest—?" I suggested,
patiently.
"He wouldn't let go of much,
but what he did say wasn't encouraging. Some of it was rather horrid."
"Tell me."
"Well, the main situation
doesn't seem to have altered a lot on the surface, but they're getting increasingly
worried about what's happening below. He didn't actually say that investigation has made no progress, either, but what he
did say implied it.
"He says for instance that atomic
bombs are out, for the moment at any rate. You can only use them in isolated
places, and even then the radioactivity spreads widely. The fisheries experts
on both sides of the
"And, here's something else.
Two of those bombs they've sent down haven't gone off."
"Oh," I said, "and
what do we infer from that?"
"I don't know. But it has them
worried, very worried. You see, the way they are set to operate is by the
pressure at a given depth; simple and pretty accurate."
"Meaning that they never
reached the right pressure zone? Must have got hung up somewhere on the way
down?"
Phyllis nodded.
"It's made them extremely
anxious."
"Understandably,
too. I'd not
feel too happy myself if I'd mislaid a couple of live atom bombs," I
admitted. "What else?"
"Three cable-repair ships have
unaccountably disappeared. One of them was cut off in the middle of a radio
message. She was known to be grappling for a defective cable at the time."
"When was this?"
"One about
six months ago, one about three weeks ago, and one last week."
"They might not have anything
to do with it."
"They might not—but everyone's pretty sure they have."
"No survivors to tell what
happened?"
"None."
Presently I asked:
"Anything
more?"
"Let me see. Oh, yes. They are
developing some kind of guided depth missile which will be high-explosive, not
atomic. But it hasn't been tested yet."
I turned to look at her admiringly.
"That's the stuff, darling. The real Mata Hari touch."
Phyllis ignored that one.
"The most important thing is
that he is going to give me an introduction to Dr. Matet, the
oceanographer."
I sat up. "But, darling, the
Oceanographical Society has more or less threatened to excommunicate anybody
who deals with us after that last script—it's part of their anti-Bocker
line."
"Well, Dr. Matet happens to be
a friend of the Captain's. He's seen his fireball-incidence maps, and he's a
half-convert. Anyway, we're not convinced Bockerites, are we?"
"What we think we are isn't necessarily
what other people think we are. Still, if he's willing—when can we see
him?"
"I hope to see him in a few
days' time, darling."
"Don't you think I should—"
"No. But it's sweet of you not
to trust me still."
"But—"
"No. And now it's time we went
to sleep," she said, firmly.
* *
* *
The beginning of Phyllis's interview
was, she reported, almost standard:
"E.B.C.?" said Doctor
Matet, raising eyebrows like miniature door mats. "I thought Captain
Winters said B.B.C."
He was a man with a large frame
sparingly covered, which gave his head the appearance of properly belonging to
a still larger frame. His tanned forehead was high, and well polished back to the
crown. He gave one, Phyllis said, a feeling of being overhung.
She sighed inwardly, and started on
the routine justification of the English Broadcasting Company's existence, and
worked him round gradually until he had reached the position of considering us
nice-enough people striving manfully to overcome the disadvantages of being
considered a slightly second-class oracle. Then, after making it quite clear
that any material he might supply was strictly anonymous in origin, he opened
up a bit.
The trouble from Phyllis's point of
view was that he did it on a pretty academic level, full of strange words and
instances which she had to interpret as best she could. The gist of what he had
to tell her, however, seemed to be this:
A year ago there had begun to be
reports of discolorations in certain ocean currents. The first observation of
the kind had been made in the Kuroshio current in the
North Pacific—an unusual muddiness flowing northeast, becoming less discernible
as it gradually widened out along the West Wind Drift until it was no longer
perceptible to the naked eye.
"Samples were taken and sent
for examination, of course, and what do you think the discoloration turned out
to be?" said Dr. Matet.
Phyllis looked properly expectant.
He told her:
"Mainly radiolarian
ooze, but with an appreciable percentage of diatomaceous ooze."
"How very
remarkable!"
Phyllis said, safely. "Now what on earth could produce a result like
that?"
"Ah," said Dr. Matet,
"that is the question. A disturbance on a quite remarkable scale—even in
samples taken on the other side of the ocean, off the coast of
He went on and on, until Phyllis
finally managed to interrupt him.
"Something, then," she
said, "not only was, but still is, going on down there?"
"Something is," he agreed,
looking at her. Then, with a sudden descent to the vernacular, he added:
"But, to be honest with you, Lord knows what it is."
* *
* *
"Too much
geography," said Phyllis, "and too much oceanography, and too much
bathyography: too much of all the ographies, and lucky to escape icthyology."
"Tell me," I said.
She did, with notes.
"And," she concluded, "I'd like to see anyone scribe a script
out of that lot."
"Hm," I said.
"There's no 'Hm' about it. Some
kind of ographer might give a talk on it to high brows and low
listening-figures, but even if he were intelligible, where'd it get
anybody?"
"That," I remarked,
"is the key question each time. But little by little the bits do
accumulate. This is another bit. You didn't really expect to come back with the
stuff for a whole script, anyway. He didn't suggest how this might link up with
the rest of it?"
"No. I said it was sort of
funny how everything seemed to be happening down in the most inaccessible parts
of the ocean lately, and a few things like that, but
he didn't rise. Very cautious. I think he was rather
wishing he had not agreed to see me, so he stuck to verifiable facts. Eminently nonwheedlable—at first meeting, anyhow. He
admitted he doesn't know, but he is not going to make any guesses that might
send his reputation the way Bocker's has gone."
"Look," I said.
"Bocker must have got to know about this as soon as anyone did. He ought
to have some views on it, and it might be worth trying to find out what they are.
The select press conference of his that we went to was almost an introduction."
"He went very coy after
that," she said doubtfully. "Not surprising, really. Still, we
weren't among the ones who panned him publicly—in fact, we were very
objective."
"Toss you which of us rings him
up," I offered.
"I'll do it," she said.
So I leaned back comfortably in my
chair, and listened to her going through the opening ceremony of making it
clear that she was the E.B.C.
I will say for Bocker that having
proposed his mouthful of a theory and then sold it to himself,
he had not backed out of the deal when he found it unpopular. At the same time
he had no great desire to be involved in a further round of controversy when he
would be pelted with cheap cracks and drowned in the noise from empty vessels.
He made that quite clear when we met. He looked at us earnestly, his head a
little on one side, the lock of gray hair hanging slightly forward, his hands
clasped
together. He nodded thoughtfully, and then
said:
"You want a theory from me
because nothing you can think of will explain this phenomenon. Very well, you
shall have one. I don't suppose you'll accept it, but I do ask you if you use
it at all to use it anonymously. When people come round to my view again, I
shall be ready, but I prefer not to be thought of as keeping my name before the
public by letting out sensational driblets—is that
quite clear?"
We nodded. We are becoming used to
this general desire for anonymity.
"What we are trying to
do," Phyllis explained, "is to fit a lot of bits and pieces into a
puzzle. If you can show us where one of them should go, we'll be very grateful.
If you would rather not have the credit for it, well, that is your own
affair."
"Exactly. Well, you already know my theory of
the origin of the deepwater intelligences, so we'll not go into that now. We'll
deal with their present state, and I deduce that to be this: having settled
into the environment best suited to them, these creatures' next thought would
be to develop that environment in accordance with their ideas of what
constitutes a convenient, orderly, and, eventually, civilized condition. They
are, you see, in the position of—well, no, they are actually pioneers, colonists. Once they have safely arrived they
set about improving and exploiting their new territory. What we have been
seeing are the results of their having started work on the job."
"By doing
what?" I
asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. "How
can we possibly tell? But judging by the way we have received them, one would
imagine that their primary concern would be to provide themselves with some
form of defense against us. For this they would presumably require metals. I
suggest to you, therefore, that somewhere down in the Mindanao Trench, and also
somewhere in the Deep in the southeast of the Cocos-Keeling Basin, you would,
if you could go there, find mining operations now in progress."
I glimpsed the reason of his demand
for anonymity.
"Er—but the working of metals
in such conditions—?" I said.
"How can we guess what
technology they may have developed? We ourselves have plenty of techniques for
doing things which would at first thought appear impossible in an atmospheric
pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch, there are also a number of unlikely
things we can do under water."
"But, with a pressure of tons,
and in continual darkness, and—" I began, but Phyllis cut across me with that
decisiveness which warns me to shut up and not argue.
"Dr. Bocker," she said,
"you named two particular Deeps then, why was
that?"
He turned from me to her.
"Because that
seems to me the only reasonable explanation where those two are concerned. It may be, as Mr. Holmes once
remarked to your husband's illustrious namesake, 'a capital mistake to theorize
before one has data,' but it is mental suicide to funk the data one has. I know
of nothing, and can imagine nothing, that could produce the effect Dr. Matet
spoke of except some exceedingly powerful machine for continuous
ejection."
"But," I said, a little
firmly, for I get rather tired of being dogged by the ghost of Mr. Holmes,
"if it is mining as you suggest, then why is the
discoloration due to ooze, and not grit?"
"Well, firstly there would be a
great deal of ooze to be shifted before one could get at the rock, immense
deposits, most likely, and secondly the density of the ooze is little more than
that of the water, whereas the grit, being heavy, would begin to settle long
before it got anywhere near the surface, however fine it might be."
Before I could pursue that, Phyllis
cut me off again:
"What about the other places,
Doctor. Why mention just those two?"
"I don't say that the others
don't also signify mining, but I suspect, from their locations, that they may
have another purpose."
"Which is"?" prompted
Phyllis, looking at him, all girlish expectation.
"Communications, I think. You
see, for instance, close to, though far below, the area where discoloration
begins to occur in the equatorial
place in that strategic Trench
leaves me with little doubt that whatever is down there is concerned to improve
its methods of getting about in the depths—just as we have improved our ways of
getting about on the surface."
There was a silence while we took in
that one, and its implications. Phyllis rallied first.
"Er—and the other two main
places—the Caribbean one, and the one west of
Dr. Bocker offered us cigarettes,
and lit one himself.
"Well, now," he remarked,
leaning back in his chair, "doesn't it strike you as probable that, for a
creature of the depths, a tunnel connecting the Deeps on either side of the isthmus
would offer advantages almost identical with those that we ourselves obtain
from the existence of the Panama Canal?"
* * * *
People may say what they like about
Bocker, but they can never truthfully claim that the scope of his ideas is mean
or niggling. What is more, nobody has ever actually proved him wrong. His chief trouble was that he usually provided
such large, indigestible slabs that they stuck in all gullets—even mine, and I
would class myself as a fairly wide-gulleted type. That, however, was a
subsequent reflection. At the climax of the interview I was chiefly occupied
with trying to convince myself that he really meant what he had said, and
finding nothing but my own resistance to suggest that he did not.
Before we left, he gave us one more
thing to think about, too. He said:
"Since you are following this
along, you've probably heard of two atomic bombs that failed to go off?"
We told him we had.
"And have you heard that there
was an unsponsored atomic explosion yesterday?"
"No. Was it one of them?"
Phyllis asked.
"I should very much hope
so—because I should hate to think it could be any other," he replied.
"But the odd thing is that though one was lost off the Aleutians, and the
other in the process of trying to give the Mindanao Trench another shake up,
the explosion took place not so far off Guam—a good twelve hundred miles from
PHASE 2
We made an early start the next
morning. The car, already loaded, had stood out all night, and we were away a
few minutes after five, with the intention of putting as much of southern
I had rather favored 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 gray stone, five-roomed cottage set on a
southeasterly sloping, heathery hillside, with its
almost eaveless roof clamped down tight on it in the true Cornish manner.
Straight before us we looked across the
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: "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
Before I could settle down to the
story, 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 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
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 judgment, Phyl. We'll see The Times tomorrow 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
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 meager, and comments curiously
similar.
"All got a strong dose of
not-before-the-children this time," I said, as we finished. "And not
altogether surprising, seeing the hell the advertisers would raise."
Phyllis said coldly:
"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
dreamed 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 today."
"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.
Later, I found her staring out the
living room 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 this morning. 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 Weisman 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 this morning."
"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.
* *
* *
A pleasant month followed as we
settled down 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."
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 Yatsushiro. 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 leaned forward, and turned it 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. For the
moment she was seeing simply the ship as we had last seen her, putting out from
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 E.B.C.'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
feature."
"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 legpull—"
"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
rumor 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, and the line is your deep-sea menace. Tomorrow's
papers are using it, the Admiralty is willing to play, we've got several big
scientific names already, the B.B.C.'s next bulletin, and ours, will have good
strong hints in order to start the ball rolling, 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." I hung up and turned to Phyllis. "Work
for us, darling."
The next morning, with one accord,
we decided to go back to
* * * *
The Meritorious, it will be recalled, went down in mid-Atlantic, eight hundred
miles southwest 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
cruise 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 had 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 clamor for drastic, decisive action swelled up, giving a
lead to a similar clamor at home. The Americans decided to make the placating 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
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 full
speed. . . . 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 off—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'd 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 full speed—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—On, 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 of ten came
through, a bit radioactive, 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 overcolloquial language which had
given offense 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 skeptics 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 Kurils,
and one more survey craft off eastern
The following day the British
Government proposed that an International Naval Conference should meet in
On the day before the conference
opened Phyllis and I met for lunch.
"You ought to see
"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 airplane 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 tomorrow?" 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! How
do they expect us to do our job?" she exclaimed, and sat there brooding.
When Phyllis said "our
job" the words did not connote exactly what they would have implied a few
days before. The job 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. E.B.C. ran a feature called
"News-Parade" in which we appeared to have assumed the roles of
special oceanic correspondents, without being quite sure how it had occurred.
In point of fact, Phyllis had never been on the E.B.C. 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. 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
E.B.C.
We 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 torpedolike 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 delegates 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 fervor 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 cooperation.
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, 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 tranquilizing influence.
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 to make some
last attempt at a pacific approach 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
alarming short time they had been able not only to establish themselves, but to
produce the means of taking effective action for their self-defense. 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. 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," and its diminutive, "bathy,"
began to be used in print.
"More honored 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."
Hard on Bocker's words, but with a
significance that was not immediately recognized, came the news first from
Saphira, and then from
Saphira, a Brazilian island in the
Atlantic, lies a little south of the Equator and some
four hundred miles southeast of the larger
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. . . .
The coast of
"Must've made off, the lot of
'em. Their boat'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 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
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 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, but no one at
the time inquired further into the matter.
The
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. For many
years they had dropped out of sight, but recently an informer had managed to
reach the authorities with the news that they had taken over
In order to minimize the risk to a
number of innocent people who were being held hostage by the criminals, the
approach to
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 hammering of the automatic
rifles started 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 perlikons followed the beam, his fingers steady on the triggers. The light
made a few more slow sweeps and then stopped. It was trained on several
submachine guns lying on the sand, closer 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 perlikons. 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 form 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 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. Then he shrugged. He tucked the butt of his submachine gun
comfortably under his right arm, and slowly, with his eyes flicking right and
left for the least trace of movement, led his party up the beach.
The village was formed of a
semicircle 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 center 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. Then men began to breath more
evenly.
The First Officer removed his gaze
from the huts, and examined the ground. 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 it 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 toward the water.
"Some things—three of
them," the First Officer corrected him.
They returned to the middle of the
open semicircle. 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 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 northeast coast of
Closer investigation, however,
showed some differences: of these furrows, two had been made by some objects
ascending to the beach; the other two, 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
neighborhood 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 them
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 countershouting 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 he 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 vigor. 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 jellyfish. I really think that if you'd speak to them yourself, sir
. . . ?"
* *
* *
The news about
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, that the areas in
which they had occurred so much more extensive that, pending the development of
a more efficient means of defense, 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 a confidence in shipping which had been
recovering, 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 airlines. To follow such advice, they
protested, would mean routing transatlantic liners into
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 Pacific—and reply became
superfluous.
The news of the latest sinkings was
announced on the
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 went off to commune with nature on her own. As a rule, she
returned spiritually refreshed 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 man," I reproved her.
"They'd have given up more
quickly. Sorry if I've been 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 tranquility, and I thought
that anything that could tranquilize 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 squidges out at the sides
and you—"
"Darling, the minutes are
ticking up. I rang you 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 E.B.C. want 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, unflavored drops from life's clepsydra. The—"
"Mike, you've been
rehearsing."
"What else had I to do?"
We were only twenty minutes late,
but Freddy Whittier might have been desiccating for some hours from the urgency
with which he 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 two."
He went on to expound. It seemed
that one of E.B.C's favorite 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 B.B.C. to get on to it first."
"Look, Freddy," I said.
"For several years now everybody has been trying to get on it, let alone
the B.B.C. 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
"He was always my favorite
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 personal information
about the things the other way, but we would prefer you to be in a position to
bring it back."
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?"
* *
* *
"I like idleness—in the
sun," said Phyllis.
From where we sat at an umbrella-ed
table in front of the mysteriously named Grand Hotel Britannia y
To the left was a display of life as
conducted in the capital, and only town of the
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 mailbox
prepared one for the surprise of learning that the place was called Smithtown—and
even that took on romance when one learned 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 made 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
That was about as far as he cared to
go simply on paper, and it landed us all at
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 meeny miney mo, and had brought off a very near miss.
The plane took four of us over there
as soon as he had the news. Unfortunately we learned 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)
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
When I say "we," I must
admit I mean chiefly me. The others continued to analyze 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 floodlights on trees, posts
and the corners of buildings all over Smithtown, though with greater proliferation
toward 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 slowly growing more cynical, until
the affair at
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 interisland flying
defense 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 subsea activity all over. The only report of
a raid came from the Kurils, for some Slavonic reason, undated, and therefore
assumed to have spent some time under microscopic 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.
I began to feel that I had had about
enough of it. There was a suggestion of the Anglo-Saxon draining out, and the
tropical Latin seeping in, and, while the sensation was not unpleasant, I felt
it was a bit early in my life to let myself get fixed that way.
"This can't continue
indefinitely," I said to Phyllis. "I suggest we give Bocker a time
limit—a week from now to produce his phenomenon."
"Well—" she began
reluctantly. "Yes, I suppose you're right."
"I'm damned sure I am," I
told her. "In fact, I'm not at all sure that even another week may not
prove fatal."
Which was, in an
unintended way, truer than I knew.
* * * *
"Darling, stop
worrying that moon now, and come to bed."
"No soul—that's the trouble. I
often wonder why I married you."
So 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.
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 hid the little harbor.
"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 harbor. 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—"
"No! Look there." She
nodded towards the window.
People were still converging upon
the streets 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 movie 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 around 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 further 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, gray 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 toward 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
ricocheted away whining, but it kept steadily on, thrusting itself into the
Square at something under three miles an hour,
massively indeflectable. 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, lusterless leaden color, 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 steer
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
nearest 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 at 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, domelike excrescence. It was lighter colored than the
metal beneath; a kind of off-white, semiopaque 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 up
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 explode. Nor was
there any sound.
Rather, it seemed to slit 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 bowstring. 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 of feet 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 I watched I thanked God I had grabbed Phyllis's arm, and not
the cilium itself in trying to free her.
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 flypaper. 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
mishapen 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 gray 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—"
"It's all ever 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
the 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 film and recordings, including
an eyewitness account I had added later, and was on his way to
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 gray 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 Utter
of metal fragments that lay about it, the houses all round, 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 strong fishy, salty smell, but
with the warmth of the sun at work upon it it had begun to give off an odor
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 harbor.
Seldom had I known the freshness of a light breeze to smell so good.
Bocker sat down, and leaned 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—forever, 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
hands 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 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're more like
snares."
We sat thinking that over for a bit.
"But—why—?" said Phyllis.
Bocker frowned.
"Why!" he repeated. "Everybody is always asking 'why?'. Why did the things
come to the Deeps? Why didn't they stay at home? Why do they now come out of
the Deeps on to the land? And now, why do they attack us this way and not that?
How can we possibly hope to know the answers until we can find out more about
the sort of creatures they are?
"The human view would suggest
one of two motives—but that isn't to say that they don't have entirely
different motives of their own."
"Two motives?" said
Phyllis, meekly.
"Yes. They may be trying to
exterminate us. For all we can tell they may be under the impression that we have to live on coastlines, and that they
can gradually wipe us out in this way. You see, it is so difficult: we don't
know how much they know about us, either. But I shouldn't think that is the
purpose—it doesn't account for the tactics of rolling the victims back to the
water—at least, not fully. The coelenterates could as easily crush them and
leave them. So it looks as if the other motive might fit—simply that they find
us—and perhaps other land creatures, if you recall the disappearance of goats
and sheep on Saphira—good to eat. Or even both: plenty of tribes have an old established
custom of eating their enemies."
"You mean that they may have
come sort of—well, sort of shrimping for us?" Phyllis asked, uneasily.
"Well, we land creatures let
down trawls into the sea, and eat what they catch there. Why not a reverse
process for intelligent sea creatures?
"But, of course, there again I
am giving them a human outlook. That's what we all keep trying to do with our
'whys.' The trouble is we have all of us read too many stories where the
invaders turn up behaving and thinking just like human beings, whatever their
shape happens to be, and we can't shake loose from the idea that their behavior
must be comprehensible to us. In fact, there is no reason why it should be, and
plenty of reasons why it shouldn't."
"Shrimping," repeated
Phyllis, thoughtfully. "How disgusting! But it could
be."
Bocker said firmly: "We will
now drop this 'why': we may, or may not, learn more about it later. The
important thing now is how: how to
stop the things, and how to attack
them."
He paused. I must confess that I
went on thinking about the "why"—and feeling that even if the purport
were right, Phyllis might have chosen some pleasanter
and more dignified analogy than "shrimping." Presently Bocker went
on:
"Ordinary rifle fire doesn't
appear to trouble either the sea-tanks or these millebrachiate 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
"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
coordinated. 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. "Anything else? Did anyone notice
whether the shots appeared to have any effect at all on those tentacular
forms?" he added.
"As far as I could see, either the
shooting was lousy, or the bullets went through without bothering them,"
Ted told him.
"Hm," said Bocker, and
lapsed into reflection for a while.
Presently I became aware of Phyllis
muttering.
"What?" I inquired.
"I was just saying
'millebrachiate tentacular Coelenterates,' " she explained.
"Oh," I said.
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
"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. The
gruesome and fantastically repulsive scenes to which the E.B.C. 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 countermeasures, it would be a mistake for him to assume that he has
now been granted an unlimited license to readopt his former role as the world's
premier scaremonger.
"It is our inclination to
attribute his suggestion that we should proceed forthwith to embattle virtually
the entire western coastline of the
"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 taxpayers'
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
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, custom 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 E.B.C. 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.
Phyllis talked to him. He had called
to get from us confirmation of eyewitness reports, and to give us the latest on
Bocker. It seems he had firmly put forth the theory which we had heard before,
that the sea-tanks themselves didn't have intelligence, that this intelligence was
in actuality somewhere in the Deeps, and directed them by some remote means of
communication at present unknown. But the most trouble had been caused,
apparently, by his use of the ??? pseudocoelenterate.
As Winters put it, "he says they are not
coelenterates, not animals, and probably not in the accepted sense, living
creatures at all, but that they may well be artificial organic constructions built for a specialized purpose. He read
Bocker's statement on the subject to Phyllis over the phone.
" '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 behavior
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' "
"Oh—oh—oh!" said Phyllis
painedly, to Captain Winters. "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, too!"
* * * *
A bad week followed. Those papers
that had already adopted The Beholder's scornful
attitude to coastal preparations pounced upon the pseudobiotic suggestions with
glee. Writers of editorials filled their pens with sarcasm, a squad of
scientists which had trounced Bocker before was marched out again, to grind him
still smaller. Almost every cartoonist discovered simultaneously why his
favorite political butts had somehow never seemed quite human.
The other part of the Press already
advocating effective coastal defenses, let its
imagination go on the subject of pseudo-living structures that might yet be
created, and demanded still better defense against the horrific possibilities
thought up by its staffs.
Then the sponsor informed E.B.C.
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 E.B.C. 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 the purchase of the product might be disregarded as
tacit endorsement of the Bocker theory which, he feared, might have the effect
of promoting sales resistance in the upper income brackets. E.B.C. parried with
the observation that build-up 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 E.B.C.'s own comedians had suggested that pseudo life
might explain a longstanding mystery concerning his mother-in-law, and if this
kind of thing was going to be allowed, etc., etc. E.B.C. 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 B.B.C. displayed an
infuriatingly courteous sympathy to any members of our staff whom they chanced
to meet.
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 E.B.C. too obviously would not trust him near a live
microphone, and was insisting on recordings.
At last, however, the scripts were
finished. We were too tired of them to argue any more. We packed hurriedly and
departed blasphemously for the peace and seclusion of
The first noticeable thing as we
approached Rose Cottage,
"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 of lot of your compostminded friends—"
"That," Phyllis told me,
coldly, "is an arbor."
I looked at it more carefully. The
architecture was unusual. One wall gave an impression of leaning a little.
"Why do we want an arbor?"
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."
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 arbor. I pottered about wondering why the sense of
peace wasn't flowing over me quite as I had hoped. The Cornish sea still lapped
immemorially at the rocks. It was hard indeed to imagine our home sea spawning
such morbid novelties as had slid up the
The national airlift was working
now, though on a severe schedule of primary necessities. It had been discovered
that two large airfreighters 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, and in spite of the rationing system the cost
of living had already risen by about two hundred per cent.
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.
A few ships could still be found in
which crews, at fortune-making wages, would dare the deep water, but the
insurance rate pushed the cargo prices up to a level at which only the direst
need would pay.
Somebody somewhere hatf perceived in
an enlightened moment that every vessel lost had been power driven, and there
was a world-wide boom in sailing craft of every size and type. There was also 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 it again when it was shown that they had been rendered
unreliable in some way, if no actually countered. Nevertheless, that the
scientists would come through with the complete answer one day was not to be doubted—and
always, it might be tomorrow.
From what I had been hearing, the
general faith in scientists was now somewhat greater than the scientists' faith
in themselves. Their shortcomings as saviors 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 it. 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 practice
on." They had become ready to grasp at any straw—which may have been the
reason why it was only among a desperate section of the scientists that
Bocker's theory of pseudobiotic forms received any serious consideration.
As for the sea-tanks, the more
lively papers were having a great time with them, so were the newsreels. Selected
parts of the Escondida films were included in our scripted accounts on E.B.C. A
small footage was courteously presented to the B.B.C. for use in its newsreel,
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, and sea-tanks were particularly
suitable for this purpose.
Their depredations, however, were
becoming increasingly serious. In the short time since we had left Escondida
raids had been reported from ten or eleven more places in the Caribbean area,
including a township on
From the inhabitants of
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 defenses, 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. I'll
get over it again. Don't you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age
of Reason, instead of 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 airplanes 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 brush-off, 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 something?"
"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
setup 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 size of 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 arbor. 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."
I tightened my arm. "There's
nothing to be frightened about, darling."
She kept on looking at me.
"You're not frightened?" she said.
"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 today."
She dabbed at her eyes. "All
right," she said, with unusual meekness.
We really needed to relax, to
relieve the dreadful concentration. And so for the next six weeks we rested
completely; not going near a script, cutting off the telephone and the radio,
not even approaching the novel.
Certainly, in six weeks I had become
addicted to this life 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 archrival'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.
"In the House today, 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 defense into their
own hands. The people, he said, were entitled to defense. 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."
"The Prime Minister replied
that the nature of the steps that would, if necessary, be taken would have to
be dictated by the emergency, if one should arise. These, he said, were deep
waters: there was much consolation to be found in the reflection that the
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 his bloody self said one time: '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
Consequently when, five nights
before, the sea-tanks had come crawling through the mud, across the shore, and
up the slipways at
Someone telephoned the garrison at
the cuartel with the news that foreign
submarines were invading the harbor 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.
The sea-tanks had continued their
slow advance. 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, countersniping, 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 nor 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 learned a thing or two;
among them, that is the bottom story 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
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 learned 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 down
to no more than a few yards. Somewhere about ten-thirty in the evening 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 in this, 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 hundred of casualties,
felt that it had earned battle honors.
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. Bu' no.
'No cause for alarm,' says the bloody Government. Huh! 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 to Phyllis, who had gone up to
* * * *
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 scientists had not yet produced a panacea (though the usual new device was
to be tested), the merchantships still choked the harbors, the aircraft
factories were working three shifts and threatening to strike, the Communist
Party was pushing a line of Every Plane is a Vote for War.
Mr. Malenkov, interviewed by
telegram, had said that although the intensified program 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 Defense of Peace had been tripled. Indeed, so resolutely
were the Peoples of the Free Democracies determined to preserve Peace in spite
of the new Imperialist threat, that war was not inevitable—though there was a
possibility that under prolonged provocation the patience of the Soviet Peoples
might become exhausted.
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. I looked in the
desk-diary, but the last entry was three days old, and said simply: "Lamb
chops."
I picked up the telephone.
It was nice of Freddy Whittier to
sound genuinely pleased that I was in circulation again. After the greetings:
"Look," I said, "I've
been so strictly incommunicado 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'?"
"
"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."
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—? O, 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 E.B.C.'s
regular drivers. I asked him what the hell, but all he knew was that there was
a special charter job waiting at Northolt. I found 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 room 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 gray cottages, and burst their sprays of tentacles
here, seemed utterly preposterous.
Yet, there were the ground-down
stones of the slipway in the little harbor, the grooves on the beach beside the
harbor 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
By the time I got back to
Phyllis and Bocker were back from
And a lot was. The
Across the Atlantic serious trouble
was almost confined to the
exposure to bright sunlight. And it still
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 minor Deep, south
of Rockall. They rapidly developed a skill in dealing with the things that made
it a point of dishonor that even one should get away.
Then, only a few days after the
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 experiencd 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 for certain. They may have been trawling for us as we
trawl for fish, though that is difficult to understand; there is more to be caught
more cheaply in the sea than on the land. Or 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.
"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.
"Observation has convinced 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—it's 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 program again, if it ever does,
they'll switch off in their thousands. As a bit of friendly advice, tell him to
start cultivating the B.B.C."
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 getting votes could be turned 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 harbors. There's no
sense in it. This is the biggest emergency we have ever had."
"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 mere intelligent than we are. Do you?"
He frowned. "I don't see how
one could answer that. My impression, as I have said before, 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—"
PHASE 3
Even though Bocker had been unaware
of it when he gave his warning, the new method of attack had already begun, but
it took six months more before it became apparent.
Had the ocean vessels been keeping
their usual courses, it would havearoused general comment earlier, but with
transatlantic crossings taking place only by air, the pilots' reports of
unusually dense and widespread fog in the west
Atlantic were simply noted. With the increased range of aircraft, too,
Checking reports of that time in the
light of later knowledge I discovered that there were reports about the same
time of unusually widespread fogs in the northwestern Pacific, too. Conditions
were bad off the northern Japanese
The chilly mistiness of the summer
in
Fog, in fact, was scarcely noticed by
the wider world-consciousness until the Russians mentioned it. A note from
The territorial rights of the
U.S.S.R. in that area of the Arctic lying between the meridians 32° East, and
168° West of Greenwich were recognized by International Law. Any unauthorized
incursion into that area constituted an aggression. The Soviet Government,
therefore, considered itself at liberty to take any action necessary for the preservation
of Peace in that region.
The note, delivered simultaneously
to several countries, received its most rapid and downright reply from
The Peoples of the West, the State
Department observed, would be interested by the Soviet Note. As, however, they
had now had considerable experience of that technique of propaganda which had
been called the prenatal tu quoque,
they were able to recognize its implications. The Government of the
Government, in the interests of
accuracy, that the segment mentioned in the Note was only approximate, the true
figures being: 32° 04' 35" East of Greenwich, and 168° 49' 30" West
of Greenwich, giving a slightly smaller segment than that claimed, but since
the center of the phenomenon mentioned was well within this area the United
States Government had, naturally, no cognizance of its existence until informed
of it in the Note.
Recent observations had, curiously,
recorded the existence of just such a feature as that described in the Note at
a center also close to the 85th Parallel, but at a point 79° West of Greenwich.
By coincidence this was just the target area jointly selected by the
The Russians commented on the
quaintness of choosing a target area where observation was not possible; the
Americans, upon the Slavonic zeal for pacification of uninhabited regions.
Whether both parties then proceeded to attack their respective fogs is not on
public record, but the wider effect was that fogs became news, and were
discovered to have been unusually dense in a surprising number of places.
Had weather ships still been at work
in the
That straightforwardly explained the
fogs off
Then, from Godhavn, north of
Godthaab on the west
"At about Latitude 77, 60
degrees West," one of the fliers wrote, "we found
the most awesome sight in the world. The glaciers which run down from the high
An enormous section tilts out,
falling and turning slowly. When it smashes into the water the spray rises up
and up in great fountains, spreading far out all around. The displaced water
comes rushing back in breakers which clash together in tremendous spray while a
berg as big as a small island slowly rolls and wallows and finds its balance.
For a hundred miles up and down the coast we saw splashes starting up where the
same thing was happening. Very often a berg had no time to float away before a
new one had crashed down on top of it. The scale was so big that it was hard to
realize. Only by the apparent slowness of the falls and the way the huge
splashes seemed to hang in the air—the majestic pace of it all—were we able to
tell the vastness of what we were seeing."
Just so did other expeditions
describe the scene on the east coast of Devon Island, and on the southern tip
of
Away over on the other side of the
The public received the information
in a cushionly style. People were impressed by the first magnificent
photographs of icebergs in the process of creation, but, although no iceberg is
quite like any other iceberg, the generic similarity is pronounced. A rather
brief period of awe was succeeded by the thought that while it was really very
clever of science to know all about icebergs and climate and so on, it did not
seem to be much good knowing if it could not, resultantly, do something about
it.
The dreary summer passed into a
drearier autumn. There seemed to be nothing anybody could do about it but
accept it with a grumbling philosophy.
At the other end of the world spring
came. Then summer, and the whaling season started—in so far as it could be
called a season at all when the owners who would risk ships were so few, and
the crews ready to risk their lives fewer still. Nevertheless, some could be
found ready to damn the bathies, along with all other perils of the deep, and
set out. And the end of the Antarctic summer came
news, via
The Sunday Tidings, which had for some years been pursuing a line of intellectual
sensationalism, had never found it easy to maintain its supply of material. The
policy was subject to lamentable gaps during which it could find nothing
topical on its chosen level to disclose. It must, one fancies, have been a
council of desperation over a prolonged hiatus of the kind which induced it to
open its columns to Bocker.
That the Editor felt some
apprehension over the result was discernible from his italicized note preceding
the article in which he disclaimed, on grounds of fair-mindedness, any
responsibility for what he was now printing in his own paper.
With this auspicious beginning, and
under the heading: The Devil and the
Deeps, Bocker led off:
"Never, since the days when
Noah was building his
That beginning I remember, but
without references I can only give the gist and a few recollected phrases of
the rest.
"This," Bocker continued,
"is the latest chapter in a long tale of futility and failure stretching
back to the sinkings of the Yatsushiro,
and the Keweenaw, and beyond. Failure
which has already driven us from the seas, and now
threatens us on the land. I repeat, failure.
"That is a word so little to
our taste that many think it a virtue to claim that they never admit it. All
about us are unrest, inflating prices, whole economic structures changing—and,
therefore, a way of life that is changing. All about us, too, are people who
talk about our exclusion from the high seas as though it were some temporary inconvenience,
soon to be corrected. To this smugness there is a reply; it is this:
"For over five years now the
best, the most agile, the most inventive brains in the world have wrestled with
the problem of coming to grips with our enemy—and there is, on their present
findings, nothing at all to indicate that we shall ever be able to sail the
seas in peace again.
"With the word 'failure' so wry
in our mouths it has apparently been policy to discourage any expression of the
connection between our maritime troubles and the recent developments in the
"I do not suggest that the root
problem is being neglected; far from it. There have been, and are, men wearing
themselves out to find some means by which we can locate and destroy the enemy
in our Deeps. What I do say is that with them still unable to find a way, we
now face the most serious assault yet.
"It is an assault against which
we have no defenses. It is not susceptible of direct attack.
"What is this weapon to which
we can oppose no counter?
"It is the melting of the
Arctic ice—and a great part of the Antarctic ice, too.
"You think that fantastic? Too colossal? It is not. It is a task which we could have
undertaken ourselves, had we so wished, at any time since we released the power
of the atom.
"Because of the winter darkness
little has been heard lately of the patches of Arctic fog. It is not generally
known that though two of them existed in the Arctic spring; by the end of the Arctic
summer there were eight, in widely separated areas. Now, fog is caused, as you
know, by the meeting of hot and cold currents of either air or water. How does
it happen that eight novel, independent warm currents can suddenly occur in the
"And the
results?
Unprecendented flows of broken ice into the Bering Sea, and into the
"And the
icebergs?
Obviously there are a great many more icebergs than usual, but why should there be more icebergs?
"Everyone knows where they are
coming from. Greenland is a large island—greater than nine times the size of
the
"Several times the ice has come
south, grinding and scouring, smoothing the mountains, scooping the valleys on
its way until it stood in huge ramparts, dizzy cliffs of glass-green ice, vast
slow-crawling glaciers, across half
"If some means, or some several
means, of melting the Arctic ice were put into operation, a little time would
have to pass before its effect namely the rise of the sea level became
measurable. Moreover, the effects would be progressive; first a trickle, then a
gush, then a torrent.
"In this connection I draw
attention to the fact that in January of this year the mean sea level at
Newlyn, where it is customarily measured, was reported to have risen by
two-and-one-half inches."
"Oh, dear!" said Phyllis,
when she had read this. "Of all the pertinacious
stickers-out-of-necks! We'd better go and see him."
It did not entirely surprise us when
we telephoned the next morning to find that his number was not available. When
we called, however, we were admitted. Bocker got up from a desk littered with
mail, to greet us.
"No earthly good your coming here," he told us. "There isn't a
sponsor that'd touch me with a forty-foot pole."
"Oh, I'd not say that,
A.B." Phyllis told him. "You will very likely find yourself immensely
popular with the sellers of sandbags and makers of earth-shifting machinery
before long."
He took no notice of that.
"You'll probably be contaminated if you associate with me. In most
countries I'd be under arrest by now."
"Terribly
disappointing for you. This has always been discouraging territory for ambitious martyrs. But
you do try, don't you?" she responded. "Now, look, A.B." she
went on, "do you really like to
have people throwing things at you, or what is it?"
"I get impatient,"
explained Bocker.
"So do other people. But nobody
I know has quite your gift for going just beyond what people are willing to
take at any given moment. One day you'll get hurt. Not this time because,
luckily you've messed it up, but one time certainly."
"If not this time, then
probably not at all," he said. He bent a thoughtful, disapproving look on her.
"Just what do you mean, young woman, by coming here and telling me I
'messed it up'?"
"The
anticlimax.
First you sounded as if you were on the point of great revelations, but then
that was followed by a rather vague suggestion that somebody or something must
be causing the Arctic changes—and without any specific explanation of how it
could be done. And then your grand finale was that the tide is two-and-a-half
inches higher."
Bocker continued to regard her.
"Well, so it is. I don't see what's wrong with that. Two-and-a-half
inches is a colossal amount of water when it's spread over a hundred and
forty-one million square miles. If you reckon it up in tons—"
"I never do reckon water in
tons—and that's part of the point. To ordinary people two-and-a-half inches
just means a very slightly higher mark on a post. After your build-up it
sounded like such a let-down that everyone feels annoyed with you for alarming
them—those that don't just laugh, and say: 'Ha! ha! These professors!'"
Bocker waved his hand at the desk
with its load of mail.
"Quite a lot of people have
been alarmed—or at least indignant," he said. He lit a cigarette.
"That was what I wanted. You know that at every stage the great majority, and particularly the authorities have resisted the
evidence as long as they could. This is a scientific age—in the more educated
strata. It will therefore almost fall over backwards in disregarding the
abnormal, and it has developed a deep suspicion of its own senses. Very reluctantly
the existence of something in the Deeps was belatedly conceded. There has been
equal reluctance to admit all the succeeding manifestations until they couldn't
be dodged. And now here we are again, balking at the newest hurdle.
"We've not been altogether
idle, though. The Arctic Ocean is deep, and even more difficult to get at than
the others, so there was some bombing where the fog patches occurred, but the
devil of it is there's no way of telling results.
"In the middle of it the
Muscovite, who seems to be constitutionally incapable of understanding anything
to do with the sea, started making trouble. The sea, he appeared to be arguing,
was causing a great deal of inconvenience to the West; therefore it must be
acting on good dialectically materialistic principles, and I have no doubt that
if he could contact the Deeps he would like to make a pact with their inhabitants
for a brief period of dialectical opportunism. Anyway, he led off, as you know,
with accusations of aggression, and then in the back-and-forth that followed
began to show such truculence that the attention of our Services became
diverted from the really serious threat to the antics of this oriental clown
who thinks the sea was only created to embarrass capitalists.
"Thus, we have now arrived at a
situation where the 'bathies,' as they call them, far from falling down on the
job as we had hoped, are going ahead fast, and all the brains and organizations
that should be working full speed at planning to meet the emergency are
congenially fooling around with those ills they have, and ignoring others that
they would rather know not of."
"So you decided that the time
had come to force their hands by—er—blowing the gaff?" I asked.
"Yes—but not alone. This time I
have the company of a number of eminent and very worried men. Mine was only the
opening shot at the wider public on this side of the
"What?" asked Phyllis.
He looked at her thoughtfully for a
moment, then shook his head slightly.
"That, thank God, is someone
else's department—at least, it will be when the public
forces them to admit the situation."
"It's going to be a very bloody
business," he said seriously.
"What I want to know—"
Phyllis and I began, simultaneously.
"Your turn, Mike," she
offered.
"Well, mine is: how do you
think the thing's being done? Melting the
"There've been a number of
guesses. They range from an incredible operation like piping warm water up from
the tropics, to tapping the Earth's central heat—which I find just about as
unlikely."
"But you have your own
idea?" I suggested. It seemed improbable that he had not.
"Well, I think it might be done this way. We know that
they have some kind of device that will project a jet of water with
considerable force—the bottom sediment that was washed up into surface currents
in a continuous flow pretty well proved that. Well, then, a contraption of that
kind, used in conjunction with a heater, say an atomic reaction pile, ought to
be capable of generating a quite considerable warm current. The obvious snag
there is that we don't know whether they have atomic fission or not. So far,
there's been no indication that they have—unless you count our presenting them
with at least one atomic bomb that didn't go off. But if they do have it, I think that might be an
answer."
"They could get the necessary
uranium?"
"Why not? After all, they have forcibly
established their rights, mineral and otherwise, over more than two-thirds of
the world's surface. Oh, yes, they could get it, all right, if they know about
it."
"And the
iceberg angle?"
"That's less difficult. In
fact, there is pretty general agreement that if one has a vibratory type of
weapon which their attacks on ships led us to believe they had, there ought to
be no great difficulty in causing a lump of ice— even a considerable sized lump
of ice—to crack."
"Suppose we can't find a way of
hindering the process, how long do you think it'll take before we are in real
trouble?" I asked him.
He shrugged. "I've absolutely
no idea. As far as the glaciers and the icecap are concerned, it presumably
depends on how hard they work at it. But directing warm currents on pack ice
would presumably show only small results to begin with and then increase
rapidly, very likely by a geometrical progression. Worse than
useless to guess, with no data at all."
"Once this gets into people's
heads, they're going to want to know the best thing to do," Phyllis said.
"What would you advise?"
"Isn't that the Government's
job? It's because it's high time they thought about doing some advising that we
have blown the gaff, as Mike put it. My own personal advice is too
impracticable to be worth much."
"What is it?" Phyllis
asked.
"Find a nice, self-sufficient
hilltop, and fortify it," said Bocker, simply.
* *
* *
The campaign did not get off to the
resounding start that Bocker had hoped. In
Nevertheless, official indifference
was slightly breached, Bocker assured us. A Committee on which the Services
were represented had been set up to inquire and make recommendations. A similar
Committee in
The average Californian was not
greatly worried by a rise of a couple of inches in the tide level; he had been
much more delicately stricken. Something was happening to his climate. The
average of his seaboard temperature had gone way down, and he was having cold,
wet fogs. He disapproved of that, and a large number of Californians
disapproving makes quite a noise.
It was clear to all parties that the
increased flow of ice and cold water pouring out of the Bering Sea was being
swept eastward by the Kuroshio Current from Japan, and obvious to at least one
of the parties that the amenities of the most important State in the Union were
suffering gravely. Something must be
done.
In
Assurances that this had happened a
number of times before and was devoid of particular significance were swept
aside by the triumphant we-told-you-so of the Nethermore Press. A hysterical Bomb-the-Bathies demand sprang up on
both sides of the
Foremost, as well as first, in the
Bomb-the-Bathies movement, the Nethermore
Press inquired, morning and evening: "WHAT IS THE BOMB FOR?"
"Billions have been spent upon
this Bomb which appears to have no other destiny but to be held up and shaken
threateningly, or, from time to time, to provide pictures for our illustrated
papers. The people of the world, having evolved and paid for this weapon are
now forbidden to use it against a menace that has sunk our ships, closed our
oceans, snatched men and women from our very shores, and now threatens to drown
us. Procrastination and ineptitude has from the beginning marked the attitude
of the Authorities in this affair. . . ." and so on, with the earlier
bombings of the Deeps apparently forgotten by writers and readers alike.
"Working up nicely now,"
said Bocker when we saw him next.
"It seems pretty silly to
me," Phyllis told him, bluntly. "All the same old arguments against
the indiscriminate bombing of Deeps still apply."
"Oh, not that part,"
Bocker said. "They'll probably drop a few bombs here and there with plenty
of publicity and no results. No, I mean the urge towards planning. We're now in
the first stage of stupid suggestions like building immense levees of sandbags,
of course; but it is getting across that something has got to be done."
It got across still more strongly
after the next spring tides. There had been strengthening of the sea defenses
everywhere. In
They were not disappointed. The
water lapped slowly above the parapet and against the sandbags. Here and there
it began to trickle through on to the pavements. Firemen, Civil Defense, and
Police watched their sections anxiously, rushing bags to reinforce wherever a
trickle enlarged, shoring up weak-looking spots with timber struts. The pace gradually
became hotter. The bystanders began to help, dashing from one point to another
as new jets started up. Presently there could be little doubt what was going to
happen. Some of the watching crowd withdrew, but many of them remained, in a
wavering fascination. Then the breakthrough came, it occurred in a dozen places
on the north bank almost simultaneously. Among the spurting jets a bag or two
would begin to shift, then, suddenly, came a collapse, and a gap several yards
wide through which the water poured as if over a dam.
From where we stood on top of an
E.B.C. van parked on
From that point on, the thing got
thick and fast. On the south bank water was breaking into the streets of
Lambeth, Southwark, and Bermondsey in a number of places. Up river it was
seriously flooding Chiswick, down river Limehouse was getting it badly, and
more places kept on reporting breaks until we lost track of them. There was
little to be done but stand by for the tide to drop,
and then rush the repairs against its next rise.
The House outquestioned any quiz.
The replies were more assured than assuring.
The relevant Ministries and
Departments were actively taking all the steps necessary, claims should be
submitted through Local Councils, priorities of men and material had already
been arranged. Yes, warnings had been given, but unforseen factors had intruded
upon the hydrographers' original calculations. An Order in Council would be
made for the requisition of all earth-moving machinery. The public could have full
confidence that there would be no repetition of the calamity; the measures
already put in hand would insure against any further extension. Little could be
done beyond rescue work in the Eastern Counties at present, that would of
course continue, but the most urgent matter at the moment was to ensure that
the water could make no further inroads at the next high tides.
The requisition of materials,
machines and manpower was one thing; their apportionment, with every seaboard
community and low-lying area clamoring for them simultaneously, quite another.
Clerks in half a dozen Ministries grew pale and heavy-eyed in a welter of
demands, allocations, adjustments, redirections, misdirections, subornments,
and downright thefts. But somehow, and in some places, things began to get
done. Already, there was great bitterness between those who were chosen, and those
who looked like being thrown to the wolves.
Phyllis went down one afternoon to
look at progress of work on the riverside. Amid great activity on both banks a
superstructure of concrete blocks was arising on the existing walls. The
sidewalk supervisors were out in their thousands to watch. Among them she
chanced upon Bocker. Together they ascended to
"Alph, the sacred river—and
more than twice five miles of walls and towers," Phyllis observed.
"And there are going to be some
deep but not very romantic chasms on either side, too," said Bocker.
"I wonder how high they'll go before the futility comes home to
them."
"It's difficult to believe that
anything on such a scale as this can be really futile, but I suppose you are
right," said Phyllis.
They continued to regard the medley
of men and machinery down below for a time.
"Well," Bocker remarked,
at length, "there must be at least one figure among the shades who is getting a hell of a good laugh out of this."
"Nice to think there's even
one," Phyllis said. "Who?"
"King Canute," said
Bocker.
We were having so much news of our
own at that time that the effects in
But it is idle to particularize. All
over the world the threat was the same. The chief difference was that in the
more developed countries all available earth-shifting machinery worked day and
night, while in the more backward it was sweating thousands of men and women
who toiled to raise great levees and walls.
But for both the task was too great.
The more the level rose, the further the defenses had to be extended to prevent
outflanking. When the rivers were backed up by the incoming tides there was
nowhere for the water to go but over the surrounding countryside. All the time,
too, the problems of preventing flooding from the rear by water backed up in sewers
and conduits become more difficult to handle. Even before the first serious
inundation which followed the breaking of the Embankment wall near Blackfriars,
in October, the man in the street had suspected
that the battle could not be won, and
the exodus of those with wisdom and the means had already started. Many of
them, moreover, were finding themselves forestalled by refugees from the
eastern counties and the more vulnerable coastal towns elsewhere.
Some little time before the
Blackfriars breakthrough a confidential note had circulated among selected
staff, and contracted personnel such as ourselves, at E.B.C. It had been
decided, as a matter of policy in the interests of public morale, we learned,
that, should certain emergency measures become necessary, etc., etc., and so
on, for two foolscap pages, with most of the information between the lines. It would
have been a lot simpler to say: "Look. The word is that this thing's going
to get serious. The B.B.C. has orders to stay put, so for prestige reasons
we'll have to do the same. We want volunteers to man a station here, and if you
care to be one of them, we'll be glad to have you. Suitable arrangements will
be made. There'll be a bonus, and you can trust us to look after you okay if
anything does happen. How about it?"
Phyllis and I talked it over. If we
had had any family, we decided, the necessity would have been to do the best we
could by them—in so far as anyone could know what might turn out to be best. As
we had not, we could please ourselves. Phyllis summed up for staying on the
job.
"Apart from conscience and
loyalty and all the proper things," she said, "Goodness knows what is
going to happen in other places if it does get really bad. Somehow, running
away seldom seems to work out well unless you have a pretty good idea of what
you're running to. My vote is for sticking, and seeing what happens."
So we sent our names in, and were
pleased to find that Freddy Whittier and his wife had done the same.
After that, some clever
departmentalism made it seem as if nothing were happening for a while. Several
weeks passed before we got wind of the fact that E.B.C. had leased the top two
floors of a large department store near Marble Arch, and were working full
speed to have them converted into as near a self-supporting station as was
possible.
"I should have thought,"
said Phyllis, when we acquired this information, "that somewhere higher,
like Hampstead or Highgate would have been better."
"Neither of them is quite
"Just as if the water would
just go away one day," she said.
"Even if they don't think so,
they lose nothing by letting E.B.C. have it," I pointed out.
By that time we were becoming highly
level-conscious, and I looked the place up on the map. The seventy-five foot
contour line ran down the street on the building's western side.
"How does that compare with the
archrival?" wondered Phyllis, running her finger across the map.
Broadcasting House appeared to be
very slightly better off. About eighty-five feet above mean sea level, we
judged.
"Hm," she said.
"Well, if there is any calculation behind our being on the top floors,
they'll be having to do a lot of moving upstairs, too.
Gosh," she added, glancing over to the left of the map. "Look at
their television studios! Right down on the twenty-five foot level."
In the weeks just before the
breakthrough
There was plenty of warning this
time in the parts likely to be most affected. The people took it stubbornly and
phlegmatically. They had already had experience to learn by. The main response
was to move possessions to upper storys, and grumble
loudly at the inefficiency of authorities who were incapable of saving them the
trouble involved. Notices were posted giving the times of high water for three
days, but the suggested precautions were couched with such a fear of promoting
rank that they were little heeded.
The first day passed safely. On the
evening of the highest water a large part of
The smooth, oily surface crawled
slowly up the piers of the bridges and against the retaining walls. The muddy
water flowed upstream with scarcely a sound, and the crowds, too, were almost
silent, looking down on it apprehensively. There was no fear of it topping the
walls; the estimated rise was twenty-three feet, four inches, which would leave
a safety margin of four feet to the top of the new parapet. It was pressure
that was the source of anxiety.
From the north end of Waterloo
Bridge where we were stationed this time, one was able to look along the top of
the wall, with the water running high on one side of it, and, to the other, the
roadway of the Embankment, with the street lamps still burning there, but not a
vehicle or a human figure to be seen upon it. Away to the west the hands on the
Parliament clock tower crawled round the illuminated dial. The water rose as
the big hand moved with insufferable sloth up to eleven o'clock. Over the quiet
crowds the note of Big Ben striking the hour came clearly down wind.
The sound caused people to murmur to
one another; then they fell silent again. The hand began to crawl down,
ten-past, a quarter, twenty, twenty-five, then, just before the half-hour there
was a rumble somewhere upstream; a composite, crowd-voice sound came to us on
the wind.
The people about us craned their
necks, and murmured again. A moment later we saw the water coming. It poured
along the Embankment towards us in a wide, muddy flood, sweeping rubbish and
bushes with it, rushing past beneath us. A groan went up from the crowd.
Suddenly there was a loud crack and a rumble of falling masonry behind us as a
section of the wall, close by where the Discovery
had formerly been moored, collapsed. The water poured through the gap,
wrenching away concrete blocks so that the wall crumbled before our eyes and
the water poured in a great muddy cascade on to the roadway.
Before the next tide came the
Government had removed the velvet glove. Following the announcement of a State
of
But, though it was bad here, it was
still worse elsewhere. The Dutch had withdrawn in time from the danger areas,
realizing that they had lost their centuries-long battle with the sea. The
Rhine and the
For a little time we managed to
follow in a general way what was happening, but when the inhabitants of the
Ardennes and
Over the untouched parts of
We decided it was time to leave the
flat and take up our residence in the new E.B.C. fortress.
From what the short waves were
telling us there was little to distinguish the course of events in the
low-lying cities anywhere—except that in some the law died more quickly. It is
outside my scope to dwell on the details; I have no doubt that they will be
described later in innumerable official histories.
E.B.C.'s part during those days
consisted largely in duplicating the B.B.C. in the reading out of government
instructions hopefully intended to restore a degree of order: a monotonous business
of telling those whose homes were not immediately threatened to stay where they
were, and directing the flooded-out to certain higher areas and away from
others that were said to be already overcrowded. We may have been heard, but we
could see no evidence that we were heeded. In the north there may have been
some effect, but in the south the hugely disproportionate concentration of
The existence of numerous hotels and
a reassuring elevation of some seven hundred feet above normal sea level were
undoubtedly factors which influenced Parliament in choosing the town of
As for ourselves, we began to shake
down into a routine. Our living quarters were on the top floor. Offices,
studios, technical equipment, generators, stores, etc., on the floor beneath. A
great reserve of diesel oil and petrol filled large tanks in the basement,
whence it was pumped as necessary. Our aerial systems were on roofs two blocks
away, reached by bridges slung high over the intervening streets. Our own roof was
largely cleared to provide a helicopter landing, and to act as a rainwater
catchment. As we gradually developed a technique for living there we decided it
was pretty secure.
Even so, my recollection is that
nearly all spare time in the first few days was spent by everyone in
transferring the contents of the provision department to our own quarters
before it should disappear elsewhere.
There seems to have been a basic
misconception of the role we should play. As I understood it, the idea was that
we were to preserve, as far as possible, the impression of business as usual,
and then, as things grew more difficult, the center of E.B.C. would follow the administration
by gradual stages to
* * * *
I don't propose to deal in detail
with the year that followed. It was a drawn out story of decay. A long, cold winter during which the water lapped into the streets
faster than we had expected. A time when armed bands roved the streets
in search of untouched foodstores, when, at any hour of the day or night, one
was apt to hear a rattle of shots as two gangs met. We ourselves had little
trouble; it was as if, after a few attempts to raid us, word had gone round
that we were ready to defend, and with so many other stores raidable at little
or no risk we might as well be left until later.
When the warmer weather came there
were noticeably fewer people to be seen. Most of them,
rather than face another winter in a city by now largely plundered of food and
beginning to suffer epidemics from lack of fresh water and drainage, were
filtering out into the country, and the shooting that we heard was usually
distant.
Our own numbers had been depleted,
too. Out of the original sixty-five we were now reduced to twenty-five, the rest
having gone off in parties by helicopter as the national focus became more
settled in
Phyllis and I discussed whether we
would apply to go, too, but from the description of conditions that we prized
out of the helicopter pilot and his crew the E.B.C. headquarters sounded
congested and unattractive, so we decided to stay for a while longer, at any
rate. We were by no means uncomfortable where we were, and the fewer of us that
were left in our
In late spring we learned that a
decree had merged us with the archrival, putting all radio communication under
direct Government control. It was the Broadcasting House lot that were moved
out by a swift airlift since their premises were vulnerable while ours were already
in a prepared state, and the one or two B.B.C. men who stayed came over to join
us.
News reached us mainly by two
channels: the private link with E.B.C., which was usually moderately honest,
though discreet; and broadcasts which, no matter where they came from, were
puffed with patently dishonest optimism. We became very tired and cynical about
them, as, I imagine, did everyone else, but they still kept on. Every country,
it seemed, was meeting and rising above the disaster with a resolution which
did honor to the traditions of its people.
By midsummer, and a cold midsummer
it was, the town had become very quiet. The gangs had gone; only the obstinate
individuals remained. They were, without doubt, quite numerous, but in
twenty-thousand streets they seemed sparse, and they were not yet desperate. It
was possible to go about in relative safety again, though wise to carry a gun.
The water had risen further in the
time than any of the estimates had supposed. The highest tides now reached the
fifty-foot level. The floodline was north of Hammersmith and included most of
Kensington. It lay along the south side of Hyde Park, then to the south of Piccadilly,
across Trafalgar Square, along the Strand and Fleet Street, and then ran northeast
up the west side of the Lea Valley; of the city, only the high ground about St.
Paul's was still untouched. In the south it had pushed across Barnes,
Batter-sea, Southwark, most of Deptford, and the lower part of
One day we walked down to
Close to our feet, the edge of the
flood was fringed with scum and a fascinatingly varied collection of flotsam.
Further away, fountains, lampposts, traffic lights and statues thrust up here
and there. On the far side, and down as much as we could see of
Then I asked:
"Didn't somebody or other once
say: 'This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper?' "
Phyllis looked shocked. " 'Somebody or other!' " she exclaimed. "That was Mr.
Eliot!"
"Well, it certainty looks as if
he had the idea that time," I said.
Presently Phyllis remarked: "I
thought I was through a phase now, Mike. For such a long time it kept on seeming that something could be done to save the
world we're used to—if we could only find out what. But soon I think I'll be
able to feel; 'Well, that's gone. How can we make the best of what's left?'—All
the same, I wouldn't say that coming to places like this does me any
good."
"There aren't places like this.
This is—was—one of the uniques. That's the trouble. And it's a bit more than
dead, but not yet ready for a museum. Soon, perhaps, we may be able to feel,
'Lo! All our pomp of yesterday is one with
There was a pause. It lengthened.
"Mike," she said,
suddenly. "Let's go away from here —now."
I nodded. "It might be better.
We'll have to get a little tougher yet, darling, I'm afraid."
She took my arm, and we started to
walk westward. Halfwav to the corner of the square we paused at the sound of a
motor. It seemed, improbably, to come from the south side. We waited while it
drew closer. Presently, out from the Admiralty Arch swept a speedboat. It
turned in a sharp arc and sped away down
"Verv pretty," I said.
"There can't be many of us who have accomplished that in one of our waking
moments."
Phyllis gazed along the widening
ripples, and abruptly became practical again.
"I think we'd better see if we
can't find one of those," she said. "It might come in useful later
on."
* * * *
The rate of rise continued to
increase. By the end of the summer the level was up another eight or nine feet.
The weather was vile and even colder than it had been at the same time the
previous year. More of us had applied for transfer, and by mid-September we
were down to sixteen.
Even Freddy Whittier had announced
that he was sick and tired of wasting his time like a shipwrecked sailor, and
was going to see whether he could not find some useful work to do. When the
helicopter whisked him and his wife away, they left us reconsidering our own
position once more.
Our task of composing never-say-die
material on the theme that we spoke from, and for the heart of an empire bloody
but still unbowed was supposed, we knew, to have a stabilizing value even now,
but we doubted it. Too many people were whistling the same tune in the same
dark. A night or two before the
We had still, however, not reached
the point of making definite application when he called us up on the link a
couple of weeks later. After the greetings he said:
"This isn't purely social,
Mike. It is disinterested advice to those contemplating a leap from the frying
pan—don't!"
"Oh," I said, "what's
the trouble?"
"I'll tell you this. I'd have
an application in for getting back to you right now—if only I had not made my
reasons for getting out so damned convincing. I mean that. Hang on there, both
of you."
"But—" I began.
"Wait a minute," he told
me.
Presently his voice came again.
"Okay. No monitor on this, I
think. Listen, Mike, we're overcrowded, underfed, and in one hell of a mess.
Supplies of all kinds are way down, so's morale. The atmosphere's like a lot of
piano strings. We're living virtually in a state of siege here, and if it
doesn't turn into active civil war in a few weeks it'll be a miracle. The
people outside are worse off than we
are, but seemingly nothing will convince them that we aren't living on the fat
of the land. For God's sake keep this under your hat, but stay where you are,
for Phyl's sake if not for your own."
I thought quickly.
"If it's as bad as that,
Freddy, and you're doing no good, why not get back here on the next helicopter.
Either smuggle aboard—or maybe we could offer the
pilot a few things he'd like?"
"All right. There certainly isn't any use for
us here. I don't know why they let us come along. I'll work on that. Look for
us next flight. Meanwhile good luck to you both."
"Good luck to you, Freddy, and
our love to
"Oh, Bocker's here. He's now
got a theory that it won't go much over a hundred and twenty-five feet, and
seems to think that's good news."
"Well, considering he's Bocker,
it might be a lot worse. 'Bye. We'll be looking
forward to seeing you."
We were discreet. We said no more
than that we had heard the
There never was any news of that
helicopter. They said they hadn't another that they could send.
The cold summer drew into a colder
autumn. A rumor reached us that the sea-tanks were appearing again for the
first time since the waters had begun to rise. As the only people present who had had personal contact with them we assumed the status
of experts—though almost the only advice we could give was always to wear a
sharp knife, and in such a position that it could be reached for a quick slash
by either hand. But the sea-tanks must have found the hunting poor in the
almost deserted streets of
Meanwhile, there was worse trouble.
Overnight the combined E.B.C. and B.B.C. transmitters abandoned all pretense of
calm confidence. When we looked at the message transmitted to us for radiation
simultaneously with all other stations we knew that Freddy had been right. It
was a call to all loyal citizens to support their legally elected Government against
any attempts that might be made to overthrow it by force, and the way in which
it was put left no doubt that such an attempt was already being made. The thing
was a sorry mixture of exhortation, threats, and pleas, which wound up with
just the wrong note of confidence— the note that had sounded in
The link could not, or would not,
clarify the situation for us. Firing was going on, they said. Some armed bands
were attempting to break into the Administration Area. The military had the
situation in hand, and would clear up the trouble shortly. The broadcast was
simply to discourage exaggerated rumors and restore confidence in the
government. We said that neither what they were telling us,
nor the message itself inspired us personally with any confidence whatever, and
we should like to know what was really going on. They went all official, curt
and cold.
Twenty-four hours later, in the
middle of dictating for our radiation another expression of confidence, the
link broke off, abruptly. It never worked again.
* *
* *
Until one gets used to it, the
situation of being able to hear voices from all over the world, but none which
tells what is happening in one's own country, is odd. We picked up inquiries
about our silence from
The winter closed in. One noticed
how few people there were to be seen in the streets now, compared with a year
ago. Often it was possible to walk a mile without seeing anyone at all. How
those who did remain were living we could not say. Presumably they all had
caches of looted stores that supported them and their families; and obviously
it was no matter for close inquiry. One noticed also how many of those one did
see had taken to carrying weapons as a matter of course. We ourselves adopted the
habit of carrying them—guns, not rifles—slung over our
shoulders, though less with any expectation of needing them than to discourage
the occasion for their need from arising. There was a kind of wary preparedness
which was still some distance from instinctive hostility. Chance-met men still
passed on gossip and rumors, and sometimes hard news of a local kind. It was by
such means that we learned of a quite definitely hostile ring now in existence
around London; how the surrounding district had somehow formed themselves into
miniature independent states and forbidden entry after driving out many who had
come there as refugees; how those who did try to cross the border into one of
these communities were fired upon without question.
In the new year
the sense of things pressing in upon us grew stronger. The high-tide mark was
now close to the seventy-five foot level. The weather was abominable,
and icy cold. There seemed to be scarcely a night when there was not a gale
blowing from the southwest. It became rarer than ever to see anyone in the
streets, though when the wind did drop for a time the view from the roof showed
a surprising number of chimneys smoking. Mostly it was wood smoke, furniture
and fitments burning, one supposed; for the coal stores in power stations and
railway yards had all disappeared the previous winter.
From a purely practical point of
view I doubt whether anyone in the country was more favored
or as secure as our group. The food originally supplied, together with
that acquired later, made a store which should last sixteen people for some
years. There was an immense reserve of diesel oil, and petrol, too. Materially
we were better off than we had been a year ago when there were more of us. But we
had learned, as had many before us, about the bread-alone factor, one needed
more than adequate food. The sense of desolation began to weigh more heavily
still when, at the end of February, the water lapped over our doorsteps for the
first time, and the building was filled with the sound of it cascading into the
basements.
Some of the party grew more worried.
"It can't come very much higher, surely. A hundred feet is the limit, isn't
it?" they were saying.
It wasn't much good being falsely
reassuring. We could do little more than to repeat what Bocker had said; that
it was a guess. No one had known, within a wide limit, how much ice there was
in the Antarctic. No one was quite sure how much of the northern areas that
appeared to be solid land, tundra, was in fact simply a deposit on a foundation
of ancient ice; we just had not known enough about it. The only consolation was
that Bocker now seemed to think for some reason that it would not rise above
one hundred and twenty-five feet—which should leave our aerie still intact.
Nevertheless, it required fortitude to find reassurance in that thought as one
lay in bed at night, listening to the echoing splash of the wavelets that the
wind was driving along
One bright morning in May, a sunny,
though not a warm morning, I missed Phyllis. Inquiries eventually led me on to
the roof in search of her. I found her in the southwest corner gazing towards
the trees that dotted the lake which had been
"I haven't been able to get
tough, after all. I don't think I can stand this much longer, Mike. Take me
away, please."
"Where is there to go?—if we
could go," I said.
"The cottage,
Mike. It
wouldn't be so bad there, in the country. There'd be things growing—not
everywhere dying, like this. There isn't any hope here—we might as well jump
over the wall here if there is to be no hope at all."
I thought about it for some moments.
"But even if we could get
there, we'd have to live," I pointed out, "we'd need food and fuel
and things."
"There's—" she began, and
then hesitated and changed her mind. "We could find enough to keep us
going for a time until we could grow things. And there'd be fish, and plenty of
wreckage for fuel. We could make out somehow. It'd be hard—but, Mike, I can't stay
in this cemetery any longer—I can't.
"Look at it, Mike! Look at it!
We never did anything to deserve all this. Most of us weren't very good, but we
weren't bad enough for this, surely. And not to have a chance! If it had only
been something we could fight—But just to be drowned and starved and forced
into destroying one another to live—and by things nobody has ever seen, living
in the one place we can't get at them!
"Some of us are going to get
through this stage, of course—the tough ones. But what are the things down there
going to do then? Sometimes I dream of them lying down in those deep dark
valleys, and sometimes they look like monstrous squids or huge slugs, other
times as if they were great clouds of luminous cells hanging there in rocky
chasms. I don't suppose that we'll ever know what they really look like, but
whatever it is, there they are all the time, thinking and plotting what they
can do to finish us right off so that everything will be theirs.
"Sometimes, in spite of Bocker,
I think perhaps it is the things themselves that are inside the sea-tanks, and if
only we could capture one and examine it we should know how to fight them, at
last. Several times I have dreamed that we have found one and managed to
discover what makes it work, and nobody's believed us but Bocker, but what we
have told him has given him an idea for a wonderful new weapon which has
finished them all off.
"I know it all sounds very
silly, but it's wonderful in the dream, and I wake up feeling as if we had
saved the whole world from a nightmare—and then I hear the sound of the water
slopping against the walls in the street, and I know it isn't finished; it's
just going on and on and on.
"I can't stand it here any
more, Mike. I shall go mad if I have to sit here doing nothing any longer while
a great city dies by inches all round me. It'd be
different in
I had not realized it was as bad as
that. It wasn't a thing to be argued about.
"All right, darling," I
said. "We'll go."
Everything we could hear warned us
against attempting to get away by normal means. We were told of belts where
everything had been razed to give clear fields of fire, and there were booby
traps and alarms, as well as guards. Everything beyond those belts was said to
be based upon a cold calculation of the number each autonomous district could
support. The natives of the districts had banded together and turned out the refugees
and the useless on to lower ground where they had to shift for themselves. In
each of the areas there was acute awareness that another mouth to feed would
increase the shortage for all. Any stranger who did manage to sneak in could
not hope to remain unnoticed for long, and his treatment was ruthless when he
was discovered—survival demanded it. So it looked as though our own survival
demanded that we should try some other way.
The chance by water, along inlets
that must be constantly widening andreaching further, looked better, and but
for the luck of our finding that sturdy little motorboat, the Midge, I don't know what would have happened
to us. It came to us through the rather ghastly accident of the owner's being shot trying to escape from
An uneasy feeling
that some of the others might wish to get away, too, and press to come with us
turned out to be baseless. Without exception they considered us crazy. Most of them contrived to
take one of us aside at some time or another to point out the willful
improvidence of giving up warm, comfortable quarters to make a certainly cold
and probably dangerous journey to certainly worse and probably intolerable conditions.
They helped to fuel and store the Midge
until she was inches lower in the water, but not one of them could have been
bribed to set out with us.
Our progress down the river was
cautious and slow, for we had no intention of letting the journey be more
dangerous than was necessary. Our main recurrent problem was where to lay up for the night. We were sharply conscious of our
probable fate as trespassers, and also of the fact that the Midge with her contents was tempting
booty. Our usual anchorages were in the sheltered streets of some flooded town.
Several times when it was blowing hard we lay up in such places for several days.
Fresh water, which we had expected to be the main problem turned out not to be
difficult; one could almost always find some still in the tanks in the roof
spaces of a partly submerged house. Overall, the trip which used to clock at
268.8 (or .9) by road took us slightly over a month to make.
Round the corner and into the
channel the white cliffs looked so normal from the water that the flooding was
hard to believe—until we looked more closely at the gaps were the towns should
have been. A little later, we were right out of the normal, for we began to see
our first icebergs.
We approached the end of the journey
with caution. From what we had been able to observe of the coast as we came
along there were often encampments of shacks on the higher ground. Where the
land rose steeply there were often towns and villages where the higher houses
were still occupied though the lower were submerged. What kind of conditions we
might find at Penllyn in general and Rose Cottage in particular we had no idea.
I took the Midge carefully into the
We turned north from the main river.
With the water now close on the hundred-foot level the multiplication of
waterways was confusing. We lost our way half a dozen times before we rounded a
corner on an entirely new inlet and found ourselves looking up a familiar steep
hillside at the cottage above us.
People had been there, several lots
of them, I should think, but though the disorder was considerable the damage
was not great. It was evidently the consumables they had been after chiefly.
The stand-bys had vanished from the larder to the last bottle of sauce and
packet of pepper. The drum of oil, the candles, and the small store of coal
were gone, too.
Phyllis gave a quick look over the
debris, and disappeared down the cellar steps. She re-emerged in a moment and
ran out to the arbor she had built in the garden. Through the window I saw her
examining the floor of it carefully. Presently she came back.
"That's all right, thank
goodness," she said.
It did not seem a moment for great
concern about arbors.
"What's all right?" I
inquired.
"The food," she said.
"I didn't want to tell you about it until I knew. It would have been too
bitterly disappointing if it had gone."
"What food?" I asked,
bewilderedly.
"You've not much intuition,
have you, Mike? Did you really think that someone like me would be doing all
that bricklaying just for fun? I walled-off half the cellar full of stuff, and
there's a lot under the arbor, too."
I stared at her. "Do you mean
to say—? But that was ages ago! Before the flooding even began."
"But not before they began
sinking ships so fast. It seemed to me it would be a good thing to lay in stores before things got difficult, because it quite
obviously was going to get difficult later. I thought it would be sensible to
have a reserve here, just in case. Only it was no good telling you, because I
knew you'd just get stuffy about it."
I sat down, and regarded her.
"Stuffy?" I inquired.
"Well, there are some people
who seem to think it is more ethical to pay black-market prices than to take
sensible precautions."
"Oh," I said. "So you
bricked it in yourself?"
"Well, I didn't want anybody
local to know, so the only way was to do it myself. As it happened, the food
airlift was much better organized than one could have expected, so we didn't
need it, but it will come in useful now."
"How
much?" I
asked.
She considered. "I'm not quite
sure, but there is a whole big truckload here, and then there's all the stuff
we've got in the Midge, too."
I could see, and do see, several
angles to the thing, but it would have been churlishly ungrateful to mention
them just then, so I let it rest, and we busied ourselves with tidying up and
moving in.
It did not take us long to
understand why the cottage had been abandoned. One had only to climb to its
crest to see that our hill was destined to become an island, and within a few
weeks two crawling inlets joined together behind us, and made it one.
The pattern of events, we found, had
been much the same here as in other parts—except that there had been no influx:
the movement had been away. First there was the cautious retreat as the water
began to rise, later the panicky rush to stake a claim
on the higher ground while there was still the chance. Those
who remain, and still remain, are a mixture of the obstinate, the tardy, and
the ever-hopeful who have been saying since the beginning that tomorrow, or,
maybe, the next day the water will cease to rise.
A state of feud between those who
stayed and those who shifted is well established. The uplanders will allow no
newcomers into their strictly-rationed territory: the lowlanders carry guns and
set traps to discourage raids on their fields. It is said, though I do not know
with how much truth, that conditions here are good compared with Devon and places
further east, for, once the inhabitants of the lower ground had been driven out
of their homes and set on the move, very many of them decided to keep on going
until they should reach the lush country beyond the moors. There are fearsome
tales about the defensive warfare against starving gangs that goes on in Devon,
Somerset, and Dorset, but here one hears shooting only occasionally, and then
on a small scale.
The completeness of our isolation
has been one of the difficult things to bear. The radio set, which might have
told us something of how the rest of the world, if not our own country, was
faring, failed a few days after we arrived, and we have neither the means of
testing it, nor of replacing parts.
Our island offers little temptation,
so we have not been molested. The people about here grew enough food last summer
to keep themselves going, with the help of fish, which are plentiful. Our
status is not entirely that of strangers, and we have been careful to make no
demands or requests. I imagine we are thought to be existing
on fish and what stores we had aboard the Midge—and
that what can be left of it now is not worth the trouble of a raid on us. It might
have been different had the crops been poorer last summer.
* * * *
I started this account at the
beginning of November. It is now the end of January. The water continued to
rise slightly, but since about Christmas there seems to have been no increase
that we can measure. We are hoping that it has reached its limit. There are
still icebergs out in the channel, but they are fewer now.
There are still not infrequent raids
by sea-tanks, sometimes single, but more usually in fours or fives, but as a
rule they are more of a nuisance than a danger. The people living close to the
sea keep a rota of watchers who give the alarm. The sea-tanks apparently don't
like climbing, they seldom venture more than a quarter of a mile from the water's
edge, and when they find no victims they soon go away again.
By far the worst thing to face has
been the cold of the winter. Even making allowance for the difference in our
circumstances it has seemed a great deal colder than the last. The inlet below
us has been frozen over for many weeks, and in calm weather the sea itself is
frozen well out from the shore. But mostly it has not been calm weather; for
days on end there have been gales when everything is covered with ice from the
spray carried inland. We are lucky in being sheltered from the full force of the
southwest, but it is bad enough. Heaven knows what life must be like in the
encampments up on the moors when these blizzards blow.
We have decided that when the summer
comes we shall try to get away. We shall aim south, in search of somewhere
warmer. We could probably last out here another winter, but it would leave us
less provisioned and less fit to face the journey that we shall have to make sometime.
It is possible, we think, that in what is left of Plymouth or Devonport we may
still be able to find some fuel for the engine, but, in any case, we shall rig
a mast, and if we are warned-off, or if there is
no fuel to be found, then we shall try
to make it under sail.
Where to? We don't know yet. Somewhere warmer. Perhaps we shall find only bullets where
we try to land, but even that will be better than slow starvation in bitter
cold.
And Phyllis agrees. "We'll be
taking 'a long shot, Watson; a very long shot!'" she says. "But,
after all, what is the good of having been given so much luck if you don't go
on using it?"
4th May.
We shall not be going south.
This ms. will not be left here in a tin box on the chance of someone finding it
some day. It will go with us. And here is why:
Two days ago we sighted the first
aircraft that we have seen since we came here—or for some time before that. A helicopter that came trundling along the coast, and then turned inland
to pass along our own inlet.
We were down by the water, working
to get the Midge ready for her trip.
There was a distant buzzing, then this craft came
bumbling along right towards us. We looked up at it, shading our eyes. It was
against the sun, but I could make out the R.A.F. circle on its side, and I thought
I could see someone waving from the cabin. I waved my hand. Phyllis waved her
paintbrush.
We watched it plough along to our
left, and then turn north. It disappeared behind our hill. We looked at one another
as the sound of the engine dwindled. We did not speak. I don't know how it took
Phyllis, but it made me feel a bit queer. I had never
thought to find myself in a situation where
the throb of an airplane engine would be a kind of nostalgic music in my ears.
Then I realized that the sound was
not getting any further away. The craft reappeared, round the other side of the
hill. Apparently it had been giving our island a looking over. We watched it
steady up and then begin to lower towards the curve of the hill that sheltered
us. I dropped my screw driver, and Phyllis her paintbrush, and we started to run
up the hill towards it.
It came down lower, but obviously it
was not going to take the risk of landing among the stones and the heather.
While it hung there, a door in the side opened. A bundle dropped out, and
bounced on the heather, then came a rope ladder,
unrolling as it fell. A figure began to climb down the ladder, negotiating it
carefully. The helicopter was drifting slowly across the top of the hill, and
presently the man dangling on the ladder was hidden from our sight as we panted
upwards. We were still some little way from the top when the machine rose and
sheered off over our heads, with the ladder being pulled up by someone inside.
We kept on struggling up the slope.
Presently we reached a point from which we were able to see a darkly clad
figure sitting in the heather apparently exploring itself for breakages.
"It's—" Phyllis began.
"It is! It's Bocker!" she cried, and sped
recklessly over the rough ground.
By the time I got there she was on
her knees beside him, with both her arms twined round his neck, and crying
hard. He was patting her shoulder avuncularly. He held out his other hand to me
as I came up. I took it in both of mine, and felt not far from weeping, myself.
He was Bocker, all right, and looking scarcely changed from the last time I had
seen him.
There didn't seem to be much to say
for the moment except: "Are you all right? Have you hurt yourself?"
"Only a bit
shaken up. Nothing broken. But there seems to be more skill in it than
I'd thought," he said.
Phyllis raised her head to tell him:
"You never ought to have tried
it, A.B.! You might have killed yourself." Then put it back, and went on
crying comfortably.
Bocker looked at the tousle of hair
on his shoulder for some thoughtful seconds, and then up at me, inquiringly.
I shook my head.
"Others have had to face a lot
worse—but it has been lonely; and very depressing," I told him.
He nodded, and patted Phyllis's
shoulder again. Presently she began to get more control of herself. Bocker
waited a little longer, then he remarked: "If you, sir, would care to
remove your wife just for a moment, I'd like to find out if I am still able to
stand."
He could. "Nothing but a bump
and a bruise or two," he announced.
"A lot luckier than you
deserve," Phyllis told him severely. "It was a perfectly ridiculous
thing to do at your age, A.B."
"Just what I was thinking when
I was about halfway down," he agreed.
Phyllis's lips were still trembling as
she looked at him.
"Oh, A.B.," she said.
"It's wonderful to see you again. I still can't believe it."
He put one arm round her shoulders,
and linked his other into mine.
"I'm hungry," he
announced, practically. "Somewhere round here there's a parcel of food
that we dropped."
We went down to the cottage, Phyllis
chattering like mad all the way except for the pauses in which she stopped to
look at Bocker and convince herself that he was really there. When we arrived,
she disappeared into the kitchen. Bocker sat down, cautiously.
"There should be drinks now—but
they were finished some time ago," I told him sadly.
He pulled out a large flask. He
regarded a severe dent in it for a moment.
"Hm," he said. "Well,
let's hope it's more comfortable going up than coming down." He poured
whisky into three glasses, and summoned Phyllis.
"Here's to recovery," he
said. We drank.
"And now," I said, "since nothing in our experience has been more unlikely than
you descending from the skies on a trapeze, we'd like an explanation."
"That wasn't in the plan,"
he admitted. "When I found out from the
"Oh," I said, rather
flatly. Phyllis just stared at him.
"It's all very well your
looking like that, but I'd have been with you before this if you'd stayed where
you were. Why didn't you?"
"It got us down, A.B. We
thought you'd died when the
Phyllis got up and started to lay
the table.
"I don't think you would just
have quietly stayed there waiting for an inevitable end, either, A.B.,"
she said.
Bocker shook his head.
"'Oh ye of
little faith!'
This isn't Noah's world, you know. The twentieth century isn't a thing to be
pushed over quite as easily as all that. The patient is still in a grave condition,
he's been very, very sick indeed, and he has lost a tragic lot of blood—but
he's going to recover. Oh, yes, he's going to recover all right, you'll
see."
I looked out of the window at the
water spread over former fields, at the new arms of the sea running back into
the land, at the houses that had been homes, and now were washed through by
every tide.
"How?" I asked.
"It isn't going to be easy, but
it's going to be done. We lost a great deal of our best land, but the water
hasn't risen any more in the last six months, and we reckon that we ought to be
able to grow more than enough to feed five million people, once we get
organized."
"Five
million?" I
repeated.
"That's the rough estimate of
the present population— not much more than a guess really, of course."
"But it was something like
forty-six millions!" I exclaimed.
That was a side that Phylils and I
had avoided talking about, or thinking about more than we could help. In our
more depressed moments I had had, I fancy, a vague idea that in the course of
time there would be a few survivors living in barbarism, but I had never
considered it in figures.
"How did it happen? We knew
there was fighting, of course, but this—!"
"Some were killed in the
fighting, and of course there were places where a lot were cut off and drowned,
but that doesn't really account for more than a small percentage. No, it has
been pneumonia mostly that has done the damage. Undernourishment
and exposure through three bitter winters; with every dose of flu, every cold,
leading to pneumonia. No medical services, no drugs, no communications;
nothing to be done about it." He shrugged.
"But, A.B.," Phyllis
reminded him, "we just drank to 'Recovery.' Recovery?—With
nine out of ten gone?"
He looked steadily at her, and
nodded.
"Certainly," he said, with
confidence. "Five million can still be a nation. Why, damn it, there were
no more of us than that in the time of the first
"Job?" said Phyllis,
blankly.
"Yes, and it won't be putting
across soaps and cheeses this time, it'll be selling morale. So the sooner you
both start to brush up your own morale, the better."
"Just wait a minute. I can see
this is going to need some explanation," said Phyllis.
She fetched the meal, and we drew
our chairs up to the table.
"All right, A.B.," she
said. "I know you never allow mere eating to interfere with talking. Let's
have it."
"Very well," said Bocker.
"Now, imagine a country which is nothing but small groups and independent
communities scattered all over the place. All communications gone, nearly all
of them barricaded off for defense, scarcely anyone with any idea of what may
be going on even a mile or two outside his area. Well now, what have you got to
do to get a condition like that into working order again? First, I think,
you've got to find a way into these tight, isolated pockets so that you can
break them up. To do that you have first to establish some
kind of central authority, and then to let the people know that there is a central authority—and give them
confidence in it. You want to start parties and groups who will be the
local representatives of the central authority. And how do you reach them? Why,
you just start talking to them and telling them—by radio.
"You find a factory, and start
it working on turning out small radio receivers and batteries that you can drop
from the air. When you can, you begin to follow that up with
receiver-transmitter sets to give you two-way communication with the larger
groups first, and then the smaller ones. You break down the isolation, and the
sense of it.
One group begins to hear what other
groups are doing. Self-confidence begins to revive. There's a feeling of a hand
at the helm again to give them hope. They begin to feel there's something to
work for. Then one lot begins to
co-operate with, and trade with, the lot next door. And then you have started
something indeed. It's a job our ancestors had to do with generations of men on
horseback—by radio we ought to be able to make a thundering good start on it in
a couple of years. But there will have to be staff—there'll have to be people
who know how to put across what might be put across. So, what do you say?"
Phyllis went on staring at her plate
for some moments, then she looked, shiny-eyed, at Bocker, and put her hand on
his.
"A.B.," she said shakily,
"have you ever thought that you were nearly dead, and then had a sudden
shot of Adrenalin?" She leaned across the corner of the table, and kissed
him on the cheek.
"Adrenalin," I said,
"doesn't take me quite the same way, but I support Phyllis. I very
heartily subscribe."
"It makes me feel more drunk than alcohol ever did," said Phyllis.
"Fine," said Bocker. "Then
you'd better get busy with the packing up. We'll send a bigger helicopter to
take you and your baggage off in three days' time. And don't leave any food
behind; it's going to be a long time yet before we can afford to waste any of
that."
He went on explaining and giving
instructions, but I doubt whether either of us heard much of them. Then,
somehow, he was telling us how he and a few others had escaped after the attack
on
"I don't think I've ever been
called an unbridled optimist—"
"I shouldn't think so,"
agreed Phyllis.
"So," Bocker went on,
"I am hoping it will carry some weight when I say that to me the outlook
is distinctly hopeful. There have been plenty of disappointments, of course,
and there may be more, but it does look as if, for the present at any rate, we
have got hold of something which is too much for our xenobathetic
friends."
"What, without these cautious
qualifications, would it be?" I asked.
"Ultrasonics," he
proclaimed.
I stared at him. "But they've tried ultrasonics, half a dozen times at
least. I can distinctly remember—"
"Mike, darling, just shut up;
there's a love," said my devoted wife. "She turned to Bocker. "How have they done, A.B.?" she asked him.
"Well, it's well enough known
that certain ultrasonic waves in water will kill fish and other creatures, so
there were a lot of people who said all along that it would very likely be the
right answer to the Bathies—but obviously not with the wave-initiator working
on the surface, at a range of five miles or so. The problem was to get the ultrasonic
emitter down there, close enough for it to do damage. You couldn't just let it
down, because its cable would be electrified or cut—and, judging by precedent,
that would happen long before it got anywhere like deep enough to be useful.
"But now the Japs seem to have
found the answer. A very ingenious people, the Japs; and, in
their more sociable moments, a credit to science. So far, we have only
had a general description by radio of their device, but it seems to be a type of
self-propelled sphere which cruises slowly along, emitting ultrasonic waves of
great intensity. But the really clever thing about it is this: it not only
produces lethal waves, but it makes use of them itself, on the principle of an
echo sounder, and steers by them. That is to say, you can fix it to sheer off
from any obstacle when it receives an echo from it at a given distance.
"You see the idea? Set a flock
of these things for a clearance of, say, two hundred feet, and start 'em going
at the end of a narrow Deep. Then they'll cruise along, keeping two hundred feet
from the bottom, two hundred feet from the sides of the Deep,
two hundred feet from any obstructions, two hundred feet clear of one another,
and turning out a lethal ultrasonic wave as they go. That's just the simple
principle of the things—the Japs' real triumph has been out only in being able
to build them, but to have built them tough enough to stand the pressure."
"None of it sounds in the least
simple to me," Phyllis told him. "The important point is, the things really do work?"
"Well, the Japs claim they do,
and there'd not be much object in lying about it. They say they've cleared a
couple of small Deeps already. Large masses of organic jelly came up, but
they've not been able to make much of that because the pressure change had
broken it up and it decomposed quickly in sunlight, but afterwards they tested
with cables right down to the bottom, and nothing happened. They're working on
other small Deeps now until they've got enough gear to tackle bigger ones. They've
flown plans of the things over to the States, and the Americans—who've not been
hit nearly as badly as we have in this small island—are going to put them into
production, so that's a testimonial.
"It's bound to take some time
before they can get busy on a really large scale. However, that isn't our
affair for the moment—we haven't any important Deeps near us, and, anyway, it
is going to be some time before we can produce anything more than immediate
necessities. We were very badly overcrowded on this island, and we've paid for
it heavily. We shall have to take steps to see that that doesn't happen
again."
Phyllis frowned.
"A.B.," she said.
"I've had to tell you before about your habit of going just one step
further than people are willing to follow you," she told him, severely.
Bocker grinned.
"Perhaps it's lucky this one is
not going to come up in my time," he admitted.
The three of us sat in Phyllis's
arbor, looking out at the view that had changed so greatly in so short a time.
For a while, none of us spoke. I stole a sidelong glance at Phyllis; she was
looking as though she had just had a beauty treatment.
"I'm coming to life again,
Mike," she said. "There's something to live for."
I felt like that, too, but as I
looked out over the blue sea still set with a few glistening bergs, I added: "All
the same, it isn't going to be any picnic. There's this ghastly climate; and
when I think of the winters . . !"
"Oh," A.B. said,
"research is being done on that now, and the reports indicate that the
water will warm up gradually. As a matter of fact," he said, chuckling,
"now the ice has gone we may have an even better climate than before, in
three or four years' time."
We went on sitting there, and
finally Phyllis spoke again.
"I was just thinking—Nothing is really new, is it. Once upon a time there was a
great plain, covered with forests and full of wild animals. I expect some of
our ancestors used to live there, and hunt there, and make love there. Then,
one day, the water came up and drowned it all—and there was the
"I think we have been here
before. And we got through that time."
We were silent for a while. Then
Bocker looked at his watch, and said:
"That machine will be coming
back soon. I'd better make ready for my death-defying act."
"I wish you wouldn't,
A.B.," Phyllis told him. "Can't you just let them take a message, and
stay here with us until the big helicopter comes?"
He shook his head. "Can't spare
the time, I'm really playing truant as it is—only I thought I'd like to be the
one to give you two the news.
Don't you worry, my dear. The old man's not too doddery to climb a rope ladder
yet."
He was as good as his word. When the
machine descended over the crest of the hill, he caught the trailing ladder
adroitly, clung to it a moment, and then began to climb. Presently arms reached
down to help him aboard. He turned in the doorway to wave to us. The machine
speeded up, and started to climb. Quite soon it was only a speck that vanished
in the distance.
About
JOHN WYNDHAM
When we wrote the author, an
Englishman living in
"As near as I can recollect,
the earliest decisive influence must have been H. G. Wells' two stories, 'The
War of the Worlds' and 'The Time Machine.' I'm sure they had a great deal to do
with the fathering of John Wyndham. They were written long before anyone had
thought of the term 'science fiction,' and I still regard them as the best
examples of the balance it is desirable to keep between science and fiction.
"Then somewhere about 1930
there was a curious vogue for ballasting ships with surplus American magazines
and it brought a science-fiction magazine to my attention for the first time. I
decided to try a story of this kind as a change from my usual preoccupation
with detectives and ghosts, which had so far rewarded me with nothing but
rejection slips. This was accepted. The embryo Mr. Wyndham acclaimed the false
dawn with a glad cry and sat down to write ten more which were refused in
orderly rotation."
This he found puzzling (as well as
depressing) because he knew, even if the editor did not, that they were getting
better. However, it happened before long that a new man took the editorial
chair. Taking the cunning precaution of retitling his stories and retyping the
first page, just in case the editorial office should happen to have kept a
record, he started sending them all in again at judicious intervals. This time,
all save one were accepted, and the first links in a chain of circumstance
were forged.
But then, just as the chain was
really coming along nicely came the trouble with
Hitler. The expectation of bombs, and, later, their reality, made concentration
on fiction difficult, so the incipient Mr. Wyndham sold himself to one of the
innumerable Civil Service departments. This lasted three years, and then he
found himself in the Army (Royal Signals).
He left the Army with the firm
decision to try fresh fields, but little by little found himself edging toward
science fiction again. However, when he came to look at the American magazines
of science fiction after the interlude, he found that something had been
happening to them while he was away.
"The galloping space-opera was
still there in some of them, of course, but the stories in the leading
magazines were more intelligent and better written; the form had been
developing, and still is. But gradually I became aware that while the standard
continued to improve, another quality was creeping in—the suggestion of a cult.
" 'Hang it,' I said to myself, 'I believe
there are plenty of people in the world who like imaginative projections
honestly carried out, but get bored to death by scientific exhibitionism. So
let us be more implicit and less explicit, let us consider the things that
might happen, not to the inhabitants of Uranus, but to us, our friends, the
things we know—rather a big might,
perhaps—but let us assume, at least, that our reader is seeking entertainment
rather than cramming for an exam in physics.' "
So saying, he broke a bottle over
his bows, named himself John Wyndham, and started in.
And then he wrote his first novel, The Day of the Triffids, which appeared
in 1951, and about which a great many critics on both sides of the Atlantic
found a great deal to say. Here the New
York Herald Tribune said, "One of the most intelligent and readable of
all the current crop of science-fiction novels," and the Library Journal called it "the most
terrifying as well as the best-written science-fiction novel of the year, or
for several years," and The New York
Times said, "It has a devastating reality." Over there they said,
"Has all the qualities of a vividly realized nightmare" (
His second novel, Out of the Deeps, has all the terrifying
reality of his first, and does even more to further his cause of bringing the science-fiction
novel to maturity in terms of stimulating ideas and sheer good writing.
[Scan notes: I
couldn’t make out one word in the text, an adjective, and substituted it with
‘???’. If someone has the book, look it up, please. AsmManiac.]