The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  There is nothing in the least exciting or glamorous about deep-water operations if they’re done properly. Excitement means lack of foresight, and that means incompetence. The incompetent do not last long in my business, nor do those who crave excitement. I went about my job with all the pent-up emotion of a plumber dealing with a leaking faucet.

  The grids had been designed for easy maintenance, since sooner or later they would have to be replaced. Luckily, none of the threads had been damaged and the securing nuts came off easily when gripped with the power wrench. Then I switched control to the heavy-duty claws and lifted out the damaged grid without the slightest difficulty.

  It’s bad tactics to hurry on an underwater operation. If you try to do too much at once, you are liable to make mistakes. And if things go smoothly and you finish in a day a job you said would take a week, the client feels he hasn’t had his money’s worth. Though I was sure I could replace the grid that same afternoon, I followed the damaged unit up to the surface and closed shop for the day.

  The Russians hurried the thermo-element off for an autopsy, and I spent the rest of the evening hiding from Joe. Trinco is a small town, but I managed to keep out of his way by visiting the local cinema, where I sat through several hours of an interminable Tamil movie in which three successive generations suffered identical domestic crises of mistaken identity, drunkenness, desertion, insanity and death, all in Technicolor and with the sound track turned full up.

  The next morning, despite a mild headache, I was over the site soon after dawn. (So was Joe, and so was Sergei, all set for a quiet day’s fishing.) I waved cheerfully to them as I climbed into the lobster, and the tender’s crane lowered me over the side. Over the other side, where Joe couldn’t see it, went the replacement grid. A few fathoms down I lifted it out of the hoist and carried it to the bottom of Trinco Deep, where, without any trouble, it was installed by the middle of the afternoon. Before I surfaced again, the lock nuts had been secured, the conductors spot-welded, and the engineers on shore had completed their continuity tests. By the time I was back on deck, the system was under load once more, everything was back to normal, and even Karpukhin was smiling—except when he stopped to ask himself the question that no one had yet been able to answer.

  I still clung to the falling-boulder theory, for want of a better one. And I hoped that the Russians would accept it, so that we could stop this silly cloak-and-dagger business with Joe.

  No such luck, I realized when both Shapiro and Karpukhin came to see me with very long faces.

  “Klaus,” said Lev, “we want you to go down again.”

  “It’s your money,” I replied. “But what do you want me to do?”

  “We’ve examined the damaged grid, and there’s a section of the thermoelement missing. Dimitri here thinks that —someone—has deliberately broken it and carried it away.”

  “Then they did a damn clumsy job,” I answered. “I can promise you it wasn’t one of my men.”

  It was risky to make such jokes around Karpukhin, and no one was at all amused. Not even me; for by this time I was beginning to think that he might have something.

  The sun was setting when I began my last dive into Trinco Deep, but the end of the day has no meaning down there. I fell for 2,000 feet with no lights, because I like to watch the luminous creatures of the sea as they flash and flicker in the darkness, sometimes exploding like rockets just outside the observation port. In this open water there was no danger of a collision; in any case, I had the panoramic sonar scan running, and that would give far better warning than could my eyes.

  At 400 fathoms, I knew that something was wrong. The bottom was coming into view on the vertical sounder, but it was approaching much too slowly. My rate of descent was far too low; I could increase it easily enough by flooding another buoyancy tank, but I, hesitated to do so. In my business, anything out of the ordinary needs an explanation; three times I have saved my life by waiting until I had one.

  The thermometer gave me the answer. The temperature outside was five degrees higher than it should have been, and I am sorry to say that it took me several seconds to realize why.

  Only a few hundred feet below me, the repaired grid was now running at full power, pouring out megawatts of heat as it tried to equalize the temperature difference between Trinco Deep and the solar pond up there on land. It wouldn’t succeed, of course; but in the attempt it was generating electricity, and I was being swept upward in the geyser of warm water that was an incidental by-product.

  When I finally reached the grid, it was quite difficult to keep the lobster in position against the upwelling current, and I began to sweat uncomfortably as the heat penetrated into the cabin. Being too hot on the sea bed was a novel experience; so also was the miragelike vision caused by the ascending water, which made my searchlights dance and tremble over the rock face I was exploring.

  You must picture me, lights ablaze in that 500-fathom darkness, moving slowly down the slope of the canyon, which at this spot was about as steep as the roof of a house. The missing element—if it was still around—could not have fallen very far before coming to rest. I would find it in ten minutes or not at all.

  After an hour’s searching I had turned up several broken light bulbs (it’s astonishing how many get thrown overboard from ships—the sea beds of the world are covered with them), an empty beer bottle (same comment) and a brand-new boot. That was the last thing I found, for then I discovered that I was no longer alone.

  I never switch off the sonar scan, and even when I’m not moving I always glance at the screen about once a minute to check the general situation. The situation now was that a large object—at least the size of the lobster— was approaching from the north. When I spotted it, the range was about 500 feet and closing slowly. I switched off my lights, cut the jets I had been running at low power to hold me in the turbulent water, and drifted with the current.

  Though I was tempted to call Shapiro and report that I had company, I decided to wait for more information. There were only three nations with depth ships that could operate at this level, and I was on excellent terms with all of them. It would never do to be too hasty and to get myself involved in unnecessary political complications.

  Though I felt blind without the sonar, I did not wish to advertise my presence, so I reluctantly switched it off and relied on my eyes. Anyone working at this depth would have to use lights, and I’d see them coming long before they could see me. So I waited in the hot, silent little cabin, straining my eyes into the darkness, tense and alert but not particularly worried.

  First there was a dim glow, at an indefinite distance. It grew bigger and brighter, yet refused to shape itself into any pattern that my mind could recognize. The diffuse glow concentrated into myriad spots, until it seemed that a constellation was sailing toward me. So might the rising star clouds of the galaxy appear from some world close to the heart of the Milky Way.

  Even then I was not really frightened. I could not imagine what was approaching, but I did not believe that any creature of the sea could touch me inside six inches of good Swiss armor plate.

  The thing was almost upon me, glowing with the light of its own creation, when it split into two separate clouds. Slowly they came into focus—not of my eyes, but of my understanding; and I knew that beauty and terror were rising toward me out of the abyss.

  The terror came first, when I saw that the approaching beasts were squids, and all Joe’s tales reverberated in my brain. Then, with a considerable sense of letdown, I realized that they were only about 20 feet long—little larger than the lobster and a mere fraction of its weight. They could do me no harm; and quite apart from that, their indescribable beauty robbed them of all menace.

  This sounds ridiculous, but it is true. In my travels I have seen most of the animals of this world, but none to match the luminous apparitions floating before me now. The colored lights that pulsed and danced along their bodies made them seem clothed with jewels, never the same for two
seconds at a time. There were patches that glowed a brilliant blue, like flickering mercury arcs, then changed almost instantly to burning neon red. The tentacles seemed strings of luminous beads trailing through the water—or the lamps along a superhighway, when you look down upon it from the air at night. Barely visible against this background glow were the enormous eyes, uncannily human and intelligent, each surrounded by a diadem of shining pearls.

  I am sorry; that is the best I can do. Only the movie camera could do justice to these living kaleidoscopes. I do not know how long I watched them, so entranced by their luminous beauty that I had almost forgotten my mission. That those delicate, whiplash tentacles could not possibly have broken the grid was already obvious. Yet the presence of these creatures here was, to say the least, very curious. Karpukhin would have called it suspicious.

  I was about to call the surface when I saw something incredible. It had been before my eyes all the time, but I had not realized it until now.

  The squids were talking to each other.

  Those glowing, evanescent patterns were not coming and going at random. They were as meaningful, I was suddenly sure, as the illuminated signs of Broadway or Piccadilly, not the ones that spell out words, but those that form pictures. Every few seconds there would be an image that almost made sense to me, but vanished before I could interpret it. I knew, of course, that even the common octopus shows its emotions with lightning-fast color changes—but this was something of a much higher order. It was pictorial—or pictographic—communication; here were two living electric signs flashing messages to each other.

  When I saw an unmistakable picture of the lobster, my last doubts vanished. Though I am no scientist, at that moment I shared the feelings of a Newton or an Einstein at some moment of revelation.

  Then the picture changed, in a most curious manner. There was the lobster again, but rather smaller. And there beside it, much smaller still, were two peculiar objects. Each consisted of a pair of black dots surrounded by a pattern of radiating lines.

  I said that we Swiss are good at languages. However, it required little intelligence to deduce that this was a formalized squid’s-eye view of itself and that what I was seeing was a crude sketch of the situation. But why the absurdly small size of the squids?

  I had no time to puzzle that out before there was another change. A third squid symbol appeared on the living screen—and this one was enormous, completely dwarfing the others. The message shone there in the eternal night for a few seconds; then the creature bearing it shot off at incredible speed and left me alone with its companion.

  Now the meaning was all too obvious. “My God!” I said to myself. “They feel they can’t handle me. One of them has gone to fetch Big Brother.”

  And of Big Brother’s capabilities I already had better evidence than Joe Watkins, for all his research and newspaper clippings.

  That was the point, you won’t be surprised to hear, when I decided not to linger. But before I went, I thought I would try some talking myself.

  After hanging there in darkness for so long, I had forgotten the power of my lights. They hurt my eyes and must have been agonizing to the unfortunate squid. Transfixed by that intolerable glare, its own illumination utterly quenched, it lost all its beauty, becoming no more than a pallid bag of jelly with two black buttons for eyes. For a moment it seemed paralyzed by the shock; then it darted after its companion, while I soared upward to a world that could never be the same again.

  “I’ve found your saboteur,” I told Karpukhin when they opened the hatch of the lobster. “If you want to know all about him, ask Joe Watkins.”

  I let Dimitri sweat over that for a few seconds while I enjoyed his expression; then I gave my slightly edited report. I implied—without actually saying so—that the squids I’d met were powerful enough to have done all the damage; and I said nothing about the conversation I’d overseen. That would only cause incredulity; besides, I wanted time to think matters over and to tidy up the loose ends—if I could.

  Joe has been a great help, though he still knows no more than the Russians. He’s told me what wonderfully developed nervous systems squids possess—and has explained how some of them can change their appearance in a flash through what amounts to instantaneous three-color printing, thanks to the extraordinary network of “chromophores” covering their bodies. Presumably this evolved for camouflage; but it seems natural—even inevitable—that it should have developed into a communication system.

  But there’s one thing that worries Joe.

  “What were they doing around the grid?” he keeps asking me plaintively. “They’re cold-blooded invertebrates. You’d expect them to dislike heat as much as they object to light.”

  That puzzles Joe; but it doesn’t puzzle me. Indeed, I think it’s the key to the whole mystery.

  Those squids, I’m now certain, are in Trinco Deep for the same reason that there are men at the South Pole or on the Moon. Pure scientific curiosity has drawn them from their icy home to investigate this geyser of hot water welling from the sides of the canyon. Here is a strange and inexplicable phenomenon—possibly one that menaces their way of life. So they have summoned their giant cousin (servant? slave?) to bring them a sample for study. I cannot believe that they have a hope of understanding it; after all, no scientist on earth could have done so as late as a century ago. But they are trying, and that is what matters.

  Tomorrow, we begin our countermeasures; I go back into Trinco Deep to fix the great lights which Shapiro hopes will keep the squids at bay. But how long will that ruse work if intelligence is dawning in the deep?

  As I dictate this, I’m sitting here below the ancient battlements of Fort Frederick, watching the moon come up over the Indian Ocean. If everything goes well, this will serve as the opening of the book that Joe has been badgering me to write. If it doesn’t—then hello, Joe, I’m talking to you now. Please edit this for publication in any way you think fit, and my apologies to you and Lev for not giving all the facts before; now you’ll understand why.

  Whatever happens, please remember this: They are beautiful, wonderful creatures; try to come to terms with them if you can.

  * * * *

  to: Ministry of Power, Moscow

  from: Lev Shapiro, Chief Engineer,

  Trincomalee Thermoelectric Power Project

  Herewith the complete transcript of the tape recording found among Herr Klaus Muller’s effects after his last dive; we are much indebted to Mr. Joe Watkins, of Time magazine, for assistance on several points.

  You will recall that Herr Muller’s last intelligible message was directed to Mr. Watkins and ran as follows: “Joe! You were right about Melville! The thing is absolutely gigan-”

  * * * *

  “I had been dreaming for nights that I could breathe water. The dreams were so realistic that I woke up each morning thinking that I was going to try it. And when I was out on that coral, I was almost tempted to start breathing.”

  U.S.N. Lieut. Cmdr. Robert Thompson,

  (“Room at the Bottom of the Sea,”

  Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 5,1964.)

  The far reaches of space are no more mysterious or inimical to the surface creatures of Earth than the much closer depths of her oceans. Alan Shepard became a national hero in 1961 by riding a pressurized rocket capsule 116.5 miles up into the troposphere. But when four Navy officers spent eleven days without pressure suits, at a depth of 192 feet, in and out of a specially designed underwater craft called Sealab I, hardly a handful of outside specialists as much as knew the project existed.

  The Navy’s objective is to enable men to explore the ocean bottoms with equipment no bulkier than Scuba gear, and the only real problem the first experiment ran into was its own success. The men began to find it hard to remember that the atmosphere of the sea (even 2 feet down, let alone 200) will not support naked human life.

  Here on the surface we do not remember for different reasons. We know more about outer space than oceanic depth
s simply because there are vastly more “information offices,” lobbyists, public-relations men, and publicity agents working to sustain interest in the economically and strategically vital aerospace program.

  For much the same reason, we tend to know more about the prospects for man in space than about the physical realities of a wartorn peninsula in Asia where, as I write, Americans are dying in the defense of a “good” political system against one we call “bad.” The people who live there are, like ourselves, citizens of Earth; yet to most of us the language, customs, and physical environment of a Vietcong village would be as strange and unmanageable as those of some alien planet.

  I spoke of Arthur Clarke before as an unusually free man. Certainly he is one of the very few who exercises the global freedoms guaranteed in the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Man.- no accidents or happenstances of language, geography, skin color, creed, or flag have succeeded in alienating him from his right to membership in the human race. British-born, he now makes his permanent home in Ceylon, but he lives and works, actually, all over the world.