by John Wyndham
Then it came. The placid surface of the sea suddenly belched into a vast white cloud which spread, and boiled, writhing upwards. A tremor passed through the ship.
We left the screens, and rushed to the ship’s side. Already the cloud was above our horizon. It writhed and convolved upon itself in a fashion that was somehow obscene as it climbed monstrously up the sky. Only then did the sound reach us, in a buffeting roar. Much later, amazingly delayed, we saw the dark line which was the first wave of turbulent water rushing towards us.
That night we shared a dinner-table with Mallarby of The Tidings and Bennell of The Senate. I claim no credit for being included in such illustrious company except in so far as I had had the good sense to marry Phyllis and got her used to having me around before she perceived how widely she could have chosen. This was her show. We have a technique for that. I come off the sidelines just enough to show sociable, but not enough to interfere with her plan of campaign. The rest of the time I watch and admire. It is something like a combination of skilled juggling with expert chess, and her recoveries from an unexpected move are a delight to follow. She seldom loses. This time she had them more or less where she wanted them between the entrée and the joint.
‘It’s been the reluctance to postulate an intelligence that’s been the chief stumbling block,’ Mallarby remarked, ‘but here, at last, we have a half-admission.’
‘I’d still question “intelligence”,’ Bennell replied. ‘The line between instinctive action and intelligent action, particularly as regards self-defence, can be very uncertain – if only because both may often produce the same response.’
‘But you can’t deny that whatever is the cause of it, it is an entirely new factor,’ Mallarby said.
At this point I saw Phyllis relax from her efforts to get them going, and settle down to listen.
‘I could,’ Bennell told him. ‘I could say that the factor may have been down there for centuries, but that it remained uninterested in us so long as we did not disturb it by probing into its environment’.
‘You could,’ agreed Mallarby, ‘but if I were you, I wouldn’t. Beebe and Barton went down deep, and nothing happened to them. You’re disregarding the fused cables, too. There’s certainly nothing instinctive there.’
Bennell grinned. ‘They’re awkward, I admit, but any theory I’ve heard so far has half a dozen factors quite as troublesome.’
‘And the electrification of that American ship? – just static, I suppose?’
‘Well – do we know enough of the conditions to be sure that it wasn’t?’
Mallarby snorted.
‘For heaven’s sake! Lulling is for babes and nitwits.’
‘Uh-huh. But if the choice lies between that and accepting the Bocker line, I’m inclined to prefer it.’
‘I’m no Bocker champion. I doubt whether the thing as presented by him sounds more ludicrous to you than it does to me, but look what we’re facing: a lot of explanations that will neither wash singly nor hang together; or Bocker’s line. And however we feel about it, he does tie in more factors than anyone else.’
‘So, without a doubt, would Jules Verne,’ observed Bennell.
The introduction of this Bocker element set me all at sea, and Phyllis, too, though it would have been hard to guess it from the way she said:
‘Surely the Bocker line can’t be altogether dismissed?’frowning a little as she spoke.
It worked. In a little time we were adequately briefed on the Bocker view, and without either of them guessing that as far as we were concerned he had come into it for the first time.
The name of Alastair Bocker was not, of course, entirely unknown to us: it was that of an eminent geographer, customarily followed by several groups of initials. However, the information on him that Phyllis now prompted forth was something quite new to us. When re-ordered and assembled it amounted to this:
Almost a year earlier Bocker had presented a memorandum to the Admiralty in London. Because he was Bocker it succeeded in getting itself read at some quite important levels although the gist of its argument was as follows:
The fused cables and electrification of certain ships must be regarded as indisputable evidence of intelligence at work in certain deeper parts of the oceans.
Conditions, such as pressure, temperature, perpetual darkness, etc., in those regions made it inconceivable that any intelligent form of life could have evolved there – and this statement he backed with several convincing arguments.
It was to be assumed that no nation was capable of constructing mechanisms that could operate at such depths as indicated by the evidence, nor would they have any purpose in attempting to do so.
But, if the intelligence in the depths were not indigenous, then it must have come from elsewhere. Also, it must be embodied in some form able to withstand a pressure of two tons per square inch, or possibly twice as much. Now, where else on earth could a form find conditions of such pressure wherein to evolve? Clearly, nowhere.
Very well, then if it could not have evolved on earth, it must have evolved somewhere else – say, on a large planet where the pressures were normally very high. If so, how did it cross space and arrive here?
Bocker then recalled attention to the ‘fireballs’ which had aroused so much speculation a few years ago, and were still occasionally to be seen. None of these had been known to descend on land; none, indeed, had been known to descend anywhere but in areas of very deep water. Moreover, such of them as had been struck by missiles had exploded with such violence as to suggest that they had been retaining a very high degree of pressure.
It was significant, also, that these ‘fireball’ globes invariably sought the only regions of the earth in which high-pressure conditions compatible with movement were available.
Therefore, Bocker deduced, we were in the process, while almost unaware of it, of undergoing a species of interplanetary invasion. If he were to be asked the source of it, he would point to Jupiter as being most likely to fulfil the conditions of pressure.
His memorandum had concluded with the observation that such an incursion need not necessarily be regarded as hostile. There was such a thing as flight to refuge from conditions that had become intolerable. It seemed to him that the interests of a type of creation which existed at fifteen pounds to the square inch were unlikely to overlap seriously with those of a form which required several tons per square inch. He advocated, therefore, that the greatest efforts should be made to develop some means of making a sympathetic approach to the new dwellers in our depths with the aim of facilitating an exchange of science, using the word in its widest sense.
The views expressed by Their Lordships upon these elucidations and suggestions are not publicly recorded. It is known, however, that no long interval passed before Bocker withdrew his memorandum from their unsympathetic desks, and shortly afterwards presented it for the personal consideration of the Editor of The Tidings. Undoubtedly The Tidings, in returning it to him, expressed itself with its usual tact. It was only for the benefit of his professional brethren that the Editor remarked:
‘This newspaper has managed to exist for more than one hundred years without a comic-strip, and I see no reason to break that tradition now.’
In due course, the memorandum appeared in front of the Editor of The Senate, who glanced at it, called for a synopsis, lifted his eyebrows, and dictated an urbane regret.
Subsequently it occurred upon two other editorial desks of the more cloistered kind, but after that it ceased to circulate, and was known only by word of mouth within a small circle.
‘What I have never understood about it,’ Phyllis said, with a slight frown and an air of having been familiar with the situation for years, ‘is why something like The Daily Tape or The Lens hasn’t run it? Isn’t it just their stuff? Or what about the American tabloids?’
‘The Tape very nearly did,’ Mallarby told her. ‘Only Bocker said he’d sue them if they mentioned his name – he’s after respectable publicatio
n, or none at all. So the Tape tried to get some other well-known figure to sponsor the idea as if it were his own. Nobody was keen. Bocker got his stuff printed, deposited it, and claimed copyright, so that was off. They dropped it because without some weighty kind of backing it would be just another Tape scare, and the circulation figures hadn’t justified their last two scares. The Lens and the others are in roughly the same jamb. One small American paper did use a chewed-up version, but as it was their third interplanetary danger in four months it didn’t register well. The others thought it over and reckoned that it would be too easy to be accused of making cheap capital out of the loss of American lives in the Keweenaw, so they threw it out. But it will come. Before long, one or another of them is bound to splash it, with or without Booker’s name and consent – and almost certainly without his main point, which was to try to make some kind of contact. They’ll stress just what Bennell, here, stressed just now – the comic-horrific-strip aspect. Make-your-flesh-creep stuff.’
‘And what other use can you make of a farrago like that?’ Bennell inquired.
‘Well, you can at least say, as I said before, that he does include more factors than anyone else has – and that anything that includes even most of the factors is, ipso facto, bound to be fantastic. We may decry it, but, for all that, until something better turns up, it’s the best we have.’
Bennell shook his head.
‘You begged the whole thing at the start. Suppose I concede for the moment that there does seem to be intelligence of some kind down there – you’ve no solid proof that intelligence couldn’t evolve at a few tons to the square inch as easily as at fifteen pounds. You’ve nothing to support you but sheer common sense – the same kind of common sense that was satisfied that heavier-than-air craft could never fly. Prove to me – ’
‘You’ve got it wrong. He claims that the intelligence must have evolved under high pressure, but that it couldn’t do so under the other conditions obtaining in our Deeps. But whatever you concede, and whatever the top naval men may think about Bocker, it is clear enough that they must have been assuming for some time that there is something intelligent down there. You don’t design and make a special bomb like that all in five minutes, you know. Anyway, whether the Bocker theory is sheer hot air or not, he’s lost his main point. This bomb was not the amiable and sympathetic approach that he advocated.’
Mallarby paused, and shook his head.
‘I’ve met Bocker several times. He’s a civilized, liberal-minded man – with the usual trouble of liberal-minded men; that they think others are, too. He has an interested, inquiring mind. He has never grasped that the average mind when it encounters something new is scared, and says: “Better smash it, or suppress it, quick.” Well, he’s just had another demonstration of the average mind at work.’
‘But,’ Bennell objected, ‘if, as you say, it is officially believed that these ship losses have been caused by an intelligence, then there’s something to be scared about, and you can’t put to-day’s affair down as anything stronger than retaliation.’
Mallarby shook his head again.
‘My dear Bennell, I not only can, but I do. Suppose, now, that something were to come dangling down to us on a rope out of space; and suppose that that thing was emitting rays on a wavelength that acutely discomforted us, perhaps even caused us physical pain. What should we do? I suggest that the first thing we should do would be to snip the rope and put it out of action. Then we should examine the strange object and find out what we could about it.
‘Then suppose that more strange objects began to be reported dangling down from above and causing discomfort to our citizens. We should argue: “This looks like a kind of invasion, or reconnaissance for one. Anyway it is extremely painful to us, so whatever is up there doing it has got to be stopped.” And we should forthwith take what steps we could to discourage it. It might be done simply in the spirit of ending a nuisance, or it might be done with some animosity, and regarded as – retaliation. Now, would it be we, or the thing above, that was to blame?
‘In the present case, and after to-day’s performance the question becomes simply academic. It is difficult to imagine any kind of intelligence that would not resent what we’ve just done. If this were the only Deep where trouble has occurred, there might well be no intelligence left to resent it – but this isn’t the only place, as you know; not by any means. So, what form that very natural resentment will take remains for us to see.’
‘You think there really will be some kind of response, then?’ Phyllis asked.
He shrugged. ‘To take up my analogy again: suppose that some violently destructive agency were to descend from space upon one of our cities. What should we do?’
‘Well, what could we do?’ asked Phyllis, reasonably enough.
‘We could turn the backroom boys on to it. And if it happened a few times more, we should soon be giving the backroom boys full priorities.’
‘You’re assuming a lot, Mallarby,’ Bennell put in. ‘For one thing, an almost parallel state of development. The significance of the word “priority”, even, has a semantic dependence on conditions. It could scarcely mean a thing a century ago, and in the eighteenth century you could have howled “priority” until you were blue in the face without creating any technical advance whatever because our modern idea of research wasn’t there – nobody would even understand what you were after.’
‘True,’ agreed Mallarby, ‘but after what happened to those ships I’m justified in assuming quite a degree of technology there, I think.’
Phyllis said: ‘Is it really too late – for some such approach as Bocker wanted, I mean? There’s only been one bomb. If there isn’t another they might think it was a natural disaster, an eruption or something.’
Mallarby shook his head.
‘It won’t be just one bomb. And it was always too late, my dear. Can you imagine us tolerating any form of rival intelligence on earth, no matter how it got here? Why, we can’t even tolerate anything but the narrowest differences of views within our own race. No,’ he shook his head, ‘no, I’m afraid Bocker’s idea of fraternization never had the chance of a flea in a furnace.’
That was, I think, very likely as true as Mallarby made it sound; but if there ever had been any chance at all it was gone by the time we reached home. Somehow, and apparently overnight, the public had put several twos together at last. The half-hearted attempt to represent the depth-bomb as one of a series of tests had broken down altogether. The vague fatalism with which the loss of the Keweenaw and the other ships had been received was succeeded by a burning sense of outrage, a satisfaction that the first step in vengeance had been taken, and a demand for more.
The atmosphere was similar to that at a declaration of war. Yesterday’s phlegmatics and sceptics were, all of a sudden, fervid preachers of a crusade against the – well, against whatever it was that had had the insolent temerity to interfere with the freedom of the seas. Agreement on that cardinal point was virtually unanimous, but from that hub speculation radiated in every direction, so that not only fireballs, but every other unexplained phenomenon that had occurred for years was in some way attributed to, or at least connected with, the mystery in the Deeps.
The wave of worldwide excitement struck us when we stopped off for a day at Karachi on our way home, the place was bubbling with tales of sea-serpents and visitations from space, and it was clear that whatever restrictions Bocker might have put on the circulation of his theory, a good many million people had now arrived at a similar explanation by other routes. This gave me the idea of telephoning to the EBC in London to find out if Bocker himself would now unbend enough for an interview.
He did – to the representatives of a few carefully selected organs – but it added little to the script we had already put together on the journey from Karachi to London. His repeated plea for the sympathetic approach was so contrary to the public mood as to be almost unusable.
Once more, however, we had a demonstrati
on that bellicose indignation is not self-sustaining. You just can’t have a rousing fight for long with a sandbag, and little happened to animate the situation. The only step for weeks was that the Royal Navy, partly in deference to public feeling, but probably more for reasons of prestige, also sent down a bomb. It went off quite spectacularly, I understand, but the only recorded result was that the shores of the South Sandwich Islands were so littered with dead and decaying fish for weeks afterwards that they stank to heaven.
Then, by degrees, a feeling began to get about that this was not at all the way anyone had expected an interplanetary war to be; so, quite possibly, it was not an interplanetary war after all. From there, of course, it was only a step to deciding that it must be the Russians.
The Russians had all along discouraged, within their dictatorate, any tendency for suspicion to deviate from its proper target of capitalistic warmongers. When whispers of the interplanetary notion did in some way penetrate their curtain, they were countered by the statements that (a) it was all a lie: a verbal smoke screen to cover the preparations of warmongers; (b) that it was true: and the capitalists, true to type, had immediately attacked the unsuspecting strangers with atom bombs; and (c) whether it were true or not, the USSR would fight unswervingly for Peace with all the weapons it possessed, except germs.
The swing continued. People were heard to say: ‘Huh – that interplanetary stuff? Don’t mind telling you that I very nearly fell for it at the time. But, of course, when you start to actually think about it – ! Wonder what the Russian game really is? Must’ve been something pretty big to make ’em use a-bombs on it.’ Thus, in quite a short time, the status quo ante bellum hypotheticum was restored, and we were back on the familiarly comprehensible basis of international suspicion. The only lasting result was that marine insurance stayed up 1 per cent.
‘Things,’ Phyllis complained, ‘sort of die on us. We looked like being the popular authorities on fireballs – in fact, for a week or two we were. Then the interest faded away, and there were fewer of them until now, if anyone sees one, he just regards it as a hallucination that he’s not going to be taken in by. We didn’t do so badly on that first dive – but you can’t go on sustaining interest in just a couple of fused cables. We fell down badly somehow on not hearing of the Bocker business until it was practically stale – and I still don’t understand how we missed it. At the bomb-dropping we were simply two of the crowd. When all the excitement boiled up it did look as if we might come into our own – but now that’s all fizzled out. Everything’s gone quiet again everywhere; it can’t be that there’s nothing happening.’
