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

seem to shimmer because of the changing light. When they came up again Deirdre said, "Funny!"

"It had a purpose!" insisted Terry. "There were others before it, and they had a purpose too! That's not funny!"

"I didn't mean that," said Deirdre. "I meant ... just now, under the water.... What's that?"

There was a swirling at the surface, some tens of yards away. It was not the curling eddy made by a fish about to break surface. It was too big a disturbance for that. It looked as if something stirred, barely submerged, but something very large. Terry, staring, thought of a porpoise cavorting just below the ripples. Or perhaps a shark. But sharks and porpoises are too small to have made this eddying. It reappeared.

"Get in the boat!" snapped Terry. "Quick!"

While she climbed in he let himself sink, his eyes open. There was a clouding of the water underneath, where the surface-disturbance had been. It was mud from the bottom which had been stirred up. He could see nothing clearly through it, though nearby and around him he could easily see the colorings of coral and fan sponges, and he could see small fish darting here and there.

He broke surface. Deirdre bent anxiously over the gunwale.

"What is it?"

"I don't know," he said curtly. "But give me a fish spear."

"You won't...."

"I just want to have something in my hand," he told her impatiently, "while I look."

He took the spear she handed him, and sank once more. Again something moved in the deeper part of the lagoon. It was a fretful motion, as if a creature or creatures tried to burrow away from the light shining through the water. Whatever moved, a thick cloud of debris from the bottom floated all the way up to the surface.

Terry came up for air.

"There's something queer there," he said shortly. "I don't know what."

He went under and swam cautiously nearer to the disturbance. He was within a few feet of the curling cloud of obscurity when something like a gigantic worm came out of it. Or maybe it was like an elephant's trunk, only no elephant ever had a trunk so huge. It was a dull and glistening writhing object. Its end was rounded. The tip of the worm-like thing must have been a foot in diameter, and it came out of the mud cloud for four feet, then six, then, fifteen feet. It thickened only slightly in that length. It groped blindly in the brightness.

Terry swam back quickly, and the object reared up and made a groping sweep through the clear water. Some peculiar white disks suddenly appeared on the underside of the long tentacle. They looked like sucker-disks, able to grip anything at all. The monstrous tentacle fumbled for Terry, as if guided by the pressure-waves his movements generated.

Terry froze. Deirdre moved in the boat almost directly overhead. Something clanked in the boat and he heard it. The boat was probably rocking, making the pressure-waves that a creature from the abyss would depend upon for guidance where eyes would not serve at all.

The thick, bulging tentacle reached toward the sound at the surface, now ignoring Terry, though he was nearer. He was still. The white sucker-disks on its under side had several rings of a horny, tooth-like substance at their rims. The smallest were about four inches wide. The fumbling object felt blindly in the water. Deirdre stirred again in the boat. The visible portion of the groping monstrosity was already longer than the boat. The whole creature would be enormous! If this groping arm rested upon the gunwale of the boat, it could easily swamp it.

It groped for the boat, coming horribly out of a cloud of mud. It reached out. In another instant it would touch....

Terry plunged his fish spear into the worm. It jerked violently. There were enormous thrashings. Other similar white-disked arms thrust into view, fumbling somehow angrily for the creature—Terry—which had dared to attack it.

He darted for the surface. Something unspeakably horrible touched him, but it was the smooth and not the suckered side of the groping worm. Terry's head was now above water. He grasped the gunwale to pull himself in, in a fever of haste. But the thing that had touched him before came back. It grazed his leg, for just a second. Where it touched, his flesh burned like fire.

"Start ... motor!" gasped Terry. "Get away!"

Something touched the stern-board of the boat. Deirdre pulled the starter of the motor.

"Get in!" she said tensely. "Quickly!"

She saw him, straining every muscle by pure, agonized instinct against the irresistible force of whatever clung to his skin. The horrible tentacle stretched, and part of its length took a new grip. It crawled upon him.... Deirdre saw the look on his face.

She snatched up the second spear and stabbed past him, into the crawling beast. There was a most violent jerking. She stabbed again. She panted. She gasped. She stabbed and stabbed, sobbing with fear and horror. And Terry tumbled in over the gunwale, released. As soon as he fell onto the floor-boards he painfully dragged himself toward the motor at the stern. Something bumped the boat underneath. Terry pulled the starter and the motor suddenly roared. But the boat didn't start immediately, and it jerked once more. The whirling propeller-blades had touched one of the groping tentacles and cut it. Tumult arose.

The boat surged into motion and Terry, with clenched teeth, sent it into a crazy, skidding turn to avoid a surface swirl, and then another frantic swerve when something showed momentarily above the surface. The boat zig-zagged along. A grisly, writhing object rose above the water, flailing, a fish-spear sticking in it. The small, skimming boat dodged and twisted at its topmost speed.... It suddenly straightened out and almost flew across the water toward the land.

Eight

Echoes of the outboard's roaring motor came back from the trunks of palm trees that lined the lagoon's shore as the tiny boat raced across the water. Deirdre was ashen-white. She turned her eyes from the water, and they fell on the round raw places on Terry's leg where the sucker-disks had bruised it horribly. She shuddered. She still had the sensation of being pursued by the monster. Back where Deirdre's spear had finally liberated Terry, startled and convulsive motions continued, followed by a final gigantic splash. Terry drove the boat on at top speed.

The monster sank again in the spot where the lagoon was deepest. It had come from depths where there was no light; from an abyss where blackness was absolute. Now, having lost its victim, it returned peevishly to such darkness as it could secure.

Terry said curtly, as the small boat raced for the Esperance and the wharf, "That creature was driven up from the Luzon Deep into the lagoon to replace the gadget-carrying fish we speared!"

Deirdre stammered a little.

"Your l-leg.... You're bleeding...."

"I'm pretty well skinned in a couple of places," he said shortly. "That's all."

"Could it be poisonous?"

"Poison," said Terry, "is a weapon for the weak. This thing's not weak! I'm all right. And I'm lucky!"

"I'd have jumped over with my spear, if ..."

"Idiot!" said Terry gently. "Never think of such a thing! Never! Never!"

"I wouldn't want to l-live—"

A new reverberating quality came into the echoes from the shore. The pilings of the wharf were nearby, now. They multiplied the sounds they returned. The Esperance loomed up. Terry cut off the motor, the little boat drifted to contact, and Deirdre scrambled to the yacht's deck, and then took the bow line and fastened it. This was absurdly commonplace. It was exactly what would have been done on the return from any usual ride.

"Go tell the others what we found," said Terry. "I'm going to see if there's more than one of those things around."

"Not ..."

"No," he assured her. "I'm only going to use the fish-driving horn."

Deirdre looked at him in distress.

"Be careful! Please!" She kissed him suddenly, scrambled to the wharf, and set off at a run toward the shore. Terry stared hungrily after her. They'd come to a highly personal decision the night before on the Esperance, but it still seemed unbelievable to him that Deirdre felt about him the way he felt about her.

He went forward to set up the fish-driving combination. One part of him thought vividly of Deirdre. The other faced the consequences that might follow if the bolides were not bolides, and if the plastic gadgets and the nasty-sounding underwater hums were products of an intelligence which could make bolides change their velocity in space; which made them fall in the Luzon Deep in the China Sea and nowhere else.

He set up the recorder with its loop of fish-driving hum. He put the horn overboard, carefully oriented to spread its sound through all the enclosed shallow water of the lagoon. He turned the extra amplifier to maximum output, to increase the effectiveness of the noise, and turned on the apparatus.

The glassy look of the lagoon-water vanished immediately. Fish leaped crazily everywhere, from half-inch midgets to lean-flanked predators a yard and more in length. There was no square foot in all the shallows where a creature didn't struggle to escape the sensation of pins and needles all over its body. And these pins and needles pricked deep.

Flying-fish soared crazily, and they were the most fortunate because so long as they flew, the tormenting water-sound did not reach them. But many of them landed on the beach, and even among the palms.

In the spot where blind and snakelike arms had tried to destroy Terry and Deirdre, the lashing and swirling was of a different kind. Something there used enormous strength to offer battle to a noise. The water was whipped to froth. Twice Terry saw those rope-like arms rise above the water and flail it.

This particular sort of tumult, however, appeared only in one spot. So there was only one such creature in the lagoon.

When Davis and the others came down from the tracking station, Terry turned off the horn. He was applying soothing ointment to the raw flesh of his leg.

"There's a monstrous creature out there," he said evenly when a white-faced Davis demanded information. "Heaven knows how big it is, but it's something like a huge squid. It may be the kind that sperm whales feed on, down in the depths."

Others from the tracking station arrived, panting.

"Oh! I'm tired of being conservative!" added Terry fiercely. "I'm going to say what all of us think! There's something intelligent down at the bottom of the sea, five miles down!"

He glared challengingly around him.

"Who doesn't believe that?" he demanded. "Well, the reporting gadgets don't report any more. We killed the fish that carried them. So that whatever-it-is down on the sea-bed has very cleverly sent up something we ignorant savages wouldn't dare to meddle with! We would be terrified. But we'll show it what men are like!"

Dr. Morton said gently, "Perhaps we should notify the Pelorus. The biologists on board there...."

"No!" said Terry grimly. "I have a private quarrel with this monster. It might have killed Deirdre! And Davis already tried to tell those biologists something! Tell them about this, and they'll want proofs they wouldn't look at anyhow. We'll handle this ourselves! It's too important for them!"

"Much too important," said Deirdre firmly. "The shooting stars aren't shooting stars and there's something down in the depths just like Terry says. He's right that we can't consider sharing our world with—beings that come down from the sky, even if they only want our oceans and don't care about the land. He says that we wouldn't get along with creatures that know more than we do, and we would especially resent any space ships coming uninvited to start colonies on our world while we're not advanced enough to stop them! If that's what they're doing, they have to be fought from the very first instant to the very last moment there's one of them hiding in our seas! Terry's right!"

"I haven't heard him say any of those things, young lady," said Morton drily, "but they're true. And I don't like the idea of a sea monster being in the lagoon anyhow. Especially one that tries to kill people. Still, fighting it...."

"There are a couple of bazookas on the Esperance," said Terry sharply. He looked at Davis. "If you're willing to risk the yacht, we can drive the beast aground, or at least to shallow water, with the submarine horn. Then the bazookas should be able to destroy it. Will you take the risk?"

"Of course you'll use the Esperance," said Davis. "Of course!"

"Then I'll want," said Terry, unconsciously taking command, "somebody at the engine and somebody at the wheel. I'll run the horn. But, frankly, if that monster lays one sucker-arm on the Esperance, it may be good-bye. Any volunteers?"

In minutes the Esperance, her engine rumbling, pulled away from the dock. She had on board all her original