Creatures of the Abyss, Murray Leinster [read after .txt] 📗

times he was lifted upon a wave-peak, and the sky was illimitably high and large, and the breaking seas on the nearby reef merely roared and grumbled to themselves.

He swam out, away from the land. Suddenly his body began to tingle. He stopped and paddled, analyzing the sensation. One side of his body felt as if the most minute of electric currents entered his skin. It was not an unpleasant sensation. Deirdre, in the small boat, was fifty yards behind, watching him. As he swam on, the tingling grew stronger. He dived. The tingling did not vary with depth. He came up, and he was farther out than he'd realized.

He suddenly knew that he'd been incautious. There are currents which flow in and out of lagoons. A barrier of reef affects them, too. Terry found himself swimming in an outward-bound current, which pushed him out and away from the island.

Within seconds the sensation in his body changed from a mere tingling to torment. For a moment it was just very much stronger and slightly painful, but a moment later it felt as if he swam among flames. It was unbearable. His muscles were not contracted, as if by an electric shock, but he couldn't control their reflexes. He found himself splashing crazily, trying to fight his way out of the anguish which engulfed him.

He went under. His body had taken complete control over his mind, and he found himself swimming frantically, underwater. He couldn't reach the surface. His body tried to escape the intolerable agony in which it was immersed but couldn't.

He heard a roaring sound, but it meant nothing. The roaring grew louder. Finally, he did break surface for a few seconds, and he gasped horribly, but then he went under. The roaring grew thunderous, and he broke surface again....

Something seized his flailing arm and pulled him up. The arm ceased to experience the horrible sensation of being in boiling oil. His hand recognized a gunwale. He swarmed up the solid object with hands helping him, and found himself in the boat, gasping and shivering, and cringing at the bare memory of the suffering he'd undergone.

Deirdre stared at him, frightened. She swung the boat's bow shoreward. The outboard motor roared, and the boat raced past the gap in the reef and rushed toward the lagoon opening.

"Are you all right? What happened? You were swimming and suddenly...."

He swallowed. His hands quivered. He shook his head and then said unsteadily, "I meant to ... check the reason those queer fish stay in the lagoon. I thought that if they belonged in the depths and were somehow carried out of them, they would try to get back. I found out!"

He felt an unreasonable relief when the lagoon entrance was behind the boat. The glassy water was reassuring. The Esperance looked like safety itself.

"I think I know how they got here, now," he added. "We underestimated what we're trying to understand. I'll be all right in a minute."

It was less than a minute before he shook himself and managed to grin wryly at Deirdre.

"Was there a hum in the water?" asked Deirdre, still staring at him. "I thought I heard it on the bottom of the boat. Was that the trouble?"

"Yes. I wouldn't call it a hum," Terry admitted. "Not any longer. Now I know what a slow fire feels like."

"You frightened me," said Deirdre, "the way you splashed...."

"I heard the humming sound," said Terry, "last night when the yacht came up to the island. We were perhaps a half-mile off-shore. It was very faint, but I had the amplifier turned down low. The hum was at its loudest just before we passed the reef, but nobody else noticed. When Dr. Morton said there were abyssal fish in the lagoon, I knew why they'd be there. I made a guess at what might drive them there. I went to find out if I was right. I found out!"

"The hum?" asked Deirdre again. When he nodded, she said: "What are you going to do now? What do you think makes the hum?"

"I'm trying hard not to guess what makes the hum," Terry told her. "Insufficient data. I need more. I think I'll ask what other odd phenomena have turned up in this neighborhood. Foam-patches on the sea? I can't imagine a connection, but still...."

He swung the little boat alongside the docked Esperance and held out his hand to help Deirdre to the dock. His hand was wholly steady again. She accepted the help.

"We'll go to the tracking station?"

"Yes. Everybody seems to be there," said Terry.

They heard a babble of voices coming from the satellite-tracking station. As they approached the buildings, Terry looked around. Off at one side there was the very peculiar aerial system by which tiny artificial moons circling the earth could be detected by their own signals. Minute spheres and cylinders and spiky objects and foolish-looking paddle-wheels, whirling in their man-appointed rounds, sent down signals with powers of mere fractions of a watt. This system of aerials picked up those miniature broadcasts and extracted remarkable amounts of information from them. It was possible to determine the satellites' distance more accurately, by a comparison of phase-changes in their signals, than if steel tape measures were stretched up to make physical contact with them. The accuracy was of the order of inches at hundreds of miles. Floating where the stars were bright and unwinking lights against blackness and the sun was a disk with writhing arms of fire, the small objects sent back information that men had never possessed before and did not wholly know what to do with now that they did. And there were other objects in the heavens, too. There were satellites which no longer signaled back to earth. Some had their equipment worn out. Some objects were satellites which had failed to function from the beginning. Some were mysteries.

The bolide of the night before was a mystery. As Terry and Deirdre entered the wide verandah of the recreation building for the station's personnel, they heard Dr. Morton protesting, "But that's out of the question! I agree that we never know any more about what the Russians throw out to space than what we find out for ourselves. That's true! But this wasn't a terrestrial object! If it was a satellite that wasn't launched right, it had to be sent up from Russian territory. It wasn't. That's positive! If we assume it was a satellite that had already made several orbital turns, we must admit it would be an impossible shift in apogee for it to come down at the angle it did!"

Deirdre and Terry sat down as someone else said hotly, "Our observations were wrong. They had to be! The earth's magnetic field couldn't affect the speed of an object outside the atmosphere! Our observations say it slowed down. It couldn't!"

Davis lifted a hand in greeting. The argument stopped for a moment. Deirdre was known, but Terry had to be introduced. He was sitting beside a bald young man who explained in a low tone, as the argument resumed. "They're having fun. They argued for days when our radar picked up an empty second stage in orbit. They're still ready to dispute for hours about a supposed retrograde satellite that was spotted last year, was watched for four turns, and then disappeared. Beer?"

"Too early," said Terry. "Thanks just the same."

Davis said earnestly, at the other side of the room, "I'd feel a lot better if that thing last night hadn't splashed where it did."

"The bolide," said a voice humorously, "is a free animal."

The discussion went on. Terry saw Deirdre talking to a middle-aged woman with a splendid sun-tan and a placid expression on her face. Doug and Tony sat watchfully on the side lines, listening. Doug had been offered, and had accepted, a sandwich. He ate it methodically.

Terry had a sudden feeling of unreality. Less than half an hour before he'd been in torment and, but for Deirdre, on his way to death. On the Esperance there'd been so much that was absorbing in the way of fish behavior that he'd forgotten some people were interested in other things. Here a dozen people squabbled over the behavior of a meteorite. Nothing could be of less consequence to the outside world. But in the outside world, people argued about baseball, or golf, or politics....

Doug excused himself and slipped outside. Terry joined him there a little later. Doug was smoking a cigarette, looking at the sky and the palms.

"Pretty heavy discussion," said Terry.

"It's over my head," said Doug. "I got lonesome. It made me think of my girl. She likes to talk like this. That's why ..."

He stopped.

"Is there an aqualung outfit on the Esperance?" asked Terry.

"Sure! Two or three of them. Mr. Davis had an idea they'd be useful. Used one of them last week to look at the Esperance's bottom-planks. Why?"

"I'd like to poke around the bottom of the lagoon a little," said Terry, with unconscious grimness. "Would you help?"

"Sure!" said Doug.

They went back to the Esperance. Doug got out two aqualung outfits. They checked the valves and tanks and connections. Doug brought out two spring guns. In half an hour they were in the outboard, headed for what Doug said was the deepest part of the lagoon.

Arrived there, Terry tested the water with his finger and then went overside. Instead of a spring gun, he used one of the fish spears that seemed to be standard equipment for fishing, here. Doug stayed in the boat to watch.

Terry'd guessed that what he looked for would be in the deepest part of the lagoon. He was right. Within half an hour he'd speared five fish of types that had no business being within two thousand fathoms of the surface. He ignored the lagoon's normal inhabitants. He picked on fish of a dark-red color, which is predominant in the depths but not elsewhere. When the fish had extremely small eyes or extremely large ones, he hunted them determinedly, knowing they were deep-sea fish. He caught five, which was a good haul, even considering his previous suspicions.

Doug inspected the catch as the outboard went back to the yacht. Terry replaced his spear under the gunwale.

"They're queer fish," observed Doug. "I wouldn't want to eat them."

"Neither would I," agreed Terry. "But I feel a certain sympathy for them. I think we've shared an experience."

He did. Fish so far from their normal environment would not have migrated unless they'd been forced to. So these fish must have been driven up from the blissful utter blackness of the abyss, which was their habitat. He had a vivid memory of the kind of urging they'd received, because of his recent swim outside the reef opening. That was the experience he believed they shared.

He got his catch onto the Esperance's deck and found some sharp knives in the galley, while Doug put the aqualungs away. When Doug came abovedecks again, he looked distastefully at the work Terry had undertaken.

"Do you like to do that sort of thing?" he asked.

"Hardly!" said Terry. "But I want to get it done."

Doug watched for a moment or two.

"I'm pretty keen about poetry. Sometimes I feel I've got to sweat over a poem that I need to get written. It's hard work. There's no real sense to it. But I feel it's got to be done. I guess that's the way you feel now."

"Perhaps," said Terry.

It wouldn't have occurred to him to liken the writing of verses to the dissection of dead deep-sea fish, but Doug had a point. He went away presently, and Terry completed the highly unpleasant task. He had just finished flushing the deck clean when Deirdre came back from the tracking station. He was already at work on the recorder when she stepped onto the deck.

"You didn't stay," said Deirdre. "I was waiting for a chance to tell my father about the hum outside the lagoon, but he was as deep in the meteor argument as any of them. I still haven't told him."

"There's something else to tell him now," Terry remarked. "I went down with an aqualung. Doug was standing by," he added at her gesture of protest, "and speared some fish that don't belong here. I've dissected them. Their swim bladders had been very skillfully punctured, so if they went or were driven into lesser pressure, they'd leak instead of bursting. That's how they survived coming up from the depths. But the main thing is this."

He held out a small plastic object in his hand. It was about an inch in diameter and two in length, and there were inclusions in the clear material. There were plates and threads of metal. They had that look of mysterious purpose that highly-developed technical devices have.

"This was fastened to the fin of a fish that belongs as far down as a fish can go," he said.