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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42901 ***
+
+                    Creatures of the Abyss
+
+                      By Murray Leinster
+
+    [Transcriber Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
+    that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+    A BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOK
+    published by
+    THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING CORPORATION
+
+    COPYRIGHT © 1961, BY MURRAY LEINSTER
+
+    _Published by arrangement with
+    the author_
+
+    BERKLEY EDITION, AUGUST, 1961
+
+    _BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by
+    Berkley Publishing Corporation
+    101 Fifth Avenue, New York 3, N. Y._
+
+    Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+_One_
+
+
+The moment arrived when Terry Holt realized that he was simply holding
+the bag for Jimenez y Cía.--Jimenez and Company--in the city of Manila.
+He wasn't getting anywhere, himself. So, painfully, he prepared to wind
+up the company's affairs and his own, and start over. It seemed
+appropriate to take inventory, consult the police--they'd been both
+amiable and co-operative--and then make new plans. But first it would be
+a good idea to go somewhere else for a while, until the problem
+presented by _La Rubia_ and radar and fish and _orejas de ellos_ had
+been settled. He was at work on the inventory when the door opened, the
+warning-bell tinkled, and the girl came into the shop.
+
+He looked up with a wary eye, glancing over the partition separating the
+workshop area in which the merchandise sold by Jimenez y Cía. was
+assembled. There were certain people he felt should not come into the
+shop. The police agreed with him. He was prepared to throw out anybody
+who came either to demand that he build something or else, or to demand
+that he not build it or else. In such forcible ejections he would be
+backed by the authorities of the city and the Philippine Republic.
+
+But this customer was a girl. She was a pretty girl. She was pleasantly
+tanned. Her make-up, if she wore any, looked natural, and she carried a
+sizable parcel under her arm. She turned to close the door behind her.
+She was definitely from the United States. So Terry said in English,
+"Good afternoon. Can I do something for you?"
+
+She looked relieved.
+
+"Ah! We can talk English," she said gratefully. "I was afraid I'd have
+trouble. I do have trouble with Spanish."
+
+Terry came out from behind the partition marking off the workshop. The
+shop was seventeen feet wide and its larger expanse of plate glass said,
+"_Jimenez y Cía._" in large letters. Terry's now-vanished partner
+Jimenez had liked to see his name in large print. Under the name was the
+line "_Especialidades Electrónicas y Físicas._" This was Terry's angle.
+He assembled specialties in the line of electronics and modern physics.
+Jimenez had sold them, not wisely but too well. At the bottom corner of
+the window there was a modest statement: "_Orejas de Ellos_," which
+meant nothing to anybody but certain commercial fishermen, all of whom
+would deny it.
+
+The girl looked dubiously about her. The front of the shop displayed two
+glaringly white electric washing machines, four electric refrigerators,
+and two deep-freeze cabinets.
+
+"But I'm not sure this is the right shop," she said. "I'm not looking
+for iceboxes."
+
+"They're window-dressing," said Terry. "My former business associate
+tried to run an appliance shop. But the people who buy such things in
+Manila only want the latest models. He got stuck with these from last
+year. So we do--I did do--_especialidades electrónicas y físicas_. But
+I'm shutting up shop. What are you looking for?"
+
+The shop was in an appropriate place for its former products. Outside on
+the Calle Enero there were places where one could buy sea food in
+quantity, mother-of-pearl, pitch, coir rope, bêche-de-mer, copra, fuel
+oil, Diesel repair-parts and edible birds' nests. _Especialidades_
+fitted in. But though it was certainly respectable enough, this
+neighborhood wasn't exactly where one would have expected to find a girl
+like this shopping for what a girl like this would shop for.
+
+"I'm looking," she explained, "for somebody to make up a special device,
+probably electronic, for my father's boat."
+
+"Ah!" said Terry regretfully. "That's my line exactly, as is evidenced
+in Spanish on the window and in Tagalog, Malay and Chinese on cards you
+can read through the glass. But I'm suspending operations for a while.
+What kind of special device? Radar--No. I doubt you'd want _orejas de
+ellos_...."
+
+"What are they?"
+
+"Submarine ears," said Terry. "For fishing boats. The name is no clue at
+all. They pick up underwater sounds, enabling one to hear surf a long
+way off. Which may be useful. And some fish make noises and the
+fishermen use these ears to eavesdrop on them and catch them. You
+wouldn't be interested in anything of that sort!"
+
+The girl brightened visibly.
+
+"But I am! Something very much like it, at any rate. Take a look at this
+and see what my father wants to have made."
+
+She put her parcel on a deep-freeze unit and pulled off its paper
+covering. The object inside was a sort of curved paddle with a handle at
+one end. It was about three feet long, made of a light-colored fibrous
+wood, and on the convex part of its curvature it was deeply carved in
+peculiar transverse ridges.
+
+"A fish-driving paddle," she explained. "From Alua."
+
+He looked it over. He knew vaguely that Alua was an island somewhere
+near Bohol.
+
+"Naturally a fish-driving paddle is used to drive fish," she said.
+"To--herd them, you might say. People go out in shallow water and form a
+line. Then they whack paddles like these on the surface of the water.
+Fish try to get away from the sound and the people herd them where they
+want them--into fish-traps, usually. I've tried this, while wearing a
+bathing suit. It makes your skin tingle--smart, rather. It's a sort of
+pins-and-needles sensation. Fish would swim away from an underwater
+noise like that!"
+
+Terry examined the carving.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Of course we think there's something special about the noise these
+paddles make. Maybe a special wave-form?"
+
+"Possibly," he admitted. "But--"
+
+"We want something else to do the same trick on a bigger scale.
+Directional, if possible. Not a paddle, of course. Better. Bigger.
+Stronger. Continuous. We want to drive fish and this paddle's limited in
+its effect."
+
+"Why drive fish?" asked Terry.
+
+"Why not?" asked the girl. She watched his face.
+
+He frowned a little, considering the problem the girl posed.
+
+"Oh, _ellos_ might object," he said absently.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"_Ellos_," he repeated. "It's a superstition. The word means 'they' or
+'them.' Things under the ocean who listen to the fish and the
+fishermen."
+
+"You're not serious." It was a statement.
+
+"No," he admitted, still eying the paddle. "But the modern, businesslike
+fishermen who buy submarine ears for sound business reasons call them
+_orejas de ellos_ and everybody knows what they mean, even in the
+modernized fishing fleet."
+
+"Which," said the girl, "Jimenez y Cía. has had a big hand in
+modernizing. That's why I came to you. Your name is Terry Holt, I think.
+An American Navy Captain said you could make what my father wants."
+
+Terry nodded suddenly to himself.
+
+"What you want," he said abruptly, "might be done with a tape-recorder,
+a submarine ear, and an underwater horn. You'd make a tape-recording of
+what these whackings sound like under water, edit the tape to make the
+whackings practically continuous, and then play the tape through an
+underwater horn to reproduce the sounds at will. That should do the
+trick."
+
+"Good! How soon can you do it?" she asked.
+
+"I'm afraid not at all," said Terry. "I find I've been a little too
+efficient in updating the fishing fleet. I'm leaving the city for the
+city's good."
+
+She looked at him inquiringly.
+
+"No," he assured her. "The police haven't asked me to leave. They're
+glad I'm going, but they're cordial enough and it's agreed that I'll
+come back when somebody else finds out how _La Rubia_ catches her fish."
+
+"_La Rubia?_"
+
+"_The Redhead_," he told her. "It's the name of a fishing boat. She's
+found some place where fish practically fight to get into her nets. For
+months, now, she's come back from every trip loaded down gunwale-deep.
+And she makes her trips fast! Naturally the other fishermen want to get
+in on the party."
+
+"So?"
+
+"The bonanza voyages," Terry explained, "started immediately after _La
+Rubia_ had submarine ears installed. Immediately all the other boats
+installed them. My former partner sold them faster than I could assemble
+them. And nobody regrets them. They do increase the catches. But they
+don't match _La Rubia_. She's making a mint of money! She's found some
+place or she has some trick that loads her down deep every time she puts
+out to sea."
+
+The girl made an interrogative sound.
+
+"The other fishermen think it's a place," Terry added, "so they ganged
+up on her. Two months back, when she sailed, the entire fishing fleet
+trailed her. They stuck to her closer than brothers. So she sailed
+around for a solid week and never put a net overboard. Then she came
+back to Manila--empty. They were furious. The price of fish had gone
+sky-high in their absence. They went to sea to make some money
+regardless. When they got back they found _La Rubia_ had sailed after
+they left, got back before they returned--and she was just loaded with
+fish, and the market was back to normal. There was bad feeling. There
+were fights. Some fishermen landed in the hospital and some in jail."
+
+A motor truck rolled by on the street outside the shop of the now
+moribund Jimenez y Cía. The girl automatically turned her eyes to the
+source of the noise. Then she looked back at Terry.
+
+"And then my erstwhile associate Jimenez had a brainstorm," said Terry
+ruefully. "He sold the skipper of _La Rubia_ on the idea of short-range
+radar. I built a set for him. It was good for possibly twenty miles. So
+_La Rubia_ sailed in the dark of the moon with fifty fishing boats
+swearing violent oaths that they'd follow her to hell-and-gone. When
+night fell _La Rubia_ put out her lights, used her radar to locate the
+other boats who couldn't see her, and sneaked out from their midst. She
+came back loaded down with fish. There were more fights and more men in
+the hospital and in jail. Some of _La Rubia's_ men boasted that they'd
+used radar to dodge their rivals. And that's how the police got
+interested in me."
+
+The girl had listened interestedly.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Oh, Jimenez began to take orders for radar from other fishing boat
+owners. If _La Rubia_ could dodge them by radar, they could trail her by
+radar even in the dark. So the skipper and crew of _La Rubia_ promised
+blood-curdling things as Jimenez's fate if he delivered a radar set to
+anybody else. Then the skippers and crews of other boats made even more
+blood-curdling threats if he didn't deliver radar to them. So Jimenez
+ran away, leaving me to hold the bag."
+
+The girl nodded.
+
+"And therefore," said Terry, "I'm shutting up shop. I'll turn the
+inventory over to the police and go off somewhere until someone learns
+where _La Rubia_ gets her fish. When things calm down again, I'll come
+back and start up business once more--without Jimenez. I'll probably
+stick to electric-eye doors, burglar alarms, closed-circuit television
+systems and things like that. Then I might make this underwater
+broadcasting device, if your father still wants it. I'd better not now."
+
+"We heard about your problem," said the girl. "Almost exactly the way
+you just explained it."
+
+Terry stared. Then he said politely, "Oh. You did?"
+
+"Yes, I thought--"
+
+"Then you knew," said Terry more politely still, "that I was leaving
+town and couldn't make the gadget you want? You knew it before you came
+here?"
+
+"Why," said the girl, "your plans seemed to fit in very nicely with
+ours. We've got a sixty-five-foot schooner and we're sailing around. My
+father wants something like--what you described. So since you want
+to--well--travel around for a time, why not come on board our boat and
+make the thing we want there? We'll land you anywhere you like when it's
+finished."
+
+"Thanks," said Terry with very great politeness indeed. "I think I made
+a fool of myself, explaining. You knew it all beforehand. I'm afraid I
+bored you horribly. You probably even know that Jimenez took all the
+funds when he ran away."
+
+She hesitated, and then said, "Y-yes. We thought--"
+
+"That I should have trouble raising steamer-fare to any place at all,"
+he said without cordiality. "And I will. You had that information too,
+didn't you?"
+
+"Please!" she said with distress. "You make it sound--"
+
+"Did you have any idea what I'd charge to assemble the device you want?"
+
+"If you'll name a price."
+
+Terry named one. He was angry. The sum was far from a small one. It was,
+in fact, exorbitant. But he felt that he'd made a fool of himself,
+responding to her encouragement by telling her things she already knew.
+
+She opened her purse and peeled off bills. She put them down.
+
+"I'll leave the paddle with you," she said crisply. "Our boat is the
+_Esperance_. You'll find it...." She named the anchorage, which was that
+of Manila's most expensive yacht club. "There's a launch which will
+bring you out whenever you're ready to sail. It would be nice if you
+could sail tomorrow--and nicer if you could come aboard today."
+
+She nodded in friendly fashion, opened the door--the bell jangled--and
+went out.
+
+Terry blinked. Then he swore and snatched up the pile of bills. Two
+fluttered to the floor and he lost time picking them up. He went out
+after her, the money in his hand.
+
+He saw a taxicab door close behind her, three or four doors down the
+street. Instantly the cab was in mad career away. The taxicabs of Manila
+are driven by a special breed of chauffeurs. It is said that they are
+all escaped lunatics with homicidal tendencies. The cab went roaring
+down the Calle Enero's cluttered length and turned the corner.
+
+Terry went back to the shop. He swore again. He looked at the money in
+his hand. It totalled exactly the excessive amount he'd named as the
+price of an electronic fish-driving unit, including an underwater horn.
+
+"The devil!" he said angrily.
+
+He felt the special indignation some men feel when they are in
+difficulties which their pride requires them to surmount by themselves,
+and somebody tries to help. The indignation is the greater as they see
+less chance of success on their own.
+
+Terry's situation was offensive to him because he shouldn't be in this
+kind of situation at all, or rather, his troubles were not foreseeable
+by the most competent of graduate electronic engineers. He'd trained for
+the work he'd undertaken. He'd prepared himself for competence. At
+graduation he'd encountered the representatives of at least three large
+corporations who were snapping up engineers as soon as they left the
+cloistered halls of learning. Terry'd asked how many men were employed
+in the category he'd fit in. When one representative boasted that ten
+thousand such engineers were on his company's payroll, Terry declined at
+once. He wanted to accomplish something himself, not as part of a team
+of some thousands of members. The smaller the organization, the better
+one's chance for personal satisfaction. He wouldn't make as much money,
+but--
+
+It was a matter of simple logic. If he was better off with a really
+small company, he'd be best off on his own. And he'd nearly managed it.
+He'd worked only with Jimenez. Jimenez was the sales organization. Terry
+was the production staff. In Manila there was certainly room for special
+electronic equipment--_especialidades electrónicas y físicas_. He should
+have had an excellent chance to build up a good business. Starting
+small, even without capital, he'd confidently expected to be going
+strong within months. There were taxi fleets to be equipped with
+short-wave radio. There were burglar alarms to be designed and
+installed, and all sorts of setups to be engineered. And these things
+were still in demand. His expectations had a solid foundation. Nobody
+could have anticipated the disaster caused by _La Rubia's_ phenomenal
+success in commercial fishery. It was even irrational for it to be a
+disaster to Terry. But it was.
+
+More immediately, though, he was indignant because this girl had known
+all about him when she came into the shop. She'd probably even known
+about his gimmicking a standard-design submarine listening device so it
+was really good and really directional. But she'd let him talk, asking
+seemingly interested questions, when she knew the whole business
+beforehand. And at the end she'd done a most infuriating thing by paying
+him in advance for something he'd refused to do, thereby forcing him
+into the obligation to do it.
+
+He fretted. He needed the money. But he objected to being tricked. He
+went back to the probably senseless business of taking an inventory.
+Time passed. Nothing happened. Nobody came to the shop. The police had
+been firm about _La Rubia_ crewmen calling on Terry to make threats.
+They'd been equally firm about other people calling to make
+counterthreats. No casual customers entered. Two hours went by.
+
+At four o'clock the door opened--with the sound of its tinkling
+bell--and Police Captain Felicio Horta came in.
+
+"_Buenas tardes_," he said cordially.
+
+Terry grunted at him.
+
+"I hear," said Horta, "that you leave Manila."
+
+Terry asked evenly, "Is that a way of asking me to hurry up and do it?"
+
+"_Pero no! Por supuesto no!_" protested Horta. "But it is said that you
+have new and definite plans."
+
+"What do you know about them?" demanded Terry.
+
+Police Captain Horta said pleasantly, "Officially, nothing. Privately,
+that you will aid some _ricos americanos_ to do experiments
+in--_oceanografía_? Some study of oceanic things. That you regret having
+agreed to do so. That you consider changing your mind. That you are
+angry."
+
+The girl, of course, could have inferred all this from his angry charge
+out of the shop with the money in his hand, too late to stop her
+taxicab. But Terry snapped, "Now, who the devil told you that?"
+
+Police Captain Horta shrugged.
+
+"One hears. I hope it is not true."
+
+"That what's not true? That I leave? Or that I don't?"
+
+"I hope," said Horta benignly, "that you do as you please. I am not on
+duty at the moment. I have my car. I offer myself to chauffeur you if
+there is any place you wish to go--to a steamer or anywhere else. If
+you do not wish to go anywhere, I will take my leave. With no pre ...
+prejudice," he finished. "We have been friendly. I hope we remain so."
+
+Terry stared at him estimatingly. Police Captain Horta was a reasonable
+and honest man. He knew that Terry had contributed to matters giving the
+police some trouble, but he knew it was accidental on Terry's part. He
+would hold no grudge.
+
+"Just why," asked Terry measuredly, "did you come here to offer to drive
+me somewhere? Is there any special reason to want me to get out of
+town?"
+
+"That is not it," said Horta. "It could be wished that you would--take a
+certain course of action. Yes. But not because you would be absent from
+here. It is because you would be present at a special other place. The
+matter connects with _La Rubia_, but in a manner you could not possibly
+guess. Yet you are wholly a free agent. You will do as you please. I
+would like to make it--convenient. That is all."
+
+He paused. Terry stared at him, frowning. Horta tried again.
+
+"Let us say that I have much interest in _oceanografía_. I would like to
+see certain research carried on."
+
+"Being, I'm sure, especially interested in fish-driving," said Terry
+skeptically. "You sound as if you were acting unofficially to get
+something done that officially you can't talk about."
+
+Horta smiled warmly at him.
+
+"That," he pronounced, "is a logical conclusion."
+
+"What's the object of the--research, if that's what it is? And why pick
+me?"
+
+Horta shrugged and did not answer.
+
+"Why not tell me?"
+
+"_Amigo_," said Horta, "I would like nothing better than to tell you. I
+would be interested to see your reception of the idea. But it would be
+fatal. You would think me cr-azy. And also more important persons. But
+especially me."
+
+It was Terry's turn to shrug his shoulders. He hesitated for a long
+moment. If Horta had tried to apply pressure, he'd have turned obstinate
+on the instant. But there was no pressure. First the girl and now Horta
+tried to lure him with mystery and assurance of interest in high places.
+
+"And _La Rubia's_ involved in the secret?" demanded Terry.
+
+"Innocently," said Horta promptly. "As you are."
+
+"Thank you for faith in my innocence," said Terry with irony. "All
+right. If I'm involved, I'm involved. I'll try to devolve out of being
+involved by playing along."
+
+He turned to the workshop space at the back of the store. He found boxes
+to pack his working tools and the considerable stock of small parts
+needed to make such things as burglar alarms, submarine ears and the
+assorted electronic devices modern business finds increasingly
+necessary. He began to pack them. Surprisingly, Horta helped. Any man of
+Spanish blood is apt to be sensitive about manual labor. If he has an
+official position his sensitiveness is apt to be extreme. But Horta not
+only helped pack the boxes with Terry's stock of parts; he helped carry
+them to his car outside. He helped to load them.
+
+Terry turned the key in the door and handed it to him, with the nearly
+complete inventory of the shop's contents.
+
+"Jimenez having run away, I leave the shop in your hands," he observed.
+
+Horta put the key and document away. He started the motor of his car and
+drove along the Calle Enero. He drove with surprising moderation for a
+police officer authorized to ignore traffic rules on occasion. Presently
+the dock-area of Manila was left behind, and then the rest of the
+commercial district, and then for a time the car tooled along wide
+streets past the impressive residences of the wealthy. Some of the
+architecture was remarkable. A little further, and the harbor--the
+bay--appeared again. The car entered the grounds of Manila's swankiest
+yacht club. The design of the clubhouse was astounding. The car stopped
+by the small-boat pier. There were two men waiting there. Without being
+given any orders, they accepted the parcels Horta handed out. Also
+without orders, they carried them out to the float. They loaded them
+into the brass-trimmed motor tender which waited there.
+
+"They knew we were coming," said Terry shortly. "Would I have been
+brought anyhow?"
+
+"_Pero no_," said Horta. "But there are telephones. When we left the
+shop, one was used."
+
+The men who'd carried out the parcels vanished. Terry and Horta stepped
+aboard. The tender cast off and headed out into the harbor. There was a
+Philippine gunboat and a mine-layer and an American flattop in plain
+view. There were tankers and tramp steamers and a vast array of smaller
+craft at anchor. A seemingly top-heavy steamer ploughed across oily
+water two miles distant. The tender headed for a trim sixty-five-foot
+schooner anchored a mile from shore. It grew larger and seemed more trim
+as the tender approached it.
+
+The smaller boat passed under the larger one's stern, and the name
+_Esperance_ showed plainly. On the starboard side a boat boom projected.
+The tender ran deftly up and a man in a sweat shirt and duck trousers
+snubbed the line. He said cheerfully, "How do you do, Mr. Holt?" Then he
+nodded to Horta. "Good to see you, Captain." He offered his hand as
+Terry straightened up on deck. "My name's Davis. We'll have your stuff
+aboard right away."
+
+Two young men in dungarees and with crew cuts appeared and took over the
+motley lot of cartons that Terry and Horta had made ready.
+
+"Have you everything you need?" asked Davis anxiously. "Would some extra
+stuff be useful?"
+
+"I could do with a few items," said Terry, stiffly.
+
+He had quickly developed an acute dislike for the patent attempt to
+induce him to join the _Esperance_. He had no reason for his objection,
+save that he had not been informed about the task he was urged to
+undertake.
+
+"Also," he added abruptly, "Captain Horta didn't think to stop at my
+hotel so I could get my baggage."
+
+"Write a list of what you want," suggested Davis. "I'm sure something
+can be done about your baggage. Make the list complete. If something's
+left over, it won't matter. There's a desk in the cabin for you to write
+at." He turned to Horta. "Captain, what's the news about _La Rubia_?"
+
+"She sailed again yesterday," said Horta ruefully. "She was followed by
+many other boats. And now there is a moon. It rises late, but it rises.
+Many sailors will be watching her from mastheads. It is said that all
+the night glasses in Manila have been bought by fishermen...."
+
+His voice died away as Terry went down the companion ladder. Belowdecks
+was attractive. There was no ostentation, but the décor was obviously
+expensive. There were armchairs, electric lamps, a desk, and shelves
+filled with books--two or three on electronics and a highly
+controversial one on marine monsters and sea serpents. There were some
+on anthropology. On skin diving. On astronomy. Two thick volumes on
+abyssal fish. There was a shelf of fiction and other shelves of
+reference books for navigation, radio and Diesel maintenance and repair.
+There were obvious reasons for these last, but no reason that could be
+imagined for two books on the solar planets.
+
+Terry sat at the desk and compiled a list of electronic parts that he
+was sure wouldn't be available in Manila. He was annoyed as he realized
+afresh the smoothness of the operation that had brought him to the
+_Esperance_. He found satisfaction in asking for some multi-element
+vacuum tubes that simply couldn't be had except on special order from
+the manufacturers back in the United States. But it took time to think
+of them.
+
+When he went abovedecks, half an hour later, he had listed just six
+electronic components. The tender was gone, and Horta with it. Davis
+greeted Terry as cordially as before.
+
+"The tender's left," said Terry with restraint. "Here's my list."
+
+Davis did not even glance at it, but beckoned to one of the crew-cut
+young men who'd unloaded the tender.
+
+"This is Nick Alden," he said to Terry. "He's one of the gang. See about
+this list, Nick."
+
+The crew-cut young man put out his hand and Terry shook it. It seemed
+expected. He went forward with the list and vanished down the forecastle
+ladder. Davis looked at his watch.
+
+"Five-thirty," he observed. "A drink might not be a bad thing."
+
+He went below, and Terry surveyed the _Esperance_. She had the look of a
+pleasure craft, but was built along the lines of something more
+reliable. There was an unusual power winch amidships, with an
+extraordinarily large reel. Next to it there was a heavy spar by which
+to swing something outboard. There were two boats, well stowed against
+heavy weather, and a number of often-omitted bits of equipment, so that
+the schooner was not convincing as the hobby of a mere yachtsman.
+
+Then Terry saw the brass-trimmed tender heading out from the yacht-club
+float again. Foam spread out from its bow. A figure in it waved. Terry
+recognized the girl who'd come into the shop of Jimenez y Cía. She was
+smiling, and as the launch came nearer it seemed to Terry that there was
+triumph in her smile. He bristled. Then he saw some parcels in the bow
+of the tender. Next to the parcels--and he unbelievingly suspected what
+they were--he suddenly recognized something else: his suitcases and
+steamer-trunk. In order to sail with the _Esperance_ he need not go
+ashore to get his belongings. They were brought to him. He became
+totally convinced that these people had assumed he'd do what they wanted
+him to, without consulting him. He rebelled. Immediately. Any time other
+people took for granted that they could make plans for him, he would
+become obstinate. When he was in a fix--and now he was practically
+stranded in Manila with a need to go elsewhere for a time and no money
+with which to do it--he was especially touchy. He found himself scowling
+and angry, and the more angry because what was required of him would
+have been very convenient if there'd been no attempt to inveigle him
+into it.
+
+The launch came around the _Esperance's_ stern. Davis came from below
+with two glasses. The girl said cheerfully, "Howdo! We've got your extra
+items. All of them. And your baggage."
+
+Terry said curtly, "How did my list get ashore?"
+
+"Nick phoned it," said Davis. "By short-wave."
+
+"And where the devil did you find the stuff I named?"
+
+"That," said Davis, "is part of the mystery you don't like."
+
+"Right!" said Terry grimly. "I don't like it. I don't think I'll play.
+I'll go ashore in the tender."
+
+"Hold it!" said Davis. But he was speaking to the operator of the
+tender. The crew-cut Nick was in the act of handing up the first piece
+of baggage. Davis waved it back. "I'm sorry," he said to Terry. "We'll
+stay at anchor here. If you change your mind, the tender will bring you
+out any time."
+
+Terry brought out the sheaf of bills the girl had left in the shop of
+the vanished Jimenez. He held them out to the girl. She put her hands
+behind her back and shook her head.
+
+"We put you to trouble," she said pleasantly, "and we haven't been frank
+with you. That's to make up for it."
+
+"I won't accept it," said Terry stiffly. "I insist."
+
+"We won't have it back," said Davis. "And we insist!"
+
+Terry felt idiotic. There was enough of a breeze to make it impractical
+simply to put the batch of bank notes down. They'd blow away. The girl
+looked at him regretfully.
+
+"I'm truly sorry," she said. "I planned the way we went after you. You
+are exactly the person we're sure to need. We decided to try to get you
+to join us. We couldn't explain. So we asked what you were like. And
+you're not the sort of person who can be hired to do what he's told and
+no questions asked. Captain Horta said you were a gentleman. So since we
+couldn't ask you to volunteer blindly--though I think you would
+volunteer if you knew what we're about to do--we tried to make you come
+for the adventure of it. It didn't work. I'm sorry."
+
+Terry had the singular conviction that she told the exact truth. And she
+was a very pretty girl, but she wasn't using her looks to persuade him.
+She spoke as one person to another. He unwillingly found himself
+mollified.
+
+"Look!" he said vexedly. "I was leaving Manila. I need to be away for a
+while. I am coming back. I can do any crazy thing I want for some weeks,
+or even a couple of months. But I don't like to be pushed around! I
+don't like--"
+
+The girl smiled suddenly.
+
+"All right, I'll keep the money."
+
+The girl smiled more widely and said, "Mr. Holt, we are off on a cruise.
+We'll put in at various ports from time to time. We think you would fit
+into our party. We invite you to come on this cruise as our guest. You
+can be helpful or not, as you please. And we will _not_ try to pay you
+for anything!"
+
+Davis nodded. Terry frowned. Then he spoke painfully.
+
+"I have a gift for making a fool of myself," he said ruefully. "When
+it's put that way, fine! I'll come along. But I reserve the right to
+make guesses."
+
+"That's good!" said Davis warmly. "If you do find out what we won't tell
+you, you'll see why we didn't."
+
+He waved to Nick and the tender operator. The parcels came onto the
+_Esperance's_ deck. His baggage followed. He picked up one of the new
+cardboard parcels and examined its markings.
+
+"This," he said more ruefully still, "has me stymied. I'd have sworn you
+couldn't get one of these special tubes nearer than Schenectady, New
+York. But you found one in Manila in minutes! How did you do it?"
+
+The girl laughed.
+
+"Terribly simple!" she said. "We'll tell you. But not until we're under
+way, or you might be so disgusted with the simplicity of it that you'd
+want to go ashore again."
+
+
+
+
+_Two_
+
+
+The edge of the sun touched the horizon and sank below it, out of sight.
+There were magnificent tints in the sky, and the gently rippling harbor
+water reflected them in innumerable swirlings of color. The _Esperance_
+swayed very slightly and very gracefully on the low swells. In minutes
+two of the dungareed members of the ship's company got the anchor up
+with professional efficiency. One of them went below, and the
+_Esperance's_ engine began to rumble. Davis casually took the wheel, and
+the small yacht began to move toward the open sea while Nick played a
+salt-water hose on the anchor before lashing it fast. The brief twilight
+of the tropics transformed itself swiftly into night. Lights winked and
+glittered ashore and on the water.
+
+Terry felt more than a little absurd. The girl said pleasantly, at his
+side, "My name's Deirdre, in case you don't know."
+
+"Mine's Terry, but you do know."
+
+"Naturally!" she said briskly. "I should explain that I'm the ship's
+cook, and the boys forward aren't professional sailors, and my father
+isn't--"
+
+"Isn't in this business for money," said Terry. "It's strictly for
+something else. And I don't think it's buried treasure or anything like
+that."
+
+"Nothing so sensible," she agreed. "Now, if you want to join a watch,
+you'll do it. If you don't, you won't. The port cabin, the little one,
+is yours. You are our guest. If you want anything, ask for it. I'm going
+below to cook dinner."
+
+She left him. He surveyed the deck again, and presently went back to
+where Davis sat nonchalantly by the _Esperance's_ wheel. Davis nodded.
+
+"Now that you've, well, joined up," he said meditatively, "I've been
+trying to think how to, well, justify all the mystery. Part of it was
+Deirdre's idea. She thought it would make our proposition more
+interesting, so you'd be more likely to take it up. But when I think
+about explaining, I bog down immediately."
+
+Terry sat down. The _Esperance_ drove on. Her bow lifted and dipped and
+lifted and dipped. The water was no longer nearly smooth. There was the
+beginning of a land breeze.
+
+"There's _La Rubia_," said Davis uncomfortably. "You outfitted her with
+underwater ears and a radar, at least. Was there anything else?"
+
+"No," said Terry curtly. "Nothing else."
+
+"She catches the devil of a lot of fish," said Davis. He frowned. "Some
+of them you might call very queer fish. You haven't heard anything about
+that?"
+
+"No," said Terry. "Nothing."
+
+"I think, then," said Davis, "that I'd better not expose myself to
+scorn. I'd like to be able to read her skipper's mind, though. But it's
+possible he simply thinks he's lucky. And it's possible he's right."
+
+Terry waited. Davis puffed on his pipe. Then he said abruptly, "Anyhow
+you're a good man at making gadgets. We'll let it go at that, for the
+time being."
+
+The sea became less and less smooth. There were little slapping sounds
+of waves against the yacht's bow. The muted rumble of her engine was not
+intrusive. The breeze increased. Davis gave a definite impression of
+having said all he intended to say for the time being. Terry stirred.
+
+"You want me to build a gadget," he said. "To drive fish. Would you want
+to give me some details?"
+
+Davis considered. A few drops of spray came over the _Esperance's_ side.
+
+"N-o-o-o," said Davis. "Not just yet. There's a possibility it will fit
+in. I'd like you to make one, and maybe it will fit in somewhere. But
+_La Rubia's_ the best angle we've got so far. There is one gadget I'd
+give a lot to have! You know, a depth-finder. It sends a pulse of sound
+down to the bottom and times the echo coming back. Very much like radar,
+in a way. Both send out a pulse and time its return."
+
+Terry nodded. There was no mystery about depth-finders or radars.
+
+"We've got a depth-finder on board," said Davis. "If I sail a straight
+course and keep the depth-finder running, I can make a profile of the
+sea bottom under me. If I had a row of ships doing the same thing, we
+could get profiles and have a relief map of the bottom."
+
+"That's right," agreed Terry.
+
+"What I'd give a lot for," said Davis, "would be a depth-finder that
+would send spot-pulses, like radar does. Aimed sound-pulses. And an
+arrangement made so it could scan the ocean bottom like radar scans the
+sky. One boat could make a graph of the bottom in depths and heights,
+mapping even hummocks and hills underwater. Could something like that be
+done?"
+
+"Probably," Terry told him. "It might take a good deal of doing,
+though."
+
+"I wish you'd think about it," said Davis. "I know a place where I'd
+like to use such a thing. It's in the Luzon Deep. I really would like to
+have a detailed picture of the bottom at a certain spot there!"
+
+Terry said nothing. He'd been made angry, then mollified, and now he
+felt tempted to grow angry again. There was nothing definite in what was
+wanted of him, after elaborate machinations to get him aboard the
+_Esperance_. He was disappointed.
+
+"Good breeze," said Davis in a different voice. "We might as well hoist
+sail and cut off the engine. Take the wheel?"
+
+Terry took the wheel. Davis went forward. Four dungareed figures came up
+out of the forecastle. The sails went up and filled. The engine stopped.
+The motion of the boat changed. More spray came aboard, but the movement
+was steadier. Davis came back and took the wheel once more.
+
+"I think," he said, "that we're acting in a way to--hm--be annoying. I
+ought to lay my cards on the table. But I can't. For one thing, I
+haven't drawn a full hand yet. For another, there are some things you'll
+have to find out for yourself, in a situation like this."
+
+"Such as--"
+
+"Well," said Davis with a sudden dogged air, "take those _orejas de
+ellos_, for an example. _Ellos_ are supposed to be some sort of beings
+at the bottom of the sea who listen to fish and fishermen. It's a
+superstition pure and simple. Suppose I said I was investigating the
+possibility that there were such--beings. You'd think I was crazy,
+wouldn't you?"
+
+Terry shrugged.
+
+"What I am interested in," said Davis, "has enough credit behind it for
+me to get some pretty rare electronic parts from the flattop in harbor
+back yonder. Nick called them by short-wave, they sent the parts ashore
+and gave them to Deirdre, and she brought them out to you."
+
+Terry blinked. Then he realized. Of course, that was where just about
+any imaginable component for electronic devices would be found--in the
+electronics stores of a flattop! They needed to have such things at
+hand. They'd carry them in store. Davis said drily, "They wouldn't
+supply parts to a civilian who was investigating imaginary gods or
+devils. So what I'm bothered with isn't a superstition. Right?"
+
+"Y-yes," agreed Terry.
+
+It was true. The Navy would not stretch regulations for a crackpot
+civilian. It was not likely, either, that Horta would have implied so
+definitely that the Philippine Government wanted somebody with Terry's
+qualifications to go for a cruise on the _Esperance_.
+
+Deirdre put her head up through the after-cabin hatch.
+
+"Dinner is served," she said cheerfully.
+
+"The wheel," said Davis to Terry.
+
+He went forward. All four of the non-professional seamen came with him
+when he returned.
+
+"This is the rest of the gang," said Davis. "You met Nick. The others
+are Tony Drake, Jug Bell, and Doug Holmes." He made an embracing gesture
+as they shook hands in turn. "Harvard, Princeton, Yale--and Nick's
+M.I.T. It's your turn at the wheel, Tony."
+
+One of the four took over. The others filed below after Davis and Terry.
+Terry was silent. Davis had wanted to show that he was being
+informative, and yet he'd said exactly nothing about the interests or
+the purpose of the _Esperance's_ complement.
+
+Dinner in the after-cabin was almost as confusing to Terry. Seen at
+close range across a table, the four dungareed young men could not
+possibly be anything but college undergraduates. They were respectful to
+Davis as an older man and they tended to be a little cagey about Terry,
+because he was slightly older than themselves but not an honorary
+contemporary. They plainly regarded Deirdre with the warmest possible
+approval.
+
+Conversation began, at first cryptic but suddenly only preposterous.
+There was an argument about the supposed intelligence of porpoises,
+based on recent studies of their brain structure. Tony observed
+profoundly that without an opposable thumb intelligence could not lead
+to artefacts, and hence no culture and no great effective intelligence
+was possible. Jug denied the meaningfulness of brain structure as an
+indication of intellect. Intellect would be useless to a creature which
+could neither make nor use a tool. Doug argued hotly that the point was
+absurd. He pointed to spastic children once rated as morons but actually
+having high I.Q.'s. They had intellects, though they had been useless
+because of their inability to communicate. But Nick asserted that
+without tools they'd have nothing to talk about but food, danger, and
+who went where with whom for what. All of which, he observed, needed no
+brains.
+
+Davis listened amusedly. Deirdre threw in the suggestion that without
+hands or tools an intelligent creature could compose poetry, and Jug
+protested that that was nothing to use a brain for--and the talk turned
+into a violent argument about poetry. Doug insisted vehemently that the
+finest possible intellects were required for the composition and
+appreciation of true poetry. Then Davis said, "Tony's still at the
+wheel."
+
+The argument died down and the crew-cuts devoted themselves to eating,
+so one of them could get through and relieve him.
+
+Afterward, Davis settled down below to a delicate short-wave tuning
+process to get music from an improbable distance. Deirdre served Tony
+his meal and talked with him while he ate it. Terry went abovedecks and
+paced back and forth as the _Esperance_ sailed on through the night.
+
+He couldn't make out anything at all about the crew or the purpose
+behind the _Esperance's_ chosen task and purpose. He felt dubious about
+the whole business. Like most technically-minded men, he could become
+absorbed in a problem, especially if it was a device difficult to design
+or a design that somehow didn't work. Such things fascinated him. But
+the _Esperance's_ crew was not concerned with a problem like that. There
+was no pattern in their talk or behavior to match the way a technical
+mind would go about finding a solution. The problem was bafflingly
+vague, yet there _was_ one.
+
+_La Rubia_ was an element in it. Possibly Davis' wistful mention of a
+partial map of the bottom of the Luzon Deep fitted in somewhere. Davis
+had spoken of _orejas de ellos_ with some familiarity, but certainly no
+Navy ship would cooperate in the investigation of a fisherman's
+superstition in which even fishermen didn't believe any longer. The
+Philippine fishing fleet was modern and efficient. Fishermen used
+submarine ears without superstitious fears, and if they referred to
+imaginary _ellos_ it was as an American would say "knock on wood," with
+no actual belief that it meant anything.
+
+Whatever the _Esperance's_ purpose was, there was nothing mystical about
+it--not if a flattop parted with rare and expensive specialized vacuum
+tubes to try to help, and the police department of Manila urged Terry
+tactfully--through Horta--to join the yacht, and no less than a Navy
+Captain had named him as someone to be recruited.
+
+Deirdre came abovedecks and replaced Tony at the wheel. The _Esperance_
+sailed on. A last-quarter moon was now shining low on the eastern
+horizon. It seemed larger and nearer to the earth than when seen from
+more temperate climes. The wake of the yacht glowed in the moonlight.
+
+The wide expanse of canvas made stark contrast between its moonlit top
+and its shadow on the deck. The only illumination on the ship was the
+binnacle lights and the red and green running lights. Deirdre kept the
+_Esperance_ on course.
+
+Terry went up to where she sat, beside the wheel.
+
+"I've been making guesses," he told her. "Your father.... I believe that
+his curiosity has been aroused by something, and he's resolved to track
+it down. I strongly suspect that at some time or another he's gotten
+bored with making money and decided to have some fun."
+
+Deirdre nodded.
+
+"Very good! Almost completely true. But what he's interested in is a
+good deal more important than fun."
+
+Terry nodded in his turn.
+
+"I suspected that too. And it's rather likely that you've got a
+volunteer crew instead of a professional one because these young men
+consider it a fascinating adventure into the absurd, and because they'll
+keep their mouths shut if something turns out to be classified
+information."
+
+"My father's doing this strictly on his own!" said Deirdre quickly.
+"There's nothing official about it. There isn't any classified
+information about it. This is a private affair from the beginning!"
+
+"But in the end it may turn out to be something else," said Terry.
+
+"Y-yes. We don't know, though. It's impossible to know!
+It's--ridiculous!"
+
+"And my explanation for your being so mysterious with me is that you and
+your father insist that I find out everything for myself because I'd
+think it foolish if you told me."
+
+Deirdre did not answer for a moment. There was a movement behind Terry,
+and Davis came on deck.
+
+"That was good music!" he said pleasedly. "You missed some very
+interesting sounds, Deirdre! You too, Holt."
+
+"He's decided," said Deirdre, "that we're a little bit ashamed of our
+enterprise and won't tell him about it for fear he'll simply laugh at
+us."
+
+Terry protested, "Not at all! Nothing like that!"
+
+"When some forty-odd people have been killed by something inexplicable
+at one time that we know of," said Davis, "--and we don't know how many
+others have been killed at other times, or may be killed by it in the
+future--I don't think that's a laughing matter."
+
+He surveyed what should be the direction of the land. A light showed
+there and vanished, then came on again and vanished. A minute later it
+showed and disappeared, then came on again twice. It was very far away.
+Davis said in a different tone, "We can change course now, Deirdre. You
+know the new one."
+
+The _Esperance's_ bowsprit forsook the star at which it had been aiming.
+It swung to another. Davis moved about, adjusting the sheets alone. On
+the new heading the yacht heeled over a little more and the water
+rushing past her hull had a different sound. The sky seemed larger and
+more remote than it ever appears from a city. The yacht's wake streamed
+behind her in a trail of bluish brightness. Even the moon was strange.
+It had the cold enormousness of something very near and menacing. It
+looked as close as when seen through a telescope of moderate power.
+
+The _Esperance_ seemed very lonely on the immense waste of waters.
+
+Next morning, of course, the sense of loneliness was gone. There was
+neither land nor any ship in sight, but gulls fluttered and squawked
+overhead, and the waves seemed to leap and gambol in the sunshine. Just
+before the foremast a metal plate in the decking had been lifted up, and
+a new, stubby, extensible mast rose almost as high as the crosstrees. A
+tiny basket-like object rotated monotonously at its upper end. It was a
+radar-bowl, and somehow it was not unusual, except in the manner in
+which it was mounted. Yet, such a collapsible radar mast was reasonable
+on a sailing yacht with many lines aloft that could be fouled. Anyhow,
+the radar was concerned with human affairs, and so it was company.
+
+The housekeeping work on the boat was in progress. Doug and Jug scrubbed
+the deck. The other crew-cuts gave signs of industry from time to time,
+appearing and vanishing. Davis smoked tranquilly at the wheel. Terry
+felt useless, as well as puzzled.
+
+"Can I do anything?" he asked awkwardly.
+
+"You're your own boss," said Davis.
+
+"Then I might as well see what can be done about that submarine
+noisemaker."
+
+"If you feel like it," said Davis, "fine!"
+
+But he did not urge. Terry waited a moment. There was a sort of
+contagion of purposefulness in this eccentric small group on the
+_Esperance_. They had something they were trying to do, and it seemed
+important to them. But Terry was an outsider and would remain one until
+he became active in their joint effort.
+
+He got out his equipment and materials and spread them out. There was no
+need to build a recorder, since there was one among the supplies. The
+rest wouldn't be unduly difficult. He established a working space and
+set systematically to work. The task he'd accepted was essentially
+simple. A submarine ear was to pick up underwater sounds. He had to
+modify a microphone and enclose it in a water-tight housing, with
+certain special features that would make it highly directional. The
+recorder would take the pick-up and register it on magnetic tape, while
+playing it for simultaneous listening. Then he had to assemble a
+machine for playing back the taped sounds under water. That required a
+unit for a submarine horn, to broadcast the amplified sound. It isn't
+difficult to make a sound under water. One can knock two stones together
+under the surface and a swimmer can hear it a mile or more away. But a
+horn to reproduce specific sounds is more difficult to build. It needs
+extra power. A sound-truck in a city, competing with all the traffic
+noises, will turn no more than fifteen watts of electricity into noise.
+But much more power would be needed to produce a similar volume under
+water.
+
+Terry modified the mike into a submarine ear--an _orejas de ellos_. Then
+he began to assemble an audio amplifier to build up the volume of the
+sounds already taped for re-use under the sea. He had the parts. It was
+mostly just finicky labor. He sat cross-legged in the sunshine, not far
+from the _Esperance's_ unusual winch.
+
+Nick came up from below and went aft. He spoke to Davis. Terry couldn't
+hear what was said, but Davis gave orders.
+
+The _Esperance_ heeled over; away, away over. The four crew-cuts
+adjusted the sheets for maximum effect of the sails on the new direction
+of motion. The yacht seemed to tear through the water like a racing
+boat. Terry had to rescue some of his smaller parts which started for
+the scuppers. He looked up. Deirdre said cheerfully, "Our radar picked
+up a boat that's probably _La Rubia_ on the way back to Manila. We don't
+want her to see us."
+
+Terry blinked.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"We're going to take a look at the spot where we think she catches her
+fish," said Deirdre. "It's strange enough that she catches so many, but
+what's even stranger is the kind of fish she catches at times."
+
+"How?"
+
+Deirdre shrugged. Then she said irrelevantly, "_La Rubia's_ skipper
+would like to have the only radar in the world, as you've reason to
+know, and he doesn't think of radars, except his own and possible
+competitors. But there are lots of others. We're probably a blip on
+somebody's radar-screen right now. In fact, we're supposed to be. So
+when my father got interested in _La Rubia_ and her--catches, he was
+able to have somebody notice where she goes every time she slips away
+from the fishing fleet. And so he was told. It was all quite unofficial,
+of course."
+
+Terry bent over his task again while the _Esperance_ sped along over the
+off-shore swells. There was no land in sight anywhere. An albatross
+glided overhead for a time, as if inspecting the _Esperance_ as a
+possible source of food. When Terry looked for it later it was gone.
+Once there was a flurry in many wave-flanks, and a small school of
+flying fish darted out of the sea with hazy, beating fins, and dived
+back into the sea many yards from where they started.
+
+But nothing of any consequence happened anywhere. Terry fitted and
+soldered and tested. By noon he had a rather powerful audio amplifying
+unit, set up to magnify any sound the tape-recorder fed into it. Deirdre
+prepared a meal. The galley of the _Esperance_ was admirably supplied
+with all kinds of food. After the noon meal the yacht changed course
+again to a line which would intersect her original morning course at
+some point.
+
+Terry found himself fuming. He'd set to work to make something that
+Davis apparently wanted, but his most elementary questions still ran
+against a blank refusal to answer. Both Davis and Deirdre had spoken of
+oddities in the catches of _La Rubia_. There could not possibly be any
+reason for them to refuse to tell him what they were. Terry worked
+himself into irritability, recalling how he volunteered to come on the
+_Esperance_ but not thinking that he would be treated as someone who
+wasn't allowed to know what everybody else aboard most certainly did.
+
+In the afternoon there was guitar music down in the forecastle, and Doug
+came out and settled himself on the bowsprit with a book of poetry.
+Presently Nick sat down close by Terry and watched interestedly as he
+put mysterious-looking electronic elements together into
+incomprehensible groups. When he had finished, Terry did not admire his
+handiwork. The noisemaking unit came last. The electrical part had to be
+enclosed, water-tight, with a diaphragm exposed to the water on one
+side and its working parts protected from all moisture on the other. The
+device looked cobbled, but it worked, and made monstrous sounds in the
+air.
+
+Now he plugged the submarine ear into the recorder. He dropped it
+overside and taped the random noises of the sea: the washings of sea
+water against the _Esperance's_ hull, frequent splashings, and very
+faint, chirping noises from who-knew-what.
+
+"Watch the volume, will you?" Terry pointed out the Indication that
+should not be exceeded. Nick nodded. "I'm going to whack the paddle
+overside and see what we get in the way of noise."
+
+Nick hesitated. Then he said uneasily, "Wait a minute."
+
+He went aft to Davis, apparently somnolent at the wheel. Deirdre joined
+the two of them in a seemingly very serious discussion. Then she walked
+over to Terry.
+
+"I hate to say it," she told him with evident concern, "but my father
+thinks it would be wiser to try out the paddle in shallow water. Do you
+mind?"
+
+"Yes," snapped Terry. "I do mind, since I'm not allowed to know the
+reason for that or anything else."
+
+He put away his tools and the unused parts. He pointed to the machines
+he had already built.
+
+"This is what your father wanted, I think. After it's tested I'll ask
+you to put me ashore."
+
+He went below, where he fretted to himself. But no one came, either to
+inform him of Davis' reasons, or to tell him to do as he pleased. He
+felt like a child who isn't allowed to play with other children; who is
+arbitrarily excluded from the purpose and the excitement of his fellows.
+Thinking in such terms did not make him feel any better. His irritation
+increased. The _Esperance_ was engaged in an enterprise that these
+people considered very much worth doing. He'd joined them to accomplish
+it, and they wouldn't tell him what it was. He hadn't the temperament to
+be content with just following blindly. And somehow the fact that
+Deirdre was aboard and a participant in the secret made his exclusion an
+insult.
+
+He felt about Deirdre that urgent concern that a man may feel about one
+or two, or at most three girls during his whole lifetime. It wasn't a
+romantic interest, at this stage, but he wanted to look well in her
+eyes, and he was enormously interested in anything she said and did. If
+he left the _Esperance_ and ceased to know her, he knew he'd be nagged
+at by the feeling that he'd made a very bad mistake. He didn't want to
+stop knowing her. But he refused to be patronized.
+
+He saw an open book on the after-cabin table and glanced restlessly at
+it. There were three or four photographs and a newspaper clipping stuck
+into its pages. The book itself dealt with physics at post-graduate
+levels--which meant that it included a good deal about electronics.
+
+Still fuming, Terry glanced at the pictures. The first was of a
+spherical object made of transparent plastic and probably of small size.
+It had a number of metallic elements clearly visible through the
+transparent case. It looked as if it might be an electronic device
+itself, but there was no sign of lead-in contacts, and the parts inside
+made no sense at all. The second and third photographs were of a similar
+yet slightly different object. The fourth photograph was a picture of
+what looked like ocean water, taken from a plane. The horizon showed in
+one corner. The center of the picture was an irregularly-shaped mass of
+white. On close examination it appeared to be foam. But it looked as if
+it were piled up in masses above the surface. If the water around it was
+ocean--and it was--and the visible crest-lines were of waves--and they
+were--that heap of foam must have been hundreds of yards in diameter and
+piled many feet high on the surface. Foam does not form in such masses
+in the open sea. It would not last if it did.
+
+On the margin of this picture a date had been inked--three days
+before--and a position in degrees of latitude and longitude.
+
+Terry turned to the chart rack. He pulled out a chart and looked up the
+position. Someone had made a pencil-dot there. It was close to Thrawn
+Island, on the very brink of the Luzon Deep, that incredible submarine
+chasm in which the entire Himalayan chain could be sunk without showing
+a single pinnacle above the surface.
+
+He went back to the clipping. It was dated Manila, two years earlier. It
+was an obviously skeptical article on a report made by the crewmen of a
+sailing ship that stopped by Manila. Sailing ships are rare enough in
+modern times. This ship reported that she had sighted another of her own
+kind at sea. The two ships altered course to speak to each other. And
+the one which came into Manila declared that when the other vessel was
+no more than two miles away, white foam suddenly appeared on the sea
+just in front of her. A geyser of unsubstantial white stuff spouted up
+and spread, shooting up about thirty feet on the water. The bow of the
+other sailing ship entered the foam patch. And suddenly her bow tilted
+downward, her masts swayed forward, and the entire ship vanished into
+the white stuff, exactly as if she had sailed over a precipice. She did
+not sink. She dropped. She "fell" under water--under the foam--her sails
+still spread. One instant she sailed proudly. The next instant she was
+gone.
+
+The position of such an incredible happening was roughly given. It was
+almost exactly the same as the position written on the photograph of
+foam taken from the air. At the margin of the Luzon Deep.
+
+Terry found that his indignation had evaporated. The reason for it still
+remained, but now he wanted to know more about this happening and about
+the spheres of plastic with those deftly designed but enigmatic
+inclusions. The plastic objects had a purpose. He wanted to know what.
+And the news clipping....
+
+Having announced crossly that he would ask to be set ashore as soon as
+the fish-driving unit was tested, he was ashamed to take it back. He
+stayed below, now angry at himself again. Nobody came below. Deirdre did
+not descend to cook. Night fell. Well after nightfall he heard movements
+on deck, and presently a voice which sounded oddly distant. The
+_Esperance's_ course changed abruptly. The quality of her motion altered
+once more.
+
+He went abovedecks. Twilight was long over, but the moon was not yet up.
+Here and there a wave-tip frothed, and blue luminescence appeared. Here
+and there a streak of dim blue light could be seen under water, where
+some fish darted. But those dartings were rare. Despite the yacht's
+shining wake and the curling wave-tips, the sea was darker than usual.
+
+Nick's voice came from aloft, faint and eerie and seeming to come from
+the stars.
+
+"... farther to port.... Two points ..."
+
+Terry could see the masthead weaving and swaying against the stars, with
+a small dark silhouette clinging to it: Nick. The yacht began to swing.
+On one bearing she pounded heavily. The seas could hit her squarely, and
+they did. Figures moved swiftly about the deck, loosening sheets or
+tightening them. Nick's voice again, from overhead.
+
+"Stea-a-a-dy!"
+
+The _Esperance_ ceased to turn. Rushing, pounding water sprayed in the
+air. The waves splashed upon the hull of the yacht, which was sweeping
+along on a quartering wind.
+
+For a while no one talked. Tony stood at the wheel, with Davis nearby,
+by the binnacle light. Terry could see Davis glancing into the binnacle,
+then gazing at the horizon ahead, and then aloft, where Nick seemed to
+swing among low-hanging stars.
+
+"Ri-i-i-ght!" he called from high overhead. "Steady as she goes."
+
+The _Esperance_ sailed on, over the surging seas. Waves came out of
+nowhere, leaped beside the yacht and then went by--to nowhere. It was
+hard to believe that the yacht actually moved forward. She seemed to
+stay perpetually in the one spot. But there was a winding, sinuous wake,
+and there was froth under her forefoot.
+
+Then a vague brightness appeared on the sea, at the limit of vision. It
+spread out more widely as the _Esperance_ approached. Presently it was
+clearly visible.
+
+Dead ahead, the beam of the headlight suddenly revealed an incredible
+spectacle. Until then there had been just a few flashes in the water,
+where some fish darted away from the yacht's bulk. But here the entire
+surface of the water shone with thousands and thousands of fish. They
+were packed in a sharply delimited circle about a mile wide. When the
+_Esperance_ got close enough, she hauled up into the wind to look.
+
+From a spot fifty yards ahead, the sea was alive with a million frantic
+dartings of swimming things. They were crowded, packed almost
+fin-to-fin. And it was not a surface phenomenon only. From the yacht's
+deck the streaks of light were visible deep down, as far as the clear
+water would let them be seen. They formed a column of glittering chaos.
+The vast circle, to an indefinite depth, was packed solid with agitated
+fish. At that edge of brightness the thronging creatures were splashing
+in a mad frenzy. Solid shining shapes leaped crazily from the water.
+Some leaped again and again, until they reached the spot where the
+flashes were thickest, and got lost in the multitude of their fellows. A
+few escaped to the darker surrounding sea. They seemed to run away in
+stark terror. But those were only a few. The greatest mass of fish
+milled crazily inside the circle. There were even porpoises, darting
+about as if frightened beyond all normal behavior, not even trying to
+feed on the equally fear-maddened creatures all about them.
+
+
+
+
+_Three_
+
+
+Terry stared incredulously. Someone moved beside him. It was Davis. He
+spoke in a dry voice.
+
+"I would think," he said detachedly, "that _La Rubia_ could catch a
+boatload of fish in that water with a single haul of her nets. Certainly
+with two."
+
+Terry turned his head.
+
+"But what is it? What makes these fish gather like this?"
+
+"An interesting question," said Davis. "We'll try to find out how it
+happens. Even more interesting, I'd like to know why."
+
+He moved away along the deck. Terry went close to the side rail. A few
+minutes later the startling glare of one of the side searchlights smote
+upon the water away from the incredible scene. It moved slowly back and
+forth. Where the light struck, the sea seemed totally commonplace. No
+fish could be seen. Then the white beam swept here and there in jerky
+leapings. There was nothing unusual on the surface, nothing beyond the
+limit of brightness, where the sea turned dark.
+
+Deirdre said at Terry's side, "We didn't really expect this! I'm going
+to get a sample of the water, Terry. Want to help?"
+
+She ignored his haughty withdrawal of the afternoon, and he could not
+stand on his dignity in the presence of such an incredible phenomenon.
+She got a water bucket from the nearby rack. A wave sprung up as she
+tried to fill the bucket overside. It touched her hand and she cried
+out. Terry jerked her back by the shoulder. The bucket bumped against
+the _Esperance's_ side, hanging on the line attached to the rail.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"It stung! The water stung! Like a nettle!" Shaking a little, Deirdre
+rubbed her wet hand with the other. "It doesn't hurt now, but it was
+like a stinging nettle--or an electric shock!"
+
+Terry hauled in the bucket and set it down. He leaned far over the rail.
+He plunged his hand into a lifting pinnacle of the sea. Instantly, his
+skin felt as if pricked by ten thousand needles. But his muscles did not
+contract as they would in an electric shock. The sensation was on the
+surface of his skin alone.
+
+He shook his head impatiently. He put his finger in the bucket he'd
+lifted to the deck. There was no unusual sensation. He dipped overside
+again. Again acute and startling hurt, from the mere contact with the
+water.
+
+Deirdre still rubbed her hand. She said in a queer, surprised voice,
+
+"Like pins and needles. It's like--like the fish-driving paddle! But
+worse! Much worse!"
+
+Terry looked again at the sea glittering with the swarms of fish in
+hopeless, panicked agitation, confined in a specific narrow compass by
+something unguessable. The searchlight continued to flick here and
+there. The _Esperance_ drifted away from the edge of brightness. Terry
+put his hand overside once more, and once more he felt the stinging,
+nettle-like sensation. He got a fresh bucket of water from overside. On
+deck, there was no strange sensation when he dipped his hand in it.
+
+The searchlight went out abruptly and only a faint and quickly dimming
+reddish glow came from it. That too died.
+
+Davis' voice gave orders. Terry said sharply, "Wait a minute!" He began
+to explain about the stinging of the water. But then he said, "Deirdre,
+you tell him! I'm going to put a submarine ear overboard. At the least
+we'll get fish noises on a new scale. But I've got an idea ... don't
+sail into the bright circle yet."
+
+He got out the submarine ear and the recorder he'd made ready that
+afternoon. He started the recorder. Then he trailed the microphone
+overside. The sounds would be heard live through the speaker and they
+would be taped at the same time. At first, a blaring, confused sound
+came through. Terry turned down the volume.
+
+He heard gruntings and chirpings and rustlings. Fish made those
+noises--not all fish, but certain species. These shrill, squeaking
+noises were the protests of frightened porpoises. But under and through
+all other sounds, a steady, unvarying hum could be easily detected.
+Terry had never heard anything quite like it. Its pitch was the same as
+that of a sixty-cycle frequency, but its tone quality was somehow
+sardonic and snarling. The word that came into Terry's mind was "nasty."
+Yes, it was a nasty sound. One didn't like it. One would want to get
+away from it. In the air the same unpleasant sensation is produced by
+noises that make one's flesh crawl.
+
+Terry straightened up from where the recorder played upon the wet deck.
+Davis and Deirdre had come to listen, in the strange darkness under the
+sails of the _Esperance_.
+
+"I've got a sort of hunch," said Terry slowly. "Let's sail across the
+bright patch. I'll record the sea noises all the way. I've a feeling
+that that hum means something."
+
+"It's not what you'd call an ordinary sound," said Davis.
+
+He raised his voice. One of the crew-cuts was at the schooner's wheel.
+He spun it. The sails filled, and the rattling of flapping canvas died
+away. The _Esperance_ gathered way and moved swiftly from the glittering
+circle, came about, and sailed again toward the shining area. She got
+closer and closer to the boundary.
+
+The recorder continued to give out the confused and frightened noises of
+the sea creatures, but under and through their sounds there remained the
+nasty and sardonic hum. It grew louder and more unpleasant--much louder
+in proportion to the fish sounds. At the very boundary of the bright
+space it was loudest of all.
+
+But as the yacht went on, the hum dimmed. At the very center of the
+circle where the glitterings were brightest, the humming sound was
+overwhelmed by the submarine tumult of senseless fish voices. Terry
+dipped his hand here. The tingling was almost tolerable, but not quite.
+
+Davis hauled more buckets of water to the deck. In two of them he found
+some fish, so dense was the finny multitude. Then the yacht neared the
+farthest limit of the bright circle. The hum from the recording
+instrument grew progressively louder. Again, at the very edge of the
+shining water, it was loudest.
+
+The _Esperance_ sailed across the live boundary and into the dark sea.
+As the boat went on, the sound dimmed....
+
+"Definitely loudest," said Terry absorbedly, "at the edge of the circle
+of fish. At the line the fish couldn't cross to escape. It is if there
+were an electric fence in the sea. It felt like that, too. But there
+isn't any fence."
+
+Davis asked evenly, "Question: what holds them crowded?"
+
+Terry said again, groping in his mind, "They act like fish in a closing
+net. I've seen something like this once, when a purse-seine was hauled.
+Those fish were frantic because they couldn't get away. Just like
+these."
+
+"Why can't they get away?" asked Davis grimly. "We haven't seen anything
+holding them."
+
+"But we heard something," pointed out Deirdre. "The hum. That may be
+what closes them in."
+
+Her father made a grunting noise. "We'll see about that."
+
+He moved away, back to the stern. In moments, the _Esperance_ was
+beating upwind. Presently, she headed back toward her previous position,
+but outside the brightness. Terry could see dark silhouettes moving
+about near the yacht's wheel. Then he saw another brightness at the
+eastern horizon, but that was in the sky. Almost as soon as he noticed
+it, the moon peered over the edge of the world, and climbed slowly to
+full view, and then swam up among the lower-hanging stars.
+
+Immediately, the look of the sea was different. The waves no longer
+seemed to race the darkness with only star glitters on their flanks. The
+figures at the _Esperance's_ stern were now quite distinct in the
+moonlight.
+
+"You said a very sensible thing, Deirdre," said Terry. "I thought of the
+fish-driving paddle and its effects, but I was ashamed to mention it. I
+thought it would sound foolish. But when you said it, it didn't."
+
+"I have a talent," said Deirdre, "for making foolish things sound
+sensible. Or perhaps the reverse. I'm going to say a sensible thing now.
+We haven't had dinner. I'm going to fix something to eat."
+
+"You won't get anybody to go belowdecks right now!" said Terry.
+
+"I thought of that," she told him. "Sandwiches."
+
+She went below. Terry continued to watch, while figures at the stern of
+the schooner went through an involved process of visual measurement. It
+was not simple to determine the dimensions of a patch of shimmering
+light flashes from a boat in motion. But presently, Davis came toward
+him.
+
+"It's thirteen hundred yards across," he told Terry. "Plus or minus
+twenty."
+
+"I didn't expect all this," Davis said, frowning. "I've been making
+guesses and hoping fervently that I was wrong. And I have been, but each
+time the proof that I was wrong has led to new guesses, and I'm afraid
+to think those guesses may be right."
+
+"I can't begin to guess yet," said Terry.
+
+"You will!" Davis assured him. "You will! You try to add up things.... A
+half-mile-wide patch of foam that piles up thirty feet above the
+sea...."
+
+"And into which," Terry interrupted, "a sailing ship does not sink but
+drops out of sight as if there were a hole in the sea."
+
+Davis turned sharply toward him.
+
+"There were some photographs and a newspaper clipping on the cabin
+table," explained Terry. "I suspected they might have been put there for
+me to see."
+
+"Deirdre, perhaps," said Davis. "She's resolved to involve you in this.
+You've got scruples, so she suspects you of having brains. Yes. You'll
+add those things up. You'll include the remarkable success of a fishing
+boat named _La Rubia_ and the fact that she sometimes brings in very
+strange fish ... And then you'll add ..."
+
+His eyes flickered aloft. A shooting star streaked across one-third of
+the sky leaving a trail of light behind it. Then it went out.
+
+"You'll even be tempted," said Davis, "to include something like that in
+your guesses! And then you'll try to come up with a total for the lot.
+Then you'll be as troubled as I am."
+
+He paused a moment.
+
+"You said you wanted to be put ashore as soon as the gadget you made
+today was tested. I hope you've changed your mind, or will. That
+tape-recording may mean something to somebody. We wouldn't have heard
+that very singular noise but for you."
+
+"I withdraw the business of going ashore," said Terry uncomfortably.
+"I'm going to ask another question. What are those little spheres that I
+saw in the photographs on the cabin table? Were they found fastened to
+the fish?"
+
+"So I'm told," said Davis. "They are made of plastic. One was on a fish
+caught by a chief petty officer of the United States Navy. Four have
+been found on fish brought into the market by _La Rubia_. They could
+conceivably be a joke, but it's very elaborate! Somebody tried to cut
+one open and it burst to hell-and-gone. Terrific pressure inside. The
+metal parts inside were iridium. The others haven't been cut open.
+They're--" Davis' tone was dry. "They're being studied."
+
+A figure came out of the forecastle and walked aft. It was Nick. He
+stopped to say, "I called Manila and got a loran fix on us. We're right
+at the place _La Rubia_ heads for every time she sneaks away from the
+rest of the fishing fleet. It seems that she hauls her nets yonder."
+
+He nodded toward the circular area of luminosity on the sea. "It looks
+smaller than when I went below deck."
+
+Davis stared. He seemed to stiffen.
+
+"It does. We'll make sure."
+
+He went aft. Deirdre came up with sandwiches. Terry took the tray from
+her and followed her toward the others.
+
+"Cigars, cigarettes, candy, sandwiches?" she asked cheerfully.
+
+Davis was back at the task of measuring the angle subtended by the patch
+of shining sea, and then closely estimating its distance from the
+_Esperance_. He said, "It _is_ smaller. Eleven hundred yards, now."
+
+"When _La Rubia_ was here today," said Terry, "it might have been a
+couple of miles across. Even that would be a terrific concentration of
+fish! They're not all at the surface."
+
+Davis said with impatience, seemingly directed against himself, "It's
+narrowed two hundred yards in the past half-hour. It must be tending
+toward something! There has to be a conclusion to it! Something must be
+about to happen!"
+
+Deirdre said slowly, "If it's the equivalent of a seine being hauled,
+with a hum instead of a net, what's going to happen when it's time for
+the fish to be boated?"
+
+Davis ignored her for a moment. Then he said irritably, "Everyone seems
+to have more brains than I do! Tony, break out those gun-cameras. Nick,
+get back and report if the bright spot's getting any smaller. I wish you
+weren't here, Deirdre!"
+
+The two crew-cuts moved to obey. Terry, alone, had no specific duty
+assigned to him on the yacht, unless tending to the recorder was it. He
+bent over the instrument which was playing in the air anything that a
+trailing microphone picked up under water. He raised the volume a
+trifle. He could still hear the singular noises of the agitated fish
+mixed in with the thin, strangely offensive humming sound. He heard
+small thumpings, and realized that they were the footfalls of his
+companions on the deck of the _Esperance_, transmitted to the water. He
+heard ...
+
+Tony came abovedecks with an armful of mysterious-looking objects which
+could not be seen quite clearly in the slanting moonlight. He put two of
+them down by the wheel and passed out the others. He silently left one
+for Terry and another for Deirdre, while Terry adjusted tone and volume
+on the recorder for maximum clarity.
+
+"What are those?" asked Terry.
+
+"Cameras," said Deirdre. "Mounted on rifle stocks, with flashbulbs in
+the reflectors. You aim, pull the trigger, and the shutter opens as the
+flashbulb goes off. So you get a picture of whatever you aim at, night
+or day."
+
+"Why ..."
+
+"There was a time when my father thought they might be useful," said
+Deirdre. "Then it looked like they wouldn't. Now it looks like they
+may."
+
+Terry was tempted to say, "Useful for what?" But Davis' vague talk of
+unpleasant wrong guesses which led to even less pleasant ones had
+already been an admission that no convincing answer could be given him.
+Davis came over to him.
+
+"This has me worried," he said in a frustrated tone of indecision. "We
+must be near the end of some process that I didn't suspect, and the
+conclusion of which I can't guess. I don't know what it is, and I don't
+know what it's for. I only know what it's tied in with."
+
+Terry said absorbedly, "Two or three times I've picked up some new kinds
+of sounds. You might call them mooing noises. They're very faint, as if
+they were far away, and there are long intervals between them. I don't
+think they come from the surface."
+
+Davis made an irresolute gesture. He seemed to hesitate over something
+he was inclined to accept. Deirdre protested before he could speak. "I
+don't think what you're thinking is right!" she said firmly. "Not a bit
+of it! Whatever happens will be connected with the fish. _La Rubia_ has
+been around this sort of thing over and over again! We haven't been
+running the engine and we haven't been making any specific noises in the
+water to arouse curiosity! If anything were going to happen to us, it
+would have happened to _La Rubia_ before now! It would be ridiculous to
+run away just because I'm on board!"
+
+Terry, bent intently over the recorder, suddenly felt a cold chill run
+up and down his spine. His mind told him it was ridiculous to associate
+distant mooing sounds, underwater, with a completely unprecedented,
+frantic gathering of fish into one small area, and come up with the
+thought that something monstrous and plaintive was coming blindly to
+feed upon fellow creatures of the sea. There was nothing to justify the
+thought. It was out of all reason. But his spine crawled, just the same.
+
+"The circle's only eight hundred yards across, now," said Davis,
+uneasily. "The fish can't crowd together any closer! But Doug went
+overboard with diving goggles, and he says there's a column of
+brightness as far down as he can make out."
+
+Terry looked up.
+
+"He went overboard? Didn't he tingle?"
+
+"He said it was like baby nettles all over," Davis protested, as if it
+were someone's fault. "But he didn't sting after he came out. It must
+be ..."
+
+A mooing sound came out of the recorder. It was fainter than the other
+sounds and very far away. It must have been of terrific volume where it
+originated. It lasted for many seconds, then stopped.
+
+"I should have been recording," said Terry. "That sound comes up about
+every five minutes. I'll catch it next time."
+
+Davis went away, as if he wanted to miss the noise and the decision it
+would force upon him. Yet Terry told himself obstinately that there was
+no reason to connect the mooing sound with the crazed fish herd half a
+mile away. But somehow he couldn't help thinking there might be a
+connection.
+
+The ship's clock sounded seven bells. Deirdre said, "The brightness is
+really smaller now!" The patch of flashes was no more than half its
+original size. Terry pressed the recording button and straightened up to
+look more closely. Right then Deirdre said sharply, "Listen!"
+
+Something new and quite unlike the mooing noise now came out of the
+recorder.
+
+"Get your father," commanded Terry. "Something's coming from somewhere!"
+
+Deirdre ran across the heaving deck. Terry shifted position so he could
+manipulate the microphone hanging over the yacht's side into the water.
+Davis arrived. His voice was suddenly strained and grim. "Something's
+coming?" he demanded. "Can you hear any engine noise?"
+
+"Listen to it," said Terry. "I'm trying to get its bearing."
+
+He turned the wire by which the submarine ear hung from the rail. The
+chirpings and squealings and squeakings changed volume as the microphone
+turned. But the new sound, of something rushing at high speed through
+the water--that did not change. Terry rotated the mike through a full
+circle. The fish noises dwindled to almost nothing, and then increased
+again. The volume of the steady hum changed with them. But the rushing
+sound remained steady. Rather, it grew in loudness, as if approaching.
+But the directional microphone didn't register any difference, whether
+it received sound from the north, east, south, or west.
+
+It was a booming sound. It was a rushing sound. It was the sound of an
+object moving at terrific speed through the water. There was no engine
+noise, but something thrust furiously through the sea, and the sound
+grew louder and louder.
+
+"It's not coming from any compass course," said Terry shortly. "How deep
+is the water here?"
+
+"We're just over the edge of the Luzon Deep," said Davis. "Four thousand
+fathoms. Five. Maybe six."
+
+"Then it can only be coming from one direction," said Terry. "It's
+coming from below. And it's coming up."
+
+For three heartbeats Davis stood perfectly still. Then he said, with
+extreme grimness, "Since you mention it, that would be where it's coming
+from."
+
+He turned away and shouted a few orders. The crewmen scurried swiftly.
+The yacht's head fell away from the wind. Terry listened again to the
+rushing sound. There seemed to be regular throbbings in it, but still no
+engine noise. It was a steady drone.
+
+"Bazooka shells ought to discourage anything," Davis said in an icy
+voice. "If it attacks, let go at it. But try to use the gun-cameras
+first."
+
+The _Esperance_ rolled and wallowed. Her bows lifted and fell. Her sails
+were black against the starry sky overhead. Two of the crew-cuts settled
+themselves at the starboard rail. They had long tubes in their hands,
+tubes whose details could not be seen. The wind hummed and thuttered in
+the rigging. Reef-points pattered. Near the port rail the recorder
+poured out the amplified sounds its microphone picked up from the sea.
+The sound of the coming thing became louder than all the other noises
+combined. It was literally a booming noise. The water started to bubble
+furiously as it parted to let something rise to the surface from
+unthinkable depths.
+
+Doug put two magazine-rifles beside Terry and Deirdre, then he moved
+away. Deirdre had a clumsy object in her hands. It had a rifle-stock and
+a trigger. What should have been the barrel was huge--six inches or more
+in diameter--but very short. That was the flashbulb reflector. The
+actual camera was small and on top, like a sight.
+
+"We'll aim these at anything we see," said Deirdre composedly, "and pull
+the trigger. Then we'll pick up the real rifles and see if we must
+shoot. Is that all right?"
+
+She faced the shining patch of ocean. Davis and the crew-cut at the
+wheel faced that way. Tony and Jug stood with the clumsy tubes of
+bazookas facing the same direction. Doug had taken a post forward, with
+a camera-gun and a magazine rifle. He had the camera in hand, to use
+first.
+
+It seemed that hours passed, but it must have been just a few minutes.
+Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be taking place anywhere. The moon
+now shone down from a sky in which a few thin wisps of cloud glowed
+among the stars. Sharp-peaked waves came from one horizon and sped
+busily toward the other. The yacht pitched and rolled, its company
+strangely armed and expectant. The recorder gave out a droning, booming,
+rushing sound which grew louder with ever-increasing rapidity. Now the
+sound reached a climax.
+
+From the very center of the glinting circle of sea, there was a
+monstrous splashing sound. A phosphorescent column rose furiously from
+the waves. It leaped. Water fell back and ... something soared into the
+air. Sharp, stabbing flashes of almost intolerably white light flared
+up. The gun-cameras fired their flashbulbs without a sound.
+
+It was then that Terry saw it--in mid-air. He swung the gun-camera, and
+a flash from another gun showed him that he would miss. He jerked the
+gun to bear and pulled the trigger. The flash illuminated _it_ vividly.
+Then night again.
+
+It was torpedo-shaped and excessively slender but very long. It could
+have been a living thing, frozen by the instantaneous flash. It could
+have been something made of metal. It leaped a full fifty feet clear of
+the waves and then tumbled back into the ocean with a colossal splash.
+Then there was silence, except for the sounds of the sea. Terry had the
+magazine-rifle still in his hands. Tony and Jug waited with their
+bazookas ready. It occurred to Terry that yachts are not customarily
+armed with bazookas.
+
+"That--wasn't a whale," said Deirdre unsteadily.
+
+The recorder bellowed suddenly. It was the hum that had been heard
+before: the nasty, sixty-cycle hum that surrounded the captive fish. But
+it was ten, twenty, fifty times as loud as before.
+
+The fish in the bright-sea area went mad. The entire surface whipped
+itself to spray, as fish leaped frenziedly to get out of the water,
+which stung and burned where it touched.
+
+Then, very strangely, the splashing stopped. The brightness of the sea
+decreased. A while later the enormous snarling sound was noticeably less
+loud than it had been at that first horrible moment.
+
+The wind blew. The waves raced. The _Esperance's_ bow lifted and dipped.
+The noise from the loudspeaker system--the noise from the sea--decreased
+even more. One could hear the squeakings and chitterings of fish again.
+But they were very much fainter. Presently the humming was no louder
+than before the strange apparition. By that time the fish-sound had died
+away altogether. The nearer normal noises remained. The hum was
+receding. Downward.
+
+Davis came to Terry, where he stood by the recording instrument.
+
+"The fish have gone," he said in a flat voice, "they've gone away. They
+didn't scatter. We'd have seen it. Do you realize where they went?"
+
+Terry nodded.
+
+"Straight down. Do you want to hear an impossible explanation?"
+
+"I've thought of several," said Davis.
+
+Doug came and picked up the gun-cameras that Terry and Deirdre had used
+and went away with them.
+
+"There's a kind of sound," said Terry, "that fish don't like. They won't
+go where it is. They try to get away from it."
+
+Deirdre said quietly, "I would too, if I were swimming."
+
+"Sound," said Terry, "in water as in air, can be reflected and directed,
+just as light can be. A megaphone turns out one's voice in a cone of
+noise, like a reflector on a light. It should be possible to project it.
+One can project a hollow cone of light. Why not a hollow cone of sound,
+in water?"
+
+Davis said with an unconvincingly ironic and skeptical air, "Indeed, why
+not?"
+
+"If such a thing were done," said Terry, "then when the cone of sound
+was turned on, the fish inside it would be captured as if by a conical
+net. They couldn't swim through the walls of sound. And then one can
+imagine the cone made smaller; the walls drawn closer together. The fish
+would be crowded together in what was increasingly like a vertical,
+conical net, but with walls of unbearable noise instead of cord. It
+would be as if the sea were electrified and the fish were shocked when
+they tried to pass a given spot."
+
+"Preposterous, of course," said Davis. But his tone was not at all
+unbelieving.
+
+"Then suppose something were sent up to the top of the cone, and it
+projected some kind of a cover of sound on the top of the cone and
+imprisoned the fish with a lid of sound they couldn't endure. And then
+suppose that thing sank into the water again. The fish couldn't swim
+through the walls of noise around them. They couldn't swim through the
+lid of sound above them. They'd have to swim downward, just as if a hood
+were closing on them from above."
+
+"Very neat," said Davis. "But of course you don't believe anything of
+the sort."
+
+"I can't imagine what would produce that sound in that way and send up a
+cork of sound to take the fish below. And I can't imagine why it would
+be done. So I can't say I believe it."
+
+Davis said slowly, "I think we begin to understand each other. We'll
+stay as close to this place as we can until dawn, when we will find
+nothing to show that anything out of the ordinary happened here."
+
+"Still less," said Terry, "to hint at its meaning. I've been doing sums
+in my head. That bright water was almost solid with fish. I'd say there
+was at least a pound of fish to every cubic foot of sea."
+
+"An underestimate," said Davis judicially.
+
+"When the bright patch was a thousand yards across--and it was even
+more--there'd have been four hundred tons of fish in the top three-foot
+layer."
+
+Davis seemed to start. But it was true. Terry added, "The water was
+clear. We could see that the packing went on down a long way. Say fifty
+yards at least."
+
+"Y-yes," agreed Davis. "All of that."
+
+"So in the top fifty yards, at one time, there were at least twenty
+thousand tons of fish gathered together. Probably very much more. What
+_La Rubia_ carried away couldn't be noticed. All those thousands of tons
+of fish were pushed straight down. Tell me," said Terry, "what would be
+the point in all those fish being dragged to the bottom? I can't ask who
+or what did it, or even why. I'm asking, what results from it?"
+
+Davis grunted.
+
+"My mind stalls on who or what and why. And I'd rather not mention my
+guesses. I.... No!"
+
+He moved abruptly away.
+
+The _Esperance_ remained under sail near the patch of sea that had
+glittered earlier and now looked exactly like any other square mile of
+ocean. The recorder verified the position by giving out, faintly, the
+same unpleasant humming noise, either louder or fainter. A soft warm
+wind blew across the waters. The land was somewhere below the horizon.
+The reel of recorder-tape ran out. It was notable that there were very
+few fish sounds to be heard, now. Very few. But the hum continued.
+
+Toward morning it stopped abruptly. Then there was nothing out of the
+ordinary to be observed anywhere.
+
+The sun rose in magnificent colorings. The sky was clear of clouds.
+Again the waves looked like living, leaping, joyous things. Gulls were
+squawking.
+
+Doug came up from belowdecks. He carried some photographic prints in his
+hand. He'd developed and printed what the gun-cameras had photographed
+when the mysterious object, or beast, leaped clear of the sea. There
+were seven different pictures. Four showed flashbulb-lighted sections of
+empty ocean. One showed a column of sea water rising at fantastic height
+from the sea. Another one showed the edge of something at the very edge
+of the film.
+
+The seventh picture Terry recognized. It was what he'd seen when the
+flashbulb of his gun-camera went off. The focus was not sharp. But it
+was neither a whale nor a blackfish--not even a small one--nor was it a
+shark. It was not a squid. It was not even a giant manta. The picture
+was a blurry representation of something unreal made for an unimaginable
+purpose, under abnormal conditions.
+
+Deirdre looked at it over his shoulder. It could be a living creature.
+It could be ... anything.
+
+"You said you didn't like mysteries," commented Deirdre. "Are you sorry
+you came?"
+
+
+
+
+_Four_
+
+
+The next morning the _Esperance_ headed southeast over a sunlit sea.
+First, of course, the crew examined the sea's surface for miles around.
+As expected, there was nothing remarkable to be observed. Davis did
+point out that there were no fish jumping, which was an indication that
+there were not as many fish as usual in this part of the ocean. But it
+was hard to be sure. There is no normal number of times when fish will
+be seen to jump. They usually jump to escape larger fish that want to
+eat them. The number is pure chance. But there seemed to be almost no
+jumps at all this morning.
+
+It was not discussed at length, however. All the ship's company was
+curiously reluctant to refer to the events of the previous night. In
+broad daylight, a detached review was simply impractical. With gulls
+squawking all about, with seas glinting in the sunshine, with decks to
+be washed and breakfast to be eaten, and commonplace, routine
+ship-keeping to be done, the adventure of the patch of shining sea
+seemed highly improbable. Terry felt that it couldn't really have
+happened. To discuss it seriously would be like a daylight ghost tale.
+One was unable to believe it in daylight. It was better ignored.
+
+Terry, though, did get out his tools to make a minor modification in the
+underwater microphone. It had been designed to be directional, so that
+the sound of surf or fish could be located by turning the mike, but he
+hadn't been able to point it vertically downward, and last night that
+had been the key direction--right under the yacht's keel. So now he
+improvised gimbals for the microphone, and a mounting for it similar to
+that of a compass, so it could tilt in any desired direction, as well as
+turn.
+
+Which, of course, was a tacit admission that something peculiar had
+happened. Presently, Deirdre came and watched him.
+
+"What's that for?" she asked, when he fitted the gimbals in place.
+
+He told her. She said hesitantly, "Yesterday, when I asked you not to
+try the paddle until we got to shallow water, you got angry and said
+you'd ask to be put ashore. We're headed for Barca now. Someone there is
+building something for my father, the same thing I had asked you to
+build--a fish-driving instrument. If you still want to go, you can get a
+bus from there to Manila. But I hope you have changed your mind."
+
+"I have," said Terry dourly. "I told your father so. I was irritated
+because I couldn't get any answers to the questions I asked. Now I've
+got some questions your father wants answers to. And I'm going to try to
+find them out."
+
+Deirdre sighed, perhaps in relief.
+
+"I put some pictures and a clipping in a book on the cabin table," she
+said. "Did you see them?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"What did you think?"
+
+"That you put them for me to see," he said.
+
+"It was to make you realize that we can't answer every question, which
+you know now."
+
+"I still think you could answer a few more than you have," he observed.
+"But let it go. Is the Barca harbor shallow?"
+
+"Ten, fifteen feet at low tide," she informed him. "We're having a sort
+of dredge made there. Something to go down into the sea, take pictures,
+get samples of the bottom, and then come up again. There's an
+oceanographic ship due in Manila shortly, by the way. It will have a
+bathyscaphe on board. Maybe that will help find out some answers." Then
+she said uncomfortably, "I have a feeling the bathyscaphe isn't ...
+safe."
+
+He glanced up.
+
+"_Ellos?_" He grinned as she looked sharply at him. Then he said, "This
+dredge: isn't it pretty ambitious for a boat this size to try to dredge
+some thousands of fathoms down?"
+
+"It's a free dredge," she said. "It will sink by itself and come up by
+itself. There's no cable. What are you doing now?"
+
+He'd put away the submarine microphone he'd just altered and was now
+taking out the still untested underwater horn.
+
+"I'm going to try to make this directional, too," he said. "In fact, I'm
+going to try to make it project sound in a beam shaped like a fan. A
+hollow cone may come later."
+
+She was silent. The _Esperance_ sailed on.
+
+"Ever talk to the skipper of _La Rubia_?" he asked presently.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"You should. He's a stupendous, self-confident liar," said Terry. "He
+lies automatically. Gratuitously. A completely amiable man, but he can't
+tell the truth without stopping to think."
+
+"We found that out," said Deirdre. "I didn't. Someone else."
+
+"Is this another censored subject, or can I ask what happened?"
+
+"I'd better see about lunch," said Deirdre quickly.
+
+She got up and left. Terry shrugged. The day before yesterday, or even
+yesterday, he'd have been indignant. But then he'd known these people
+had secrets in which he had no share. Today he was beginning to share
+those secrets, and he had fabulously nonsensical material on which to
+work on his own. He had strange ideas about the event of last night. He
+did not quite believe them, but he thought he had devised some ways to
+see how much of truth they contained, if any. Deirdre could keep her
+secrets, so long as he did not have to disclose his own wildly
+imaginative ideas.
+
+The routine of the yacht went on. It was in a way a very casual routine.
+Davis gave orders when the need arose, but there was no formal
+discipline; there was co-operation. Terry heard one of the crew-cuts ask
+Deirdre a question using her first name. It would have been highly
+improbable in a paid crew, but it was reasonable enough in a volunteer
+expedition. He heard Deirdre say, "Why don't you ask him?"
+
+The crew-cut, Tony, came to the part of the deck where Terry worked.
+
+"We got into an argument," he said without preface. "We were talking
+about that ... 'whale' last night."
+
+Terry nodded. The use of the term "whale" was a deliberate pretense that
+the previous night's events were natural and normal.
+
+"How fast do you think it was traveling when it broached?" asked Tony.
+"I know a whale can jump clear of the water. I've seen it in the movies.
+But that one jumped awfully high!"
+
+"I hadn't tried to estimate it," said Terry.
+
+"You've got a tape of the noise," said Tony. "Could you time the
+interval between the sound when it left the water, and the splash when
+it fell back?"
+
+"Mmm. Yes," said Terry. He looked up. "Of course."
+
+"It would be interesting to do it," said Tony, semicasually. Then he
+added hastily, "I've read somewhere that whales have been clocked at
+pretty high speeds. If we can find out how long its leap lasted, we
+could know how fast it was going."
+
+Terry considered for a moment, and then got out the recorder. He played
+the tape for a moment, and skipped forward to later parts of the record
+until he came to the place where the unpleasant humming sound was loud,
+and finally reached the beginning of the rushing noise. That, in turn,
+had preceded the leap of the object photographed by the gun-cameras.
+
+Terry glanced at his watch when the rushing started. He timed the period
+of ascent of the noise, while it grew louder and louder and became a
+booming sound, which was at its loudest the instant before it ceased. At
+that moment the mysterious object had leaped out of the sea. The splash
+of its re-entry came long seconds later.
+
+Tony timed the leap. When the splash came he made his calculations
+absorbedly, while Terry switched off the recorder.
+
+"It would take the same amount of time going up as it does coming down,"
+said Tony, scribbling numbers. "Since we know how fast things fall, when
+we know how long they fall we can tell how fast they were traveling when
+they landed, and therefore when they leaped."
+
+He multiplied and divided.
+
+"Sixty miles an hour, roughly," he pronounced. "The whale was going
+sixty miles an hour straight up when it left the water! What can swim
+that fast?"
+
+"That's your question," said Terry. "Here's one of mine. We heard it
+coming for five minutes ten seconds. How deep is the water where we
+were?"
+
+"About forty-five hundred fathoms."
+
+"If we assume that it came from the bottom, it must have been traveling
+at least sixty miles an hour when it broke surface," said Terry.
+
+"But can a whale swim sixty miles an hour?"
+
+"No," said Terry.
+
+Tony hesitated, opened his mouth, closed it, and went away.
+
+Terry returned to the changing of the submarine horn. Sound has its own
+tricks underwater. If you know something about them you can produce some
+remarkable results. A deliberately made underwater signal can be heard
+through an unbelievable number of thousands of miles of seawater. But,
+except through a yet untested fish-driving paddle, Terry had never heard
+of fish being herded by sound. Still, fish can be stunned or killed by
+concussions. They have been known to be made unconscious by the noise
+of a very near submarine bell. It wasn't unreasonable that a specific
+loud noise could make a barrier no fish would try to cross. But there
+were still some parts of last night's events that did not fit into any
+rational explanation.
+
+Davis came over to Terry.
+
+"I think," he said, "that we may have missed a lot of information by not
+having submarine ears before. There may have been all sorts of noises we
+could have heard."
+
+"Possibly," agreed Terry.
+
+"We're more or less in the position of savages faced with phenomena they
+don't understand," said Davis vexedly. "The simple problems of savages
+range from what produces thunder to what makes people die of disease.
+Savages come up with ideas of gods or devils doing such things for
+reasons of their own. We can't accept ideas of that sort, of course!"
+
+"No," agreed Terry, "we can't."
+
+"But what happened last night," said Davis, "is almost as mysterious to
+us as thunder to a savage. A savage would blame it on devils or
+whatnot."
+
+"Or on _ellos_," said Terry.
+
+"He'd imagine a personality behind it, yes," said Davis. "He does things
+because he wants to, so he thinks all natural phenomena occur because
+somebody wants them to. He has no idea of natural law, so he tries to
+imagine what kind of person--what kind of god or devil--does the things
+he notices. It's a natural way to think."
+
+"Very likely," admitted Terry. "But the point?"
+
+"Is that we mustn't fall into a savage's way of thinking about last
+night's affair."
+
+Terry said, "I couldn't agree with you more. But just what are you
+driving at?"
+
+"There's a dredge being made for me in Barca. I'm afraid you may suspect
+that I'm trying to--stir up something with it. To poke something we
+_know_ is somewhere but can't identify. I didn't want you to try the
+fish-paddle in deep water, that's true. But...."
+
+"You're explaining," said Terry, "that you didn't want me to whack a
+fish-driving paddle overside in deep water."
+
+Davis hesitated, and then nodded.
+
+"The phenomena you're interested in are under water?"
+
+"Yes," said Davis. "They are in the Luzon Deep area."
+
+"Then, to be co-operative, I'll test this contrivance in ten to fifteen
+feet of water in the Barca harbor. And I will not get temperamental
+about your suggestions that I should not mess up your deep-water
+inquiries."
+
+"Thanks," said Davis.
+
+He went forward to meet Nick, just coming abovedecks with a slip of
+paper in his hand. It occurred to Terry, suddenly, that somebody went
+below down the forecastle hatch just about every hour on the hour. They
+must be in short-wave communication with Manila. It had been mentioned
+last night--a loran fix on the _Esperance's_ position. There were
+apparently frequent reports to somebody somewhere.
+
+The afternoon went by. A tree-lined shore appeared to the eastward just
+when the gaudy colorings of a beautiful sunset filled all the western
+sky. The _Esperance_ changed course and followed the coast line, some
+miles out. Night fell. The yacht sailed with a fine smooth motion over
+the ocean swells.
+
+After dinner Davis was below, fiddling with the knobs to pick up
+short-wave music from San Francisco, and the muted sound of an argument
+came occasionally from the forecastle where the four crew-cuts resided.
+Terry and Deirdre went on deck.
+
+"My father," said Deirdre, "says you understand each other better, now.
+He doesn't think you're going to feel offended with us, and he's really
+pleased. He says your mind doesn't work like his, but you come to more
+or less the same conclusions, which makes it likely the conclusions are
+right."
+
+Terry grimaced.
+
+"My conclusion," he observed, "is that I haven't enough facts yet to
+come to any conclusion."
+
+"Of course!" said Deirdre. "Just like my father!"
+
+They sat in silence. It was not exactly a tranquil stillness. It was
+pleasant enough to be here on the slanting deck of a beautiful yacht,
+driving competently through dark seas under a canopy of stars. But now
+Terry realized he was constantly aware of Deirdre. He liked her. But
+he'd liked other people, male and female, without being continually
+conscious of their existence. Girls are usually more conscious of such
+things than men. At least ninety-nine per cent of the time, a man does
+not modify his behavior because of the age, sex, and marital status of
+the people he comes in contact with. It isn't relevant to most of what
+he says and does. But a girl frequently modifies her actions in just
+such circumstances. Deirdre was well aware of the slightly uneasy,
+extremely interested state of Terry's mind. There was silence for a long
+time. Then a shooting star went across the sky. It went out.
+
+"Would you like to hear something really wild?" asked Deirdre, ruefully.
+"That shooting star, just then. It used to be true that more
+meteorites--shooting stars--had fallen and been recovered in Kansas than
+any other place in the world. But it would be ridiculous to think they
+aimed for Kansas, wouldn't it?"
+
+Terry nodded, not following at all.
+
+"At Thrawn Island," said Deirdre, "since the satellite-tracking station
+has been built, space-radars have picked up more bolides--big
+meteors--coming in to fall in the Luzon Deep than ever in Kansas or
+anywhere else. I think my father frets over that, simply because he's so
+concerned about the Luzon Deep."
+
+Terry heard himself saying irrelevantly, "I'd like to ask you a few
+strictly personal questions, Deirdre. What's your favorite food? What
+music do you like? Where would you like best to live? When...."
+
+Deirdre turned her head to smile at him.
+
+"I've been wondering," she said, "if you thought of me only as a fellow
+researcher or whether you'd noticed that I'm a person, too. Hmmmmm.
+There's a restaurant in Manila where they still cut their steaks along
+the muscle instead of across it, but where they make some unheard-of
+dishes. That place has some of my favorite foods. And...."
+
+"Next time we're in Manila we'll try it," said Terry. "Now, I know a
+place...."
+
+The _Esperance_ went on. Presently, the moon rose and moonlight glinted
+on the waves while the stars looked cynically down on the small yacht
+upon the sea. And two people talked comfortably and absorbedly about
+things nobody else would have thought very interesting.
+
+When Terry turned in for the night he realized pleasantly that he was
+very glad he'd let himself be persuaded to join the _Esperance's_
+company.
+
+Dawn came. Terry was already on deck when the _Esperance_ threaded her
+way into a small harbor. There were palm trees along the shore, and
+there was a Philippine town with edifices ranging from burnt brick to
+stucco to mere nipa huts on its outskirts. Two-man fishing boats were
+making their way out from the shore on which they'd been beached. From
+somewhere came the staccato, back-firing noise of an old
+automobile-engine being warmed up for the day's work. It would
+undoubtedly be the bus for Manila. But it was not thinkable that Terry
+should take it, now.
+
+The yacht dropped anchor and lay indolently at rest while her crew
+breakfasted and the morning deck routine was being performed. Then
+Deirdre appeared in shore-going clothes of extreme femininity. Davis too
+was dressed otherwise than as usual.
+
+"We're going ashore to the shipyard," he told Terry. "If you'd like to
+come--"
+
+"I've something to do here," said Terry.
+
+Two of the crew-cuts got a boat overside and headed it for the shore.
+Terry got out the recorder and the submarine ear and horn. He set up his
+apparatus for a test. Tony came from belowdecks and watched. Then he
+came closer.
+
+"If I can help," he said tentatively.
+
+"You can," Terry told him. "But let's listen to what the fish are
+saying, first."
+
+He dropped over the submarine ear and started the recorder to play what
+it picked up, but without recording it. Sounds from underwater came out
+of the speakers. The slappings of tiny harbor-waves against the yacht's
+planking; the chunking, rhythmic sound of oars from a fishing boat which
+was rowing after the half-dozen that had gone out earlier; grunting
+sounds. Those were fish.
+
+Terry listened critically, and Tony with interest. Then Terry brought
+out the fish-driving paddle. He turned on the tape, now, to have a
+record of the sound the paddle made.
+
+"Whack this on the water," he suggested, "and we'll hear how it sounds."
+
+Tony went down the ladder and gave the water surface a few resounding
+whacks. There were tiny, violent swirlings. For thirty or forty feet
+from the _Esperance's_ side there were isolated, minute turmoils in the
+water. Three or four fish actually leaped clear of the surface.
+
+"Not bad!" said Tony. "Shall I whack some more?"
+
+Terry reeled back a few feet of the tape which contained the whacking
+sounds. He re-played them, listening critically as before. Tony had
+returned to the deck. The whackings, as heard underwater, were not
+merely impacts. There was a resonance to them. Almost a hum. Rather
+grimly, Terry substituted this tape-reel with the recording he'd made
+the night before. He started the instrument and found the exact spot
+where the object from the depths had fallen back into the sea. He
+stopped the recorder right there. He hauled up the submarine ear and
+plugged in the horn to the audio-amplifier, as yet untested, which
+should multiply the volume of sound from the tape. Then he put the horn
+overside.
+
+He switched on the recorder again. The tape-reel began to spin. The
+sound went out underwater from the horn. Underwater it was much louder
+than when it had been received by the _Esperance's_ microphone. Here it
+was confined by the surface above and the harbor-bottom beneath. It must
+have been the equivalent of a loud shout in a closed room--only worse.
+
+The fish in the harbor of Barca went mad. All the harbor-surface turned
+to spray. Creatures of all sizes leaped crazily above the surface, their
+fins flapping, only to leap again, more frantically still, when they
+fell back. A totally unsuspected school of very small flying fish
+flashed upward in such frenzied haste that some tried to climb too
+steeply and fell back and instantly flung themselves into the air again.
+
+Terry turned off the playing recorder. The disorder at the top of the
+water ceased immediately. But he heard shrill outcries. Children had
+been wading at the edge of the shore. They stampeded for solid ground,
+shrieking. Where their feet and legs had been underwater they felt as if
+a million pins and needles had pricked them.
+
+Something flapped heavily on the _Esperance's_ deck. Tony went to see.
+It was a three-pound fish which had leaped clear of the water and over
+the yacht's rail to the deck.
+
+Tony threw it back into the water.
+
+"I guess there's not much doubt," he said painfully.
+
+"Of what?" demanded Terry.
+
+"Of what ... I had guessed," said Tony.
+
+"And what did you guess?"
+
+Tony hesitated.
+
+"I guess," he said unhappily, "that I'd better not say."
+
+He watched with a startled, uneasy expression on his face as Tony put
+the apparatus away.
+
+Time passed. Davis and Deirdre had been ashore over an hour. Then Terry
+saw the small boat leave the shore and approach. It came deftly
+alongside, the two passengers climbed up to the deck, and all four
+crew-cuts hauled the boat back inboard and lashed it fast.
+
+"Our dredge isn't ready yet," said Davis. "It looks good, but there'll
+be a delay of a few days."
+
+Deirdre examined Terry's expression.
+
+"Something's happened. What?"
+
+Terry told her. Davis listened. Tony added what he'd seen, including the
+fish that had leaped high enough out of the water to land on the
+_Esperance's_ deck.
+
+"After the fact," said Davis, "I can see how it could happen. But...."
+He hesitated for a long time and then said, "This is another case where
+I've been making guesses and hoping I was wrong. And like the others,
+proof that my early guess was wrong makes another guess necessary. And I
+dislike the later guess much more than the first."
+
+He moved restlessly.
+
+"I'm glad you only tried it once, here," he said unhappily. "We're due
+up at Thrawn Island anyhow. You can work this trick out in the lagoon up
+there. If there's no reaction to the dredge when we try it, we can try
+this. But it might be a very violent poke at something we don't quite
+believe in. I'd rather try a gentle poke first."
+
+He turned away. In minutes Nick was belowdecks starting the yacht's
+engine, two others of the crew-cuts were hauling up the anchor, and the
+fourth was at the wheel. Without haste, but with celerity, the
+_Esperance_ headed for the harbor-mouth and the open sea.
+
+They had their midday meal heading north by west. Late in the afternoon
+Deirdre found occasion to talk to Terry about Thrawn Island.
+
+"It's the China Sea tracking station for satellites," she told him.
+"Some of the staff are friends of my father's. It's right on the edge of
+the Luzon Deep, and the island's actually an underwater mountain that
+just barely protrudes above the surface. There are some hills, a coral
+reef and a lagoon. It's also terrifically steep, and you can use the
+fish-driving device as much as you please without startling any Filipino
+fishermen."
+
+"You've been there before," said Terry.
+
+"Oh, yes! I told you a fish wearing a plastic object was caught in the
+lagoon there. That was when the station was being built. The men at the
+tracking station fish in the lagoon for fun, and now they're naturally
+watching out for more ... oddities."
+
+The _Esperance_ sailed on. The crew-cuts went about their various chores
+and talked endlessly, among themselves and with Deirdre, when she joined
+in. Terry felt useless. He trailed the submarine ear overboard and set
+the recorder to work as an amplifier only. At low volume it played the
+sounds of things below. He kept half an ear cocked toward it for the
+mooing sound he'd picked up at the place where the ocean glittered. He
+heard it again now, and again found it difficult to imagine any cause
+for it. The sounds uttered by noisemaking fish are usually produced in
+their swim-bladders. The purpose of fish cries is as obscure as the
+reason for some insect stridulations, or the song of many birds. But a
+long-continued fish noise would involve a swim-bladder of large size. At
+great depths, if a considerable cavity were filled with gas, under
+pressures running into tons to the square inch.... Terry could not
+quite believe it.
+
+He did not hear the mooing sound any more, as the yacht went on its way.
+Other underwater sounds became commonplace, and he tended not to hear
+them. From the deck around him, though, he heard arguments about wave
+mechanics, prospects in the World Series, the virtues of Dixieland jazz,
+ichthyology, Copeland's contribution to modern music, the possibility of
+life on other planets, and kindred topics. The crew-cuts were taking
+their summer vacations as able seamen on board the _Esperance_, but they
+had as many and as voluble opinions as any other undergraduates. They
+aired them on each other.
+
+The afternoon passed. Night fell, and dinner was a session of learned
+discussion of different subjects, always vehemently argued. Later Terry
+took the yacht's wheel, Deirdre sat comfortably nearby, and they
+discussed matters suitable to their more mature status. They were much
+less intellectual than the crew-cuts. In a few days they developed an
+interest in each other, but each of them believed this was just a very
+pleasant friendship.
+
+Eventually, the moon rose. It was close to midnight when Nick bobbed
+belowdecks and came up with a report that they'd been picked up by the
+Thrawn Island radar and were proceeding exactly on course. Half an hour
+later a tiny light appeared at the edge of the sea. The _Esperance_
+headed for it, and presently there were breakers to port and starboard,
+the engine rumbled, down below, and the yacht lifted and fell more
+violently than ordinary. Then once more she was in glassy-smooth water;
+the air was very heavy with the smell of green vegetation. Certain
+rectangles of light became visible. They were the windows of the Thrawn
+Island satellite-tracking installation.
+
+The _Esperance's_ sails were lowered and she moved toward the lights on
+engine power only. There was no movement ashore, though Nick had talked
+with the island on short-wave.
+
+After a little while the searchlight was put in operation and began to
+reach out like a pencil of brilliant white light. It darted here and
+there and found a wharf reaching out from the shore to deep water. The
+_Esperance_ floated toward it, her engine barely turning over. There was
+still no sign of activity, except for the lighted windows.
+
+The engine stopped, then reversed, and the yacht drifted gently until it
+contacted the wharfs snubber-pilings. Jug and Tony jumped ashore with
+lines to fasten the yacht. Still no sign of life.
+
+"Queer," said Davis, staring ashore. "They knew we were coming!"
+
+A moving light suddenly appeared in the sky. A fireball, which is an
+unusually lurid type of shooting star. It came over the tree-tops and
+crossed the zenith, leaving a trail of light behind it. It went on and
+on, seemingly slowing down, which meant that it was descending from a
+very high altitude. Its brilliance became more and more intense, then it
+dimmed. At this point the fireball seemed to plunge downward. Then its
+flame went out and only a faint, dull-red speck in motion could be seen.
+
+It plunged down beyond the trees on the far side of the lagoon. Or so it
+seemed. Actually, it might have plunged into the sea, miles away. Then
+there was a faint noise which was something between a rumble and a hiss.
+The sound went back across the sky along the path the fireball had
+followed. It died away.
+
+There was silence. Shooting stars as bright as this one are rare. Most
+meteors are very small, but they are visible because of the attrition
+produced by their falling bodies in the atmosphere that sets them on
+fire. They usually appear at around a seventy-mile height, but
+frequently they are vaporized before they have descended more than
+thirty miles. Sometimes they explode in mid-air and strew the earth with
+fragments. Sometimes they strike ground, leaving monstrous craters where
+they have fallen. Most meteors fall in the sea. But a meteor has to be
+at least down to twenty miles from sea level before its sound can be
+heard.
+
+Someone came out of a building and moved toward the wharf, an electric
+lantern bobbing in his hand. Halfway out to the yacht he called,
+"Davis?"
+
+"Yes," said Davis. "What's happened?"
+
+"Nothing," said the man ashore. "We were watching for that bolide. It
+was picked up by space radar a couple of hours ago, but then we figured
+it to land farther on than it did."
+
+It was an educated voice, a scholarly voice.
+
+"Big?" asked Davis as the light drew nearer.
+
+"We've seen them bigger, but not much." The man with the lantern reached
+the end of the wharf. "Glad to see you. We've got some fish for you, by
+the way. We caught them in the lagoon. They're waiting for you in the
+deep-freeze. There's a _Macrourus violaceus_, if we read the books
+right, and a _Gonostoma polypus_. They match the pictures, anyhow. What
+do you make of that?"
+
+"You haven't got them!" said Davis incredulously. "You can't have them!
+I'm no fish specialist, but those are abyssal fish! They can only be
+caught at a depth of two or more miles!"
+
+"We caught 'em," said the man cheerfully, "on a hook and line, in the
+lagoon, at night. Come ashore! Everybody'll be glad to see you."
+
+Davis protested, "I won't believe you've got that kind of fish until I
+see them!"
+
+The man with the lantern stepped down to the yacht's deck.
+
+"All you've got to do is look in the mess hall deep-freeze. The cook's
+complaining that they take up space. Nobody wants to find out if they're
+good to eat. Most unwholesome-looking creatures! And how are you, young
+lady?" he asked Deirdre. "We've missed you. Tony, Nick, Jug...."
+
+Deirdre introduced Terry.
+
+"Ha!" said the man. "They got you enlisted, eh? They were talking about
+it a month ago. You've solved the problem by now, I daresay. Including
+how these very queer fish happen to be in our lagoon instead of miles
+down in the Luzon Deep. When you find time, tell me!"
+
+"I'll try," said Terry reservedly.
+
+The man went down into the after-cabin and Davis followed him. Deirdre
+said amusedly:
+
+"Dr. Morton's a dear! Don't take him seriously, Terry! He loves to
+tease. He'll hound you to tell him how deep-sea fish got up here and
+into a shallow lagoon. Please don't mind!"
+
+"I won't," said Terry. "I'll tell him tomorrow, I think. I believe now I
+know how it happened, but I want to check it first."
+
+
+
+
+_Five_
+
+
+When Terry awoke, next morning, the reflections of sunlight on water
+came in through the porthole of his cabin. He watched the shimmering
+contortions of the light spots on the wall. His thoughts went instantly
+back to the subject they'd dwelt on before he went to sleep. The man
+with the spectacles--Dr. Morton, but his doctorate was in astronomy
+instead of medicine--had said that Deirdre and his father had discussed
+enlisting him in the _Esperance's_ company a month ago. Deirdre'd come
+into the shop of Jimenez y Cía. only four days before. Some of the delay
+could have been caused by time spent in simple sailing from one place to
+another, mostly on wholly futile errands. They'd gotten a fish-driving
+paddle at Alua. That'd take some days of sailing each way. Apparently,
+they'd been fumbling at some vague idea of trying to find out what would
+produce the facts they'd noted. 'Very queer fish,' Davis had said of
+some of the catches _La Rubia_ had made. The abyssal fish mentioned last
+night would be very queer fish to catch in a lagoon. Yes....
+
+He lay still, surveying other aspects of the situation. Davis had called
+on an aircraft carrier for electronic items, and the _Esperance_ was in
+constant touch with somebody by short-wave radio. It might be the same
+carrier. The Manila police department was on very cordial terms with
+Davis, and the staff of a satellite-tracking installation saved odd
+specimens of fish for him.
+
+The _Esperance's_ enterprise was plainly not a brand-new adventure. It
+had been carried on for some time. They had had technical aid of the
+very highest caliber, but they hadn't gotten anywhere yet. It did
+appear that Terry had added a minor specialty to the arsenal of
+investigative techniques. Without the data gathered on recorder-tape,
+their idea of the events of two nights before would be very different.
+The sea would have seemed very bright, then the glowing area would have
+been noted to have grown smaller, and something resembling a whale would
+have been seen leaping high above the water. Then the brightness would
+have faded out. It would have been mysterious enough, but an entire
+aspect of the phenomenon would have gone unnoticed. There was still no
+answer to any of the far-reaching questions Terry had asked himself, but
+most of them had never been asked before. Sea noises had proved to be
+closely connected to whatever had to be found out. What was known about
+them was due to his findings. He'd established a new frame of reference.
+
+And he'd discovered the solution of a minor problem before the problem
+was even stated. He had only to prove it. Then, of course, there would
+be other problems arising from it.
+
+He got up, put on swimming trunks, and duck trousers over them. He
+slipped into a sweat shirt and went upon deck. Deirdre hailed him.
+
+"Good morning! Everybody's over at the tracking station, arguing about
+the bolide that went over last night. According to the radar, it plunged
+into the sea, miles and miles away."
+
+"What should it have done?" asked Terry. "I'm not familiar with
+meteorites. Are they planning to dive for it?"
+
+"Hardly!" Deirdre laughed. "It landed in the Luzon Deep." She waved a
+hand in an inclusive gesture. "This island's on the brink of it. A
+bathyscaphe might go down there--in fact, I think it's scheduled; you
+know, the one I said was coming to Manila on the oceanographic ship? A
+bathyscaphe can go that deep, but it's not likely to hunt for
+meteorites."
+
+"Ah," said Terry judicially. "Then what difference does it make where it
+hit?"
+
+"It didn't fall the way it should have," said Deirdre. "It was spotted
+by space radar away out, and they tried to compute its path, but they
+figured it wrong. Now they're trying to make it come out right by
+allowing for the effect of the earth's magnetic field on a metal
+meteorite. They're arguing and waving equations at each other."
+
+"Let them," said Terry. "I have trouble enough with fish. Do you think I
+could borrow a boat?"
+
+"We've always been able to," said Deirdre. Then she added, "I've kept
+your breakfast hot. While you eat it I'll get a boat."
+
+She went below, and instants later was up again.
+
+"I have a feeling," she said, "that something interesting is going to
+happen. I'll be back."
+
+She swung lightly to the wharf and headed for land. Terry went below, to
+find his breakfast laid out on the cabin table. He settled down to it,
+but first pulled a book from the shelves. It was a volume on
+oceanography, and its pages showed that it had often been referred to.
+He found the Luzon Deep described. Its area was relatively small, a mere
+ninety-mile-long chasm in the sea-bed. But it was second only to the
+Mindanao Deep in its soundings, and a close second at that. Its maximum
+depth was measured at twenty-seven thousand feet. Over five miles. There
+was a mention of Thrawn Island as being on the very edge of the Deep.
+According to the book, the island was the peak of one of the most
+precipitous and tallest submarine mountains in the world. Three miles
+from where Thrawn Island lay, there were soundings of twenty-eight
+thousand feet and upward. This depth extended as a trench....
+
+The staccato roaring of an outboard motor sounded some distance away. It
+bellowed toward the yacht, swung about, and cut off. Terry gulped down
+his coffee and went abovedecks, just as Deirdre was fastening the small
+craft alongside the yacht.
+
+"Taxi?" she asked amiably. "I got the boat. Where to?"
+
+Terry swung down and took the steering grip. He headed the boat away.
+There was a box for bait, a few fishing lines, and even two highly
+professional fish-spears on board. Fishing was not necessarily a
+sedentary pastime here.
+
+"We try the lagoon entrance," he said. "I've an idea. I noticed
+something last night, when we came in."
+
+"Do you want to brief me?"
+
+"I'd rather not," he admitted.
+
+Deirdre shrugged without resentment. The little craft went sturdily
+toward the passageway to the open sea. She formed an arrowhead of waves
+as she moved. She neared the points of land at the ends of the coral
+formation enclosing the lagoon. Thrawn Island was not an atoll. But the
+beaches were made of snow-white coral sand. Outside there was clear
+water for a space and then a reef on which the seas broke.
+
+Terry headed the boat toward the open sea. Almost immediately after,
+there was nothing but the reef and the sea between the boat and the
+horizon. He slowed the boat almost to a stop, well within the reef's
+tumult. She swayed and rolled on the surging water.
+
+"Stay here," he commanded. "I want to swim out and back."
+
+He pulled the sweat shirt over his head. He jumped overboard, leaving
+Deirdre in charge of the boat.
+
+The world looked strange to him when waves rolled by higher than his
+head. A few times the sky narrowed to the space between wave-crests.
+Other times he was lifted upon a wave-peak, and the sky was illimitably
+high and large, and the breaking seas on the nearby reef merely roared
+and grumbled to themselves.
+
+He swam out, away from the land. Suddenly his body began to tingle. He
+stopped and paddled, analyzing the sensation. One side of his body felt
+as if the most minute of electric currents entered his skin. It was not
+an unpleasant sensation. Deirdre, in the small boat, was fifty yards
+behind, watching him. As he swam on, the tingling grew stronger. He
+dived. The tingling did not vary with depth. He came up, and he was
+farther out than he'd realized.
+
+He suddenly knew that he'd been incautious. There are currents which
+flow in and out of lagoons. A barrier of reef affects them, too. Terry
+found himself swimming in an outward-bound current, which pushed him out
+and away from the island.
+
+Within seconds the sensation in his body changed from a mere tingling
+to torment. For a moment it was just very much stronger and slightly
+painful, but a moment later it felt as if he swam among flames. It was
+unbearable. His muscles were not contracted, as if by an electric shock,
+but he couldn't control their reflexes. He found himself splashing
+crazily, trying to fight his way out of the anguish which engulfed him.
+
+He went under. His body had taken complete control over his mind, and he
+found himself swimming frantically, underwater. He couldn't reach the
+surface. His body tried to escape the intolerable agony in which it was
+immersed but couldn't.
+
+He heard a roaring sound, but it meant nothing. The roaring grew louder.
+Finally, he did break surface for a few seconds, and he gasped horribly,
+but then he went under. The roaring grew thunderous, and he broke
+surface again....
+
+Something seized his flailing arm and pulled him up. The arm ceased to
+experience the horrible sensation of being in boiling oil. His hand
+recognized a gunwale. He swarmed up the solid object with hands helping
+him, and found himself in the boat, gasping and shivering, and cringing
+at the bare memory of the suffering he'd undergone.
+
+Deirdre stared at him, frightened. She swung the boat's bow shoreward.
+The outboard motor roared, and the boat raced past the gap in the reef
+and rushed toward the lagoon opening.
+
+"Are you all right? What happened? You were swimming and suddenly...."
+
+He swallowed. His hands quivered. He shook his head and then said
+unsteadily, "I meant to ... check the reason those queer fish stay in
+the lagoon. I thought that if they belonged in the depths and were
+somehow carried out of them, they would try to get back. I found out!"
+
+He felt an unreasonable relief when the lagoon entrance was behind the
+boat. The glassy water was reassuring. The _Esperance_ looked like
+safety itself.
+
+"I think I know how they got here, now," he added. "We underestimated
+what we're trying to understand. I'll be all right in a minute."
+
+It was less than a minute before he shook himself and managed to grin
+wryly at Deirdre.
+
+"Was there a hum in the water?" asked Deirdre, still staring at him. "I
+thought I heard it on the bottom of the boat. Was that the trouble?"
+
+"Yes. I wouldn't call it a hum," Terry admitted. "Not any longer. Now I
+know what a slow fire feels like."
+
+"You frightened me," said Deirdre, "the way you splashed...."
+
+"I heard the humming sound," said Terry, "last night when the yacht came
+up to the island. We were perhaps a half-mile off-shore. It was very
+faint, but I had the amplifier turned down low. The hum was at its
+loudest just before we passed the reef, but nobody else noticed. When
+Dr. Morton said there were abyssal fish in the lagoon, I knew why they'd
+be there. I made a guess at what might drive them there. I went to find
+out if I was right. I found out!"
+
+"The hum?" asked Deirdre again. When he nodded, she said: "What are you
+going to do now? What do you think makes the hum?"
+
+"I'm trying hard not to guess what makes the hum," Terry told her.
+"Insufficient data. I need more. I think I'll ask what other odd
+phenomena have turned up in this neighborhood. Foam-patches on the sea?
+I can't imagine a connection, but still...."
+
+He swung the little boat alongside the docked _Esperance_ and held out
+his hand to help Deirdre to the dock. His hand was wholly steady again.
+She accepted the help.
+
+"We'll go to the tracking station?"
+
+"Yes. Everybody seems to be there," said Terry.
+
+They heard a babble of voices coming from the satellite-tracking
+station. As they approached the buildings, Terry looked around. Off at
+one side there was the very peculiar aerial system by which tiny
+artificial moons circling the earth could be detected by their own
+signals. Minute spheres and cylinders and spiky objects and
+foolish-looking paddle-wheels, whirling in their man-appointed rounds,
+sent down signals with powers of mere fractions of a watt. This system
+of aerials picked up those miniature broadcasts and extracted
+remarkable amounts of information from them. It was possible to
+determine the satellites' distance more accurately, by a comparison of
+phase-changes in their signals, than if steel tape measures were
+stretched up to make physical contact with them. The accuracy was of the
+order of inches at hundreds of miles. Floating where the stars were
+bright and unwinking lights against blackness and the sun was a disk
+with writhing arms of fire, the small objects sent back information that
+men had never possessed before and did not wholly know what to do with
+now that they did. And there were other objects in the heavens, too.
+There were satellites which no longer signaled back to earth. Some had
+their equipment worn out. Some objects were satellites which had failed
+to function from the beginning. Some were mysteries.
+
+The bolide of the night before was a mystery. As Terry and Deirdre
+entered the wide verandah of the recreation building for the station's
+personnel, they heard Dr. Morton protesting, "But that's out of the
+question! I agree that we never know any more about what the Russians
+throw out to space than what we find out for ourselves. That's true! But
+this wasn't a terrestrial object! If it was a satellite that wasn't
+launched right, it had to be sent up from Russian territory. It wasn't.
+That's positive! If we assume it was a satellite that had already made
+several orbital turns, we must admit it would be an impossible shift in
+apogee for it to come down at the angle it did!"
+
+Deirdre and Terry sat down as someone else said hotly, "Our observations
+were wrong. They had to be! The earth's magnetic field couldn't affect
+the speed of an object _outside_ the atmosphere! Our observations say it
+slowed down. It couldn't!"
+
+Davis lifted a hand in greeting. The argument stopped for a moment.
+Deirdre was known, but Terry had to be introduced. He was sitting beside
+a bald young man who explained in a low tone, as the argument resumed.
+"They're having fun. They argued for days when our radar picked up an
+empty second stage in orbit. They're still ready to dispute for hours
+about a supposed retrograde satellite that was spotted last year, was
+watched for four turns, and then disappeared. Beer?"
+
+"Too early," said Terry. "Thanks just the same."
+
+Davis said earnestly, at the other side of the room, "I'd feel a lot
+better if that thing last night hadn't splashed where it did."
+
+"The bolide," said a voice humorously, "is a free animal."
+
+The discussion went on. Terry saw Deirdre talking to a middle-aged woman
+with a splendid sun-tan and a placid expression on her face. Doug and
+Tony sat watchfully on the side lines, listening. Doug had been offered,
+and had accepted, a sandwich. He ate it methodically.
+
+Terry had a sudden feeling of unreality. Less than half an hour before
+he'd been in torment and, but for Deirdre, on his way to death. On the
+_Esperance_ there'd been so much that was absorbing in the way of fish
+behavior that he'd forgotten some people were interested in other
+things. Here a dozen people squabbled over the behavior of a meteorite.
+Nothing could be of less consequence to the outside world. But in the
+outside world, people argued about baseball, or golf, or politics....
+
+Doug excused himself and slipped outside. Terry joined him there a
+little later. Doug was smoking a cigarette, looking at the sky and the
+palms.
+
+"Pretty heavy discussion," said Terry.
+
+"It's over my head," said Doug. "I got lonesome. It made me think of my
+girl. She likes to talk like this. That's why ..."
+
+He stopped.
+
+"Is there an aqualung outfit on the _Esperance_?" asked Terry.
+
+"Sure! Two or three of them. Mr. Davis had an idea they'd be useful.
+Used one of them last week to look at the _Esperance's_ bottom-planks.
+Why?"
+
+"I'd like to poke around the bottom of the lagoon a little," said Terry,
+with unconscious grimness. "Would you help?"
+
+"Sure!" said Doug.
+
+They went back to the _Esperance_. Doug got out two aqualung outfits.
+They checked the valves and tanks and connections. Doug brought out two
+spring guns. In half an hour they were in the outboard, headed for what
+Doug said was the deepest part of the lagoon.
+
+Arrived there, Terry tested the water with his finger and then went
+overside. Instead of a spring gun, he used one of the fish spears that
+seemed to be standard equipment for fishing, here. Doug stayed in the
+boat to watch.
+
+Terry'd guessed that what he looked for would be in the deepest part of
+the lagoon. He was right. Within half an hour he'd speared five fish of
+types that had no business being within two thousand fathoms of the
+surface. He ignored the lagoon's normal inhabitants. He picked on fish
+of a dark-red color, which is predominant in the depths but not
+elsewhere. When the fish had extremely small eyes or extremely large
+ones, he hunted them determinedly, knowing they were deep-sea fish. He
+caught five, which was a good haul, even considering his previous
+suspicions.
+
+Doug inspected the catch as the outboard went back to the yacht. Terry
+replaced his spear under the gunwale.
+
+"They're queer fish," observed Doug. "I wouldn't want to eat them."
+
+"Neither would I," agreed Terry. "But I feel a certain sympathy for
+them. I think we've shared an experience."
+
+He did. Fish so far from their normal environment would not have
+migrated unless they'd been forced to. So these fish must have been
+driven up from the blissful utter blackness of the abyss, which was
+their habitat. He had a vivid memory of the kind of urging they'd
+received, because of his recent swim outside the reef opening. That was
+the experience he believed they shared.
+
+He got his catch onto the _Esperance's_ deck and found some sharp knives
+in the galley, while Doug put the aqualungs away. When Doug came
+abovedecks again, he looked distastefully at the work Terry had
+undertaken.
+
+"Do you like to do that sort of thing?" he asked.
+
+"Hardly!" said Terry. "But I want to get it done."
+
+Doug watched for a moment or two.
+
+"I'm pretty keen about poetry. Sometimes I feel I've got to sweat over
+a poem that I need to get written. It's hard work. There's no real sense
+to it. But I feel it's got to be done. I guess that's the way you feel
+now."
+
+"Perhaps," said Terry.
+
+It wouldn't have occurred to him to liken the writing of verses to the
+dissection of dead deep-sea fish, but Doug had a point. He went away
+presently, and Terry completed the highly unpleasant task. He had just
+finished flushing the deck clean when Deirdre came back from the
+tracking station. He was already at work on the recorder when she
+stepped onto the deck.
+
+"You didn't stay," said Deirdre. "I was waiting for a chance to tell my
+father about the hum outside the lagoon, but he was as deep in the
+meteor argument as any of them. I still haven't told him."
+
+"There's something else to tell him now," Terry remarked. "I went down
+with an aqualung. Doug was standing by," he added at her gesture of
+protest, "and speared some fish that don't belong here. I've dissected
+them. Their swim bladders had been very skillfully punctured, so if they
+went or were driven into lesser pressure, they'd leak instead of
+bursting. That's how they survived coming up from the depths. But the
+main thing is this."
+
+He held out a small plastic object in his hand. It was about an inch in
+diameter and two in length, and there were inclusions in the clear
+material. There were plates and threads of metal. They had that look of
+mysterious purpose that highly-developed technical devices have.
+
+"This was fastened to the fin of a fish that belongs as far down as a
+fish can go," he said. "I've found out one of its purposes. When it is
+in the water, it makes a sound more acute than a whistle every time
+another sound strikes it. Try that on your piano!"
+
+Deirdre stared.
+
+"I'm saying," he repeated, "that it takes in one sound and gives out
+another. It's ... it could be a relay. What is that for? What's it all
+about? What does it mean? And I ask just those questions because I don't
+dare ask who and why!"
+
+"What ... what will you do?" asked Deirdre absurdly.
+
+"I've no idea," Terry told her. "I've got a feeling that the wise thing
+to do would be to settle down somewhere and buy a shop, and forget all
+this. If I don't think about it, maybe it'll go away."
+
+"I'll get my father and see what he says."
+
+"Tell him," commanded Terry, "that I want to try out my fish-driving
+horn. I'd like to have witnesses. If this foolishness has to be reported
+to somebody, we need evidence of the facts. I want to drive fish and see
+how many deep-sea ones there are in this lagoon, and how many of them
+have spy-devices on them."
+
+Deirdre turned away. Then she turned back.
+
+"Spy-dev--"
+
+"I slipped," said Terry. "I shouldn't have said that. Forget it. Just
+tell your father I have an extremely urgent impulse to drive fish, and
+would he come and help."
+
+Deirdre looked at him strangely, and went onto the wharf to search for
+her father.
+
+Terry paced back and forth on the _Esperance's_ deck. In a few minutes
+Davis and the crew-cuts appeared with Deirdre. But they were not alone.
+Straggling behind them came nearly all the personnel of the tracking
+station. There would be somebody on official duty, of course. But here
+was the bespectacled Dr. Morton; the bald young man who'd offered Terry
+beer; and the installation cook; a typist, and specialists in radar and
+other abstruse subjects.
+
+Deirdre said, "I told them about the fish-driving business and they want
+to see. They stopped arguing about last night's bolide to take ringside
+seats. All right?"
+
+Terry shrugged. He had the recorder already set up. He'd taken a section
+of the tape made where the sea was bright, at the place where the
+loudest of the unpleasant humming noise was recorded. He'd made a loop
+of it so it would play over and over.
+
+He played the much-amplified sound through the underwater horn held in
+the air. The result was a raucous bellowing noise. He lowered it into
+the water. The horn touched the surface and went under.
+
+Instantly, the fish of the lagoon seemed to go crazy. All the surface
+broke and writhed and splashed. There was an incredible number of fish.
+Terry turned the horn on one side. In this way, not all the water was
+filled with the intolerable noise, but only a net-like beam of it raced
+across the water. Within that line the fish continued to leap
+frenziedly. The rest of the lagoon suddenly quieted down. In a little
+while the beam's space, also, grew quiet. But that was because the fish
+that had been previously caught in it had escaped.
+
+"I'm afraid," said Terry, "that this isn't going to be very
+entertaining. I'm going to sweep the beam across the lagoon, pushing the
+fish ahead of it, until I should have them all in one small area."
+
+It was curious that he felt uncomfortable as he set about his task. But
+he'd experienced the sensation this sound produced. And it was not very
+pleasant.
+
+He turned the beam around, slightly. Again, there were sudden
+splashings. They died away. He turned the beam again. It was a nasty,
+snarling vibration in the water. So far as fish were concerned, it was
+more like a wall than a net, because not even the tiniest living
+creature could penetrate it. Not only fish fled before it. Shrimps and
+crabs and all types of crustaceans jerked and crawled and swam ahead of
+its motion. Jellyfish writhed when it touched them. Sea cucumbers
+contorted themselves. Everything that lived in the lagoon and could swim
+or crawl or writhe moved before the invisible barrier. Presently, the
+effect of crowding could be seen, and fish began to leap out of water.
+
+"This is a great advance in civilization," said Dr. Morton. "Men
+invented guns and destroyed the buffalo and the passenger pigeon! You
+may have made it possible to depopulate the sea!"
+
+Terry did not answer. The morning sun shone brightly, a gentle breeze
+made ripplings on the lagoon, the palms waved their fronds in languid
+gestures, and the surf could be heard booming and splashing on the outer
+reef. And about two dozen people stood on the wharf or on the
+_Esperance's_ deck and watched a spliced section of recorder-tape go
+through and through a recorder, which was set to make a sound underwater
+that could not be heard by the people above.
+
+The fish of the lagoon had crowded themselves into a minor embayment of
+the shore. There were innumerable leapings there.
+
+"There should be plenty of fish collected now," said Terry
+distastefully. "I certainly can't herd them ashore."
+
+The outboard boat pushed away from the yacht, its motor roaring. It
+reached the area in which the water seemed to seethe and surge with the
+motion of densely-crowded swimming creatures. The people in the boat
+examined the surrounding water, then the boat came back at top speed.
+
+"They're there!" called Davis. "And thick enough to walk on! I clearly
+saw some freaks that must come up from the bottom! We want to collect
+them!"
+
+"I speared five just now," Terry told him, "and one of them was wearing
+this."
+
+He held up the plastic object he'd found. There was silence for a
+moment. Then Dr. Morton said briskly, "We'll want fish spears. We'll
+take all the boats and go after some more of these piscatory oddities.
+Who's best with a spear?"
+
+Davis would go. He could use the two fish spears that were standard
+equipment for the outboard. The staff of the tracking station scattered
+to launch other boats. Only Terry and Deirdre remained on the
+_Esperance_. It was necessary for someone to stand by the recorder.
+
+Boats moved away across the water. One stout member of the island's
+staff trudged along the shore.
+
+"You're driving them," said Deirdre. "You are right."
+
+"I wish I weren't," said Terry.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You know how these weird fish got here," he said impatiently. "They
+were driven here. You know how they've been kept here. I experienced
+that! I told you why they didn't die when they came up from thousands of
+fathoms! Now, what's the only possible purpose for their being here? Put
+it more scientifically! What is the consequence of these happenings, so
+that to some biological entity it would be a favorable happening?" His
+tone was sardonic, at the end.
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"I hope I don't either," said Terry dourly.
+
+He was in no amiable mood. He'd made too many guesses like those Davis
+had mentioned. He was beginning to have less and less hope that they
+were untrue. Each new development made any imaginable cause of these
+events just so much more appalling to think about.
+
+In an hour, three boats came back from the small bay into which all the
+fish of the lagoon had been crowded. Terry turned off the underwater
+horn. A stout man walked slowly along the shore with a heavy burden of
+known edible fish. He was the island's cook, and he had speared them
+from the beach. The boats, altogether, had speared and captured not less
+than sixty specimens of fish normally found only many thousand feet
+below the ocean's surface. Upon inspection, all of them were found to
+have deftly punctured swim bladders, punctured with so slender a barb
+that the opening would close by itself, except when serving for the
+release of intolerably expanding gas.
+
+Before noon, seven more plastic objects had been found among the
+deep-sea fish. Three seemed identical to the one Terry had found. Two
+others were identical to each other but of a different kind, and the
+last two were of two different types altogether. Only those like the one
+tested by Terry seemed sensitive to sounds, which they changed into
+other sounds at a twenty-thousand-cycle frequency, or higher. The rest
+did nothing that could be detected.
+
+During the afternoon, news came to distract the absorption of the
+tracking station staff in the lagoon's fish. The short-wave operator
+came running to the wharf, waving a written message. The deck of the
+_Esperance_ was not a pretty sight, just then, with the dissection that
+had been taking place on it. Jug was beginning to flush the debris
+overside.
+
+The short-wave operator arrived. Dr. Morton read the message. He raised
+his voice.
+
+"Here's a fancy one!" he told the assembled company. "Space-radar's
+picked up a new object coming in from nowhere. It will probably orbit
+once before it hits the air and burns. By the line of motion it should
+pass nearly overhead here. We're alerted to get it under observation
+and watch it!" He waved the message in a large gesture. "We've got to
+get ourselves set up! The argument on the path of last night's bolide
+and why it fell where it did is again in order. We'll see what we can do
+about computing the fall-point of this!"
+
+He headed for the shore. The staff followed, babbling. Somebody's
+mathematics would be verified, and with it his views on the possible
+effects of terrestrial magnetism on objects approaching the earth.
+
+"We ought to get these plastic things to Manila," Davis said slowly.
+"They need to be compared to others. But I think we'll wait and see this
+bolide first."
+
+A heated argument started in the tracking station staff. From Dr. Morton
+downward, almost to the station's cook, the most varied predictions were
+made. The official computation from Washington, made from the observed
+course and height and speed, predicted that the bolide would land
+somewhere in the South Pacific. Dr. Morton predicted a fall in the China
+Sea, within a certain precisely stated number of miles from Thrawn
+Island. Other predictions varied.
+
+At exactly fourteen minutes after eight--a time way ahead of the
+official schedule but exactly as Dr. Morton had predicted--the bolide
+passed overhead. It was an amazing spectacle. It left a trail of flame
+behind, across thirty degrees of sky. It went on and on....
+
+Less than ten minutes later the short-wave radio informed the island
+that the shooting star had been seen to fall in the sea. It had been
+observed by a plane which was then circling over the area in which the
+_Esperance_ had encountered the circle of shining sea. The plane was
+there to see if the phenomenon would occur again. It didn't.
+
+But the plane saw the bolide as it struck the sea, and huge masses of
+steam and spray arose. The bolide was not white-hot, then, as when it
+passed over Thrawn Island. It was barely of dull-red brightness. It hit
+the sea and sank, leaving steam behind.
+
+The water was forty-five hundred fathoms deep at that point.
+
+
+
+
+_Six_
+
+
+Fourteen hours later the _Esperance_ made ready to sail from Thrawn
+Island. Her purpose was to carry the plastic objects to Manila, where
+they would be turned over to specialized laboratories to be studied.
+Five such objects had been found before: one in the Thrawn Island
+lagoon, while the satellite-tracking station was under construction, and
+four attached to exotic fish brought to market by the commercial fishing
+boat _La Rubia_. Now there were eight more, of four different kinds. To
+the laboratories would go Terry's observation that one kind of these
+objects absorbed sound at audible frequencies and retransmitted it at
+much higher ones, but only under water. All this was very interesting
+and very puzzling.
+
+But a serious disturbance had arisen at the tracking station.
+
+Dr. Morton came to the _Esperance_ before her departure. He had a
+problem. He'd predicted to the minute, and almost to the mile, the
+landing of the bolide of the night before. That was the first accurate
+prediction of the kind in history. But his forecast stood alone in its
+precision. Nobody else had even come near being right. Now he was being
+insistently queried by astronomers the world over. They wanted to know
+how he'd done it. In particular, they wanted to know how he'd figured
+that the bolide would lose just so many feet per second velocity,
+neither more nor less, in a three-quarter orbit around the world. Nobody
+else had such a figure in his equation for the landing spot. Dr. Morton
+had. His prediction had been exact. Where did he get that necessary but
+inexplicable figure?
+
+He beckoned Davis and Terry to go below with him, in the _Esperance's_
+after cabin. Terry hesitated.
+
+"You may as well hear my troubles," said Morton vexedly. "You're largely
+responsible for them."
+
+Terry followed uneasily. He didn't see how Dr. Morton could hold them
+responsible. He had guarded his own guesses about the _Esperance's_
+discoveries against even the slightest expression. He couldn't let
+himself believe in their correctness, but he was appalled at the
+inadequacy of all other explanations of past events.
+
+"In sixteen months," said Morton annoyedly, down below, "we've spotted
+six bolides coming in to land in the Luzon Deep. That's out of all
+reason! Of course, it could be a mathematical series of wildly unlikely
+coincidences, such as probability says may happen sometimes. Up to last
+night that seemed to be a possible explanation."
+
+Davis nodded. His expression was odd.
+
+"But now," said Morton somehow indignantly, "that's ruled out! It's
+ruled out by last night's bolide, and yesterday's fishing experiment,
+and that business of the shining sea, plus those damned plastic gadgets
+and deep sea fish thriving in shallow water! There's no reasonable
+explanation for such things, and they're not mere coincidences!"
+
+"I'm afraid," admitted Davis, "that they're not."
+
+"The obvious explanation," said Morton doggedly, "I refuse to name or
+consider. But nevertheless the question is not whether a theory or an
+explanation is unlikely or not. The question is whether it's true!"
+
+Davis nodded. Terry had to agree. But the way people are trained in
+modern times puts a great emphasis on reason, often at the expense of
+fact. Terry felt the customary civilized reluctance to accept a
+statistically improbable idea.
+
+"I'm on a spot," fumed Morton. "I calculated that the damned bolide
+would slow after it went into orbit around the earth. I calculated that
+it would slow exactly so much. Do you want to know how I figured how
+much it should slow down? I'll tell you! I calculated exactly how much
+it would have to slow to be able to fall into the Luzon Deep! It did
+slow. It did fall there. But how am I going to explain that to
+Washington?"
+
+Terry suddenly felt a warm sympathy for Morton. It is bad enough to
+dispute with oneself when something incredible happens. But Dr. Morton
+had gone out on a limb. He'd been caught psychologically naked telling
+the truth, and now he was asked to explain it. And he couldn't.
+
+"This thing has got to come to a head!" he said angrily. "Sooner or
+later they'll find out that I don't calculate where it'll land by its
+behavior in space but by its landing spot! Davis, you've talked about
+stirring something up. For Heaven's sake, do it! You may save my
+reputation! And you...."
+
+"I'll try to think of something," said Davis reservedly.
+
+"I've got to have proof that my suspicions are right or wrong before I'm
+ruined. I know what you're planning to do. Do it! Is there anything that
+can be done here to help?"
+
+Davis spread out his hands helplessly. But Terry said, "Yes. Send a boat
+every so often to listen at the gap in the reef. Put an oar overboard
+and put your ear to the handle. You should hear the underwater hum, if
+it's still there. It was there this morning."
+
+Morton looked at him suspiciously.
+
+"Why check on it? Should it change?"
+
+"Perhaps," said Terry. "We've speared most of the deep-sea fish in the
+lagoon. Maybe we've interfered with ... the reports from the plastic
+objects, telling what was happening up here. There may be a reaction. If
+so, most likely the humming will stop, and after a longer or shorter
+time begin again. And then, if my guess is right, there'll be more
+deep-sea creatures in the lagoon."
+
+"Ha," said Morton. "I think you and I have the same kind of delusions!
+All right. I'll see that that's done. You two do the rest."
+
+He went abovedecks. When Terry got on deck, Dr. Morton's angular figure
+was already marching along the wharf to the shore.
+
+There was no ceremony of departure. The _Esperance_ cast off and her
+engine started. She moved toward the lagoon entrance under power only,
+but her sails were hoisted as she floated on, and Jug Bell was trimming
+the jib when she cleared the opening to the sea.
+
+The humming in the water was still audible to the submarine ear, close
+to the land. It occurred to Terry to take a bearing on the source of the
+sound, noting both the compass direction and the vertical angle from
+the reef. If his vertical-angle reading was accurate, a line from the
+reef to the source of the sound would touch the bottom at twenty-seven
+thousand feet down, between four and five miles away.
+
+The _Esperance_ sailed on. The humming duly faded away. Terry left the
+recorder picking up undersea sounds, without recording them. It relayed
+the underwater sounds to the people on deck. It was in Terry's mind to
+keep at least half an ear cocked to it, in case the mooing sounds, heard
+and recorded elsewhere, should come again.
+
+They did not. The _Esperance_ went methodically on her way, headed south
+by east, under sail. A slowly swaying horizon of unbroken sea was all
+about. There was nothing in the least unusual or mysterious to be seen
+anywhere.
+
+Presently, Terry found himself in conversation with Deirdre, and the
+world seemed so blatantly normal that their talk dodged all unusual
+trends. They talked about their childhoods, about things they had done
+and places they had seen.
+
+At about four in the afternoon Nick bellowed, "_Thar she blows!_" in a
+fine attempt at proper whaling ship style, and all the _Esperance's_
+company joined to watch a spouting far ahead. The yacht changed course a
+little, and presently reached a pod of sperm whales at the surface. The
+huge dark bodies moved leisurely through the water. Jud displayed great
+erudition on the subject and explained in detail how their spouting
+proved them to be sperm whales. Deirdre pointed out a baby whale close
+beside a larger one.
+
+They sailed on, leaving the whales behind. The crew-cuts, inevitably,
+argued about them. They canvassed all the information and misinformation
+they possessed and came up with a heated discussion about whales, how
+they can swim down to the enormous depths without suffering from the
+bends on rising again. Then the conversation turned to the food they
+eat. Whalers, in the old days, had found snouts of squids and undigested
+sections of squids' tentacles in the stomachs of harpooned sperm whales.
+There were reports of sections of tentacles four feet thick, implying a
+startling total size, all of which proved that the whales had been at
+the bottom of the ocean, where such gigantic squids can be found. These
+were the reports of reliable whaling skippers. Certainly the scars made
+by the tentacular arms of huge squids, indicating battle, have been
+found on the skin of sperm whales, and there have been reports of
+battles on the surface between whales and squids of sizes most
+naturalists would be unwilling to certify. In such cases it was assumed
+that the squids had been attacked at the bottom of the sea and had
+followed the whale to the surface when it came up in need of air.
+Certainly only an enormous squid would be able to sustain a battle with
+a whale.
+
+Terry listened to the discussion. Everybody had his own opinion.
+
+"You'd never settle the argument, unless you could put a camera and a
+flash gun on a whale and get an instrument-report from it."
+
+Which was not a new idea, of course. But it was curious that the thought
+of sending self-reporting instruments down to the bottom of the sea had
+been suggested by his own suspicion that similar instruments had been
+sent up from below. Sounding lines had been lowered with thermometers
+and nets and sampling machines. Core-takers had been dropped to get
+samplings of abyssal mud. But tethered instrumentation is never more
+than so useful.
+
+Deirdre said something. Terry realized that she'd repeated it. He'd
+become absorbed in the possibilities of instrument-reporting from the
+surface to the depths and back again.
+
+"You're not listening," protested Deirdre. "I'm talking about the
+bathyscaphe that ought to be in Manila any day now."
+
+"I'm trying to picture myself going down in a bathyscaphe," said Terry
+hastily. "I don't think I'd like it."
+
+A bathyscaphe is a metal sphere with walls and windows of enormous
+thickness, hung from a metal balloon filled with gasoline for flotation.
+It is lowered to appalling depths with the help of heavy ballast, and is
+equipped with electric motors for independent motion. It carries
+powerful electric reflectors which allow as much as thirty or forty feet
+of visibility. It rises to the surface again when its ballast is
+dumped. There are only three such undersea exploring devices in the
+whole world.
+
+"I'm not at all sure you wouldn't like it," said Deirdre.
+
+Terry scowled at his own thoughts. There are opinions a man holds firmly
+without ever being aware of them, unless they are challenged, and if
+that happens, he is deeply suspicious of the challenge because it
+suggests that his opinion needs to be re-examined. Terry had been
+gathering scraps of information here, and unquestionable items there,
+resisting a conclusion all the while.
+
+It seemed fantastic to think that the plastic objects carried by
+deep-sea fish out of their natural environment were actually man-made
+instruments--telemetering apparatus closely comparable to the devices
+used to transmit information from outer space. It was wildly imaginative
+to suppose that they transmitted information from the water surface to
+the depths of the ocean; that fish had been driven up from the abyss in
+order to report what went on at the surface. Report to whom? It was the
+most fantastic of fantasies to think that there was curiosity, in the
+Luzon Deep, about the manners and customs of the inhabitants of the
+surface waters and of those areas not covered by the sea.
+
+But Terry stopped short. There were limits to the ideas he would allow
+his brain to think about.
+
+Deirdre walked away, and he assured himself he never thought of anything
+so ridiculous as the conclusions he had just reached. Presently, dinner
+was served, and Terry painstakingly acted like a perfectly rational
+person. After dinner Davis, as usual, settled himself down to enjoy a
+program of symphonic music from San Francisco, many thousands of miles
+away. And Deirdre vanished from sight again.
+
+Later on Terry found himself alone on the _Esperance's_ deck, except for
+Nick at the wheel--a mere dark figure seen only by the light of the
+binnacle lamp. There was a diffused, faint glow coming from the
+after-cabin hatch. Up forward, one of the crew-cuts plucked a guitar,
+and Terry could imagine Doug dourly trying to read poetry despite the
+noise. The sails were black against the sky. The deck was darker than
+the sea.
+
+Terry's guesses haunted him. He assured himself that he did not
+entertain them even for an instant. They were absurd! A part of his mind
+argued speciously that if they were absurd there was no reason not to
+test them. If he was afraid to try, it would imply that at least part of
+him believed them.
+
+He picked up one of the plastic objects, and moved the recorder close to
+the lee rail. It still transmitted faithfully, at minimum volume, the
+washing of the waves as heard from beneath, and occasional small sounds
+from living creatures, generally far away in the sea. Heeled over as the
+_Esperance_ was, his hand could reach down into the rushing waters
+overside.
+
+He came to a resolution. He felt foolish, but by now he was determined
+to try an experiment. Tiny light-blue sparks flashed where the water
+raced past the yacht's planking. When he dipped his hand, water piled up
+against his wrist and a streak of brightness trailed away behind.
+
+He tapped the plastic object against the hull. One tap, two taps, three
+taps, four taps. Then five, six, seven, eight. He went back to one. One
+tap, two, and three and four. Five and six and seven and eight.
+
+The recorder gave out the tappings the underwater microphone had picked
+up. It seemed to Terry that the loudspeaker struggled to emit the
+shrillest imaginable sounds in strict synchrony with the tappings.
+
+Then Deirdre's voice came quietly, very near.
+
+"I don't think," she said evenly, "that that's a fair thing to do."
+
+He'd been bent over the rail in an awkward position. He straightened up,
+guiltily.
+
+"I know it's nonsense, but I was ... ashamed to admit ..."
+
+"To admit," Deirdre concluded for him, "that by tapping numbers with a
+plastic spy-device, you hoped to say to whom it might concern that we've
+found a communicator, and we know what it is, and we're trying to get in
+touch with the intelligent creatures who made it."
+
+To hear his own self-denied guesses spoken aloud was appalling. Terry
+instantly disbelieved them entirely.
+
+"It's ridiculous, of course," he protested. "It's childish...."
+
+"But it could be true," said Deirdre. "And, if true, it could be
+dangerous. Suppose whatever put those plastic gadgets on the fish
+doesn't want to be communicated with? Suppose it feels that it should
+defend the secret of its existence by killing those who suspect it? I
+wasn't spying on you," she added. "I heard the tappings down below."
+
+Then she was gone. He saw the interruption in the light from the
+after-cabin hatch as she went below.
+
+He was suddenly filled with horror at the idea that if his guesses did
+prove to be right, he might have endangered Deirdre. And then he ceased
+to feel foolish. He felt like a criminal instead.
+
+For a long, long time he listened with desperate intensity to the
+recorder, lest he hear some reply to his signals.
+
+But no answer came. The sounds from undersea remained utterly
+commonplace.
+
+When morning arrived he was in a state of desperate gloom. At breakfast
+Deirdre acted as if she considered the incident closed. And, such being
+the nature of men, Terry felt worse than before.
+
+He was not wholly at ease again, even when that afternoon the
+_Esperance_ sailed in past Cavite and Corregidor and into Manila Bay. A
+new ship was at anchor in the harbor. It was a stubby, stocky ship which
+Davis regarded with interest.
+
+"That's the _Pelorus_," he told Terry as the yacht passed within a mile,
+on the way to her former anchorage. "She's the hydrographic ship with
+the bathyscaphe on board. We'll visit her. I'll get Nick to call her on
+short-wave."
+
+He went forward, where Nick was making ready to drop the anchor. Davis
+took over the chore, and Nick went below.
+
+"Are you going ashore?" asked Deirdre.
+
+Terry shrugged. "I've no reason to."
+
+She looked relieved. "Then you'll stay with the _Esperance_
+until--things are settled one way or another? I mean, you're really
+enlisted?"
+
+"Until there are no more ways left for me to blunder," said Terry
+distastefully. "I'm about through the list, though."
+
+"Not at all!" protested Deirdre. "Tapping numbers was really a very good
+idea. I was horrible! I scolded because you'd kept it a secret from me.
+I'd have been proud if I'd thought of it first!"
+
+Nick came back and spoke to Davis. Davis came aft.
+
+"The _Pelorus_ will send a boat as soon as we've anchored," he told
+them. "They've heard something and want to see the plastic objects."
+
+"I'd like the long end of a bet that they don't believe in them, or us,"
+Terry said abruptly. "They're established authorities on the ocean
+bottom. They know a lot. They probably know so much they can't really
+believe there's anything more to know than what they're busy finding out
+now."
+
+Davis shook his head. He was confident. The _Esperance_ anchored, almost
+exactly where she'd been when Terry first came on board. Within half an
+hour a boat arrived from the _Pelorus_. Terry repeated his refusal to go
+along. Deirdre went along with her father.
+
+They came back a little over an hour later. At first Davis was almost
+speechless with fury. Then he told Terry, choking on his rage,
+"According to them, the plastic objects are a hoax. The hum is a school
+of fish. We aren't trained observers. At Thrawn Island they're
+astronomers and they simply don't know anything about biology. And we
+should realize that it's starkly impossible for intelligence to develop
+where the oxygen supply is limited. It's unthinkable that abyssal fish
+should have their swim bladders punctured so they won't explode from
+release of pressure when they come to the surface. Those in the lagoon
+aren't abyssal fish, just unfamiliar species!"
+
+"Well?" Terry asked.
+
+"Oh, they're going to make a bathyscaphe dive!" said Davis as angrily as
+before. "As a matter of courtesy to somebody--not us. They'll make it
+where we found fish packed in a circle. That happens to be the deepest
+part of the Luzon Deep, in any case. They don't object to our sending
+our dredge down first. They will be politely interested if it comes back
+up."
+
+"I," announced Deirdre, "I am so mad I could spit!"
+
+"There's no use in our staying here," said Davis, seething. "Our dredge
+should be ready. We'll go up to Barca and tow it to the point we want to
+send it down."
+
+He ordered Nick to get ready to lift anchor.
+
+"One question," Terry said finally. "Did you mention the bolides?"
+
+"No!" snapped Davis. "Would I want them to think I was crazy?"
+
+He stamped away.
+
+The _Esperance_ put to sea again. She sailed north along the coast. At
+dinner everybody was quiet. It was the only meal, since Terry's joining,
+that had not been enlivened by an elaborate argument on some subject or
+other. Davis was still in an abominable mood. He knew it, and held
+himself to silence.
+
+Later, Terry and Deirdre talked together. They refrained tacitly from
+speaking of marine biology or any reasons for tapping plastic objects
+against the _Esperance's_ hull. They discussed only trivia, but somehow
+Terry found any subject absorbing, when he was with Deirdre.
+
+After a while she went below, and he stayed abovedecks, smoking. The
+moon had not yet risen when he turned in.
+
+They sailed into the small harbor of Barca at ten in the morning. By
+twelve, local boatmen had towed out an ungainly object some thirty-two
+feet long. They tethered it to bitts at the _Esperance's_ stern. By one
+o'clock they had loaded on her deck a large, folded sack of sailcloth
+and half a dozen specially-cast concrete blocks with eyed iron rods
+cemented in them. At half-past one Deirdre, who had gone ashore in one
+of the yacht's own boats, came back with innumerable supplies she'd
+bought. At two o'clock the _Esperance_ went out to sea again.
+
+The towed object was a construction around a central wooden spar with an
+iron tube at its top end and half a dozen lesser spars linked loosely to
+its bottom. A mass of fishnet was fastened to the smaller spars and
+heavy ropes were holding the spars and the net in place during its tow.
+There was a hook for attaching the main spar to the concrete sinkers.
+
+"It opens like an umbrella," explained Deirdre. "We'll hoist it upright
+barely out of the water, and fasten on the weights. The canvas bag fits
+on that iron pipe. When you let it go, it sinks like an umbrella that's
+tightly closed, but when it touches bottom the weights spread it out and
+an explosive charge automatically goes off in that iron tube. It's
+special explosive. The gas it makes inflates the canvas bag, which can't
+burn underwater, and that floats the whole thing back up with the ribs
+of the umbrella stretched out and spreading the net between them. It
+should catch anything it encounters as it rises. As the pressure lowers,
+the excess gas can escape through a relief-valve. This dredge is
+experimental. If it works, it can be modified to do lots of things."
+
+"Such as poking at things we don't believe in," said Terry drily. "That
+explosion ought to stir up anything in its neighborhood. It'll be much
+more disturbing and audible than a few light taps against the
+_Esperance's_ hull!"
+
+Deirdre grinned ruefully and did not answer.
+
+The bulky tow slowed the yacht. She did not reach the position of the
+fish-filled circle until after nightfall, and it was necessary to have
+plenty of light by which to locate the inflated bag when it came to the
+surface, so nothing could be tried until the following morning. A short
+while before daybreak, lights appeared at the horizon. Red and green
+sidelights, and white central lights. It was a steamer. It came closer
+and closer. Presently, it turned and headed upwind and went dead slow,
+barely keeping steerage. It was the _Pelorus_.
+
+Dawn arrived in a golden radiance which thrust aside the night. The
+_Pelorus_ shone brightly in the first rays of the sun. A large object
+was hoisted out of her hold. Its shape was that of a gravid goldfish,
+with a smaller sphere hanging beneath it. It went overside, slowly, and
+there it floated, rolling wildly on the waves. For a very long time
+nothing seemed to happen. Then the water-level of the float sank a
+little. It was being filled with gasoline, which is lighter than water
+and practically incompressible.
+
+On the _Esperance_, the tow had been pulled alongside and the yacht's
+powerful winch hauled it upright. The yacht heeled over from the weight.
+The crew-cuts fastened the canvas sack in place, and Davis loaded the
+explosive charge into the iron tube. The crew-cuts cleared the nets.
+This preliminary operation seemed promising, and it was quite likely
+that the dredge would operate as it was designed to do.
+
+The _Pelorus_ whistled impatiently. Nick abandoned his job and went
+below to the short-wave set. He returned shortly after.
+
+"The _Pelorus_ says she'll be ready to send the bathyscaphe down for a
+test dive in two hours," he reported. "She says she will object if our
+gadget is floating free at the time, on the chance that it might
+interfere with the bathyscaphe. She asks if you can send our dredge down
+right away and get it over with."
+
+"Tell them yes," said Davis. "In five minutes."
+
+He compressed his lips. The _Esperance's_ device, though clumsy, was
+fundamentally simple. Five minutes later the top of the central spar was
+level with the water. "Cut away," said Davis.
+
+Doug slashed the single rope holding the dredge. It sank immediately.
+
+The recorder gave off the sound of waves. Occasionally, very
+occasionally, a chirping or a grunt could be heard. Twenty minutes.
+Thirty.
+
+There was a "crump!" from the loudspeaker which reported underwater
+events. The sound seemed to come from very far below. Even a small
+amount of explosive makes a very considerable concussion when it goes
+off so far down, and the shock travels in all directions instead of
+merely upward. The recorder picked up that concussion as a deep-bass
+sound.
+
+The sun shone. The wind increased. Waves marched in serried ranks from
+here to there.
+
+A long, long time later the inflated canvas bag came up and was floating
+on top of the waves. The _Pelorus_ whistled. Nick went below. A few
+minutes later he came up again to report.
+
+"The _Pelorus_ says not to cast our dredge adrift. They're sending the
+bathyscaphe down unmanned, to test all apparatus before a manned dive.
+They don't want any debris in the sea."
+
+"Tell them we send them a kiss," snapped Davis, "and they needn't
+worry!"
+
+The _Esperance_ approached the floating bag. Jug swung out on the
+lifting boom and hooked it. The winch hauled it out of the water. The
+concrete weights were gone. What the nets had captured was not pretty to
+see. A dead fish with foliated appendages had come up from far below, to
+judge by what its unpunctured swim bladder had done to it in
+uncontrolled expansion. Davis said curtly it was _Linophrine arborifer_,
+belonging two thousand fathoms below. An angry-looking creature,
+similarly dead, was _Opisthoproctus grimaldi_. It belonged deeper than
+the other. There were other specimens. A _genostoma_ of a species the
+books didn't picture; a _Myctophum_; and various other creatures, mostly
+as grotesque as their scientific names. All were abyssal fish. They had
+died while rising from a pressure of several tons per square inch to
+surface-pressure only.
+
+"It worked," said Davis curtly. "I almost wish it hadn't. Let it down
+into the water again. We'll jettison it when the _Pelorus_ gives us
+permission."
+
+Time passed. More time. Still more. The bathyscaphe was now in the
+water, practically awash. Only a small conning tower showed above the
+waves. Men swarmed around it.
+
+There came a query from the _Pelorus_. The _Esperance_ gave assurance
+that the deep-sea dredge had returned to the surface and would be kept
+there.
+
+The bathyscaphe was allowed to sink.
+
+The recorder on the yacht began to pick up deep-toned mooing sounds from
+the depths.
+
+Presently, the mooing sounds ceased.
+
+Two hours later, waves broke over an object completely awash on the
+ocean. The _Pelorus_ steamed cautiously toward it. Boats went down from
+her sides and surrounded the float.
+
+After a long time the _Pelorus_ got alongside and men quickly fastened
+the huge buoy to the ship. Then the down-wind sea changed its
+appearance. A reek of gasoline reached the _Esperance_.
+
+"Something happened," said Davis dourly. "They're dumping the
+gasoline--not even pumping it aboard. Let's get out of the stink."
+
+The _Esperance_ beat to windward. The _Pelorus_ began to lift something
+large and ungainly out of the water. The _Esperance_ went down-wind to
+take a look at it.
+
+The yacht went past no more than fifty yards away, just as the
+bathyscaphe left the water and swung clear.
+
+The bathyscaphe's conning-tower was gone. It had been torn away by brute
+force. The three-inch-thick steel globe.... Half of it was gone. The
+rest was crushed. The sphere, which had been designed to resist a
+crushing pressure of ten tons per square inch, had been ripped in half!
+It had been bitten through. Bitten!
+
+There was no comment by anybody on the _Esperance_.
+
+Half a mile from the oceanographic ship, Davis said in a peculiarly flat
+voice, "Cut away the dredge. We won't try to use it again."
+
+Someone slashed the inflated canvas bag. It collapsed. Somebody cut away
+a rope. The free dredge sank, slowly. It would never come up again.
+
+The _Esperance_ changed course. She headed north by west. There was
+still no conversation at all. The yacht seemed to tiptoe away from the
+scene of the bathyscaphe's destruction.
+
+A long time later, Deirdre said tentatively, "Have you been making
+guesses, Terry?"
+
+"Guesses, yes," he admitted.
+
+"Such as?"
+
+"Your father denied that the dredge was designed to stir up whatever
+gathered the fish together and then carried them down to the bottom of
+the sea. I was right there with him in the denial, but that's what we
+intended, just the same. We said we didn't believe there was anything
+there, so it couldn't do any harm to poke it. We poked, all right! Our
+dredge, and then the bathyscaphe...."
+
+"But what ..."
+
+"And a bolide fell right there a couple of nights ago," said Terry
+irrelevantly. "I wonder what the entity on the ocean-bottom thought of
+the bolide. Hm." He paused. "I wonder, too, what the bolide thought of
+what it found down there. Is that too crazy for a sane man to think,
+Deirdre?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Why is my father working on this business?" she asked. "And why are the
+boys helping, and why do radar stations tell us what they find out, and
+why did the Philippine Government ask the _Pelorus_ to make a
+bathyscaphe dive at just that spot?"
+
+Terry blinked at her.
+
+"Too crazy for official notice, eh?" he said, "but too dangerous not to
+check up on! Is it absolutely certain that the bolides are bolides?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Thanks," said Terry. He pursed his lips as if to whistle. "I've been
+thinking of this thing as a puzzle. But it isn't. I'm very much afraid
+it's a threat!" He paused. "Y-y-es. I've just made a new guess. It adds
+everything together. I do hope it's wrong, Deirdre! I've got cold chills
+running up and down my spine!"
+
+
+
+
+_Seven_
+
+
+As the _Esperance_ sailed northward, she looked almost unreal. From a
+distance she might have been an artist's picture of an imaginary yacht
+heeled over in the wind, sailing splendidly over a non-existent ocean.
+The sky was a speckless blue, the sun was high.
+
+But she was real enough, and the China Sea around her was genuine, and
+what had taken place where the _Pelorus_ lay now hull-down, stowing a
+ruined bathyscaphe in her hold, had unquestionably taken place.
+
+Something monstrous and terrible was hidden in the dark abyss below the
+yacht. The ferocity of its attack on the bathyscaphe was daunting. And
+ferocity has always, somehow, a suggestion of madness about it. But the
+humming sound in the sea was not the product of madness. It was a
+technical achievement. And plastic objects with metal inclusions....
+
+Davis joined Deirdre and Terry. Before Davis could speak she said, "I
+can't imagine any guess that will add everything together, Terry."
+
+Davis made a jerky gesture.
+
+"Today's business is beyond all reason," he said unhappily, "and if
+there ever was an understatement, that's it! If there can be any
+conceivable motive for the plastic objects, which the _Pelorus dismisses
+as hoaxes, the motive is to use them to find out_ something about
+surface conditions; that is, for surface conditions to be reported back.
+And that's not easy to imagine. But try to think of something easier!
+And yet, such mindless ferocity as attacked the bathyscaphe ... that
+wouldn't be curious about the surface!"
+
+"No-o-o-o," agreed Terry. "It wouldn't. But we'd set off a bomb down
+below to stir things up. A couple of hours later the bathyscaphe went
+down. A stupid and merely ferocious thing of the depths wouldn't
+associate a bomb that exploded with a bathyscaphe that came down two
+hours later. It took intelligence to make the association of two falling
+objects with danger."
+
+Deirdre beamed suddenly.
+
+"Of course! That's it! Go on!"
+
+"Curiosity implies intelligence," said Terry carefully, "and
+intelligence is a substitute for teeth or claws. We don't assume that
+the fish that carry the plastic gadgets made them. Why assume that
+whatever attacked the bathyscaphe did it of its own accord? We believe
+that something else makes the deep-sea fish come up into the Thrawn
+Island lagoon, don't we? Or do we?"
+
+"We pretend we don't," said Deirdre.
+
+Davis nodded reluctantly.
+
+"Yes, we pretend we don't," he agreed. "But if intelligence is involved,
+I find myself getting frightened! We humans are always terrified of
+strange types of intelligence, anyhow. If it's intelligence that isn't
+human ..."
+
+Nick came up from below.
+
+"Thrawn Island calling," he reported. "They say the hum at the lagoon
+opening stopped for some forty-odd hours and then started again. They
+ask if we're coming. I said we were on the way. They're standing by.
+Anything we should tell them?"
+
+"We'll get there some time after sunset," said Davis. "And maybe you
+should tell them about the _Pelorus_ and the bathyscaphe."
+
+Nick grinned briefly. "I did. And the guy on Thrawn Island said 'Hooray'
+and then explained that he said that because he couldn't think of
+anything that fitted the idea of something biting holes in three-inch
+steel." He added, "I can't think of a proper comment, either."
+
+"We'll get to Thrawn Island after sunset," repeated Davis. "Then we'll
+see what we find in the lagoon--if anything."
+
+Nick started back toward the bow. He stopped.
+
+"Oh, yes! It wasn't a scientific guy talking, just the short-wave
+operator. The science staff is all busy. He said they heard an hour ago
+that another possible bolide's been spotted by a space-radar back in the
+US. It was picked up farther out than one's ever been spotted before.
+Five thousand miles high."
+
+Davis nodded without comment. Nick went forward and disappeared below.
+
+A school of porpoises appeared astern. They caught up with the
+_Esperance_. They went rocketing past, leaping exuberantly for no reason
+whatever. They cut across the yacht's bow and zestfully played around
+her two or three times, then went on, toward a faraway horizon. They
+managed somehow to give the impression of creatures who have done
+something they consider important.
+
+"It's said," said Terry, "that porpoises have brains as good as men's. I
+wish I could get one or two to talk! They might answer everything! I'm
+getting obsessed by this infernal business!"
+
+"I've been at it for months," said Davis. "In the past week, though,
+with you on board, I have found out more things I don't understand than
+I believed existed!"
+
+He walked away. Deirdre smiled at Terry.
+
+"My father paid you a tribute," she said. "I think we've been wasting
+time, you and I. We do a lot of talking to each other, but we haven't
+been applying our massive brains to matters of real importance."
+
+"Such as what?" asked Terry dourly.
+
+"Foam," said Deirdre. "Big masses of foam seen to be floating on the
+sea. Always over the Luzon Deep. Photographed by a plane less than a
+month ago. Reported by fishermen much more often than you'd suspect. At
+least once a ship sailed into a foam-patch and dropped out of sight,
+exactly as if there were a hole in the sea there. Let's talk about
+that."
+
+They settled down on the after-cabin roof and began a discussion on the
+foam-patches, for which there was no hint of an explanation. Then
+Deirdre mentioned that when she was a little girl she'd always been
+fascinated by the sight of her father shaving. The foam--the
+lather--entranced her. And somehow that led to something else, and that
+to something else still. A full hour later they were talking enjoyably
+about matters of no conceivable relationship to large patches of foam
+seen floating on the ocean's surface where the water was forty-five
+hundred fathoms deep.
+
+Davis came to a halt beside them.
+
+"Morton's just been talking to me from Thrawn Island," he said abruptly.
+"He's very much upset. It's about that prospective bolide that was
+spotted from Palomar. It's been right there for two hours."
+
+Terry waited.
+
+"Morton," said Davis, "would like us to try to photograph it when it
+comes in, back where the _Pelorus_ was this morning."
+
+Terry stared. Shooting stars are not rare. On an average summer night
+anybody can see at least three in an hour's watch of any one quarter of
+the sky. Bolides are a rare kind of shooting star. Still, many people
+have seen one or two in their lifetime. But nobody plans ahead of time
+to observe a bolide, and still less does anybody ever plan in advance to
+watch a meteorite arrive on the earth's surface, whether on land or sea.
+It is simply not thinkable.
+
+"We'll go back and try," said Davis. He seemed embarrassed. "Morton says
+there's no sense to it at all, and that if we do get photographs they'll
+be considered fakes. He's really wrought up. But he asked if I thought I
+could get a plane out from Manila to watch it fall--if it comes. I'm
+going to try that too." He added, more embarrassed still, "Of course
+nobody'd pay attention if I explained why the plane should go there.
+I'll have to say that I'm just looking for something else peculiar to
+happen at that spot. The _Pelorus_ must have already reported that one
+peculiar thing has happened."
+
+Terry opened his mouth, and closed it again. Davis went away.
+
+"You had an idea," said Deirdre accusingly. "What?"
+
+"I was thinking of Horta," said Terry. "Police Captain Horta. A very
+honest man with no scientific knowledge at all. Nobody with a scientific
+education would pay any attention, but I could get him to tell a few
+others who know as little as he does, and if the damned thing does turn
+up, there'll be proof it was foretold. If it doesn't arrive--" Terry
+shrugged, "I've no scientific reputation to lose."
+
+"Wonderful!" said Deirdre warmly. "But you wouldn't have proposed it but
+for me! I'll put things in motion!"
+
+She vanished. Within minutes the _Esperance_ came about in a wide
+semicircle and headed in the direction from which she had just come.
+Deirdre stayed out of sight for a long while. When she came up it was to
+tell Terry that Nick was calling on the short-wave set. He'd raised the
+flattop in Manila Bay. The flattop had raised the shore. Telephone calls
+were being made to here and there and everywhere to get Horta to a
+short-wave station to take a call from Terry.
+
+It was near sunset when the complicated call was ready and Horta's voice
+came into a pair of headphones Terry was wearing in the _Esperance's_
+radio room.
+
+"I need," said Terry slowly, "to have a number of people in Manila know
+now of something that's going to happen out at sea tonight. They'll be
+needed to testify that they knew of the prediction before the event. Can
+you arrange it?"
+
+"_Por supuesto_," said Horta's voice cheerfully. "Are we not _amigos_?
+What is the prediction and who should know?"
+
+"The prediction," said Terry doggedly, anticipating disbelief and
+protest, "is that at twelve minutes after nine o'clock tonight a large
+meteorite will fall into the sea where--hmm--where _La Rubia_ catches
+her fish. No, you'd better not locate it that way. I'll give you the
+position."
+
+Davis, standing by, wrote the position in latitude and longitude and
+handed it to him. He read it into the transmitter.
+
+"Have you got it?" he demanded. "Is it written down?"
+
+"Ah, yes," said Horta tranquilly. "I will see that they make a
+memorandum of the matter. Shall I tell three or four persons, or more? I
+have news for you also. Jimenez...."
+
+"Look here!" said Terry sharply. "I want this thing to be past all
+doubt! Everybody who's ever been worried about _La Rubia_ should know
+about this! There should be no possible doubt about it! But there should
+be disbelief, so people who don't believe will try to verify that it
+didn't happen, so they can crow over the people who thought it would, or
+might."
+
+"Ah!" said Horta. "You wish you stick out the neck! It is serious! Now
+tell me again!"
+
+"At twelve minutes after nine tonight," said Terry doggedly, "A shooting
+star will fall into the sea at...." He named the latitude and longitude
+Davis had given him. "That is where _La Rubia_ catches her fish."
+
+"A shooting star will fall there?" protested Horta. "But who knows where
+they fall?"
+
+"You do," said Terry. "This one, anyhow. Now, will you see that a number
+of people know about it?"
+
+"It is cr-azy!" objected Horta. Then he said, "I will do it."
+
+The short-wave call ended, with Horta too much disturbed to refer again
+to Jimenez.
+
+By sunset Doug had gotten out the gun-cameras. Doug held an impromptu
+class on deck, showing the other crew-cuts exactly how to aim the
+cameras and expose the films, and what button to press to change film
+automatically between shots. He was unhappy because he did not know how
+bright the object to be photographed would be, for his lens-settings. He
+was even more unhappy because the bolide might travel at practically any
+angular velocity, so he didn't know how to set the shutters. But the
+focus would be infinity, and if he used the fastest possible film, he
+could stop most motion with a hundredth second exposure.
+
+Instead of reaching Thrawn Island shortly after sunset, then, the
+_Esperance_ was back above the place where the dredge had been dropped
+and the bathyscaphe wrecked. The _Pelorus_ was gone. The people on board
+that ship must have been very upset. The bathyscaphe had cost more money
+than is usually allotted to most scientific researchers, and now it was
+smashed. How would they justify themselves? They could hardly blame the
+_Esperance_.
+
+The yacht sailed in a closed pattern over this area of the Luzon Deep.
+Deirdre served dinner on deck. Stars shone down almost instantly after a
+sunset of unusual magnificence, even for the China Sea. Tony brought his
+guitar aft, and a contagious feeling of exhilaration spread about the
+_Esperance_ and an improvised party took place on deck. Maybe the mood
+for festivity arose from the realization that at least nine-tenths of
+the world's population would have graded them as lunatics, had it known
+their project for the evening.
+
+It would have been unjust, of course. Terry reflected that it had not
+been their idea to make an appointment with a shooting star. They were
+doing it out of some sort of professional courtesy, "from one set of
+crackpots to another," Terry phrased it in his own mind. It was a wild
+attempt to secure proof of the starkly impossible. So there was chatter,
+singing, and some dancing. The high spot was perhaps the time when Jug
+bashfully serenaded the rigging and the stars above it with howling
+melodies he'd learned in college.
+
+Eventually, Nick went down to the short-wave set. Doug passed out the
+gun-cameras again, after checking each one. Nick popped his head out of
+the hatch.
+
+"Dr. Morton's been calling like crazy," he reported. "The bolide's made
+four orbital turns, coming in all the while. It ought to touch the
+atmosphere next time around. ETO is nine-twelve-seventeen-seconds. I
+told him we're all set."
+
+His head disappeared.
+
+"Don't forget!" Doug said anxiously. "The cameras will feel like
+shotguns but don't lead your target! And don't forget to press the
+film-changer!"
+
+Terry lifted his gun-camera experimentally. It did feel like a shotgun.
+And then, suddenly, he disbelieved everything: the purpose of the
+_Esperance's_ original investigation; the phenomena that had been
+observed; the guesses that had been made. It was pure insanity! He felt
+a quick impatience with himself for becoming entangled in anything so
+ridiculous.
+
+Deirdre leaned toward him and whispered forlornly, "Terry! It's
+dreadful! I've just had an attack of common sense! What are we doing
+here? We're crazy!"
+
+He put his hand consolingly over hers. The act was unpremeditated and
+the sensation was startling. He found that they were staring at each
+other intently in the starlight.
+
+"I think ..." said Terry, unsteadily, "that it's very sensible to be
+crazy. We've got to ... talk this over."
+
+Deirdre smiled at him shakily.
+
+"Y-yes, we will."
+
+Then Davis pointed out positions for the camera operators. The bolide's
+course should be three hundred fifty degrees, not quite on a north-south
+line. It might land short of, or beyond, the _Esperance_. Or it might
+pass many miles to the east or west. Dr. Morton needed as many pictures
+of it against recognizable stars as could possibly be secured.
+
+Suddenly, there was a faint, dull rumbling in the heavens. It grew
+louder. Presently, cruising lights appeared in the sky. They maintained
+a fixed relationship to each other. They looked like moving stars,
+flying in formation from star-cluster to star-cluster.
+
+Nick popped abovedecks again.
+
+"The planes just called us," he reported. "They've just had a Loran
+position-check and they're on the mark. They've got orders to observe
+any unusual phenomena occurring around nine-twelve P.M., Manila time.
+Using civilian terminology, it sounds like they're saying the Philippine
+Government asked them to come out and take a look."
+
+"It's five after nine now," said Davis.
+
+The _Esperance_ headed into the wind. Her bow rose and fell. Waves
+washed past, and roarings trundled about under the stars overhead, and
+very tiny lights moved in a compact group across the firmament.
+
+Time passed.
+
+At twenty-two seconds after nine-twelve--which is to say at twenty-one
+hours, twelve minutes, twenty-two seconds--a light appeared in the sky
+from the north. It grew steadily brighter. It suddenly flared very
+brightly indeed, then dimmed, and continued to rise above the horizon.
+Seconds later it flared again, very briefly.
+
+Terry found himself aiming the gun-camera. He pulled trigger and changed
+film and pulled trigger and changed film.
+
+The bright light ceased to climb. It grew steadily brighter and
+brighter, and then it flared for the third time--Terry's mind asked
+skeptically, 'Braking rockets?'--and the light was so intense that the
+cracks in the yacht's deck-planking could be seen. Then the extra
+brilliance vanished, and suddenly the moving light was no longer white,
+but reddish.
+
+Terry aimed again and fired the gun-camera.
+
+The light passed almost directly overhead. Terry had the impression that
+he felt its heat upon his skin.
+
+It plunged into the sea two miles beyond the _Esperance_. The shock-wave
+caused by the impact tapped on the yacht's side-planking a few seconds
+later. Starlight shone upon a plume of steam.
+
+Then there was nothing but the noise of the circling planes above. Then
+a sound, as of thunder. It disappeared northward. It was the sound of
+the bolide's passage, arriving after the object itself had dived into
+the sea.
+
+The people on the _Esperance_ were dumfounded. Nick went below and came
+up again a few minutes latter.
+
+"The planes were calling," he reported. "They say they noted the unusual
+phenomenon. They ask if they should stay around for something else."
+
+"I think," said Davis caustically, "that that's all that's scheduled
+just now. Tell them so."
+
+The _Esperance_ went on steadily again, a trifle west of north. Davis
+was below, talking via radio to Dr. Morton at the satellite tracking
+base.
+
+Terry and Deirdre went to look for a place where they could talk over
+something privately. It was of enormous importance to them, but it was
+not connected with fish or meteorites or plastic objects or anything at
+all but the two of them. And to them the yacht seemed crowded with
+people, even though there was nobody else abovedecks but one of the
+crew-cuts at the wheel.
+
+When the _Esperance_ entered the lagoon the next morning, though, their
+private talk had evidently come to a satisfactory conclusion. Deirdre
+smiled at Terry without any reason whatever, and he looked at once smug
+and embarrassed and uneasy, as if he possessed a new status to which he
+was still unaccustomed.
+
+The recorder, trailing a submarine ear overboard, had duly reported the
+presence of the hum in the water, just outside the lagoon. It had not
+been operating for forty hours or thereabouts. During that time the fish
+inside could go out of the lagoon, if they chose. And other fish could
+come in. Terry said suddenly, as the yacht went under power toward the
+tracking station wharf, "Suppose there was a cone of noise just outside
+the lagoon, and the flanks of the submarine mountain under us were
+included in the cone? And suppose the cone grew smaller, like the other
+one. What would happen?"
+
+Deirdre shook her head, smiling at him.
+
+"The fish," said Terry, "could escape into the lagoon."
+
+"Probably," agreed Deirdre.
+
+"And if fish could be driven downward along a certain path," said Terry,
+"the way we saw it happen, why, fish could be driven up in a certain
+path, too."
+
+"Obviously," said Deirdre.
+
+"So if something wanted to replace the fish in the lagoon, or to add to
+their number, why, it would puncture their swim bladders far, far down,
+and then drive them up to the surface and into the lagoon, and then keep
+the noise going to keep them inside."
+
+"Is this a new idea?" asked Deirdre.
+
+"N-n-o," admitted Terry. "I've had it for some time."
+
+"So," said Deirdre, "have I."
+
+The _Esperance's_ engine stopped, and she floated to gentle contact with
+the wharf. Members of the tracking station staff made the yacht fast.
+With others, Dr. Morton came on board. His expression was the picture of
+unrelieved gloom.
+
+"I'm in a nice spot!" he told Davis. "I predicted a second bolide
+correctly! I had to use a different retardation factor to make the math
+come out right. Now I'm asked to explain that! How can I tell them I
+knew where it would fall, and only had to compute when?"
+
+"Come below and look at the pictures we got," said Davis.
+
+They disappeared down the after-cabin hatch. Terry knew about the
+pictures. Doug had developed them with sweating care, developing each
+negative separately and adjusting the development-time to the varying
+exposures of the bright object.
+
+There was a total of twenty reasonably good pictures of the bolide, from
+its first appearance to its plunge into the ocean, two miles from the
+_Esperance_. Doug had enlarged some of them. There were distinct
+star-patterns in most. In nearly all, though, the object was more or
+less blurred by its own motion. In those taken when it flared most
+brightly, the blurriness was especially marked. There was only one
+picture of professional, if accidental, quality, and it was the least
+convincing of all. It showed the fore-part of a conical shape traveling
+point-first. Nobody would conceivably believe that it was a meteorite.
+It looked artificial.
+
+Terry and Deirdre, as it happened, stayed on deck. The people of the
+tracking station made a babbling uproar. It appeared that the most
+important event in history, as history was viewed on Thrawn Island, had
+taken place the night before. It was revealed--Terry had not suspected
+his own success--that in asking Horta to see that there was
+foreknowledge of a meteoric fall, Terry had arranged for the matter to
+be taken immediately to high Philippine Government officials. The
+American flattop, at their request, had sent planes to the place of the
+fall, with orders which were enigmatic only until the descending object
+appeared. Then every man in every plane knew that he'd been sent there
+to see it.
+
+So there could be no question but that Dr. Morton had predicted it. That
+meant that he knew more about meteoric objects than anybody else in the
+world. What he had to say was of vast importance, and Thrawn Island
+shared in his achievement. But it was a strictly professional triumph.
+The news would not break in the newspapers. No ordinary reader would
+believe in it. And nobody anywhere would believe in Morton's knowledge
+of the place of the fall before he began to calculate.
+
+Terry observed that the people of Thrawn Island were definitely no
+longer interested in fish. They'd kept their eyes open for oddities
+because a deep-sea fish with a plastic object attached had been caught
+in the lagoon a long while before. They'd been intensely interested when
+Terry herded all the lagoon fish into one small inner bay, and they
+speared sixty fish that had no business being at the surface. They'd
+found eight more plastic objects. Such things had been interesting, if
+not important. But now the head of the Thrawn Island staff had computed
+the place and time of arrival of a meteoric mass from space! And he did
+it when that mass was five thousand miles out! From a professional
+standpoint, this was stupendous! They tried to make Terry see how
+important it was.
+
+Davis and Morton came up from below. They headed for the shore. The
+crew-cuts trailed off to the land with most of the visitors. Only
+Deirdre and Terry remained on the yacht, with a mere short-wave operator
+from the island.
+
+"We're going to have a fancy lunch, with champagne and speeches," the
+operator said hopefully. "You'll come?"
+
+"Naturally!" said Terry. "But first we're going swimming. We haven't had
+a chance to be overboard since the last time we were here."
+
+"We'll be back in time for lunch," Deirdre assured the operator, "but
+swimming here is so wonderful! We've been talking about it for days!"
+
+She went below to change. The operator shrugged. After a further attempt
+to interest Terry in the celebration of an astronomical first, he went
+ashore. Terry went with him to get the outboard motorboat he and Deirdre
+had used before. He was already wearing swimming trunks.
+
+A little later the small boat putt-putted away from the _Esperance_ upon
+the glassy-rippled waters of the lagoon.
+
+There was a very great tranquillity everywhere. The booming roar of the
+surf came from unseen rollers on the reef outside. Seabirds squawked.
+Palms along the edge of the lagoon waved their fronds very, very gently.
+
+"How far will you go before we swim?" asked Deirdre. "All the lagoon's
+perfect. One place is as good as another."
+
+He cut off the motor.
+
+"Hmmm. There's a deep place yonder," he observed. "That's where I went
+with the aqualung and speared the freak fish. Stay away from it."
+
+She jumped over in a clean dive. He joined her in the water. She came
+up, blowing bubbles.
+
+"All right, Terry. What are your troubles?"
+
+"That bolide bothers me," he told her. "It had a specific destination!
+It was meant to hit the water over the Luzon Deep!"
+
+She dived again. This time Terry followed her. The underwater world was
+beautifully bright, with ripplings making everything seem to shimmer
+because of the changing light. When they came up again Deirdre said,
+"Funny!"
+
+"It had a purpose!" insisted Terry. "There were others before it, and
+they had a purpose too! That's not funny!"
+
+"I didn't mean that," said Deirdre. "I meant ... just now, under the
+water.... What's that?"
+
+There was a swirling at the surface, some tens of yards away. It was not
+the curling eddy made by a fish about to break surface. It was too big a
+disturbance for that. It looked as if something stirred, barely
+submerged, but something very large. Terry, staring, thought of a
+porpoise cavorting just below the ripples. Or perhaps a shark. But
+sharks and porpoises are too small to have made this eddying. It
+reappeared.
+
+"Get in the boat!" snapped Terry. "Quick!"
+
+While she climbed in he let himself sink, his eyes open. There was a
+clouding of the water underneath, where the surface-disturbance had
+been. It was mud from the bottom which had been stirred up. He could see
+nothing clearly through it, though nearby and around him he could easily
+see the colorings of coral and fan sponges, and he could see small fish
+darting here and there.
+
+He broke surface. Deirdre bent anxiously over the gunwale.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I don't know," he said curtly. "But give me a fish spear."
+
+"You won't...."
+
+"I just want to have something in my hand," he told her impatiently,
+"while I look."
+
+He took the spear she handed him, and sank once more. Again something
+moved in the deeper part of the lagoon. It was a fretful motion, as if a
+creature or creatures tried to burrow away from the light shining
+through the water. Whatever moved, a thick cloud of debris from the
+bottom floated all the way up to the surface.
+
+Terry came up for air.
+
+"There's something queer there," he said shortly. "I don't know what."
+
+He went under and swam cautiously nearer to the disturbance. He was
+within a few feet of the curling cloud of obscurity when something like
+a gigantic worm came out of it. Or maybe it was like an elephant's
+trunk, only no elephant ever had a trunk so huge. It was a dull and
+glistening writhing object. Its end was rounded. The tip of the
+worm-like thing must have been a foot in diameter, and it came out of
+the mud cloud for four feet, then six, then, fifteen feet. It thickened
+only slightly in that length. It groped blindly in the brightness.
+
+Terry swam back quickly, and the object reared up and made a groping
+sweep through the clear water. Some peculiar white disks suddenly
+appeared on the underside of the long tentacle. They looked like
+sucker-disks, able to grip anything at all. The monstrous tentacle
+fumbled for Terry, as if guided by the pressure-waves his movements
+generated.
+
+Terry froze. Deirdre moved in the boat almost directly overhead.
+Something clanked in the boat and he heard it. The boat was probably
+rocking, making the pressure-waves that a creature from the abyss would
+depend upon for guidance where eyes would not serve at all.
+
+The thick, bulging tentacle reached toward the sound at the surface, now
+ignoring Terry, though he was nearer. He was still. The white
+sucker-disks on its under side had several rings of a horny, tooth-like
+substance at their rims. The smallest were about four inches wide. The
+fumbling object felt blindly in the water. Deirdre stirred again in the
+boat. The visible portion of the groping monstrosity was already longer
+than the boat. The whole creature would be enormous! If this groping arm
+rested upon the gunwale of the boat, it could easily swamp it.
+
+It groped for the boat, coming horribly out of a cloud of mud. It
+reached out. In another instant it would touch....
+
+Terry plunged his fish spear into the worm. It jerked violently. There
+were enormous thrashings. Other similar white-disked arms thrust into
+view, fumbling somehow angrily for the creature--Terry--which had dared
+to attack it.
+
+He darted for the surface. Something unspeakably horrible touched him,
+but it was the smooth and not the suckered side of the groping worm.
+Terry's head was now above water. He grasped the gunwale to pull himself
+in, in a fever of haste. But the thing that had touched him before came
+back. It grazed his leg, for just a second. Where it touched, his flesh
+burned like fire.
+
+"Start ... motor!" gasped Terry. "Get away!"
+
+Something touched the stern-board of the boat. Deirdre pulled the
+starter of the motor.
+
+"Get in!" she said tensely. "Quickly!"
+
+She saw him, straining every muscle by pure, agonized instinct against
+the irresistible force of whatever clung to his skin. The horrible
+tentacle stretched, and part of its length took a new grip. It crawled
+upon him.... Deirdre saw the look on his face.
+
+She snatched up the second spear and stabbed past him, into the crawling
+beast. There was a most violent jerking. She stabbed again. She panted.
+She gasped. She stabbed and stabbed, sobbing with fear and horror. And
+Terry tumbled in over the gunwale, released. As soon as he fell onto the
+floor-boards he painfully dragged himself toward the motor at the stern.
+Something bumped the boat underneath. Terry pulled the starter and the
+motor suddenly roared. But the boat didn't start immediately, and it
+jerked once more. The whirling propeller-blades had touched one of the
+groping tentacles and cut it. Tumult arose.
+
+The boat surged into motion and Terry, with clenched teeth, sent it into
+a crazy, skidding turn to avoid a surface swirl, and then another
+frantic swerve when something showed momentarily above the surface. The
+boat zig-zagged along. A grisly, writhing object rose above the water,
+flailing, a fish-spear sticking in it. The small, skimming boat dodged
+and twisted at its topmost speed.... It suddenly straightened out and
+almost flew across the water toward the land.
+
+
+
+
+_Eight_
+
+
+Echoes of the outboard's roaring motor came back from the trunks of palm
+trees that lined the lagoon's shore as the tiny boat raced across the
+water. Deirdre was ashen-white. She turned her eyes from the water, and
+they fell on the round raw places on Terry's leg where the sucker-disks
+had bruised it horribly. She shuddered. She still had the sensation of
+being pursued by the monster. Back where Deirdre's spear had finally
+liberated Terry, startled and convulsive motions continued, followed by
+a final gigantic splash. Terry drove the boat on at top speed.
+
+The monster sank again in the spot where the lagoon was deepest. It had
+come from depths where there was no light; from an abyss where blackness
+was absolute. Now, having lost its victim, it returned peevishly to such
+darkness as it could secure.
+
+Terry said curtly, as the small boat raced for the _Esperance_ and the
+wharf, "That creature was driven up from the Luzon Deep into the lagoon
+to replace the gadget-carrying fish we speared!"
+
+Deirdre stammered a little.
+
+"Your l-leg.... You're bleeding...."
+
+"I'm pretty well skinned in a couple of places," he said shortly.
+"That's all."
+
+"Could it be poisonous?"
+
+"Poison," said Terry, "is a weapon for the weak. This thing's not weak!
+I'm all right. And I'm lucky!"
+
+"I'd have jumped over with my spear, if ..."
+
+"Idiot!" said Terry gently. "Never think of such a thing! Never! Never!"
+
+"I wouldn't want to l-live--"
+
+A new reverberating quality came into the echoes from the shore. The
+pilings of the wharf were nearby, now. They multiplied the sounds they
+returned. The _Esperance_ loomed up. Terry cut off the motor, the little
+boat drifted to contact, and Deirdre scrambled to the yacht's deck, and
+then took the bow line and fastened it. This was absurdly commonplace.
+It was exactly what would have been done on the return from any usual
+ride.
+
+"Go tell the others what we found," said Terry. "I'm going to see if
+there's more than one of those things around."
+
+"Not ..."
+
+"No," he assured her. "I'm only going to use the fish-driving horn."
+
+Deirdre looked at him in distress.
+
+"Be careful! Please!" She kissed him suddenly, scrambled to the wharf,
+and set off at a run toward the shore. Terry stared hungrily after her.
+They'd come to a highly personal decision the night before on the
+_Esperance_, but it still seemed unbelievable to him that Deirdre felt
+about him the way he felt about her.
+
+He went forward to set up the fish-driving combination. One part of him
+thought vividly of Deirdre. The other faced the consequences that might
+follow if the bolides were not bolides, and if the plastic gadgets and
+the nasty-sounding underwater hums were products of an intelligence
+which could make bolides change their velocity in space; which made them
+fall in the Luzon Deep in the China Sea and nowhere else.
+
+He set up the recorder with its loop of fish-driving hum. He put the
+horn overboard, carefully oriented to spread its sound through all the
+enclosed shallow water of the lagoon. He turned the extra amplifier to
+maximum output, to increase the effectiveness of the noise, and turned
+on the apparatus.
+
+The glassy look of the lagoon-water vanished immediately. Fish leaped
+crazily everywhere, from half-inch midgets to lean-flanked predators a
+yard and more in length. There was no square foot in all the shallows
+where a creature didn't struggle to escape the sensation of pins and
+needles all over its body. And these pins and needles pricked deep.
+
+Flying-fish soared crazily, and they were the most fortunate because so
+long as they flew, the tormenting water-sound did not reach them. But
+many of them landed on the beach, and even among the palms.
+
+In the spot where blind and snakelike arms had tried to destroy Terry
+and Deirdre, the lashing and swirling was of a different kind. Something
+there used enormous strength to offer battle to a noise. The water was
+whipped to froth. Twice Terry saw those rope-like arms rise above the
+water and flail it.
+
+This particular sort of tumult, however, appeared only in one spot. So
+there was only one such creature in the lagoon.
+
+When Davis and the others came down from the tracking station, Terry
+turned off the horn. He was applying soothing ointment to the raw flesh
+of his leg.
+
+"There's a monstrous creature out there," he said evenly when a
+white-faced Davis demanded information. "Heaven knows how big it is, but
+it's something like a huge squid. It may be the kind that sperm whales
+feed on, down in the depths."
+
+Others from the tracking station arrived, panting.
+
+"Oh! I'm tired of being conservative!" added Terry fiercely. "I'm going
+to say what all of us think! There's something intelligent down at the
+bottom of the sea, five miles down!"
+
+He glared challengingly around him.
+
+"Who doesn't believe that?" he demanded. "Well, the reporting gadgets
+don't report any more. We killed the fish that carried them. So that
+whatever-it-is down on the sea-bed has very cleverly sent up something
+we ignorant savages wouldn't dare to meddle with! We would be terrified.
+But we'll show _it_ what men are like!"
+
+Dr. Morton said gently, "Perhaps we should notify the _Pelorus_. The
+biologists on board there...."
+
+"No!" said Terry grimly. "I have a private quarrel with this monster. It
+might have killed Deirdre! And Davis already tried to tell those
+biologists something! Tell them about this, and they'll want proofs they
+wouldn't look at anyhow. We'll handle this ourselves! It's too important
+for them!"
+
+"Much too important," said Deirdre firmly. "The shooting stars aren't
+shooting stars and there's something down in the depths just like Terry
+says. He's right that we can't consider sharing our world with--beings
+that come down from the sky, even if they only want our oceans and don't
+care about the land. He says that we wouldn't get along with creatures
+that know more than we do, and we would especially resent any space
+ships coming uninvited to start colonies on our world while we're not
+advanced enough to stop them! If that's what they're doing, they have to
+be fought from the very first instant to the very last moment there's
+one of them hiding in our seas! Terry's right!"
+
+"I haven't heard him say any of those things, young lady," said Morton
+drily, "but they're true. And I don't like the idea of a sea monster
+being in the lagoon anyhow. Especially one that tries to kill people.
+Still, fighting it...."
+
+"There are a couple of bazookas on the _Esperance_," said Terry sharply.
+He looked at Davis. "If you're willing to risk the yacht, we can drive
+the beast aground, or at least to shallow water, with the submarine
+horn. Then the bazookas should be able to destroy it. Will you take the
+risk?"
+
+"Of course you'll use the _Esperance_," said Davis. "Of course!"
+
+"Then I'll want," said Terry, unconsciously taking command, "somebody at
+the engine and somebody at the wheel. I'll run the horn. But, frankly,
+if that monster lays one sucker-arm on the _Esperance_, it may be
+good-bye. Any volunteers?"
+
+In minutes the _Esperance_, her engine rumbling, pulled away from the
+dock. She had on board all her original company except Deirdre--firmly
+left ashore by her father and Terry--and in addition she carried Dr.
+Morton and the most enthusiastic amateur photographer of the tracking
+station staff. He was shaky but resolute, and was hanging about with an
+imposing array of cameras, for both still and motion pictures. The
+_Esperance's_ sails were furled and she went into battle under bare
+poles. Davis was busy manufacturing improvised hand grenades for himself
+and Morton.
+
+The sun was nearly overhead. Terry asked Morton questions about the
+lagoon. They finally chose a minor inlet as the place to which the
+creature must be driven, if possible. There it could be immobilized by
+the intolerable sound from the recorder. There it could be destroyed.
+
+"I wonder," said Morton wryly, "if I can present a dead giant squid as
+part of the explanation for my computed orbits for the last two
+bolides!"
+
+The _Esperance_ moved steadily toward the place where Terry had nearly
+been killed.
+
+The enterprise was risky. The _Esperance_ was sixty-five feet long. The
+creature it was to attack was much larger, and if one of its kind had
+crushed the bathyscaphe, it had sufficient strength and ferocity to make
+a battle cruiser a much more suitable antagonist. But the true folly of
+the effort was its purpose.
+
+It all started when a fishing boat--_La Rubia_--went to sea and caught
+remarkable quantities of fish, of which four specimens had had plastic
+artefacts fastened to them. Then Terry began checking on certain noises
+he heard in the sea which provoked an incomprehensible crowding of
+millions of fish into a small area, from which they swam down to depths
+where they could not survive. Now the killing of this squid was supposed
+to cast a light on the mystery of the nine bolides which had fallen into
+a particular part of the ocean.
+
+Terry had the undersea horn turned vertically so that it would transmit
+a blade of sound wherever he aimed it, instead of spreading all through
+the lagoon. He turned it on.
+
+The water before the _Esperance_ suddenly speckled and splashed from the
+maddened leaps of fish of every possible size. He turned it off. He
+aimed it where the ripples showed the presence of something huge beneath
+the surface. He turned it on again.
+
+There were convulsive writhings. A long tentacle emerged briefly and
+then splashed under again. The writhings continued. Terry adjusted his
+aim. Crazy leapings of smaller creatures showed the line of the
+sound-beam, as tracer-bullets show the paths of bullets from a machine
+gun. He cut off the sound for an instant and turned it on again at full
+volume, pointed where the monster must be. There was explosive tumult
+underwater. Huge arms flailed above the surface. But once again the
+creature fled.
+
+The _Esperance_ followed slowly, now. The monster had reacted to the
+stinging sound-beam as if cowed. But it was a deep-sea creature. It did
+not know how to move when squeezed into a shallow water which hampered
+its movements. It seemed frightened to discover itself trapped between
+the lagoon-bottom and the surface. And it was dazzled by the brightness
+to which it had been driven. Left unattacked, even for an instant, it
+tried to burrow away from the light, and again it made a dense cloud of
+mud from the bottom. Then it became quiet, as if hiding.
+
+Grimly, Terry lanced it with the painful noise. The water frothed.
+Monstrous tentacles appeared and disappeared, and once part of the
+creature's body itself emerged. It was cornered into a minor inlet, and
+there the water grew more shallow and the monster did not want to go to
+where its motions would be even more confined.
+
+It seemed to flow into the deepest part of the miniature bay. It was as
+if it felt certain of a haven there. When the tormenting noise-beam
+struck again, the abyssal monster flung itself about crazily. A
+terrible, frustrated rage filled it. Its arms fumbled here and there,
+above water and below. It hauled itself upright so that a part of its
+torpedo-shaped body broke through the surface. The monster was mad with
+fury. It plunged toward the _Esperance_, not swimming now, but crawling
+with all its eight legs in water too shallow to submerge it. Its effort
+was desperate. It lifted everything from the water, and splashed
+everything down again, all the while crawling toward its enemy.
+
+Terry saw Nick and Jug steady the aim of their bazookas. Davis ran
+toward the bow with hand grenades. The huge squid came crawling, and
+with every foot of advance the pain-noise grew more unendurable.
+Suddenly the creature uttered a mooing cry and retreated. The cry was
+like the mooing noise Terry had picked up from the depths.
+
+It went aground. It struggled to climb ashore, to do anything to escape
+its tormentors. It foamed and splashed....
+
+Despairing, it turned to face its tormentors. Its body reared almost
+entirely out of the water, now. It sagged flabbily. It reeled as its
+arms strained. Its eyes rose above the surface, blinded by the light.
+They were huge eyes. Squids alone, among the invertebrates, have eyes
+like those of land beasts. They flamed demoniac hatred. A beak appeared,
+not unlike a parrot's, but capable of rending steel plates. The beak
+opened and closed with clicking sounds that were singularly horrifying.
+It snapped at the yacht, which was beyond reach. One of the tentacles
+wrenched violently at something. It gave. The arm rose above the water.
+A thorny mass of branched coral flew through the air and splashed close
+beside the _Esperance_.
+
+"Shoot!" said Terry, somehow sickened. "Dammit, shoot!"
+
+Nick and Tony aimed closely. The bazookas made their peculiar,
+inadequate sounds. The bazooka-shells, like small rocket-missiles, sped
+through the short distance. They struck. Their shaped charges detonated,
+again with inadequate loudness. They did not explode in a fashion to
+tear the creature to bits. Instead, they sent lancing flames a thousand
+times more deadly than bullets into the squid's flesh.
+
+It fought insanely. It uttered shrill cries. Its arms tore at its own
+wounds, at the water, at the lagoon-bed as if it would rend and shatter
+all the universe in its rage.
+
+The bazookas fired again and again.
+
+It was the eighth missile from the bazooka which ended the battle. Then
+the enormous body went limp. Its horny beak ceased to try to crush all
+creation. But the long, thick, sucker-disked arms thrashed aimlessly for
+a long time. Even when they ceased to throw themselves about, they
+quivered and rippled for a considerable period more. And when it seemed
+that all life had left the gigantic beast, and the men from the
+satellite-tracking station stepped on the monstrous body, it suddenly
+jerked once more, in a last attempt to murder.
+
+The squid's body, without the tentacles, was thirty-five feet long. The
+largest squid, the Atlantic variety, captured before had a mantle no
+longer than twenty feet. That relatively familiar creature,
+_Architeuthis princeps_, came to a maximum total length of fifty-two
+feet. Counting the two longest arms of this one, it reached eighty. It
+could not possibly swim in water less than six yards deep. It did not
+belong in a coral lagoon, but it was there.
+
+It was close to sunset when the last tremors of the great mass of flesh
+were stilled. Terry was in no mood for eating, afterward. He skipped the
+evening meal altogether, and paced up and down the veranda of the dining
+hall, at the satellite-tracking station. Inside, there was a clatter of
+dishes and a humming of voices. Outside, there was a soft, warm, starlit
+night. The surf boomed on the reef outside the lagoon.
+
+Deirdre came out and walked quickly into Terry's arms. She kissed him
+and then drew back.
+
+"Darling!" she said softly. Her voice changed. "How is your leg? Does it
+still hurt?"
+
+"It's nothing to worry about," said Terry. "I'm worried about something
+else. Two things, in fact."
+
+"Name one!" said Deirdre, smiling.
+
+"I'd like to get married soon," said Terry ruefully.
+
+"To whom?" she asked, jokingly.
+
+"But I have to have a business or an income first. I think, though, that
+with a little hard work I can start up my _especialidades electrónicas y
+físicas_ again, and if you don't mind skimping a little ..."
+
+"I'll adore it," said Deirdre enthusiastically. "What else would I
+want? What's the other thing you worry about?"
+
+"That monster," said Terry with some grimness.
+
+"Pouf!" said Deirdre. "You've killed it!"
+
+"I don't mean that one," said Terry more grimly. "I mean the one that
+sent it. I wish I knew what it is and what it intends to do!"
+
+"You've already found out more than anybody else even dared to guess!"
+she protested.
+
+"But not enough. We've stirred it up. It sent small fish in the lagoon
+here and elsewhere to report back to it. We can't guess what the fish
+reported, but we know some of it was about human beings. Whatever is
+down at the bottom of the sea must be interested in men. Remember? It
+made a patch of foam that swallowed up one ship and all its crew. It's
+interested in men, all right!"
+
+"True, but...."
+
+"We dropped the dredge, which implied that we were interested in it. The
+bathyscaphe indicated more interest on our part. To discourage that
+interest--or perhaps in self-defense--it wrecked the bathyscaphe."
+
+"It, Terry?" asked Deirdre. "Or _ellos_, they?"
+
+"They," he corrected himself coldly. "We killed the fish that were
+reporting men's doings from here. That was insolence on our part. So the
+hum at the lagoon entrance went off and, after two nights, started
+again--and then this huge squid was found in the lagoon. It should have
+been able to defend itself against us. It was sent up here because it
+was capable of defending itself! But we've killed it just the same. So
+now what will come up out of the depths? And what will it do?"
+
+Deirdre said firmly, "You'll be ready for it when it comes!"
+
+"Maybe," said Terry. "Your father once mentioned an instrument he'd like
+to have to take a relief map of the ocean bottom. Changed around a
+little, it might be something we need very badly indeed. The horn we've
+got is good, but not good enough. I'll talk to the electronics men
+here."
+
+There was a noise of scraping chairs, inside the dining hall. People
+came out, talking cheerfully. There was much to talk about on Thrawn
+Island today. The killing of a giant squid had been preceded by a
+specific guess that linked it to meteoric falls in the Luzon Deep.
+Logically, the excitement had grown.
+
+Terry found his electronics specialists, and explained to them the type
+of apparatus he was interested in. He asked if it was included in the
+island's technical stores. He wanted to assemble something capable of
+emitting underwater noises of special quality and unprecedented power.
+There is not much power involved in sound through the air. A cornet
+player manages with much effort to convert four-tenths of a watt of
+power into music. A public-address system for a large area may give out
+fifteen watts of noise. Terry described a device which could use a small
+amount of power, serving as a sonar or a depth-finding unit, and then,
+with the throw of a switch, turn kilowatts into vibrations underneath
+the sea. If powerful and shrill enough, such vibrations could be lethal.
+
+A technical argument ensued. Terry's demands were toned down to fit the
+equipment at hand. Then three men went with him to the island's
+workshop. They took off their coats and set to work.
+
+Three hours later someone noticed an unknown vessel making its way into
+the lagoon. She was stubby and small, and had short thick masts with
+heavy booms tilted up at steep angles. Her Diesel engines boomed
+hollowly, louder than the surf. As she entered the lagoon, a searchlight
+winked on and flicked here and there. It finally found the wharf where
+the _Esperance_ was moored.
+
+Men of the tracking station staff went down to the wharf to meet the
+small row boat that was now coming ashore.
+
+A short, stout, irate fishing boat skipper waved his arms and shouted
+angrily. What had _los americanos_ done to keep _La Rubia_ from catching
+fish? Why had they changed the arrangement by which the starving wives
+and children of _La Rubia's_ crew were fed? He would protest to the
+Philippine Government! He would expose the villainy of _los americanos_
+to the world! He demanded that now, instantly, the original state of
+affairs be restored!
+
+A fish leaped out of the water nearby. Where it leaped, and where it
+fell back, bright specks of luminosity appeared. Even the ripples of the
+splashes glowed faintly as they spread outward. The skipper of _La
+Rubia_ stared. And now the people of the island realized that the look
+of the water was not altogether commonplace. Little bluish flames under
+the surface showed that many fish darted there. There were more fish
+than usual in the lagoon. Many more. The lagoon had suddenly become a
+fine place to catch fish. Some care would be needed, of course. There
+were doubtless coral heads in plenty. But still ...
+
+The skipper of _La Rubia_ abruptly returned to his fury and his
+protests. _La Rubia_ had gone to the place where she always found fish.
+Always! There was a humming in the water there, and fish were to be
+found in quantity. But yesterday the American ship had been there, and
+also this very yacht! _La Rubia_ stayed out of sight lest the
+_americanos_ learn her fishing secrets. But it was useless. When the two
+American ships were gone, there was no longer a humming in the sea and
+no more fish for the crew of _La Rubia_ to capture for their hungry
+wives and children. And therefore he, Capitán Saavedra, demanded that
+the _americanos_ restore the previous state of affairs.
+
+Davis would have intervened, but the chubby skipper erupted into wilder
+and more theatrical accusations still.
+
+Let them not deny what they had done! Fish were always to be found where
+there was a humming in the sea that _las orejas de ellos_ heard and
+reported to him. But that humming was not in its former place. It was
+here! At the entrance of the lagoon! The fish were here, also! _Los
+americanos_ had moved the fish so the crewmen of _La Rubia_ could not
+feed their wives and children. _Los americanos_ wished to take all the
+fish for themselves! But fish were the property of all men, especially
+fishermen with starving wives and children. So he, Capitán Saavedra,
+would fish in this lagoon, and he defied anyone to stop him.
+
+"Certainly," said Terry. "_Seguramente!_" He added in Spanish: "We'll
+lend you a short-wave contact with Manila to make any complaints you
+please. I'm sure all the other fishing boats will be glad to hear where
+you've been catching fish, and where you've found the fish have moved
+to! Calm yourself, Capitán, and help yourself to the fish of the lagoon,
+and any time you want to call Manila we'll arrange it!"
+
+He moved away. He went back to the electronics shop, while Morton and
+Davis and the others talked encouragingly to Capitán Saavedra. Presently
+they suggested that he accept their hospitality, and the Capitán and his
+oarsmen went up to the dining hall, where they were served dinner, and a
+more friendly mood developed. In time the Capitán said happily that he
+would wait till sunrise to lower his nets, because he didn't want to
+risk losing them on the coral heads. A few drinks later the Capitán
+boasted about his own system of fishing, as practised by _La Rubia_. The
+starving condition of his crew's wives and children ceased to be
+mentioned.
+
+In the presence of so accomplished a liar, nobody of the tracking
+station staff mentioned a giant squid hauled partly, but only partly,
+out of the water. They suspected that he would not believe it. They were
+sure that he would top their real feat by an imaginary one. So the four
+crew-cuts listened politely, and fed him more drinks, and learned much.
+
+In the workshop the most unlikely device Terry'd described took form. In
+effect, it was an underwater horn which was much more powerful than it
+looked. Submerged, and with power from a group of amplifiers in
+parallel, it would create a tremendous volume of underwater noise. That
+sound would run through a tube shaped like a gun-barrel. It would travel
+in a straight line, spreading only a little.
+
+The same projection tube could also send out the tentative
+beep-beep-beep of sonar gear, or the peculiar noise a depth-finder
+makes. So the instrument could search out a distance or find a target,
+and then fling at it a beam of humming torment equal to bullets from a
+machine gun.
+
+It would have taken Terry, alone, a long time to build. But he had
+three assistants, two of whom were very competent. By dawn, they had it
+ready to be mounted upon the _Esperance_. It was placed hanging from the
+bow, mounted on gimbals, so that it could point in any direction. It was
+firmly fixed to the yacht's planking.
+
+There was plenty of activity on _La Rubia_, too, at daybreak. That squat
+and capable fishing boat prepared to harvest the fish in the lagoon. She
+got her nets over. She essayed to haul them. Some got caught on the
+coral heads rising from the lagoon's bottom toward the surface. Capitán
+Saavedra swore, and untangled them. He tried again. Again coral heads
+baulked the enterprise. The nets tore.
+
+A helicopter came rattling into view from the south. It grew in size and
+loudness, and presently hovered over the tracking station. Then it made
+a wide, deliberate circuit of the lagoon. At the inlet where the squid
+lay almost entirely in the water--but fastened by ropes lest it drift
+away--above that spot, the helicopter hovered for a long time. It must
+have been taking photographs. Presently, it lowered one man by a line to
+the ground. Obviously, the man could not endure any delay in getting at
+so desirable a biological specimen. Then the helicopter went droning and
+rattling to the tracking station, and landed with an air of weariness.
+
+_La Rubia_ continued to try to catch fish. They were here in plenty. But
+the coral heads were everywhere. Nets tore. Ropes parted. Capitán
+Saavedra waved his arms and swore.
+
+The _Esperance_ rumbled and circled away from the wharf, and headed for
+the lagoon entrance. The singular contrivance built during the night was
+in place at her bow. She passed _La Rubia_, on whose deck men
+frantically mended nets.
+
+The _Esperance_ passed between the small capes and the first of the
+ocean swells raised her bow and rocked her. She proceeded beyond the
+reef. The bottom of the sea dropped out of sight. Terry switched on the
+submarine ear and listened. The humming sound was to be expected here.
+
+It had stopped. It was present yesterday, and even during the night,
+when _La Rubia_ came into the lagoon. But now the sea held no sound
+other than the multitudinous random noises of fish and the washing,
+roaring, booming of the surf.
+
+Deirdre was aboard, of course. She watched Terry's face. He turned to
+the new instrument, and then dropped his hand.
+
+"I think," he said carefully to Davis, "that I'd like to make a sort of
+sweep out to sea. It's just possible we'll find the hum farther out."
+
+Deirdre said quickly, "I think I know what you're up to. You want to
+survey a large area of the ocean while something comes up. Then you can
+direct that "something" to the lagoon mouth by using your sound device,
+so the ... whatever-it-is has to take refuge in the lagoon. Since we've
+killed the squid...."
+
+"That's it," said Terry. "Something like that happened when we speared
+the fish. The squid took their place. Now we've killed the squid. Just
+possibly...."
+
+They found the humming sound in the water four miles off-shore. They
+traced it through part of a circle. If something were being driven
+upward, it could not pass through that wall of humming sound.
+
+"That proves your point," Davis said. "Now what?"
+
+Without realizing it, he'd yielded direction of the enterprise to Terry,
+who had unconsciously assumed it.
+
+"Let's go back to the island," said Terry thoughtfully. "I've got a
+crazy idea--really crazy! I want to be where we can duck into shallow
+water when we try the new projector."
+
+The _Esperance_ swung about and headed back toward the island. The sea
+and the distant island looked comfortingly normal and beautiful in the
+sunshine. Under so blue a sky it did not seem reasonable to worry about
+anything. Events or schemes at the bottom of the sea seemed certainly
+the last things to be likely to matter to anyone.
+
+Terry had the _Esperance_ almost between the reefs before he tried the
+new contrivance. If it worked, it should be possible to make a relief
+map of the ocean bottom with every height and depth on the sea-bed
+plotted with precision.
+
+He started to operate the new instrument. First he traced the steep
+descent from the flanks of the submarine mountain whose tip was Thrawn
+Island. He traced them down to the abyss which was the Luzon Deep. Then
+he began to trace the ocean bottom at its extreme depth, on what should
+have been submarine plains at the foot of the submerged mountain. The
+instrument began to give extraordinary readings. The bottom, in a
+certain spot, read forty-five hundred fathoms down. But suddenly there
+was a reading of twenty-five hundred. There was a huge obstruction,
+twelve thousand feet above the bottom of the sea, more than twenty
+thousand feet below the surface. The instrument scanned the area.
+Something else was found eighteen hundred fathoms up. These were objects
+of enormous size, floating, or perhaps swimming in the blackness. They
+were not whales. Whales are air-breathers. They cannot stay too long in
+deep waters, motionless between the top and the bottom of the sea.
+
+The instrument picked up more and more such objects. Some were
+twenty-five hundred fathoms from the bottom, and two thousand from the
+surface. Some were twenty-two hundred up, and twenty-three hundred down.
+There were eighteen hundred-fathom readings, and twenty-one, and
+twenty-four, and nineteen. The readings were of objects bigger than
+whales. They rose very slowly, and appeared to rest, then rose some
+more, and rested....
+
+Blank faces turned to Terry. He licked his lips and looked for Deirdre.
+Then he said evenly, "We go into the lagoon. And if we come out
+again--if!--we leave Deirdre ashore, unless these readings have been
+cleared up. There are chances I'm not willing to take."
+
+The _Esperance_ headed in. It was not possible for the new instrument to
+tell what the large objects were. They could be monstrous living
+creatures, perhaps squids, and one could only guess that their errand
+was to deal with the surface-creatures--men--who speared fish and giant
+squids and set off explosions in the Luzon Deep.
+
+Or the rising objects could be, say, bolides which had dived into the
+Deep from outer space and were now coming to the surface to make sure
+that the natives of the earth did not again disturb the depths taken
+over by beings from another planet.
+
+
+
+
+_Nine_
+
+
+The sun rose high in the sky as the _Esperance_ returned to the wharf.
+Davis went ashore and held lengthy conversations with Manila by
+short-wave radio. The biologists essayed to investigate the squid. _La
+Rubia_ still attempted to catch fish. All efforts seemed to tend toward
+frustration.
+
+When Terry walked over to see his victim at close range, he found the
+biologists balked by the mere huge size of the squid. There were
+literally tens of tons of flesh to be handled. Squid have no backbone,
+but a modified internal shell is important to biologists for study. The
+biologists wanted it. The gills needed to be examined, and their
+position under the mantle noted, and their filaments counted. The
+nervous system of the huge creature must have its oddities. But the
+actual preservation of the squid was out of the question. The mere
+handling of so large an object was an engineering problem.
+
+Terry consulted the frenziedly swearing Capitán Saavedra, who was ready
+to weep with sheer rage as he contemplated torn nets, and fish he could
+not capture. Squids were an article of commerce. Terry took the Capitán
+to view this one. His crew would help the biologists get at the
+scientifically important items, and for reward they would have the rest
+of the giant--more than they could load upon _La Rubia_. This would make
+their voyage profitable, and the Capitán would have the opportunity to
+tell the most stupendous story of his capture and killing of the giant.
+With the evidence he'd have, people might believe him.
+
+Presently, the crewmen of _La Rubia_ clambered over the monster, huge
+knives at work under the direction of the men from Manila. There was
+bitter dispute with the tracking station cook, who objected to the use
+of his refrigeration space to freeze biological material before it was
+sent to Manila by helicopter.
+
+In mid-afternoon the _Esperance_ left the lagoon again. The
+sonar-depth-finder probed the depths delicately. The objects in mid-sea,
+it appeared, had been rising steadily. Their previous position had
+averaged twenty-five hundred fathoms deep. They were now less than two
+thousand fathoms down, and there were many of them. Unfortunately, the
+_Esperance_ was not a steady enough platform for the instrument. But a
+fairly accurate calculation was made, and if the unidentified objects
+continued their ascent at their present rate, they would surface not
+long after sunrise. Then what?
+
+Increasingly urgent queries came by short-wave, asking for Dr. Morton's
+explanation of how he had computed the landing place and time of the
+latest bolide. His accuracy was not disputed. But astronomers and
+physicists wanted to be able to do it themselves. How had he done it?
+
+Terry came upon him sitting gloomily before a cup of coffee in the
+tracking station. Davis was there too.
+
+"I wish I hadn't done it," Morton confided. "It's one of those things
+that shouldn't happen. It's bad enough to have a giant squid to account
+for. They tell me it's a new species, by the way. Never found or even
+described before. One of the _Pelorus_ men tells me it's an immature
+specimen, too. It's not full-grown! What will a grown-up one be like?"
+
+"I have a hunch we'll find out when those submerged giants reach the
+surface," said Davis unhappily.
+
+Terry said, "The one we killed couldn't get out of the water. I wonder
+if the adult forms can walk over the land!"
+
+Davis stared. "Should we send Deirdre to safety on the _Esperance_?"
+
+"Safety?" asked Terry. "On a boat? When a mass of bubbles from undersea
+could provoke such a turmoil in the water that no ship could stay
+afloat? That's how one ship disappeared. It might be the _Esperance's_
+turn next. Who knows?" Then he added, "There's no limit to the size of a
+swimming creature!"
+
+A bald-headed member of the tracking station staff walked in. He
+carried an object of clear plastic. It was a foot and a half long, about
+six inches in diameter. There was an infinite complexity of metallic
+parts enclosed in the plastic.
+
+"I caught one of the fishermen making off with this," he said in a flat
+voice. "It was fastened to one of the squid's shorter arms. The
+fishermen didn't want to give it up. The skipper claimed it as
+treasure-trove."
+
+He put it down on the table. Davis, Terry and Morton looked at it. Then
+Morton shrugged his shoulders, almost up to his ears.
+
+"The intelligent being that made it," said Davis, "apparently came down
+from the sky in a bolide. That's easier to believe than that a submarine
+civilization of earthly origin lives down in the depths. But why would
+anybody prefer the bottom of the sea to--anywhere else on earth? Where
+would such a creature come from?"
+
+Deirdre walked in and stood by the table, watching Terry's face. The
+bald-headed man said, "I could believe some pretty strange things, but
+you can't make me believe that a creature can develop intelligence
+without plenty of oxygen. There's not much free oxygen at the bottom of
+the sea."
+
+"But there's something intelligent down there," said Davis doggedly. "If
+it has to have free oxygen, you've only raised the question of where it
+gets it. Maybe it brings it."
+
+Deirdre shook her head. "Foam," she said.
+
+The four men stared at her. Then Terry said sharply, "That's it! On the
+_Esperance_ there's a picture of a huge mass of foam on the sea. A ship
+dropped right out of sight right into it. Deirdre found the answer!
+Something down below needs free oxygen. In quantity. Why not get it from
+the water? What to do with the hydrogen that is left? Let it loose!
+It'll come to the surface, make a foam-patch...."
+
+Dr. Morton said with a sort of mirthless geniality, "I add a stroke of
+pure genius! Davis just asked what would be the origin of a creature
+which preferred the depths of the sea to any other place on earth.
+What's to be found down there that's missing everywhere else? Cold? No.
+Moisture? No. Just two things! Darkness and pressure! At the bottom of
+the Luzon Deep the pressure is over seven tons to the square inch.
+There's no light--I repeat, none--below three hundred fathoms. Down at
+the sea-bottom it's black, black, black! Now, where in the universe
+could there be creatures capable of riding down here in a bolide, and in
+need of an environment like that?"
+
+Terry shook his head. He remembered seeing a book on the solar planets,
+in the after-cabin of the _Esperance_. He hadn't read it. The others on
+the yacht must have.
+
+"How about Jupiter?" asked Deirdre. "The gravity's four times the
+earth's, and the atmosphere is thousands of miles thick. The pressure at
+the surface should be tons to the square inch."
+
+Morton nodded. With the same false geniality he added, "And there'll be
+no light. Sunlight will never get through that muggy thick atmosphere!
+So we consider ourselves to be rational beings and guess that the
+bolides come from Jupiter! But I must admit that the last bolide was
+headed inward toward the sun, and from the general direction of Jupiter.
+So-o-o-o, do we warn the world that creatures from Jupiter are
+descending in space ships and are settling down under water, at a depth
+of forty-five hundred fathoms? Like hell we do!"
+
+He got up and walked abruptly away.
+
+"I ..." said the bald-headed man, shaking his head incredulously, "will
+put this gadget away and go back to carve some more squid."
+
+"I'll talk to Manila," said Davis drearily. "Something is coming up from
+below. There shouldn't be any ships allowed to come this way until we
+find out what's happening."
+
+Deirdre smiled at Terry, now that they were alone.
+
+"Have you anything very important to do just now?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"If the things that are coming up are--space ships, we can't fight them.
+If they're anything else, they can't very well fight us. If we wanted to
+attack something at the bottom of the sea we'd have to fumble at the
+job. We wouldn't know where to begin. So maybe, if a submarine power
+wants to attack at the surface of the sea, it may find it difficult,
+too."
+
+He frowned. Deirdre said, "Let's go look at the sea and think things
+over!"
+
+She very formally took his arm and they walked out. Presently, they
+stood on the white coral beach on the outer shore, and talked. Terry's
+mind came back, now and then, to how inadequate his previous guesses
+about the impending menace had been. It seemed now that the menace must
+be much worse than he had imagined. But there were many things he wanted
+to say to Deirdre.
+
+As they talked, they were disturbed. The helicopter, which had left
+before noon loaded down with biological material for Manila, was
+approaching again. It landed by the tracking station. Then they were
+alone again.
+
+When night fell, they were astonished at how quickly time had passed.
+They went back to the station. The helicopter was on the ground. The
+biologists had stopped their work, exhausted but very excited by their
+discovery of a new species of squid, of which an immature specimen
+measured eighty feet. It had offered extremely interesting phylogenic
+material for the Cephalopoda in general. The photographs they'd taken
+were invaluable, from a scientific viewpoint.
+
+The crew of _La Rubia_ had returned to their boat. The _Esperance_ had
+been out beyond the reef once more. The unidentified objects were still
+rising. They had risen to less than a thousand fathoms from the surface,
+well before sundown. At this same rate of rise, they should reach the
+surface some time after midnight. What would happen after that?
+
+"What will happen depends," said Terry, "on how accurate their
+information about us is. It depends on their instruments, really. I
+suspect their ideas about us are weird. I find I haven't any ideas about
+them."
+
+At dinner, Davis said worriedly, "I talked to Manila. The mine layer
+that was in the Bay left harbor yesterday. The flattop picked it up by
+radio and they're both going to come on here tomorrow. I had to talk
+about the foam. They weren't impressed. The squid does impress them, but
+the foam--no. I hate," he said indignantly, "to try to convince people
+of things I couldn't possibly be convinced of myself!"
+
+They talked leisurely. Somebody mentioned _La Rubia_. It had been more
+or less expected that her skipper would turn up for drinks and
+conversation again. But he hadn't. The conversation turned to the
+plastic objects. They might or might not pick up sounds. It was not
+likely they'd respond to light. Certainly, complete images would be
+meaningless to creatures who had evolved in blackness and without a
+sense of sight. They might respond to pressure-waves, such as are known
+to be picked up by fish when something struggles in the water, even
+though man-made instruments have not yet detected them. They might
+furnish data of a sensory kind that is meaningless to humans, as
+pictures would be to Jovians. _If_ there were such things....
+
+"Why argue only for Jupiter?" asked Deirdre. "Venus is supposed to be
+mostly ocean. There could be abyssal life there."
+
+The crew-cuts joined in the argument, but tentatively, because there
+were many experts present.
+
+Midnight came. The open sea outside the reef showed nothing unusual. The
+waves glittered palely at their tips. There were little flashings in the
+water where an occasional surface fish darted. The stars shone. The moon
+was not yet risen.
+
+Two o'clock came. The _Esperance_ people were divided. Terry and Davis
+were too apprehensive to sleep. Deirdre'd gone confidently to the yacht
+to turn in. The crew-cuts slept peacefully, too. Davis said uneasily,
+"I've got a feeling that the ... objects are at the surface, or very
+close to it, but that they simply aren't showing themselves. I think
+they're lying in ambush. The squid that was killed must have had trouble
+getting into the lagoon. They probably won't try to get the big ones in.
+They'll wait...."
+
+Terry shook his head.
+
+"We killed that little one--save the mark!--and its death was probably
+reported in some fashion. So maybe they'll use the big ones on the
+surface as bait for another kind of weapon. Foam, for example. We know
+how a ship simply dropped out of sight, as if into a hole."
+
+"I know!" said Davis drearily. "I told the flattop about that. But I
+don't think they really believe it."
+
+At two-thirty Davis and Terry went down to the yacht. They stood on the
+deck. They kept watch by mere instinct. There was no activity anywhere.
+Faint noises were coming from _La Rubia_. Maybe her crew was repacking
+the hastily loaded masses of squid-flesh. The last-quarter moon rose at
+long last, and shone upon the glassy-rippled water of the lagoon.
+Star-images danced beside its reflection.
+
+A little after three, quite abruptly, the Diesels of _La Rubia_ rumbled
+and boomed. The dark silhouette of the ship headed across the lagoon
+toward its opening. Terry swore.
+
+"She lifted her anchor without making a noise," he said angrily. "Her
+skipper wants to get to Manila with his catch before it spoils!
+Damnation! I told him not to leave without warning. Anything could be
+waiting outside!"
+
+He raced for the shore and the outboard motorboat. Davis shouted down
+the forecastle and pelted after him. Terry had the outboard in the water
+by the time Davis arrived. He jumped in and pulled the starter. The
+motor caught.
+
+The outboard went rushing across the water. Its wake was a brilliant
+bluish luminescence.
+
+The booming of the Diesels grew louder. Capitán Saavedra thought he had
+put over a fast one on _los americanos_, who had moved the fish from
+where he regularly captured them in vast quantities and gathered them in
+a lagoon where his nets tore. They had given him most of a monster
+squid, true, but they had reserved certain parts for themselves. They
+were undoubtedly the most valuable parts. So when labor officially
+ceased at sundown, _La Rubia's_ skipper only pretended to accept the
+idea. In the last hour his crew had quietly completed loading _La Rubia_
+with squid. They'd been carefully silent. They'd lifted anchor without
+noise. Now _La Rubia_ headed for the lagoon entrance, heavy in the water
+but with precise information about what coral heads needed to be dodged.
+She had on board a cargo history had no parallel for. Her skipper
+expected to be rewarded with fame, as well as cash.
+
+When the outboard motor rushed toward _La Rubia_, Capitán Saavedra
+zestfully gave his engines full throttle. When the racketing, roaring
+motorboat arrived beside his ship, and Terry shouted to him to stop, he
+chuckled and drove on. In fact, he left _La Rubia's_ pilot-house to wave
+cheerfully at the two men. They frantically ran close and shouted to him
+above the rat-tat-tatting of their own motor and the rumble of his
+Diesels.
+
+_La Rubia_ reached the lagoon entrance with the smaller boat close at
+her side, and Terry still shouting.
+
+But Capitán Saavedra did not believe. Maybe he did not understand.
+Certainly he did not obey. Ocean swells lifted and tossed the motorboat.
+It became necessary to slow down, for safety. But _La Rubia_ went
+grandly on, into the open sea.
+
+"We can't force him to stop," said Davis in a despairing voice. "He
+won't. I only hope we're wrong, and he gets through!"
+
+The outboard stayed where it was, and swells tossed it haphazardly. _La
+Rubia_ switched on her navigation lights. She drove zestfully to the
+southward. She sailed on, dwindling in size, as the drone of her Diesels
+diminished in volume.
+
+Looking back, Terry saw the _Esperance_ approaching from the lagoon,
+dark figures on her deck. Terry shouted, cries answered him, and the
+_Esperance_ came to a stop as the motorboat drew alongside.
+
+Terry and Davis scrambled to her deck while one of the crew-cuts led the
+smaller boat astern and tethered it.
+
+"We're safe enough here," Terry said bitterly, "and since you've come,
+we can stay and watch if anything happens. If only she keeps on
+going...."
+
+But _La Rubia_ did not. Her lights showed that she had changed course.
+She changed course again. Her masthead light began to waver from side to
+side. She wallowed in such a way that it was clear she was neither on
+course nor in motion any longer.
+
+Nobody gave orders, but the _Esperance's_ engine roared. The action from
+this point on became an automatic and quick response to an emergency.
+
+The schooner-yacht plunged ahead at top speed. Terry switched on the
+recorder and the ultrapowerful sound projector. Davis bent over the
+searchlight. Two of the crew-cuts readied the bazookas.
+
+Suddenly, a flare went off on _La Rubia's_ deck. Her stubby masts and
+spars became startlingly bright. Screams came across the waves, even
+above the growling of the surf and above the noise of the _Esperance's_
+engine.
+
+The flare shot through the air. It arched in a high parabola, bright in
+the sky, and fell into the sea. Another flare was ignited.
+
+The _Esperance's_ searchlight flicked on. A long pencil of light reached
+across the waves as she raced on. More screamings were heard. Another
+flare burned. It arched overside. The _Esperance_ plunged on,
+shouldering aside the heavier waves of open water.
+
+A half-mile. A quarter-mile. _La Rubia_ wallowed crazily, and more
+shrieks came from her deck. Then the fishing boat seemed to swing.
+Beyond her, a conical, glistening and utterly horrifying monster
+emerged, a mere few yards from her rail. Enormous eyes glittered in the
+searchlight rays. A monstrous tentacle with a row of innumerable
+sucker-disks reached over the stern of _La Rubia_.
+
+Another flare swept from the fishing boat's deck in the direction of the
+giant squid. It fell upon wetted, shining flesh. The monster jerked, and
+_La Rubia_ was shaken from stem to stern. Hurriedly, Terry pressed the
+power-feed button, and the sound projector was on. Its effect was
+instantaneous. The monster began to writhe convulsively. It was
+gigantic. It was twice, three times the size of the squid captured in
+the lagoon. Terry heard his own voice cry out, "Bazookas! Use 'em! Use
+'em!"
+
+Flaring rocket missiles sped toward the giant. Davis flung one of the
+hand grenades he'd manufactured. The yacht plunged on toward the
+clutched, half-sunk fishing boat. The hand grenade exploded against the
+monster's flesh. Simultaneously, the bazooka-missiles hit their target
+and flung living, incandescent flame deep into the creature's body.
+Those flames would melt steel. They bored deeply into the squid, and
+they were infinitely more damaging than bullets.
+
+The creature leaped from the water, as chunks of its flesh exploded. It
+was a mountainous horror risen from the sea. As it leaped, it had
+squirted the inky substance which is the squid's ultimate weapon of
+defense. But, unlike small squid, this beast of the depths squirted
+phosphorescent ink.
+
+The beast splashed back into the sea, and the wave of its descent swept
+over the deck of _La Rubia_. The fishing boat nearly capsized. But the
+monster had not escaped the anguish of its wounds. It fought the injured
+spots as though an enemy still gnawed there. It was a struggling madness
+in the sea.
+
+The _Esperance_ swung to approach the half-sunken trawler, and Terry
+kept the searchlight on the turmoil. The beast knew panic. It was
+wounded, and the abyss is not a place where the weak or wounded can long
+survive. Its fellows would be coming....
+
+They did. Something enormous moved swiftly under the sea toward the
+wounded monster. It could be seen by the phosphorescence its motion
+created, as it approached the surface. There was a jar, a jolt. Some
+part of it actually touched the _Esperance's_ keel. The huge monster
+moved ahead, but a trailing tentacle flicked up to what it had touched a
+moment before.
+
+The ugly tentacle trailed over the yacht's rail. The rail shattered. The
+forecastle hatch was wiped out. The bowsprit became mere debris which
+dangled foolishly from the standing rigging.
+
+The _Esperance_ bucked wildly at this fleeting contact. Nick fired a
+bazooka-shell, but it missed. Holding fast, Davis flung a grenade. It
+detonated uselessly. It was then that Deirdre screamed.
+
+Terry froze for an instant. There had simply been no time for him to
+think that Deirdre might be aboard. It was inexcusable, but nothing
+could be done now.
+
+Tony had been knocked overside by the shock of the contact with the
+giant, and was swimming desperately trying to follow the yacht and climb
+back on board. Terry flashed the searchlight about. He found Tony,
+splashing. The _Esperance_ swung in her own length while Terry kept the
+searchlight beam focused. More shrieks came from _La Rubia_. Davis threw
+a rope and Tony caught it. They hauled him aboard, and the _Esperance_
+turned again to pluck away the trawler's crewmen.
+
+There were unbelievable splashings off to port. Terry flung the
+lightbeam in that direction. It fell upon unimaginable conflict. The
+monster that had passed under the yacht now battled the wounded squid.
+They fought on the surface, horribly. A maze of intertwining tentacles
+glistened in the light, and their revolting bodies appeared now and
+again as the battered creature fought to protect itself, and the other
+to devour. Other enormous squids came hurrying to the scene. They flung
+themselves into the gruesome fight, tearing at the dying monster and at
+each other. There were still others on the way....
+
+The sea resounded with desperate mooing sounds.
+
+The _Esperance_ bumped against _La Rubia_. Frantic, hysterically
+frightened men clambered up from the deck of the sinking trawler to the
+yacht. As soon as they were aboard they implored their rescuers to head
+for land, immediately.
+
+"Get 'em all off!" bellowed Terry, in command by simple virtue of having
+clear ideas of what had to be done. "Get 'em all off!"
+
+The stout skipper of _La Rubia_ jumped over the yacht's rail. Without
+orders, the yacht's engine bellowed. The _Esperance_ turned toward the
+shore, which now seemed very far away.
+
+Something splashed to starboard. The sea glowed all around it. Terry
+poured the pain-sound exactly in that direction. The monster went into
+convulsions. The yacht swerved away to keep its distance. She raced on,
+past the spot where the giant flailed its tentacles insanely about. It
+mooed.
+
+The _Esperance_ raced at full speed toward the island. About a mile
+ahead, the surf roared and foamed on the coral reef almost awash.
+
+Back at the scene of the battle of monsters, there was a sudden break in
+the conflict. One of the wounded giants broke free. It may have been the
+one the _Esperance_ had first attacked; perhaps it was another, which
+might have been partly devoured while still fighting.
+
+In any case, one of them broke loose and fled, with the hellish pack
+after it. It is the instinct of squids, if injured, to try to find some
+submarine cavern in which to hide. The monster dived, and the others
+pursued it. There was no opening in the reef barrier--not underwater.
+But there was an opening on the surface. The crippled beast had to find
+a refuge, or be torn to bits. It may have been guided by instinct, or
+perhaps the current flowing into or out of the lagoon furnished the
+clue. In any case, the fleeing creature darted crazily into the channel
+used by the _Esperance_ for passage. For a little way, it proceeded
+underwater. Then it grounded itself. Hopelessly.
+
+And the pursuing pack arrived.
+
+The sight from the _Esperance's_ deck was straight out of the worst
+possible nightmare. Glistening serpentine tentacles writhed and flailed
+the seas. They tore the swells to froth. The pursuers had flung
+themselves savagely upon the helpless one. The gap in the reef was
+closed by the battling giants. They slavered. They gripped. They tore.
+They rent each other....
+
+Terry saw a tentacle as thick as a barrel which had been haggled half
+through and dangled futilely as its stump still tried to fight.
+
+And more giants came. Terry shouted, and the _Esperance_ turned. He
+could see large patches of phosphorescence under the surface. And
+suddenly, he noticed that a few of them had swerved toward the
+_Esperance_. As they approached the sound-horn stung them. They went
+into convulsive struggling, as the sound played upon them, and they
+passed the _Esperance_ by.
+
+Davis found Terry beside the sound-weapon's controls watching the sea
+with desperate intensity.
+
+"Listen," said Davis fiercely, "we're out at sea and we can't get back
+into the lagoon! We'd better get away from here!"
+
+"Across deep water?" demanded Terry. "That dangerous foam can come up
+from deep water, but maybe not from shallow water. We've got to stay
+close to the reef until the flattop comes and bombs these creatures--if
+it will ever come!"
+
+Davis made a helpless gesture. Terry said crisply, "Get the 'copter to
+hang over the reef and report on the fighting there. Tell it to report
+to the flattop. They may not believe us, but they may send a plane
+anyway. And if the ships come, they'll have to believe about the foam!
+Tell them to listen for it underwater. They've got sonar gear."
+
+Davis stumbled away. Presently, the dark figure of Nick lowered himself
+through what had been the forecastle hatch. Davis followed him.
+
+Deirdre came over to Terry.
+
+"Terry ..."
+
+"I'm going to beat in the heads," said Terry, "of those idiots who came
+after your father and me without throwing you on the wharf first!"
+
+"They'd have wasted precious time," said Deirdre calmly. "I wouldn't
+have let them. Do you think I want to be ashore when you ..."
+
+There was the faintest of palings of the horizon to the east. Terry said
+grimly, "I'm going to try to find a passage through the surf, to get you
+ashore. I'm keeping the _Esperance_ in shallow water--inside the
+hundred-fathom line--but I don't trust it. Certainly I don't trust a
+ship to make you safer!"
+
+"It's going to be daybreak soon," she protested. "Then...."
+
+"Then we won't be able to see what goes on underwater," he told her.
+"Those ... creatures down below are smart!"
+
+There was a racketing, rumbling roar from the island. A light rose above
+the tree-tops. Presently a parachute-flare lit up. Then there was
+another, as if the men in the helicopter did not believe what they saw
+the first time.
+
+"Terry," said Deirdre shakily, "I'm ... glad we found each other, no
+matter what happens...."
+
+Davis came up from below.
+
+"The flattop's only a few miles away. They're now proceeding at top
+speed. The mine layer's following. They'll be here by sunrise."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Far away to the east, some brightness entered into the paling of the
+sky. A drab, colorless light spread over the sea. The ocean was a dark,
+slate blue. Swells flattened abruptly about a quarter-mile away. Terry
+aimed the sound-weapon and pressed the button. Something gigantic
+started up, and the top of a huge squid's mantle pierced the surface.
+The giant leaped convulsively, high above the water, save for trailing
+tentacles. It was larger than a whale. It fell back into the sea with a
+loud splash, and moved away quickly.
+
+Color came into the sky. The sun's upper rim appeared. Flecks of gold
+spread upon the sea.
+
+Far, far away at the horizon a dark speck appeared. As the sun climbed
+up over the edge of the world, the speck turned golden. There was a mist
+of smoke above it. A plane took off from the ship. Another plane
+followed.
+
+Fighter planes flashed toward the island. One of them zoomed sharply,
+like a bird astonished at something it has seen below. It whirled and
+came back over that spot. There was the rasping whine of a machine gun.
+Something like a giant snake reared up and fell back again. And now more
+planes appeared.
+
+Sunrise was suddenly complete. Terry stared out over the sea. And he
+could not believe his eyes, accustomed as he was to the highly unlikely,
+now. Giant squids were afloat at the surface. He saw one here, and
+another there, and another, and another.... They were emerging by tens,
+by scores.
+
+"They've been sent up," said Terry very grimly, "by an entity that
+didn't evolve on the earth. They're ... domesticated, in a way. They're
+watchdogs for whatever arrives in bolides that fall in the Luzon Deep.
+They are the reason for the shining circle of sea from which thousands
+of tons of living fish were drawn down into the abyss. The
+creatures--the ... _ellos_ who listen to what fish and fishermen
+say--they keep these things as domestic animals. And they have to feed
+them. Those mooings were the ... cries of these things waiting to be
+fed. Try to imagine that, Deirdre! In the blackness of the pit, in the
+abyss at the bottom of the sea...."
+
+A tentacle broke surface. Terry swung the sound-beam. A mantle reared
+above the waves. A bazooka-shell hit it. Something huge and stupid and
+monstrous fought the impalpable thing that hurt it....
+
+Davis approached.
+
+"These," he said absurdly, "aren't the creatures who made the plastic
+objects. Maybe we ought to try to open communication with their masters.
+Why should we fight? If we prove we can defend ourselves...."
+
+"I suspect," said Terry, "that all intelligent beings think the same
+way, intelligently. If we landed on another planet, on some part of that
+planet that the natives didn't use but we could, it wouldn't be sensible
+for those natives to welcome us! Trade with us, perhaps. But let us
+settle down, no!"
+
+There was a bomb explosion out at sea. A plane had dropped a
+hundred-pound bomb on a monster at the surface. The flattop was now
+distinct. Golden, almost horizontal sunlight struck upon it. Off to the
+west a plane dived steeply, something dropped from it, and the plane
+levelled off. A three-hundred-foot fountain erupted from the surface.
+Then there came absolute proof that intelligence lay behind all this. It
+was not human intelligence, to be sure. Men are tool-using creatures
+nowadays. They imagine robots for fighting, and nowadays they make them,
+but many centuries ago men ceased to try to use animals as combatants in
+war.
+
+The creatures under the sea had not. They'd send up giant squids to do
+battle with men, as men once sent elephants against the Macedonian army.
+It was naïve. But the generals, the tacticians, the strategists of the
+Deep did not remain wedded to the one weapon. Already, they saw that
+beasts could be fought by men. So their instruments of battle changed.
+Doubtless, orders were given, and five miles under the sea
+something--something men could not have duplicated--began the
+transformation of seawater into gas, in quantities past imagining. Tiny,
+tiny bubbles were produced by some unguessable engine, and rose toward
+the surface, in a steady stream. At the bottom they were under a
+pressure of tons to the square inch. But the pressure lessened as they
+rose, and as they rose they swelled. A bubble which was pinhead-size at
+the sea-bed grew to be the size of a basketball a half-mile up, and
+would have been the size of a house a mile up, except that then it
+separated into smaller ones. They rose and rose and expanded and
+separated. Five miles up from their origin, at little more than
+atmospheric pressure, they made a rising column of insubstantiality. At
+the surface they became foam. But under the foam there was more foam,
+and under that still more. A ship sailing from normal ocean water into
+such airy stuff would drop like a stone into the miles-long cone of
+semi-nothingness. Nothing solid could float there. Nothing substantial
+could rest its weight upon such rushing thistledown.
+
+And the first of the bubble-weapons appeared at the surface in the form
+of a patch of foam. Its source--and hence the place of its
+appearance--could be moved. It could be shifted under any ship, though
+there would be a time-interval, always, before the foam at the surface
+was exactly above the gas-generating engine below. It could be moved to
+anticipate the movements of a ship. But there was always that time-lag.
+
+The _Esperance_ headed back toward the heap of monsters at the break in
+the reef. Other giant squids emerged and joined the pack. A plane came
+over and bombed it. The _Esperance_ turned away. The mine layer from
+Manila appeared at the horizon. The flattop made a sudden violent turn,
+and more foam appeared upon the water. It curled and writhed and piled
+up to be ten--twenty--thirty yards in height.
+
+The flattop fired a shell into it. There was a gigantic flash and flame,
+and for an instant there was no foam, but only peculiarly pock-marked
+ocean surface, instantly covered by more foam which piled up as before.
+
+"Gas," said Terry grimly. "Hydrogen. You guessed right, Deirdre!"
+
+Now the flattop shot off plane after plane, as if they were projectiles.
+They swung in the air and flew low to drop bombs in the now wabbling,
+moving, sweeping patch of white stuff. It was a huge discoloration of
+the ocean surface. It was almost in diameter as the flattop's length.
+Now the carrier dodged it warily.
+
+There were dull concussions everywhere. Giant squids writhed in
+death-agonies. White foam-patches appeared here and there--but somehow
+haphazardly--as if fumbling for the ships. One patch swept close to _La
+Rubia_, and that small derelict seemed to tremble. And then the fishing
+boat touched the very edge of the white stuff, and was engulfed in it.
+She vanished instantly, as if she had fallen into a hole in the sea.
+When the foam-patch passed on, the sea was empty.
+
+The effect of the foam, actually, was that of a gigantic, slavering,
+blind gullet straining to devour. It moved erratically over the surface.
+Terry called to Deirdre, "Have Nick tell the flattop that the foam only
+comes up from deep water. If they can get inside the hundred-fathom
+curve they're safe! Maybe even five hundred. Maybe more. But the foam
+only comes up from deep water!"
+
+The mine layer came on from the horizon at topmost speed. Apparently,
+they had received warning from the carrier, because the ship suddenly
+began to zig-zag. The carrier itself adopted the unpredictable
+change-of-course system which had been originally designed to frustrate
+submarines lying in wait. Both ships adopted it just in time. A ravening
+area of foam appeared directly before the mine layer's bow just as she
+turned aside. The mine layer dumped a mine. Terry saw it go overboard.
+But it would have five miles to sink before it hit bottom.
+
+Terry called Davis and jerkily explained that the mines would have to be
+armed when they went overboard--set so that they would explode when they
+hit bottom. He explained that depth-bombs might be useful against
+squids, but if they went off at a fixed depth they would be harmless
+against the enemy which deployed the squids.
+
+The carrier, in the middle of a ninety-degree zig-zag turn, found her
+bow projecting into a foam-patch. The bow sank deep. The carrier's
+propellers were out of the water as her bow pointed downward. Had the
+foam stayed still for two seconds, the carrier would have slid into the
+column of gigantic ascending bubbles and plunged to destruction. But the
+foam swerved sidewise.
+
+The carrier escaped, and was infinitely cautious after that. She made
+short, swift, unpredictable dashes this way and that.... Her
+anti-aircraft guns rumbled and rattled at things upon the surface.
+Presently, her depth-finder discovered an underwater extension of the
+island's mountain-foundation, and the ship took refuge where the water
+was less than a hundred fathoms deep. There she lay, shooting off planes
+and retrieving them, her guns flashing at whatever targets appeared.
+
+Twice, as it happened, snaky, monstrous arms flung themselves up and
+heaved at the flattop as if the giant squids hoped to overturn even an
+aircraft carrier by their weight. But those arms were blasted to
+nothingness. The only damage they did was that a twenty-foot section of
+tentacle--writhing independently on the flight-deck--broke the
+landing-gear of a returning plane which collided with it.
+
+The mine layer ploughed across the sea. From time to time she heaved
+something overboard. Nothing seemed to happen. But each mine was,
+nevertheless, so adjusted that it could explode any time it touched
+something underwater. They did not allow the usual time so that the mine
+layer could get away. The mine layer had ample time, because the mines
+had to go slowly spinning down five long miles to the bottom of the
+Luzon Deep.
+
+Twenty mines went down before the first one detonated. The concussion
+was felt on the _Esperance_, twenty-seven thousand feet up and in
+shallow water. Then another, and another, and another. The mine layer
+continued to sow her destructive seed. Far behind her, a monstrous
+spouting of gas and spume rose up hundreds of feet. There was another
+concussion, and another....
+
+The _Esperance_ quivered, and Terry said grimly to Deirdre, "We set off
+five pounds of explosive down the Deep, and the bathyscaphe returned all
+smashed. What will the creature do now? I wish we could get some mines
+down to the bottom there!"
+
+Davis came up, beaming--but shaking.
+
+"The carrier's sending some planes down to drop eggs at the spot where
+the fish were dragged down!" he said zestfully.
+
+Gigantic, terrifying masses of gas leaped skyward where the gases
+released by the exploding mines finally reached the surface. The mine
+layer zig-zagged, and dropped a mine. She zig-zagged again, and dropped
+another. Presently, she took refuge beside the carrier. The _Esperance_
+drove over and came to a stop between the two armed vessels. Someone
+shouted down by megaphone from the carrier's deck, "What happened to
+you? What hit your bowsprit?"
+
+Terry shouted back, "You shot those beasts. We've been wrestling with
+'em!"
+
+An enormous eruption of gas.... Then the underwater ear began to emit an
+unprecedented sound. It was a rushing sound, but it was only vaguely
+like the noise of whatever had come up from the depths last Tuesday
+night. This was powerful beyond imagining.
+
+"Something's coming up!" roared Terry. "Better alert for a real fight
+now!"
+
+Deirdre said with a little gasp, "The real creatures are coming up!
+Terry! The ... things that come in the bolides...."
+
+He said savagely, "They've been shaken up badly by the concussions
+underwater. They resented five pounds of explosive! There's been four
+hundred pounds in every mine! If they try to fight after what they've
+taken down below...."
+
+The rushing sound from underwater was a loud, throbbing hum which had no
+relationship with the humming sound that drove fish. Two spoutings of
+gas from mine-explosions shot up. There were more concussions in the
+water.
+
+Then something broke surface. It was huge, and looked like a rocket. It
+leaped. No, it dashed upward, toward the sky. It flashed skyward,
+accelerating as it rose. Something else broke the surface and headed for
+the heavens. This one was globular.
+
+There were dull concussions coming from far underwater, and more rockets
+broke surface and shot skyward.
+
+Anti-aircraft guns were fired. Shell-bursts came close, but not close
+enough. Not less than twenty enormous rockets leaped out of the water
+and shot up toward the sky. Some observers claimed there were more than
+thirty. Down to southward, where the bathyscaphe had been crushed, the
+planes that were dropping mines reported that four other objects broke
+loose from the ocean and fled for empty space at speeds too great to be
+estimated.
+
+Terry looked suddenly astonished.
+
+"But ... of course!" he told Deirdre. "When you need high pressure, of
+course you've got a weakness. You can't take concussions! Anything
+underwater is completely vulnerable to bombs! Whatever was down there
+has found out that the natives--we aborigines--have a weapon they can't
+face. Primitive stuff. Explosives! Chemical explosives! And creatures
+that can travel between planets and undoubtedly have atomic power
+and--who knows what else--can't fight back if we drop submarine mines on
+them!"
+
+A last object broke surface and hurtled skyward. Behind it, deep, deep
+down, there was a titanic explosion.
+
+"Ah!" said Terry. "That was a time-bomb! They've gone home for good!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A task force of a private yacht, a fishing boat, a satellite-tracking
+station, an airplane carrier and a mine layer had driven off an invasion
+of earth. But the public could not be told that the earth had been
+invaded. The people who had been involved in this secret adventure had
+to be satisfied with the realization that they had saved mankind.
+
+After a jubilant dinner Terry and Deirdre sat in the veranda.
+
+Davis came out. He blinked at the night.
+
+"Deirdre? Terry?"
+
+"Here," said Terry.
+
+Davis joined them. They had drawn apart a little.
+
+"Good news by short-wave," said Davis. "Those rockets were picked up by
+radar. They divided into two groups. One headed sunward. The other
+headed for deep space. My guess is Venus for one group and Jupiter for
+the other. They couldn't have come from Mars. But they've gone home.
+Both groups."
+
+Terry paused, and then said wryly, "Two races! Some of the bolides were
+bullet-shaped and some were globular. That figures. But two races
+capable of space travel and both in our own solar system!"
+
+Davis grimaced. "We've been talking about it. Our guess is that the
+Venus race developed in deep water, and therefore at high pressure. And
+anything that developed on the solid surface of Jupiter would also be
+accustomed to extremely high pressure."
+
+Terry nodded. He was not exactly absorbed in what Davis had to say. But
+he said suddenly, "I make a guess. They didn't want to start a colony
+here. The sea-bottom here is too cold to be comfortable for the beings
+from Venus, and far too hot to suit those from Jupiter. But both needed
+terrific pressure. In order to keep contact with each other, in order to
+do business, they could have set up a trading post here. To meet and
+trade. Neither one could take over the earth. When you think of it, we
+couldn't take over Venus or Jupiter! Maybe that's the answer!"
+
+"Eh?" said Davis.
+
+"We won't have to fight as planets," said Terry, "when we have
+space-ships like they do. We couldn't gain anything by fighting. All we
+can gain by is trade. They'll be pleased. It must have been horribly
+inconvenient to have to set up a trading post here on earth. There were
+always the natives, you know. Lately, they've noticed that we've been
+getting restless. We have been. I imagine that now they'll wait for us
+to make space-ships and start up interplanetary trade."
+
+Davis said, "Very true. There's going to be the devil of a mess, though.
+Morton will still have to explain the accuracy of his prediction about
+the bolides' landings. I suspect he'll be censured for assuming anything
+as unlikely as the truth has turned out to be."
+
+Terry did not answer. Deirdre was saying something, and he did not hear
+at all.
+
+"There are still loose ends," added Davis. "For instance, how do you
+suppose they controlled those squids down below? What did they use for
+eyesight? How the devil would Jovians and Venusians agree on a meeting
+place in our oceans?"
+
+Terry answered what Deirdre'd said. She smiled at him. They'd forgotten
+that Davis was there.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Creatures of the Abyss, by Murray Leinster
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42901 ***