The Atlantic Abomination

by John Brunner

  And then—

  “Oh God!” whispered Peter softly. “Look at that!”

  Startled exclamations revealed that the other passengers had seen it too. Barghin ordered the pilot to interrupt their panicky flight and circle at constant distance, because whatever the risk was now, they couldn’t afford to miss this most incredible sight.

  Steadily on a column of luminescent green which violated every law of optics Peter could think of, the metal shell was rising from the ground. Majestically; as lightly and yet as placidly as a balloon in dead calm air …

  “What’s he going to do?” wondered Barghin aloud. “Is he armed? Is he going to use that as a permanent mobile headquarters? Or is he just going to go straight on up? Because if he gets higher than a few thousand feet, do you realize what this means? He’s put himself at our mercy!”

  “Yes, of course,” Peter breathed. There was a nuclear missile waiting, back behind the evacuated area. If the monster was going to rise far enough for the explosion to avoid injuring the people below, they could at long last use it.

  “General!” crackled a voice from the radio. “We have a bogey in our sights, rising on some kind of green rockets from the missile base. Do we fire?” The speaker seemed to be in a state of tension-controlled terror. His voice shook.

  “No!” snapped Barghin. “On no account provoke him till we see whether he’s going up or along!”

  The thing was still rising, gathering speed now. Barghin hesitated, narrow-eyed, and bent to the microphone again.

  “Get me in circuit with Last Resort,” he ordered. When he was connected, he said, “He’s still going up. Are you ready to blow?”

  “We’re counted down to six, general,” was the reply. “I’m holding it there.”

  “Let’s see, you’re about forty-eight miles off, aren’t you? When his azimuth angle hits twenty degrees, you can blow.”

  “Right, general!” said the voice excitedly. “And believe me, the pleasure will be all ours.”

  Does he know? Peter wondered, watching the drifting, puzzling ascent of the monster’s craft. Was he perhaps aware that he was laying himself open to the horrible vengeance he had only escaped because these human beings he had considered primitive were not primitive enough to condemn their own species to a nuclear hell until there was no other path open?

  Perhaps he was. Perhaps it was shaming to him that the creatures he regarded as expendable vermin should have proved his match, and his code of honor as an allegedly superior being demanded that he suffer death for his failure. They might never know unless one day, out there among the stars where men were also going, their species’ paths crossed again.

  The craft was moving sideways a little, as though surveying the city below, or jockeying for a course which demanded absolute precision of planning. Peter’s mouth was dry, and he could hear Barghin muttering to himself.

  And then it went. It was as though the column of green, whose brilliance had become nearly blinding, stretched and vanished, leaving no trace but a reddish after-image. They felt the ’copter rock in the wind of the going of it, while they threw their heads back in a vain effort to see where it had gone.

  “We beat him, anyway;” said Barghin. “He’s heading back to space, looks like. I’m only sorry he got off so lightly. But we’ve never built anything that could climb like that.”

  He spoke to the microphone. “Last Resort, did you blow?”

  “He took us by surprise, general,” the answer came, apologetically. “We must have undershot by literally a mile. My God, general, what’s he using for power?”

  “How should I know? Maybe when we can question the technicians who worked for him, we’ll be able to piece it together for ourselves—”

  “Holy God, no!” The radio voice interrupted in tones of horror. “General, we’ve lost the missile! They were trying to get it back on course, but it’s gone.”

  “What? How? Where was it last on track?” Visions of a kiloton warhead flaring at random filled Barghin’s mind. Maybe it had even been seized by the monster! “Quickly!”

  “It intersected the green column,” said the radio voice. “It was dead on course. Only the monster wasn’t there any longer. And since then—”

  “General,” said Peter quietly, staring upwards through the window of the ’copter. “There’s your missile, or I’m much mistaken. And what’s more, it seems to have done its job.”

  Barghin followed his stare incredulously. Against the lightening sky of dawn, a slowly expanding ball of fire was shining like an enormous morning star.

  Very faintly, distant thunder came to them.

  “Yes, we got confirmation from both the space stations and the lunar base,” said Barghin. “As we figure it, Mr. President, that column of green on which the monster’s ship went up was a sort of visible by-product of a raging controlled energy. Not nuclear. Electro-gravitic, they tell me. And inside the column, space was twisted. Changed. It doesn’t make sense to anyone but a physicist or a mathematician. We guess that the laws of gravity didn’t apply inside that column, and that was why the monster’s ship could go up so fast.

  “Only the speed with which the missile arrived enabled it to penetrate the outside of the column. Inside, gravity was polarized, or something. What it amounts to is that the missile flew straight up, along the column, instead of continuing horizontally. And about a hundred and ten miles up, it caught up with the monster, and …”

  The President ran his finger around the neck of his shirt. He said, “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter exactly how it happened, so long as it did happen. Things will be back to normal in a little while, I guess, though reports I’ve seen on the state of the casualties they’re bringing out of Jacksonville means that a hell of a lot of people are going to be in mental homes for a while … Dr. Gordon, do your people think there are any more monsters like that hiding under the sea?”

  Gordon shook his head. “Lord knows,” he said. “I hope not. And in fact I doubt it. It was probably a million-to-one chance that we alerted this one, so even if others are hiding down there, they won’t be awakened till we really begin to explore the great depths.”

  He buried his face in his hands. “I was so sure,” he murmured. “When we found Atlantica, I thought we’d found Atlantis, and maybe the secrets of a lost civilization.”

  “Well,” said Peter, “in a way we did. Only the secrets were not very pleasant ones. How far might we not have come by now if our ancestors in those days hadn’t had the weight of him and his kind on their necks!”

  “I must say it’s going to give a lot of people qualms when the next batch of appropriations for space research comes up,” said the President bluntly. “Myself included, I think. If that thing was a sample of the life that grows on other worlds, then—”

  “On the contrary, Mr. President,” said Peter. “That thing had experience before it came to Earth, I think. This implies that it had met races similar to ours, and when we go out to the stars we’re going to find other species similar to man, as well as monsters like the one we unearthed. We dealt with him. I’d almost be inclined to give up oceanography and go into space research just for the privilege of being among the first to meet another race like ourselves.”

  “Only we’re going to have to be hellishly careful,” said Barghin. “Well have to go out with H-bombs in one hand and the pipe of peace in the other, and I’m afraid we shall probably guess wrong when it comes to choosing between them. But it’s the only way.”

  The President smiled suddenly. “I’m glad that thing was found when it was,” he said. “From the purely personal point of view, I’m pretty sure the public at large will regard it as something that happened during my term of office, and it will count heavily against me. But if it had come up, say, fifteen or twenty years ago, when there were nuclear weapons poking out from under every stone, the use of an H-bomb on Jacksonville would have triggered a war even if we warned the public why it was being used. They’d have assumed t
he monster was a Russian secret weapon!”

  “Or a century ago,” supplied Barghin. “When we’d only have had guns to oppose it, instead of missiles, and no television to give us information from robot watchposts. We would be slaving for him still.”

  The whole appalling horror, Peter reflected, had directly afflicted perhaps one in a thousand of the people in the world. That included those who suffered under the monster’s lash, those who manned the cordon, those who struggled to extract information about him from his behaviour and to locate his psychological and physical weaknesses, those who treated the sick after he had hurt them, and those who fled their homes and were now straggling back.

  And they had got the better of him in a few short months.

  It was a good augury. When they met his kind again, it would not be the effort of a mere one-tenth of one per cent of man that opposed their strength to the monsters. It would be—it would have to be—one hundred per cent.

  He would not be among them. He moved his stump tentatively. Not in person. But at least, if he was no longer whole in body, he was whole and free in his mind.

  Which was more than the monster’s subjects had been the first time he appeared on Earth.

  He looked across at Mary, and the memory of Luke came into his mind. Poor devil! What was the secret that he had been about to reveal and never was allowed to utter? Peter could not be sure, but he was fairly certain it was connected with the fact that Luke had managed to secure a position of trust in the monster’s retinue while all the time scheming to oppose him. It was something only a free man could know.

  Men change their gods, and when they have changed them often enough they cease to fear their power.

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  Also by John Brunner

  A Maze of Stars

  A Planet of Your Own

  Age of Miracles

  Bedlam Planet

  Born Under Mars

  Castaways’ World

  Catch a Falling Star

  Children of the Thunder

  Double, Double

  Enigma from Tantalus

  Galactic Storm

  Give Warning to the World

  I Speak for Earth

  Into the Slave Nebula

  Manshape

  Meeting at Infinity

  More Things in Heaven

  Muddle Earth

  Players at the Game of People

  Polymath

  Quicksand

  Sanctuary in the Sky

  Stand on Zanzibar

  Telepathist

  The Atlantic Abomination

  The (Compleat) Traveler in Black

  The Altar on Asconel

  The Avengers of Carrig

  The Brink

  The Crucible of Time

  The Dramaturges of Yan

  The Dreaming Earth

  The Gaudy Shadows

  The Infinitive of Go

  The Jagged Orbit

  The Ladder in the Sky

  The Long Result

  The Martian Sphinx

  The Productions of Time

  The Psionic Menace

  The Repairmen of Cyclops

  The Rites of Ohe

  The Sheep Look Up

  The Shift key

  The Shockwave Riders

  The Skynappers

  The Space-Time Juggler

  The Squares of the City

  The Stardroppers

  The Stone That Never Came Down

  The Super Barbarians

  The Tides of Time

  The World Swappers

  The Wrong End of Time

  Threshold of Eternity

  Times Without Number

  Timescoop

  To Conquer Chaos

  Total Eclipse

  Web of Everywhere

  John Brunner (1934-1995) was a prolific British SF writer. In 1951, he published his first novel, Galactic Storm, at the age of just 17, and went on to write dozens of novels under his own and various house names until his death in 1995 at the Glasgow Worldcon. He won the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award for Stand on Zanzibar (a regular contender for the ‘best SF novel of all time’) and the British Science Fiction Award for The Jagged Orbit.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © John Brunner 1960

  All rights reserved.

  The right of John Brunner to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 1960

  This eBook first published in 2011 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 10117 3

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  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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