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

"I've found out one of its purposes. When it is in the water, it makes a sound more acute than a whistle every time another sound strikes it. Try that on your piano!"

Deirdre stared.

"I'm saying," he repeated, "that it takes in one sound and gives out another. It's ... it could be a relay. What is that for? What's it all about? What does it mean? And I ask just those questions because I don't dare ask who and why!"

"What ... what will you do?" asked Deirdre absurdly.

"I've no idea," Terry told her. "I've got a feeling that the wise thing to do would be to settle down somewhere and buy a shop, and forget all this. If I don't think about it, maybe it'll go away."

"I'll get my father and see what he says."

"Tell him," commanded Terry, "that I want to try out my fish-driving horn. I'd like to have witnesses. If this foolishness has to be reported to somebody, we need evidence of the facts. I want to drive fish and see how many deep-sea ones there are in this lagoon, and how many of them have spy-devices on them."

Deirdre turned away. Then she turned back.

"Spy-dev—"

"I slipped," said Terry. "I shouldn't have said that. Forget it. Just tell your father I have an extremely urgent impulse to drive fish, and would he come and help."

Deirdre looked at him strangely, and went onto the wharf to search for her father.

Terry paced back and forth on the Esperance's deck. In a few minutes Davis and the crew-cuts appeared with Deirdre. But they were not alone. Straggling behind them came nearly all the personnel of the tracking station. There would be somebody on official duty, of course. But here was the bespectacled Dr. Morton; the bald young man who'd offered Terry beer; and the installation cook; a typist, and specialists in radar and other abstruse subjects.

Deirdre said, "I told them about the fish-driving business and they want to see. They stopped arguing about last night's bolide to take ringside seats. All right?"

Terry shrugged. He had the recorder already set up. He'd taken a section of the tape made where the sea was bright, at the place where the loudest of the unpleasant humming noise was recorded. He'd made a loop of it so it would play over and over.

He played the much-amplified sound through the underwater horn held in the air. The result was a raucous bellowing noise. He lowered it into the water. The horn touched the surface and went under.

Instantly, the fish of the lagoon seemed to go crazy. All the surface broke and writhed and splashed. There was an incredible number of fish. Terry turned the horn on one side. In this way, not all the water was filled with the intolerable noise, but only a net-like beam of it raced across the water. Within that line the fish continued to leap frenziedly. The rest of the lagoon suddenly quieted down. In a little while the beam's space, also, grew quiet. But that was because the fish that had been previously caught in it had escaped.

"I'm afraid," said Terry, "that this isn't going to be very entertaining. I'm going to sweep the beam across the lagoon, pushing the fish ahead of it, until I should have them all in one small area."

It was curious that he felt uncomfortable as he set about his task. But he'd experienced the sensation this sound produced. And it was not very pleasant.

He turned the beam around, slightly. Again, there were sudden splashings. They died away. He turned the beam again. It was a nasty, snarling vibration in the water. So far as fish were concerned, it was more like a wall than a net, because not even the tiniest living creature could penetrate it. Not only fish fled before it. Shrimps and crabs and all types of crustaceans jerked and crawled and swam ahead of its motion. Jellyfish writhed when it touched them. Sea cucumbers contorted themselves. Everything that lived in the lagoon and could swim or crawl or writhe moved before the invisible barrier. Presently, the effect of crowding could be seen, and fish began to leap out of water.

"This is a great advance in civilization," said Dr. Morton. "Men invented guns and destroyed the buffalo and the passenger pigeon! You may have made it possible to depopulate the sea!"

Terry did not answer. The morning sun shone brightly, a gentle breeze made ripplings on the lagoon, the palms waved their fronds in languid gestures, and the surf could be heard booming and splashing on the outer reef. And about two dozen people stood on the wharf or on the Esperance's deck and watched a spliced section of recorder-tape go through and through a recorder, which was set to make a sound underwater that could not be heard by the people above.

The fish of the lagoon had crowded themselves into a minor embayment of the shore. There were innumerable leapings there.

"There should be plenty of fish collected now," said Terry distastefully. "I certainly can't herd them ashore."

The outboard boat pushed away from the yacht, its motor roaring. It reached the area in which the water seemed to seethe and surge with the motion of densely-crowded swimming creatures. The people in the boat examined the surrounding water, then the boat came back at top speed.

"They're there!" called Davis. "And thick enough to walk on! I clearly saw some freaks that must come up from the bottom! We want to collect them!"

"I speared five just now," Terry told him, "and one of them was wearing this."

He held up the plastic object he'd found. There was silence for a moment. Then Dr. Morton said briskly, "We'll want fish spears. We'll take all the boats and go after some more of these piscatory oddities. Who's best with a spear?"

Davis would go. He could use the two fish spears that were standard equipment for the outboard. The staff of the tracking station scattered to launch other boats. Only Terry and Deirdre remained on the Esperance. It was necessary for someone to stand by the recorder.

Boats moved away across the water. One stout member of the island's staff trudged along the shore.

"You're driving them," said Deirdre. "You are right."

"I wish I weren't," said Terry.

"Why?"

"You know how these weird fish got here," he said impatiently. "They were driven here. You know how they've been kept here. I experienced that! I told you why they didn't die when they came up from thousands of fathoms! Now, what's the only possible purpose for their being here? Put it more scientifically! What is the consequence of these happenings, so that to some biological entity it would be a favorable happening?" His tone was sardonic, at the end.

"I don't know."

"I hope I don't either," said Terry dourly.

He was in no amiable mood. He'd made too many guesses like those Davis had mentioned. He was beginning to have less and less hope that they were untrue. Each new development made any imaginable cause of these events just so much more appalling to think about.

In an hour, three boats came back from the small bay into which all the fish of the lagoon had been crowded. Terry turned off the underwater horn. A stout man walked slowly along the shore with a heavy burden of known edible fish. He was the island's cook, and he had speared them from the beach. The boats, altogether, had speared and captured not less than sixty specimens of fish normally found only many thousand feet below the ocean's surface. Upon inspection, all of them were found to have deftly punctured swim bladders, punctured with so slender a barb that the opening would close by itself, except when serving for the release of intolerably expanding gas.

Before noon, seven more plastic objects had been found among the deep-sea fish. Three seemed identical to the one Terry had found. Two others were identical to each other but of a different kind, and the last two were of two different types altogether. Only those like the one tested by Terry seemed sensitive to sounds, which they changed into other sounds at a twenty-thousand-cycle frequency, or higher. The rest did nothing that could be detected.

During the afternoon, news came to distract the absorption of the tracking station staff in the lagoon's fish. The short-wave operator came running to the wharf, waving a written message. The deck of the Esperance was not a pretty sight, just then, with the dissection that had been taking place on it. Jug was beginning to flush the debris overside.

The short-wave operator arrived. Dr. Morton read the message. He raised his voice.

"Here's a fancy one!" he told the assembled company. "Space-radar's picked up a new object coming in from nowhere. It will probably orbit once before it hits the air and burns. By the line of motion it should pass nearly overhead here. We're alerted to get it under observation and watch it!" He waved the message in a large gesture. "We've got to get ourselves set up! The argument on the path of last night's bolide and why it fell where it did is again in order. We'll see what we can do about computing the fall-point of this!"

He headed for the shore. The staff followed, babbling. Somebody's mathematics would be verified, and with it his views on the possible effects of terrestrial magnetism on objects approaching the earth.

"We ought to get these plastic things to Manila," Davis said slowly. "They need to be compared to others. But I think we'll wait and see this bolide first."

A heated argument started in the tracking station staff. From Dr. Morton downward, almost to the station's cook, the most varied predictions were made. The official computation from Washington, made from the observed course and height and speed, predicted that the bolide would land somewhere in the South Pacific. Dr. Morton predicted a fall in the China Sea, within a certain precisely stated number of miles from Thrawn Island. Other predictions varied.

At exactly fourteen minutes after eight—a time way ahead of the official schedule but exactly as Dr. Morton had predicted—the bolide passed overhead. It was an amazing spectacle. It left a trail of flame behind, across thirty degrees of sky. It went on and on....

Less than ten minutes later the short-wave radio informed the island that the shooting star had been seen to fall in the sea. It had been observed by a plane which was then circling over the area in which the Esperance had encountered the circle of shining sea. The plane was there to see if the phenomenon would occur again. It didn't.

But the plane saw the bolide as it struck the sea, and huge masses of steam and spray arose. The bolide was not white-hot, then, as when it passed over Thrawn Island. It was barely of dull-red brightness. It hit the sea and sank, leaving steam behind.

The water was forty-five hundred fathoms deep at that point.

Six

Fourteen hours later the Esperance made ready to sail from Thrawn Island. Her purpose was to carry the plastic objects to Manila, where they would be turned over to specialized laboratories to be studied. Five such objects had been found before: one in the Thrawn Island lagoon, while the satellite-tracking station was under construction, and four attached to exotic fish brought to market by the commercial fishing boat La Rubia. Now there were eight more, of four different kinds. To the laboratories would go Terry's observation that one kind of these objects absorbed sound at audible frequencies and retransmitted it at much higher ones, but only under water. All this was very interesting and very puzzling.

But a serious disturbance had arisen at the tracking station.

Dr. Morton came to the Esperance before her departure. He had a problem. He'd predicted to the minute, and almost to the mile, the landing of the bolide of the night before. That was the first accurate prediction of the kind in history. But his forecast stood alone in its precision. Nobody else had even come near being right. Now he was being insistently queried by astronomers the world over. They wanted to know how he'd done it. In particular, they wanted to know how he'd figured that the bolide would lose just so many feet per second velocity, neither more nor less, in a three-quarter orbit around the world. Nobody else had such a figure in his equation for the landing spot. Dr. Morton had. His prediction had been exact. Where did he get that necessary but inexplicable figure?

He beckoned Davis and Terry to go below with him, in the Esperance's after cabin. Terry hesitated.

"You may as well hear my troubles," said Morton vexedly. "You're largely responsible for them."

Terry followed uneasily. He didn't see how Dr. Morton could hold them responsible. He had guarded his own guesses about the Esperance's discoveries against even the slightest expression.