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

no land in sight anywhere. An albatross glided overhead for a time, as if inspecting the Esperance as a possible source of food. When Terry looked for it later it was gone. Once there was a flurry in many wave-flanks, and a small school of flying fish darted out of the sea with hazy, beating fins, and dived back into the sea many yards from where they started.

But nothing of any consequence happened anywhere. Terry fitted and soldered and tested. By noon he had a rather powerful audio amplifying unit, set up to magnify any sound the tape-recorder fed into it. Deirdre prepared a meal. The galley of the Esperance was admirably supplied with all kinds of food. After the noon meal the yacht changed course again to a line which would intersect her original morning course at some point.

Terry found himself fuming. He'd set to work to make something that Davis apparently wanted, but his most elementary questions still ran against a blank refusal to answer. Both Davis and Deirdre had spoken of oddities in the catches of La Rubia. There could not possibly be any reason for them to refuse to tell him what they were. Terry worked himself into irritability, recalling how he volunteered to come on the Esperance but not thinking that he would be treated as someone who wasn't allowed to know what everybody else aboard most certainly did.

In the afternoon there was guitar music down in the forecastle, and Doug came out and settled himself on the bowsprit with a book of poetry. Presently Nick sat down close by Terry and watched interestedly as he put mysterious-looking electronic elements together into incomprehensible groups. When he had finished, Terry did not admire his handiwork. The noisemaking unit came last. The electrical part had to be enclosed, water-tight, with a diaphragm exposed to the water on one side and its working parts protected from all moisture on the other. The device looked cobbled, but it worked, and made monstrous sounds in the air.

Now he plugged the submarine ear into the recorder. He dropped it overside and taped the random noises of the sea: the washings of sea water against the Esperance's hull, frequent splashings, and very faint, chirping noises from who-knew-what.

"Watch the volume, will you?" Terry pointed out the Indication that should not be exceeded. Nick nodded. "I'm going to whack the paddle overside and see what we get in the way of noise."

Nick hesitated. Then he said uneasily, "Wait a minute."

He went aft to Davis, apparently somnolent at the wheel. Deirdre joined the two of them in a seemingly very serious discussion. Then she walked over to Terry.

"I hate to say it," she told him with evident concern, "but my father thinks it would be wiser to try out the paddle in shallow water. Do you mind?"

"Yes," snapped Terry. "I do mind, since I'm not allowed to know the reason for that or anything else."

He put away his tools and the unused parts. He pointed to the machines he had already built.

"This is what your father wanted, I think. After it's tested I'll ask you to put me ashore."

He went below, where he fretted to himself. But no one came, either to inform him of Davis' reasons, or to tell him to do as he pleased. He felt like a child who isn't allowed to play with other children; who is arbitrarily excluded from the purpose and the excitement of his fellows. Thinking in such terms did not make him feel any better. His irritation increased. The Esperance was engaged in an enterprise that these people considered very much worth doing. He'd joined them to accomplish it, and they wouldn't tell him what it was. He hadn't the temperament to be content with just following blindly. And somehow the fact that Deirdre was aboard and a participant in the secret made his exclusion an insult.

He felt about Deirdre that urgent concern that a man may feel about one or two, or at most three girls during his whole lifetime. It wasn't a romantic interest, at this stage, but he wanted to look well in her eyes, and he was enormously interested in anything she said and did. If he left the Esperance and ceased to know her, he knew he'd be nagged at by the feeling that he'd made a very bad mistake. He didn't want to stop knowing her. But he refused to be patronized.

He saw an open book on the after-cabin table and glanced restlessly at it. There were three or four photographs and a newspaper clipping stuck into its pages. The book itself dealt with physics at post-graduate levels—which meant that it included a good deal about electronics.

Still fuming, Terry glanced at the pictures. The first was of a spherical object made of transparent plastic and probably of small size. It had a number of metallic elements clearly visible through the transparent case. It looked as if it might be an electronic device itself, but there was no sign of lead-in contacts, and the parts inside made no sense at all. The second and third photographs were of a similar yet slightly different object. The fourth photograph was a picture of what looked like ocean water, taken from a plane. The horizon showed in one corner. The center of the picture was an irregularly-shaped mass of white. On close examination it appeared to be foam. But it looked as if it were piled up in masses above the surface. If the water around it was ocean—and it was—and the visible crest-lines were of waves—and they were—that heap of foam must have been hundreds of yards in diameter and piled many feet high on the surface. Foam does not form in such masses in the open sea. It would not last if it did.

On the margin of this picture a date had been inked—three days before—and a position in degrees of latitude and longitude.

Terry turned to the chart rack. He pulled out a chart and looked up the position. Someone had made a pencil-dot there. It was close to Thrawn Island, on the very brink of the Luzon Deep, that incredible submarine chasm in which the entire Himalayan chain could be sunk without showing a single pinnacle above the surface.

He went back to the clipping. It was dated Manila, two years earlier. It was an obviously skeptical article on a report made by the crewmen of a sailing ship that stopped by Manila. Sailing ships are rare enough in modern times. This ship reported that she had sighted another of her own kind at sea. The two ships altered course to speak to each other. And the one which came into Manila declared that when the other vessel was no more than two miles away, white foam suddenly appeared on the sea just in front of her. A geyser of unsubstantial white stuff spouted up and spread, shooting up about thirty feet on the water. The bow of the other sailing ship entered the foam patch. And suddenly her bow tilted downward, her masts swayed forward, and the entire ship vanished into the white stuff, exactly as if she had sailed over a precipice. She did not sink. She dropped. She "fell" under water—under the foam—her sails still spread. One instant she sailed proudly. The next instant she was gone.

The position of such an incredible happening was roughly given. It was almost exactly the same as the position written on the photograph of foam taken from the air. At the margin of the Luzon Deep.

Terry found that his indignation had evaporated. The reason for it still remained, but now he wanted to know more about this happening and about the spheres of plastic with those deftly designed but enigmatic inclusions. The plastic objects had a purpose. He wanted to know what. And the news clipping....

Having announced crossly that he would ask to be set ashore as soon as the fish-driving unit was tested, he was ashamed to take it back. He stayed below, now angry at himself again. Nobody came below. Deirdre did not descend to cook. Night fell. Well after nightfall he heard movements on deck, and presently a voice which sounded oddly distant. The Esperance's course changed abruptly. The quality of her motion altered once more.

He went abovedecks. Twilight was long over, but the moon was not yet up. Here and there a wave-tip frothed, and blue luminescence appeared. Here and there a streak of dim blue light could be seen under water, where some fish darted. But those dartings were rare. Despite the yacht's shining wake and the curling wave-tips, the sea was darker than usual.

Nick's voice came from aloft, faint and eerie and seeming to come from the stars.

"... farther to port.... Two points ..."

Terry could see the masthead weaving and swaying against the stars, with a small dark silhouette clinging to it: Nick. The yacht began to swing. On one bearing she pounded heavily. The seas could hit her squarely, and they did. Figures moved swiftly about the deck, loosening sheets or tightening them. Nick's voice again, from overhead.

"Stea-a-a-dy!"

The Esperance ceased to turn. Rushing, pounding water sprayed in the air. The waves splashed upon the hull of the yacht, which was sweeping along on a quartering wind.

For a while no one talked. Tony stood at the wheel, with Davis nearby, by the binnacle light. Terry could see Davis glancing into the binnacle, then gazing at the horizon ahead, and then aloft, where Nick seemed to swing among low-hanging stars.

"Ri-i-i-ght!" he called from high overhead. "Steady as she goes."

The Esperance sailed on, over the surging seas. Waves came out of nowhere, leaped beside the yacht and then went by—to nowhere. It was hard to believe that the yacht actually moved forward. She seemed to stay perpetually in the one spot. But there was a winding, sinuous wake, and there was froth under her forefoot.

Then a vague brightness appeared on the sea, at the limit of vision. It spread out more widely as the Esperance approached. Presently it was clearly visible.

Dead ahead, the beam of the headlight suddenly revealed an incredible spectacle. Until then there had been just a few flashes in the water, where some fish darted away from the yacht's bulk. But here the entire surface of the water shone with thousands and thousands of fish. They were packed in a sharply delimited circle about a mile wide. When the Esperance got close enough, she hauled up into the wind to look.

From a spot fifty yards ahead, the sea was alive with a million frantic dartings of swimming things. They were crowded, packed almost fin-to-fin. And it was not a surface phenomenon only. From the yacht's deck the streaks of light were visible deep down, as far as the clear water would let them be seen. They formed a column of glittering chaos. The vast circle, to an indefinite depth, was packed solid with agitated fish. At that edge of brightness the thronging creatures were splashing in a mad frenzy. Solid shining shapes leaped crazily from the water. Some leaped again and again, until they reached the spot where the flashes were thickest, and got lost in the multitude of their fellows. A few escaped to the darker surrounding sea. They seemed to run away in stark terror. But those were only a few. The greatest mass of fish milled crazily inside the circle. There were even porpoises, darting about as if frightened beyond all normal behavior, not even trying to feed on the equally fear-maddened creatures all about them.

Three

Terry stared incredulously. Someone moved beside him. It was Davis. He spoke in a dry voice.

"I would think," he said detachedly, "that La Rubia could catch a boatload of fish in that water with a single haul of her nets. Certainly with two."

Terry turned his head.

"But what is it? What makes these fish gather like this?"

"An interesting question," said Davis. "We'll try to find out how it happens. Even more interesting, I'd like to know why."

He moved away along the deck. Terry went close to the side rail. A few minutes later the startling glare of one of the side searchlights smote upon the water away from the incredible scene. It moved slowly back and forth. Where the light struck, the sea seemed totally commonplace. No fish could be seen. Then the white beam swept here and there in jerky leapings. There was nothing unusual on the surface, nothing beyond the limit of brightness, where the sea turned dark.

Deirdre said at Terry's side, "We didn't really expect this! I'm going to get a sample of the water, Terry. Want to help?"

She ignored his haughty withdrawal of the afternoon, and he could not stand on his dignity in the presence of such an incredible phenomenon. She got a water bucket from the nearby rack. A wave sprung up as she tried to fill