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

then, the Esperance was back above the place where the dredge had been dropped and the bathyscaphe wrecked. The Pelorus was gone. The people on board that ship must have been very upset. The bathyscaphe had cost more money than is usually allotted to most scientific researchers, and now it was smashed. How would they justify themselves? They could hardly blame the Esperance.

The yacht sailed in a closed pattern over this area of the Luzon Deep. Deirdre served dinner on deck. Stars shone down almost instantly after a sunset of unusual magnificence, even for the China Sea. Tony brought his guitar aft, and a contagious feeling of exhilaration spread about the Esperance and an improvised party took place on deck. Maybe the mood for festivity arose from the realization that at least nine-tenths of the world's population would have graded them as lunatics, had it known their project for the evening.

It would have been unjust, of course. Terry reflected that it had not been their idea to make an appointment with a shooting star. They were doing it out of some sort of professional courtesy, "from one set of crackpots to another," Terry phrased it in his own mind. It was a wild attempt to secure proof of the starkly impossible. So there was chatter, singing, and some dancing. The high spot was perhaps the time when Jug bashfully serenaded the rigging and the stars above it with howling melodies he'd learned in college.

Eventually, Nick went down to the short-wave set. Doug passed out the gun-cameras again, after checking each one. Nick popped his head out of the hatch.

"Dr. Morton's been calling like crazy," he reported. "The bolide's made four orbital turns, coming in all the while. It ought to touch the atmosphere next time around. ETO is nine-twelve-seventeen-seconds. I told him we're all set."

His head disappeared.

"Don't forget!" Doug said anxiously. "The cameras will feel like shotguns but don't lead your target! And don't forget to press the film-changer!"

Terry lifted his gun-camera experimentally. It did feel like a shotgun. And then, suddenly, he disbelieved everything: the purpose of the Esperance's original investigation; the phenomena that had been observed; the guesses that had been made. It was pure insanity! He felt a quick impatience with himself for becoming entangled in anything so ridiculous.

Deirdre leaned toward him and whispered forlornly, "Terry! It's dreadful! I've just had an attack of common sense! What are we doing here? We're crazy!"

He put his hand consolingly over hers. The act was unpremeditated and the sensation was startling. He found that they were staring at each other intently in the starlight.

"I think ..." said Terry, unsteadily, "that it's very sensible to be crazy. We've got to ... talk this over."

Deirdre smiled at him shakily.

"Y-yes, we will."

Then Davis pointed out positions for the camera operators. The bolide's course should be three hundred fifty degrees, not quite on a north-south line. It might land short of, or beyond, the Esperance. Or it might pass many miles to the east or west. Dr. Morton needed as many pictures of it against recognizable stars as could possibly be secured.

Suddenly, there was a faint, dull rumbling in the heavens. It grew louder. Presently, cruising lights appeared in the sky. They maintained a fixed relationship to each other. They looked like moving stars, flying in formation from star-cluster to star-cluster.

Nick popped abovedecks again.

"The planes just called us," he reported. "They've just had a Loran position-check and they're on the mark. They've got orders to observe any unusual phenomena occurring around nine-twelve P.M., Manila time. Using civilian terminology, it sounds like they're saying the Philippine Government asked them to come out and take a look."

"It's five after nine now," said Davis.

The Esperance headed into the wind. Her bow rose and fell. Waves washed past, and roarings trundled about under the stars overhead, and very tiny lights moved in a compact group across the firmament.

Time passed.

At twenty-two seconds after nine-twelve—which is to say at twenty-one hours, twelve minutes, twenty-two seconds—a light appeared in the sky from the north. It grew steadily brighter. It suddenly flared very brightly indeed, then dimmed, and continued to rise above the horizon. Seconds later it flared again, very briefly.

Terry found himself aiming the gun-camera. He pulled trigger and changed film and pulled trigger and changed film.

The bright light ceased to climb. It grew steadily brighter and brighter, and then it flared for the third time—Terry's mind asked skeptically, 'Braking rockets?'—and the light was so intense that the cracks in the yacht's deck-planking could be seen. Then the extra brilliance vanished, and suddenly the moving light was no longer white, but reddish.

Terry aimed again and fired the gun-camera.

The light passed almost directly overhead. Terry had the impression that he felt its heat upon his skin.

It plunged into the sea two miles beyond the Esperance. The shock-wave caused by the impact tapped on the yacht's side-planking a few seconds later. Starlight shone upon a plume of steam.

Then there was nothing but the noise of the circling planes above. Then a sound, as of thunder. It disappeared northward. It was the sound of the bolide's passage, arriving after the object itself had dived into the sea.

The people on the Esperance were dumfounded. Nick went below and came up again a few minutes latter.

"The planes were calling," he reported. "They say they noted the unusual phenomenon. They ask if they should stay around for something else."

"I think," said Davis caustically, "that that's all that's scheduled just now. Tell them so."

The Esperance went on steadily again, a trifle west of north. Davis was below, talking via radio to Dr. Morton at the satellite tracking base.

Terry and Deirdre went to look for a place where they could talk over something privately. It was of enormous importance to them, but it was not connected with fish or meteorites or plastic objects or anything at all but the two of them. And to them the yacht seemed crowded with people, even though there was nobody else abovedecks but one of the crew-cuts at the wheel.

When the Esperance entered the lagoon the next morning, though, their private talk had evidently come to a satisfactory conclusion. Deirdre smiled at Terry without any reason whatever, and he looked at once smug and embarrassed and uneasy, as if he possessed a new status to which he was still unaccustomed.

The recorder, trailing a submarine ear overboard, had duly reported the presence of the hum in the water, just outside the lagoon. It had not been operating for forty hours or thereabouts. During that time the fish inside could go out of the lagoon, if they chose. And other fish could come in. Terry said suddenly, as the yacht went under power toward the tracking station wharf, "Suppose there was a cone of noise just outside the lagoon, and the flanks of the submarine mountain under us were included in the cone? And suppose the cone grew smaller, like the other one. What would happen?"

Deirdre shook her head, smiling at him.

"The fish," said Terry, "could escape into the lagoon."

"Probably," agreed Deirdre.

"And if fish could be driven downward along a certain path," said Terry, "the way we saw it happen, why, fish could be driven up in a certain path, too."

"Obviously," said Deirdre.

"So if something wanted to replace the fish in the lagoon, or to add to their number, why, it would puncture their swim bladders far, far down, and then drive them up to the surface and into the lagoon, and then keep the noise going to keep them inside."

"Is this a new idea?" asked Deirdre.

"N-n-o," admitted Terry. "I've had it for some time."

"So," said Deirdre, "have I."

The Esperance's engine stopped, and she floated to gentle contact with the wharf. Members of the tracking station staff made the yacht fast. With others, Dr. Morton came on board. His expression was the picture of unrelieved gloom.

"I'm in a nice spot!" he told Davis. "I predicted a second bolide correctly! I had to use a different retardation factor to make the math come out right. Now I'm asked to explain that! How can I tell them I knew where it would fall, and only had to compute when?"

"Come below and look at the pictures we got," said Davis.

They disappeared down the after-cabin hatch. Terry knew about the pictures. Doug had developed them with sweating care, developing each negative separately and adjusting the development-time to the varying exposures of the bright object.

There was a total of twenty reasonably good pictures of the bolide, from its first appearance to its plunge into the ocean, two miles from the Esperance. Doug had enlarged some of them. There were distinct star-patterns in most. In nearly all, though, the object was more or less blurred by its own motion. In those taken when it flared most brightly, the blurriness was especially marked. There was only one picture of professional, if accidental, quality, and it was the least convincing of all. It showed the fore-part of a conical shape traveling point-first. Nobody would conceivably believe that it was a meteorite. It looked artificial.

Terry and Deirdre, as it happened, stayed on deck. The people of the tracking station made a babbling uproar. It appeared that the most important event in history, as history was viewed on Thrawn Island, had taken place the night before. It was revealed—Terry had not suspected his own success—that in asking Horta to see that there was foreknowledge of a meteoric fall, Terry had arranged for the matter to be taken immediately to high Philippine Government officials. The American flattop, at their request, had sent planes to the place of the fall, with orders which were enigmatic only until the descending object appeared. Then every man in every plane knew that he'd been sent there to see it.

So there could be no question but that Dr. Morton had predicted it. That meant that he knew more about meteoric objects than anybody else in the world. What he had to say was of vast importance, and Thrawn Island shared in his achievement. But it was a strictly professional triumph. The news would not break in the newspapers. No ordinary reader would believe in it. And nobody anywhere would believe in Morton's knowledge of the place of the fall before he began to calculate.

Terry observed that the people of Thrawn Island were definitely no longer interested in fish. They'd kept their eyes open for oddities because a deep-sea fish with a plastic object attached had been caught in the lagoon a long while before. They'd been intensely interested when Terry herded all the lagoon fish into one small inner bay, and they speared sixty fish that had no business being at the surface. They'd found eight more plastic objects. Such things had been interesting, if not important. But now the head of the Thrawn Island staff had computed the place and time of arrival of a meteoric mass from space! And he did it when that mass was five thousand miles out! From a professional standpoint, this was stupendous! They tried to make Terry see how important it was.

Davis and Morton came up from below. They headed for the shore. The crew-cuts trailed off to the land with most of the visitors. Only Deirdre and Terry remained on the yacht, with a mere short-wave operator from the island.

"We're going to have a fancy lunch, with champagne and speeches," the operator said hopefully. "You'll come?"

"Naturally!" said Terry. "But first we're going swimming. We haven't had a chance to be overboard since the last time we were here."

"We'll be back in time for lunch," Deirdre assured the operator, "but swimming here is so wonderful! We've been talking about it for days!"

She went below to change. The operator shrugged. After a further attempt to interest Terry in the celebration of an astronomical first, he went ashore. Terry went with him to get the outboard motorboat he and Deirdre had used before. He was already wearing swimming trunks.

A little later the small boat putt-putted away from the Esperance upon the glassy-rippled waters of the lagoon.

There was a very great tranquillity everywhere. The booming roar of the surf came from unseen rollers on the reef outside. Seabirds squawked. Palms along the edge of the lagoon waved their fronds very, very gently.

"How far will you go before we swim?" asked Deirdre. "All the lagoon's perfect. One place is as good as another."

He cut off the motor.

"Hmmm. There's a deep place yonder," he observed. "That's where I went with the aqualung and speared the freak fish. Stay away from it."

She jumped over in a clean dive. He joined her in the water. She came up, blowing bubbles.

"All right, Terry. What are your troubles?"

"That bolide bothers me," he told her. "It had a specific destination! It was meant to hit the water over the Luzon Deep!"

She dived again. This time Terry followed her. The underwater world was beautifully bright, with ripplings making everything