The Atlantic Abomination

by John Brunner

  Of the Atlantic Research Foundation’s scientists aboard the Alexander Bache this trip, Dick Loescher was a novice studying submarine geology, and Eloise Vanderplank was a bioecologist studying the interdependence of fish populations and plankton.

  Therefore it was to the last member of the group that Peter looked when at last he managed to drag his eyes away from the screen at the end of the table. The Chief: Dr. Gordon.

  Gordon was a plump and placid man, possessed usually of a sharp tongue equal to every occasion, respected in his field as a sober and experienced oceanologist. Years of patient work on laborious research programs had enabled him to provide mortar for the bricks of a score of brilliant but tottering theories, and he was liked for that reason both by the proposers of such theories and by those under him who were unwilling to assume what Gordon was still dedicatedly trying to place beyond doubt.

  Peter was shocked to see that Gordon, the unshakable, was leaning forward on his elbows, his gaze fixed on the screen, and murmuring to himself almost as though in prayer.

  Peter glanced at Mary on the other side of the table. She looked cool and lovely in a plain white shirt and skirt, but red puffings of her eyelids betrayed what she had done when the ’nef was hauled alongside. While the pictures were being developed and Peter was telling the story of Luke’s disappearance, she had hidden herself in her cabin and wept the grief out of her.

  Was it for the real Luke, the Luke of today, that she had cried? Or was it for the Luke she had idolized so long ago? The latter, perhaps. Peter had known Luke and liked him well enough, but although he was good at his job he was hardly a remarkable enough person to spark such admiration.

  He caught Mary’s eye now and nodded towards Gordon. An answering nod made him clear his throat and turn in his chair.

  “Uh, Dr. Gordon! Have you formed any theory about the origin of these remains yet?” This, to someone who often spent months or years testing a theory before pronouncing it fit for use, was a bad question, and Peter hastened to qualify it. “I mean, insofar as we have data to draw tentative—”

  “Theory, my dear Peter? Theory? Who can talk of theories in a moment such as the one we experience now? When, for this rare and precious time only, one can speak with immediate and perfect certainty! Theories, for God’s sake, when we know, you know, everyone knows!”

  He blew a harrumphing blast and pocketed his handkerchief before returning to his rapt contemplation of the screen.

  The other people in the room exchanged glances. Because Eliose Vanderplank was the next senior member of the staff, was not a specialist in this field, and had worked with Gordon more often than the rest of them, the lot fell to her. She rested one tanned, bony arm on the table and demanded in her high voice, “Know what, Chief?”

  “Oh, really, Eloise!” Gordon sat bolt upright. “We find buildings, or traces of building, on the ocean floor, in the Eastern Atlantic Basin which is known to be floored with granite and therefore once part of a landmass, and you ask a question like that. Really, Eloise, even if you do specialize in fish populations, I’d have thought something of the general knowledge of the field would have rubbed off. From me, if no one else.”

  Peter’s heart suddenly sank. Was this Gordon’s “secret vice?” Had they uncovered the true reason behind his patient oceanographic work, his gathering of data, his patching of promising but leaky hypotheses?

  Mary must have seen the truth quicker. She shoved back her chair with a grunt. “Dr. Gordon, if you’re talking about Atlantis you must be crazy!”

  The company grinned and relaxed. Peter heard the faintest whisper of, “Good girl!” He thought it came from Eloise.

  But the effect on Gordon was appalling. He grew red in the face. He snorted. He slapped the table loudly. At last he found his voice again. “That is unforgivable! At least grant me that I did not mention Atlantis first. I wouldn’t, for I know as well as you, and maybe better because I was studying this when you were in your cradle, that Plato’s Atlantis is supposed to have submerged far more recently than this landmass above which we float. But Atlantis is a good enough name, hallowed by usage and sanctioned by tradition.

  “Why, it’s been clear—clear to me, anyway—from the circumstantial evidence that some real disaster overwhelmed some real and great civilization, ever since I began in school. I oughtn’t to have to tell you! A single theme, a single cataclysmic event has been distorted in passage from mouth to mouth and generation to generation. Primitive; degenerate peoples have attached truth they could no longer understand to petty local events: Noah’s flood, Deucalion’s flood.

  “And now we find evidence which no one can dispute, however bitterly they may wish to. Not of Plato’s Atlantis, perhaps. But certainly of a great civilization, perhaps as great as ours in a different way. Had they been so technically accomplished, they would probably have survived the upheaval that brought about their doom. But there are other fields of knowledge than engineering.” He made the word sound like an insult, and Engineer Officer Platt started to voice a protest but thought better of it and subsided, fuming.

  Mary sat with downcast eyes. Peter found her foot under the table and pressed it with the side of his own, wishing he could reach her hand instead. Into the silence that followed, Captain Hartlund’s voice drifted coolly.

  “I must say, Chief, you seem to be getting a hell of a lot out of a few isolated flagstones with hieroglyphs on them—which may only be ornament, after all.” He removed the empty pipe that jutted from his mouth and jabbed it at the screen.

  “I’m not a trained scientist, but I’ve worked aboard the Bache and her predecessors long enough for some of it to have rubbed off, as you put it. There isn’t any doubt that here under our feet there’s an epoch-making discovery—literally A hundred thousand years back there weren’t supposed to be people on earth who lived in anything much better than skin tents, or even caves. But what have we actually got? An inexhaustible treasure-trove, or something as tantalizing and mysterious as the Easter Island statues were until they got pushed into a pattern? Peter said he couldn’t see anything else except what might be traces of masonry construction. I figure there’s a chance we may only have come across a sort of—well, a super Stonehenge, for instance; a unique masterpiece produced by an otherwise primitive society for some practical or mystical purpose it’ll take anthropologists and paleontologists years to unravel.”

  The air cleared. Hartlund’s forceful good sense impressed even Gordon, although he seemed deflated.

  “Very well,” he said with a good grace. “I had considered radioing an immediate report and facsimiles of the pictures Peter and Mary brought back. It occurs to me that newspaper reporters may seize on Atlantis, by which of course I mean the fabulous Atlantis of Plato and Ignatius Donnelly, and obscure the much more important possibilities we may later uncover.”

  He sighed, and for a moment was far away again. “But if it is not what you envisage, not a mere submarine Easter Island, then what vistas open up before us! The key to the future, yielded up by the past. Hopes of forgotten lore, of—”

  Eloise coughed, and the Chief broke off. “I’m sorry. As to practical proposals for immediate action …?”

  V

  THE REST of the meeting passed in a normal atmosphere, and when it was over Peter followed Hartlund out on deck. It was nearing sunset, but the air was still and warm.

  “Thanks for putting a stop to that nasty little situation,” he said.

  The captain, tamping shag tobacco into his pipe, smiled without raising his wood-brown face to look at Peter. “We all have our shortcomings,” he said. “I’d begun to think I’d never find out what the Chief’s was.”

  “But to hear him actually blather about forgotten secret lore!” Peter spread his hands in amazement, and then gave up. He switched the subject.

  “How long before we start the ’nef down again?”

  “Depends on how long it takes Fred Platt to give his okay. And on whether the Chief insist
s on running shallow tests on ‘Dick and Eloise’s Ostrovsky-Wong process before going all the way down. How long is it you have to allow between dives?”

  “Forty-eight hours minimum in sea-level air, and they think six dives below a mile is enough on any one trip. But they don’t know, of course. It may prove possible to cut down the rest periods. They’re playing safe.”

  “’Scuse!” said Platt from behind them, and they stepped apart to let him through. He was carrying the servicing and fault-detection kits for the ’nef, and one of the two apprentice engineers was hot on his heels.

  “Handled like a dream all the way for us, Fred!” Peter shot at the engineer officer’s back. Platt flung his reply over his shoulder.

  “Great! Now let’s see if it works like a piece of machinery!”

  He and his assistant were overside a moment later, swarming out along the line to the ’nef, hand over hand. Hartlund chuckled. “No doubts, no delays,” he commented. “Wish there was more than one of those damned ’nefs. The ‘scaphes aren’t bad in their way, but what can you really do without atomics?”

  “Well, there is more than one, you know,” Peter corrected, and Hartlund blew smoke.

  “Yes, of course. The Russkis have one, don’t they? The Vladimir Ostrovsky, isn’t it?”

  “Pavel Ostrovsky,” Peter answered. “I’d really like to see that ’nef. Better yet, make a trip in her. Some of the data they’d already hauled in before we got this thing of ours over its teething troubles made me crazy jealous!”

  He laughed. “Mark you, the luck seems to be on our side at the moment.”

  “Where are they working mostly?”

  “The Pacific deeps. That was the main reason they allotted that one out there to us, I gather. The military who were still in on the project approved its going to Atlantic because the Russian ’nef couldn’t kidnap ours if it was in another ocean, and it was all right with us because we wanted ’nef data on the Atlantic more than we wanted to duplicate the work the Russkis were doing.”

  Watching the ’nef go under again next morning with Eloise and Dick Loescher on board, Peter felt like kicking himself. If he hadn’t wasted so much time on that damned pavement, he could have done most of the work these two were intended to do on the first trip, and had the greater satisfaction of getting an overall picture of the discovery. That would have averted the unpleasant scene with the Chief yesterday.

  As to getting a general picture of what lay a thousand fathoms under them, that was work for which it was reasonable to send a geologist and an expert on fish economy. They could look about, take photographs, report the evidence of their eyes. On the next trip after this, he and Mary could begin to interpret the data.

  To occupy his time during the thirty-six hours this descent was scheduled to last, Peter prepared a report on the flagstones to accompany the picture. He had polished it five times in order to kill a couple of extra hours before he finally surrendered and took it to the Chief. Gordon received it with an abstracted nod, studied it, seemed to wish to comment but said nothing.

  Peter hesitated, and then turned to go.

  “Just a moment, Peter,” Gordon said almost inaudibly. “I should like to ask a question. I know already what Mary Davis thinks about my attitude towards this discovery. May I have your views?”

  He squared his shoulders as though tensing to receive a blow.

  “I’ve learned from you, Chief,” said Peter carefully, “not to formulate conclusions without gathering all the evidence available. There’s more evidence, probably, than what I got on my trip. Till it’s all in, or at least till we know the nature of what’s left, I’d rather reserve my opinion.”

  “Very sound, very sound,” muttered Gordon. It was a typical, almost automatic, comment. But this time his heart was not in it. “Oh, one more thing. Hartlund reminded me that we ought to hold an investigation into Luke Wallace’s death. Well, that’s hard. But I think it will suffice if you swear to a written statement. Mary will have to do the same, of course.”

  Peter left the office and sauntered out on deck, thoughtful. Through his mind was running the memory of the story Mary had told him just before Luke’s death, the story of how she came to be in Oceanography. It was curious. Prior to hearing it, he had had a blind spot towards Mary. She was too attractive to be overlooked, but although she was plainly not attached to anyone on board, nor did she speak of anyone ashore, and although their work brought them together continually, he had never thought of her as Mary Davis. As a woman.

  Partly, he now realized as he thought back, it was because he had made a subconscious assumption that lady scientists who were beautiful must be lacking in some essential thing which would make paying attention to them worthwhile. He had found such a lack so often—even in girls who seemed at first contact vivacious, intelligent, interesting to be with—that he had taken to saving himself the money and trouble involved in finding out its nature.

  But the story she had told him while waiting for Luke had suddenly made her human in his eyes.

  A door opened. It was dark, but Mary wore her plain white shirt and skirt and it made her instantly recognizable. She stood out of the darkness near the bows like a vague white statue, leaning on the rail and looking at the traces of phosphorescence in the sea.

  Peter walked quietly toward her and leaned on the rail at her side. She acknowledged his presence with a turn of her head, and went back to staring at the water.

  He didn’t say anything. He let his hand first brush and then close around hers, and she returned his inquiring pressure with a squeeze. At length she spoke.

  “It was great of you to go out looking for Luke that way.”

  “What the hell did you expect me to do?” said Peter. “Sit in the ’nef and bobble off back to the surface singing songs?”

  She managed a courtesy laugh. It sounded forced. “No. I—well, I guess I might as well say it. I didn’t try very hard to persuade you not to, because I was trying like hell not to push for the lock and go hunting myself.”

  “I understand,” said Peter as gently as he could. “Coming on top of having told me that story, when the whole thing was fresh in your mind. …”

  She nodded. She was still gazing at the water. “That made it worse, of course.”

  “That story you told me,” Peter ventured. “You tell it often?”

  “Almost never. I told it to the Chief one time, when he was ribbing me about a student who was panting at my heels. He said I had no business in Atlantic, that I ought to be in a Park Avenue apartment. No, not often.”

  “And … to Luke?”

  “No.” The word was dry and isolated, as though cut off. “No. And now I never cant” Abruptly she had turned towards him, and sobs were shaking her while he comforted her as he had done in the ’nef when they left the site of Luke’s disaster. It felt better to be doing it in the open air.

  Peter said gently, “You really carried a torch for that guy, didn’t you? Hidden under a bushel, too.”

  She pulled away from him, her face suddenly still, her eyes searching his face. “You said you understood,” she breathed. “Only you don’t. You don’t at all!”

  While Peter was still standing with his mouth half open and hunting for a reply, the mess call sounded. Mary seized it as a cue to turn on her heel and walk away.

  That incomprehensible episode was stuck in his mind next noon, getting between him and the paper on which he was trying to compose the statement about Luke which the Chief had asked him for. He had firmly dismissed it for the tenth time and was renewing his attack when there was a sudden flurry of activity. Eloise and Dick weren’t due back for hours yet. He got up and went out, bumping into First Officer Ellington almost before he had left the doorway.

  “Hey! What gives?”

  “The ’nef’s surfacing,” Ellington answered. “I got it on sonar a couple of minutes back. They’re ahead of schedule, and that means trouble, most likely. Or something epoch-making in the way of discover
ies, which they couldn’t sit on any longer. Excuse me.”

  Ellington was right. On both counts. How right, he did not learn for some time.

  There seemed to be nothing wrong with the ’nef as it progressed to the surface. The launch went skimming toward its point of arrival, Platt driving with all his test and repair equipment beside him. But as it could be seen that the ’nef was under perfect control, he slowed and ran a puzzled circle before closing in. The trouble must be with Dick or Eloise, not the mechanism.

  But two suited figures duly broke surface beside the ’nef, which was normal.

  And a third followed them. The third looked like—Luke.

  No. Correction. It was Luke!

  VI

  THE WORD went round the entire survey ship before Platt had brought the launch to a rocking halt beside the three explorers. Everyone, barring the apprentice engineer who had to stand by in the engine room and the radio officer, burst out on the deck, eager to confirm the impossible with their own eyes.

  Its effect on Dr. Gordon was tremendous. He came trotting from his office with a stylo still in his hands, his face red with excitement and beaded with new sweat. He clutched the afterrail as though strangling an enemy, and his lips moved silently.

  Peter found his powers of mind temporarily suspended. He could not even form ridiculous theories to account for Luke’s return. Damn it, if Eloise and Dick had chanced across his body that would have been acceptable, although it would have made needles in haystacks simple by comparison. But Luke was alive; he clambered over the gunwale of the launch without assistance, and removed his own helmet, squatting in the sternsheets.

  Without oxygen. …

  He couldn’t have any oxygen left! His reserve had been identical with Peter’s own; sufficient for about six hours altogether, contained in two cylinders. At three-hour intervals one exchanged an exhausted cylinder for a fresh one stored in the ’nef. Consequently Luke must have suffocated within a few hours—four, perhaps—of the ’nef’s departure for the surface.