A naval ensign next to Christopher sniggered.
“Second,” said Pirrett. “The full-scale simulated release of thermonuclear weapons. We are going to DEFCON 1.”
“Sir?” said someone from near the front. “Have the Soviets been informed?”
A ripple of laughter passed across the room.
“To what end, Mister Otis?”
“Serious point, sir. Soviet planning assumes the West would disguise a real attack as border exercises. This could panic them into a pre-emptive strike.”
“That is the intention.” Pirrett paused for effect. “It's quite a remarkable conception. Soviet analysts will fear it may be the real thing. Our mission is to observe Soviet countermeasures: see how the enemy responds, identify his weaknesses.”
“Holy shit,” said someone. “That's suicide.”
“Not our problem,” said Pirrett with a smile. “We have our mission. Execute with excellence.”
* * * *
Christopher was eating his dinner at the kitchen table when Sara came in that night. It was after nine, and she was soaked to the skin.
“Hi,” she said, and took off her dripping fur coat and hung it from the back of the kitchen door. Her long black hair clung to her back, flat and dripping, streaked with purple and blue. She put her wet towel on the table next to his dinner, then picked it up again straight away. “Sorry,” she said. “Don't mind me.” She turned toward the sink and began to rub her hair with the already-dripping towel.
He watched her carefully. He always did, when he got the chance. She was tall, perhaps taller than him. Her hips and shoulders were narrow. Damp and shivering as she was, she looked thin beneath her long black skirt. She lifted her hair, wrapped in another towel, and piled it on top of her head, revealing the nape of her neck. It was slender and vulnerable, at odds with the purple-painted nails, the streaks in her hair, the black eyeliner. Once he had seen her blurred naked outline through the rippled glass of the bathroom door, bending over the basin. It was like seeing her through water.
“How's the spook's nest?” said her muffled voice from under the towel.
“Oh, you know, quiet. You haven't been out swimming now? Not in this weather?”
“Absolutely.” She turned round and gave him a grin. “Every day. Never miss. Tonight was fantastic. The tide was way up and the swell was massive. Amazing.”
Sara had deep brown eyes, the irises so large they showed almost no white at all. Now, fresh from her swimming, her eyes were bright and shining wet, her pupils darkly dilated. Sometimes Christopher wondered whether she took drugs. She was shivering. “It is bloody cold, though,” she said. “You should try it sometime.”
“I was going to make tea,” he said. “Want some?”
“Mm,” she said. “Please.” She sat at the table and lit a cigarette while he made the tea, and they talked about the weather. He hoped she'd stay and drink it with him, but she didn't. “Thanks,” she said, and took it up to her room and closed the door.
Sara was already living in the cottage when Christopher took the room. He hadn't realized the only other tenant was a woman. Somehow he'd assumed it would be another serviceman from the base. She didn't talk to him much. He thought it might be the uniform, though he always took it off as soon as he got in. Sometimes she left Greenham Common leaflets lying around. He wanted to let her know he was different: he made cynical comments about Mrs. Thatcher, and left carefully selected albums—The Cure, The Smiths, The Fall—where she would see them. He wanted Sara to like him, and he wanted to know more about her. She didn't seem to go to work. As far as he could tell from the overflowing plates and saucers she used as ashtrays, she hung around the house, smoking. He did know that every day she took the narrow path along the cliff edge and down to the bay, where she swam. And every night the man he never saw came to the cottage and she took him up to her room. Christopher wondered if he was there during the day, too.
That night he was lying on his bed, trying to read but thinking of Soviet submarines in the Arctic seas, burrowing forward under the weight of dark waters, bearing their loads of death. He heard Sara go downstairs and open the door. He heard them go into her room. He listened for the sounds to begin.
* * * *
Christopher's next few days were spent almost entirely in the watch room. Listening. Watching the scratchy pen-trails on the unrolling paper. They were on long shifts, instructed to sleep on the base.
There were celebrations when the first traces were triangulated: a US Navy convoy—an aircraft carrier and two cruisers—was steaming north-east of the Reykjanes Ridge on a course that would take them between Iceland and the Faeroes, breaching the GIUK Gap; and to the north of them, deep in the Norwegian Sea, three Soviet submarines were on a convergent southward course. The early elation of discovery soon evaporated, replaced by a subdued nervousness in the watch room as the analysts watched the game play itself out.
A Soviet Delta-1 class submarine, 139 meters long, propelled by two VM4 pressurized-water nuclear reactors, operates comfortably at depths of up to four hundred meters and carries twelve “Stingray” thermonuclear ballistic missiles. Its hydrophone signature is an unmistakeable rhythmic knocking rumble. That is what the approach of armageddon sounds like.
Every hour brought the US convoy and the Soviet submarines closer together.
“Reagan terrifies the Soviets,” someone said. “They think he's a religious nut. They think he wants to open the Seventh Seal.”
“How would you know?” said Stone. He was as alert and groomed as ever.
“I've got friends studying in Moscow. They know people there.”
“You report those contacts?”
“Lighten up, Stone.”
“Shut up!” called Christopher. “Quiet! Let me listen! I've got something else.”
There was ... something else. There was the drumming of the Delta-1's and ... something else. A voice. Not a whale's voice (he heard them calling sometimes, out in the lonely ocean) but something larger than a whale, sadder, more intelligent, more beautiful. It was imitating the submarines. Another voice joined it. Harmonizing. Both voices were harmonizing with the submarines’ monotones, weaving them into complex, beautiful song.
“Listen!” Christopher was shouting. “For god's sake. Shut up and listen.” He flipped the feed to the speakers and adjusted the filters to take out the background noise, until the long, beautiful song filled the watch room.
“It's a wind-up,” said Stone. “You made this yourself. It's a tape.”
“No,” said Christopher. “It's not.”
It was impossible to pick out the song on the gram paper. Too much background. No trace there. And then, abruptly, it faded, and on the speakers there was only the lonely, ominous tone of the Soviet turbines.
That evening NATO readiness was raised to DEFCON 2 for the first time since Cuba, 1961. The Western military world was just one ratchet below nuclear war. But there was no preventing the British contingent celebrating Bonfire Night, and the US personnel seized on the distraction. Christopher found himself sitting in a corner, full of beer, the jukebox hammering at his head. Bonnie Tyler. Irene Cara. Billy Joel's “Uptown Girl.” Yes, “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” When Kiss came on, “Lick It Up,” the bar staff turned the volume up and the bar filled with whooping and cheering. The TV was showing First Blood on video without the sound.
Christopher was telling some guy he had a guitar at home, he wanted to be a musician, not this kind of crap, The Smiths, for instance. Then he said he had to go to the bathroom. As he left the table, he heard them talking about him. “Osgerby, yeah. Nice enough guy, maybe, but...”
AC/DC, “Guns For Hire” was thumping up the corridor. There was a smell of stale bodies, cigarettes and beer. He turned away from the bathroom and headed for the quiet of the deserted watch room. Ozone was heavy in the air, the ranks of gram-writers were scratching relentlessly at their rolls of paper. He put the headphones on, just to rest in the sounds of th
e cold mid-ocean darkness.
And the beautiful voices were there again. Long and slow, they were calling to each other, and to him. The submarines were still in the song, but it was more complex now, fragmented and recombined, repeated faster and slower. And more voices. Sometimes they broke off in a kind of repetitious bellowing. Slower phrases sank through the octaves until they dropped out of his hearing altogether. Then came shrill, intermittent pulses, hard and fast little tumbling balls of sound, like bird song. Each voice had a different way of putting sounds together, each one a clear and distinctive personality, though he could not have described their characteristics in human terms. He almost jumped out of his seat when one came right up close to a hydrophone and shrieked into it, angrily.
For an hour he simply listened. Then, sleepwalking, he plugged in a tape recorder and set it running.
He stayed all night listening, and at the end of the next day's shift he took the first big risk in his life. Never before had he knowingly broken the rules, the big ones, the ones that matter. Never before had he done anything which put him beyond the approval of the authorities. But now he picked up the cassettes of tape and slipped them into his pocket.
When he crossed the perimeter his heart was pumping so hard he could not have spoken, not a word, if they had challenged him. He felt so sick he thought he would just vomit on the spot. But he wasn't stopped. Nobody gave him a second glance. They all knew Osgerby, a nice enough guy, but...
Outside it was late on Monday afternoon. Thin drifts of mist and drizzle swept across the moorland under a dim grey sky. He was trembling. His legs were so weak he could hardly keep walking.
The anxiety on the base—the strain of days watching the traces as the Soviet submarines moved south through icy waters and the US convoy steamed further into the GIUK Gap—had grown so strong you could feel it and smell it. His clothes and his hair, even his skin, were saturated with the sour smell of the watch room. He smelled of fear. And now ... what had he done? He felt the tapes in his pocket. If he were caught, if they knew...
When he reached the cliff-edge path which led to the cottage, he needed to rest. Leaning against a stile, he looked out across the mist-shrouded bay. For a moment the grey veils drifted apart and he saw the low, dark shape of an island, about half a mile out. There should have been no island there. There should have been nothing but the grey body of the sea. But there was no doubting it: he could see an island, a black mass of rock rising to a slight prominence at the northern end. It must have been a mile long. He could make out trees. A low crest of woodland edging the spine of it. Then the mist closed in again and the island disappeared.
Though he stood and waited until he was cold right through and soaking wet, the mist didn't clear again. When the wind picked up and the rain grew heavier he turned away.
There was a mess of wet sand and seaweed on the doorstep, and the air inside the cottage was damp and chill and heavy with the smell of the sea, like a cave on the beach. It felt as if the tide had just withdrawn. Sara was not at home and her fur coat was not in its place behind the door. She had left one of her heaps of stuff from the seashore strewn across the table: seashells, pebbles, pieces of driftwood, seaweed holdfasts, dried urchin cases, mermaid's purses. There was stuff like that all over the cottage. Christopher climbed up to his room, put the first of the cassettes in the tape deck, and fell, exhausted, onto the bed.
He was aching with tiredness and tension. As the room filled with the slow, aching voices of the sea, he drifted in a kind of befuddled wakefulness. The long voices on the tape were calling to him. He felt as if he were floating deep under the sea himself. His body became larger. He was vast. He no longer had rigid limbs and a heavy skeleton, he was a huge floating agglomeration with no clear edge of definition. He felt like nothing so much as an enormously, hugely, stupendously vast egg, without a shell, floating in the heavy cold darkness. He stretched for miles. He was held together by the viscosity of himself, denser and more coherent at the center but spreading outward in all directions, a vast shapeless umbra of consciousness that became more dispersed and permeable as it mingled indefinitely with the sea at the borders between him and not-him.
It was wonderful.
He was weightless and timeless, a darkly luminous awareness, an all-encompassing intelligence. He enjoyed the thoughts and feelings that passed through him. He savored them. He lingered patiently over every insight and sensation, tasting the currents of the ocean as he slowly, languorously turned and stretched like a comfortable cat.
There was a tentative knock at his bedroom door. He jumped up in a guilty panic and slammed off the tape player. It was Sara.
“Oh,” he said. “Hi.”
“Can I come in?”
“What? Oh, sure. I guess.”
Evening had come. He'd been lying in his room in near-darkness.
“It's a bit of a mess in here...” he said. He couldn't think straight. He stood in the doorway, hesitating, blocking her way.
“I was listening,” she said. “To those ... sounds...”
“Oh...”
“I didn't think anyone else round here could hear them. I thought I was the only one.”
“You've heard that? Before? How could...?”
“Can I come in? I mean, just for a minute?”
“Well, I guess so.”
“I don't want to disturb you. I mean, I'm sorry, I couldn't help but hear, you had it on very loud....”
“The thing is,” he said. “I don't know what it is. I wish I did, but I don't. How could you ... I mean, do you...?”
“I don't know. Maybe. Possibly. I'm not sure. Look, I'm sorry to disturb you. Another time.”
“No, wait. Come in.” He stood aside, and turned on the desk lamp. “Please.”
* * * *
Afterward, Christopher found that he couldn't remember the detail of what they actually said that evening. Above all, what he did remember was Sara sitting in the fat red leatherette chair, and him on the bed. Her black, purple-streaked hair, still wet from swimming in the sea, held back from her face with a black band. She was wearing a grey cardigan with holes in the sleeves, a long black skirt, scruffy flat shoes that left the tops of her pale feet bare. The slender bone structure moved visibly when she flexed her toes.
She smoked as they talked. Somehow, she ended up asking him about himself, and somehow, because he was overstretched and bewildered and she was listening to him, he told her. It came out all mixed up: how he'd wanted to be a musician but his parents wanted a proper career for him. The Navy had paid for him to study electronics. “The money was good,” he said. “I never really thought what would happen afterward. And now here I am.” He told her about listening for submarines, hearing the beautiful songs of the sea, making the tapes. Stealing them. “God knows what made me. If they find out ... Christ, it's spying ... it's probably treason...”
“But they don't know, do they?” she said. “And they can't find out.”
“I could take them back. Or burn them.”
“No,” she said. “Don't do that.”
“What is it, anyway? It's got to be organic. Like whale song. Only we get whales all the time. They sound nothing like that. You said you'd heard it before?”
“Well, I thought so. Maybe...”
“When? When could you have?”
“Oh,” she looked surprised. “Swimming. Out in the bay. When I go deep, sometimes I ... but I really don't know. I shouldn't have said anything. I'd need to hear it more. I was only listening from downstairs.”
He stood up. “I'll put it on now.”
“Not now,” she said. “I have to go.”
She stood up. Without either of them intending it, they found themselves close together. They both hesitated. Christopher found he was looking into her face intently, examining her. He knew the expression on his own face was wide open. Unprotected. Obvious, like he never let it be, the need and wanting plain and raw. Scarcely knowing what he was doing, he took hold
of her arm gently.
“Sara. I...”
She withdrew her arm from his grip.
“I'd better go,” she said.
The smell of her cigarettes lingered in the room. Later, the man came to the house again. Christopher played the “Blue Monday” twelve-inch. Over and over again.
When he finally slept he dreamed of sleek, coiling monsters.
* * * *
The next morning the rain had lifted, but though he stood for fifteen minutes on the cliff top to scan the dull grey water under a watery sky, there was no island out there.
As he got near the base, the fear reached inside his chest and began to squeeze. By the time he reached the gates he was water inside. Knowing the guards would arrest him. But they nodded him through.
No one looked up when he entered the watch room, but the usual trays were empty.
“Hey,” he said to Stone, trying to make it casual. “Where are the scrolls from yesterday?”
“What? Oh, yeah. Special analysis. Somebody making a cross-check with Reykjavik or something.”
“All of them?”
“Guess so.”
“Who does a reconciliation in the middle of an exercise?”
Stone shrugged. “What's it matter? Some hush-hush thing. You know,” he tapped the side of his nose. “Sneaky beaky. Ask no questions.”
“Don't patronize me, Stone. I'm senior officer on this watch and I should know what's happening.”
“Sure. Whatever you say, Lieutenant. Why don't you go ask Pirrett about it?”
Christopher buried his head in his work. He kept the headphones on as much as he could but there was nothing to hear. As the day wore on he found it harder and harder to concentrate. He wanted to hear again the long songs of the sea. He wanted to go back to the cottage and play the tapes. Sara would be there now. Alone. Probably.
By lunchtime, crisis gripped NAVFAC Maerdy. The Delta-1's were hanging motionless in mid-ocean. NATO was at DEFCON 1. Nobody at Maerdy was quite sure whether Able Archer 83 was still an exercise or not. Lieutenant Christopher Osgerby quietly put down his pen, put on his coat and walked off the base.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2008 Page 12
