by John Brunner
“Okay! I may say we’ve had nearly three quarters of an hour’s perfect operation on the way here. This means something is likely to blow up any moment now. But cross your fingers.”
There was a breathless pause. Peter heard a stir along the deck and turned his head to see that Mary had come out, a white bandage on her bruised temple.
A light showed on the back of the submarine. Very dimly they heard chains clanking.
“Just rigging something that will hook on to your bathynef if they can locate it,” the officer reported. “Only makeshift, I’m afraid, but if there’s anything to hitch on to, it’ll do.”
“Make it good and long,” the Chief warned. “The ’nef has an atomic beacon on top. You’ll need to keep as least fifteen feet clear.”
“We’re allowing ninety fathoms,” said the officer calmly.
The light went out. Another pause. And then—
“Good God!” said Hartlund, and nearly let fall his pipe. The submarine had put its nose down in the water so sharply that its tail, with the reactor pipe, blew a two-hundred-foot fountain of more-than-boiling water towards the sky. And the deck rocked beneath them as it was gone.
Peter and Mary sat long hours in silence on the deck, and stared at the water or dozed fitfully. Without the ’nef, there was nothing to do prior to turning for home, except to cover the monstrous body on the afterdeck. Platt attended to that, using canvas awnings.
Two of the officers from the submarine’s mother ship came over in a motor-dinghy at breakfast time and inspected the body at Gordon’s invitation. Hartlund and the Chief were asked to lunch in return and warned that they wouldn’t be permitted to see over the vessel because it was classified.
There was no news.
It was approaching dark when the submarine came back in sonar range, and the indistinct reports it made held no hope. Nothing had gone wrong with the sub. They had tracked the ’nef and tried to communicate with Luke, without success. Then they had tied a slip knot in their chain—
“What?” said the staff of the survey ship when they heard that. The British officer coughed and looked blandly surprised.
“Yes, why not? Good practice for the pilot, you know. Why else do you think we put ninety fathoms of chain on?”
“Like a needle and thread?” said Hartlund incredulously.
“Precisely. Then they lassoed the bathynef and got a good hold before starting to drag it upwards. Only this man of yours got out a cutting torch from somewhere and severed the chain.”
“Oh, Jesus!” said Gordon quietly.
“Naturally, that made it difficult to tie another knot. But they managed it all right, and caught him a second time, and he cut the chain again. We didn’t have anyone aboard who’d been through the Ostrovsky-Wong process, so we couldn’t get anyone outside except in a rubber suit, and he was armed with this torch. They said it was a fearsome kind of weapon. Had a flame as long as a man’s arm.”
“It does,” said Platt, listening intently. “At that depth.”
“Anyway, they went after him regardless, but he chased them all round, hanging on to the ’nef with a line, and in the end the commander called them back, deciding it was not worth the candle.” The officer shrugged and looked apologetic. “I’m dreadfully sorry we couldn’t do more.”
There was nothing more to be done—for some considerable time to come. Having lost the ’nef, they would have to wait either until the Russian one was brought from the Pacific or until the next one was built. Unless the Russians had one on the stocks, the “next” one was still on the drawing boards. The sunken city could hardly have been more effectively closed to them if it had been behind locked doors.
A fishery protection vessel of the Royal Navy turned up unannounced just before they pulled dampers to leave the site. It had been asked to stand by at the request of the commander of the submarine, and watch for the ’nef if it returned to the surface. Within another hour the USS Gondwana also closed in, dispatched hastily by the Submarine Mapping Department from her usual station on the other side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
As the Alexander Bache headed away, the two ships began their patrolling, one on the surface, one a few feet beneath.
“Do you think he’ll come back a second time?” Mary asked Peter as they gazed at the dwindling watchers.
Peter shrugged. “It’s in the lap of the gods,” he said.
“I—oh well, I’ll say it. I don’t care so much this time. You must have thought my behavior awfully peculiar, Peter, and I owe you an apology for snapping at you when you were trying to be helpful and kind. You see, I didn’t tell you the whole story about me and Luke. Would you like me to finish it?”
The breeze, as the ship picked up speed, blew her hair around her face. Peter looked at her, wondering whether she needed to tell him, wanted to, or just felt she owed it to him.
At length he said, “Yes. I’d like to hear.”
She stared fixedly at the sea again, and seemed to be sorting out words in her mind. “It was like this. When I had this obsession about Luke, I told myself there was nothing I wouldn’t do. I almost had a breakdown over him. I was a very nervy child, unstable, emotional, the lot.
“And then—it was the last day before he moved over to Scripps to do a preliminary course there—I had my chance. He’d been celebrating, and I was half out of my mind with juvenile self-abnegation, and I’d come to bring him some sort of parting gift. There was no one else in the house …”
She shrugged. “Well, I got my chance, like I said, and I suppose you could say I took it. I’d told myself there was nothing I wouldn’t do for him, so I did it.”
She sounded very calm, as though she were talking about someone else. In a way, Peter realized, she was.
“You can imagine the results. Me, not quite fifteen, crazy-mad with delight about as much as I was shaken by the shock. The two together might have torn me to bits. What did the job, though, was discovering that to Luke it was just another interlude on the way to where he wanted to go.
“It took me months to put myself together again, and when I did, the only way I could do it was by using Luke, my idealized image of Luke, as a center post. So here I am in oceanography, like I told you. It was pretty much of a shock when Luke joined Atlantic from Scripps, and I had to accept this flippant, shallow guy as the reality. Oh, I liked him well enough on the surface, but underneath I couldn’t forgive him for being what he was, and for not being able to realize how much he had meant to me for so many years. …”
She turned to face him, a little defiantly. “Clear?”
Peter nodded. “And now?”
“Now I figure it’s about time I started looking for a real man and not a dream to build my life around.”
Peter held out his arms, and she came to them, smiling.
X
THE PLACID New England fall moved quietly in on the land. But it was still warm enough to breakfast outdoors, if one did not get up ridiculously early.
“And who,” asked. Peter of the trees around the little lodge, “gets up early on their honeymoon?”
“Queen Victoria and Prince Albert,” said Mary mysteriously, coming out of the door on to the sun porch with a plate of pancakes.
“What?”
“’S a fact,” she nodded, portioning out maple syrup. “I read somewhere that they got up early on the first morning after their wedding, and the lord chamberlain or some bigwig wrote disapprovingly in his diary that this was no way to ensure an heir to the throne.”
Their eyes met across the table. For a moment they kept straight faces, but at length they burst into helpless laughter.
“Poor Victoria!” Mary said when at last she could speak.
“Poor Albert, don’t you mean?” Peter contradicted. “Or maybe not. He always seemed like a straitlaced kind of prig to me. Say, these are delicious.”
“What did you expect?” Mary stretched her sweater-clad arms gracefully. “Did you go down for the mail yet?”
“No. And I don’t much feel like going, either. It’s a long walk down to the highway, you know.”
“I do know. And that’s what I thought you’d say. So I went before you woke up.” Like a conjurer with a rabbit, she produced envelopes she had been sitting on. Fanning them like a poker hand, she proffered them. “Pick a card, any card, and I’ll tell your fortune, pretty gentleman. Only first you have to cross my path with silver, or something.”
“I have my fortune,” said Peter, grinning, and gave her outstretched hand a squeeze. He glanced at the envelopes. “One, two, three from the Foundation. Damnation, can’t they leave us in peace even on our honeymoon?”
“Maybe they’re private, from people who wrote in the office and snitched the envelopes. Aren’t you going to open them?”
When he had done justice to the breakfast, he lit a cigaret with a contented sigh, tipped back the chair, and ripped open the envelopes while Mary cleared the dishes. He left the Foundation ones till last.
“Best wishes from Hartlund and the crew of the Alexander Bache,” he reported. “Mailed in Panama, when they were done there meeting the Russians and taking them out to the site. With regrets that they missed the ceremony.”
“Anything from the Russians?” Mary called jokingly.
“You’re not kidding, honey. Right here under Hartlund’s signature there’s a sort of scribble labeled ‘Captain, bathynef Pavel Ostrovsky.’”
“That’s nice! What else?”
“Invitation from a cousin of mine to see him in Florida, and a note from—” He broke off, and whistled under his breath. “You don’t say! Honey, here’s the analysis of the hide of that monster we brought up. It’s made of carbon, silicon, oxygen, and boron of all things, in the damnedest sort of arrangement. I wish I was a biochemist. And”—he turned the page—”they’ve done up the bones, too. They’ve got chromium in them, so help me, and cobalt and nickel and God knows what. But wait till you get to this bit! The chemists say these materials are basically different from the organic substances found in any high life-form anywhere on Earth. Their tentative conclusion is that they originated elsewhere …”
A sudden chill seemed to blow through the trees. Mary came out with a dishtowel in her hands and sat down opposite him, her face sober. “Martians, huh?” she said. But her attempt to keep her tone light was a failure.
Suddenly anxious to know what else was in the letters from the Foundation, Peter thrust the first one at her and attacked the second. Casual news and good wishes from Eloise Vander-plank. He threw it aside after the first glance and took up the last remaining envelope.
The color drained from his face and he sat for a very long time staring at the paper, so long that Mary had to touch his arm twice before bringing him back to reality. He gave her the letter to read herself.
Over Dr. Gordon’s signature, it said:
You may have heard by now that the biologists assign a nonterrestrial origin to the creature you brought up from Atlantica (that’s the name we’ve bestowed on the city, by the way). It won’t be announced publicly yet; flying saucers on top of what we already have would be too much.
What you will not have heard is that we have found the bathynef. It was discovered accidentally during the search for the Gondwana, the Mapping Department sub we last saw at the site waiting for the ’nef to reappear.
I only have this at secondhand. I was in the Pacific on the way back from my visit to the Russian bathynef expedition, which is due at the site of operations in a few days. But it appears that the Gondwana went down to six or seven hundred feet after a suspicious sonar echo, losing contact with the British ship, and failed to come back.
Two days later and a hundred miles west, a Navy patrol plane spotted the abandoned bathynef, which looked as though someone had laid into its most delicate equipment with a sledge hammer. It will be weeks, perhaps months, before it is again fit for use. There has been no sign of the Gondwana for more than two weeks. This is being kept quiet for obvious reasons. There may be no connection, But—
And, of course, there was no sign of Luke Wallace.
I cannot, and do not want to, say anything more to you than this: Hartlund told me you wanted a trip in the Russian bathynef, and we are very short of people who have had the Ostrovsky-Wong treatment. The pattern emerging is an ugly one. Before we are finished, we shall need all the help we can get. I don’t know what has converted me to wild speculation instead of my old methodical scepticism, but something has.
I’m worried.
Mary folded the letter and handed it back. “That’s the nearest thing to panic I can imagine from the Chief,” she said.
Peter nodded, his eyes on his bride’s face. “Well?”
She sighed heavily and pushed back her chair. “Well,” she echoed, “we’d better get packed.”
They had been out of touch with events altogether for just over two weeks. On their return, they had spent a week answering questions; decided to get married; made the arrangements and taken off for the country. In that time, much had happened.
The Gondwana’s disappearance had involved the Navy. The scientific data presented to them had involved the First Soviet Pacific Bathygraphic Expedition, which was the official name of the Pavel Ostrovsky and its mother ship. An appeal by Dr. Gordon had involved the oceanographic institutes of every nation that had an Atlantic seaboard and one that had not, to wit, Monaco, which has a royalty-sponsored tradition of deepsea exploration.
And the extraterrestrial nature of the creature from Atlantica had involved the United Nations, whose banner flew proudly above the inaccessible rocky islet that had suddenly been promoted to the dignity of base for the new arrivals because a freak of nature had endowed it with fresh water.
The aircraft bringing Peter and Mary was a Navy seaplane flying out a brand-new fifteen-ton underwater TV camera intended to carry the search far below the level a bathynef could attain. It dropped them out of sunlight and into sight of the scene of operations through an overcast at five thousand feet.
Peter gasped, and caught at Mary’s arm. “Look at that!”
There were more than thirty vessels riding here. Dominating them was the Russian bathynef’s mother ship, gleaming white like a cross between a luxury liner and a whaling ship—the latter, because of the hinged bows and miniature dry dock where the bathynef was carried. Her American cousin was still fitting out; they had decided to go ahead during the summer using the inefficient system of towing so as not to waste time.
Larger, but less conspicuous because of her gray paint, was the aircraft carrier Cape Wrath. And there were others, from giant nuclear submarines and the Russian cruiser escorting the survey ship, to the tiny but ultramodern Monegasque floating biology laboratory.
They put down, and as soon as the TV camera had been loaded aboard a lighter, Peter and Mary were whisked in a fast launch across to the Russian mother ship. Its facilities were about comparable with those of the Alexander Bache, Peter judged, but it was obvious why the HQ had been established here and not there. Here they had more room.
Gordon greeted them delightedly, showered them with thanks and apologies, introduced them to Captain Vassiliev—the man who had added his signature to the greeting card from Panama—and took them on a quick tour to familiarize them with the set-up.
“The Ostrovsky went down just before you arrived,” he said. “Ostrovsky himself, and Wong, are both across on the island where we’ve set up our base, processing relief crews from Woods Hole, Darwin and the Chinese station at Tienling. But that’s not a quarter of it. People have come up with gadgets nobody knew existed except the owners. That British sub is back again. Right now, it’s a thousand feet down with an insane new German invention tied to its snout; an underwater crawler which they’re going to dump in the mud at the bottom of the submarine’s range and which they hope will be able to crawl down the side of the Ridge as far as the city. It’s got a bulldozer blade on it. If this works, we’ll be able to shift the o
oze ten times as fast as we can now.”
He bustled on. “Then there’s this TV camera you flew in with. It has four thousand fathoms of cable on it and if we can find a self-propelled drogue to stand the pressure we can get right down across the valley floor. There may be nothing to see but mud—or there may be anything.”
Their amazement grew as they really began to take in the extent of the effort being invested here, until finally Mary could bear it no longer. “Chief!” she said. “I’m not going to believe that this is all due to scientific curiosity. I think somebody’s not just worried, but frightened!”
Gordon paused and fixed her with his eyes. “Frightened?” he said solemnly. “Yes, you could say that.
“I told you in my letter that there was no sign of the Gondwana. That was only a half-truth. She was reported two days ago by the liner Queen Alexandra, thirty hours out from New York for Southampton and Cherbourg.
“But we haven’t found her again. And now we’ve lost the Alexandra, with eighteen hundred passengers aboard. …”
PART TWO
THE TERROR
XI
AT FIRST he had been very weak. Naturally. He had prepared himself for this as he would have prepared for a long trip between the stars, cutting down his metabolism to near-zero, accumulating reserves, planning the trigger which would awaken him when it was once more safe to walk the surface of this world.
Only he had not bargained for what he found.
He had come aware with the memories of the fall of his city as fresh in his mind as though they had been yesterday’s. It seemed that no more than hours had gone by since he left that foolish one who had come pleading for help amid the wreck of his hopes, while the earth shook and shivered.
He was cautious as he reached out mentally into the great dark, prepared to return himself to hibernation if the alarm had been false. It was not.
