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

the bucket overside. It touched her hand and she cried out. Terry jerked her back by the shoulder. The bucket bumped against the Esperance's side, hanging on the line attached to the rail.

"What's the matter?"

"It stung! The water stung! Like a nettle!" Shaking a little, Deirdre rubbed her wet hand with the other. "It doesn't hurt now, but it was like a stinging nettle—or an electric shock!"

Terry hauled in the bucket and set it down. He leaned far over the rail. He plunged his hand into a lifting pinnacle of the sea. Instantly, his skin felt as if pricked by ten thousand needles. But his muscles did not contract as they would in an electric shock. The sensation was on the surface of his skin alone.

He shook his head impatiently. He put his finger in the bucket he'd lifted to the deck. There was no unusual sensation. He dipped overside again. Again acute and startling hurt, from the mere contact with the water.

Deirdre still rubbed her hand. She said in a queer, surprised voice,

"Like pins and needles. It's like—like the fish-driving paddle! But worse! Much worse!"

Terry looked again at the sea glittering with the swarms of fish in hopeless, panicked agitation, confined in a specific narrow compass by something unguessable. The searchlight continued to flick here and there. The Esperance drifted away from the edge of brightness. Terry put his hand overside once more, and once more he felt the stinging, nettle-like sensation. He got a fresh bucket of water from overside. On deck, there was no strange sensation when he dipped his hand in it.

The searchlight went out abruptly and only a faint and quickly dimming reddish glow came from it. That too died.

Davis' voice gave orders. Terry said sharply, "Wait a minute!" He began to explain about the stinging of the water. But then he said, "Deirdre, you tell him! I'm going to put a submarine ear overboard. At the least we'll get fish noises on a new scale. But I've got an idea ... don't sail into the bright circle yet."

He got out the submarine ear and the recorder he'd made ready that afternoon. He started the recorder. Then he trailed the microphone overside. The sounds would be heard live through the speaker and they would be taped at the same time. At first, a blaring, confused sound came through. Terry turned down the volume.

He heard gruntings and chirpings and rustlings. Fish made those noises—not all fish, but certain species. These shrill, squeaking noises were the protests of frightened porpoises. But under and through all other sounds, a steady, unvarying hum could be easily detected. Terry had never heard anything quite like it. Its pitch was the same as that of a sixty-cycle frequency, but its tone quality was somehow sardonic and snarling. The word that came into Terry's mind was "nasty." Yes, it was a nasty sound. One didn't like it. One would want to get away from it. In the air the same unpleasant sensation is produced by noises that make one's flesh crawl.

Terry straightened up from where the recorder played upon the wet deck. Davis and Deirdre had come to listen, in the strange darkness under the sails of the Esperance.

"I've got a sort of hunch," said Terry slowly. "Let's sail across the bright patch. I'll record the sea noises all the way. I've a feeling that that hum means something."

"It's not what you'd call an ordinary sound," said Davis.

He raised his voice. One of the crew-cuts was at the schooner's wheel. He spun it. The sails filled, and the rattling of flapping canvas died away. The Esperance gathered way and moved swiftly from the glittering circle, came about, and sailed again toward the shining area. She got closer and closer to the boundary.

The recorder continued to give out the confused and frightened noises of the sea creatures, but under and through their sounds there remained the nasty and sardonic hum. It grew louder and more unpleasant—much louder in proportion to the fish sounds. At the very boundary of the bright space it was loudest of all.

But as the yacht went on, the hum dimmed. At the very center of the circle where the glitterings were brightest, the humming sound was overwhelmed by the submarine tumult of senseless fish voices. Terry dipped his hand here. The tingling was almost tolerable, but not quite.

Davis hauled more buckets of water to the deck. In two of them he found some fish, so dense was the finny multitude. Then the yacht neared the farthest limit of the bright circle. The hum from the recording instrument grew progressively louder. Again, at the very edge of the shining water, it was loudest.

The Esperance sailed across the live boundary and into the dark sea. As the boat went on, the sound dimmed....

"Definitely loudest," said Terry absorbedly, "at the edge of the circle of fish. At the line the fish couldn't cross to escape. It is if there were an electric fence in the sea. It felt like that, too. But there isn't any fence."

Davis asked evenly, "Question: what holds them crowded?"

Terry said again, groping in his mind, "They act like fish in a closing net. I've seen something like this once, when a purse-seine was hauled. Those fish were frantic because they couldn't get away. Just like these."

"Why can't they get away?" asked Davis grimly. "We haven't seen anything holding them."

"But we heard something," pointed out Deirdre. "The hum. That may be what closes them in."

Her father made a grunting noise. "We'll see about that."

He moved away, back to the stern. In moments, the Esperance was beating upwind. Presently, she headed back toward her previous position, but outside the brightness. Terry could see dark silhouettes moving about near the yacht's wheel. Then he saw another brightness at the eastern horizon, but that was in the sky. Almost as soon as he noticed it, the moon peered over the edge of the world, and climbed slowly to full view, and then swam up among the lower-hanging stars.

Immediately, the look of the sea was different. The waves no longer seemed to race the darkness with only star glitters on their flanks. The figures at the Esperance's stern were now quite distinct in the moonlight.

"You said a very sensible thing, Deirdre," said Terry. "I thought of the fish-driving paddle and its effects, but I was ashamed to mention it. I thought it would sound foolish. But when you said it, it didn't."

"I have a talent," said Deirdre, "for making foolish things sound sensible. Or perhaps the reverse. I'm going to say a sensible thing now. We haven't had dinner. I'm going to fix something to eat."

"You won't get anybody to go belowdecks right now!" said Terry.

"I thought of that," she told him. "Sandwiches."

She went below. Terry continued to watch, while figures at the stern of the schooner went through an involved process of visual measurement. It was not simple to determine the dimensions of a patch of shimmering light flashes from a boat in motion. But presently, Davis came toward him.

"It's thirteen hundred yards across," he told Terry. "Plus or minus twenty."

"I didn't expect all this," Davis said, frowning. "I've been making guesses and hoping fervently that I was wrong. And I have been, but each time the proof that I was wrong has led to new guesses, and I'm afraid to think those guesses may be right."

"I can't begin to guess yet," said Terry.

"You will!" Davis assured him. "You will! You try to add up things.... A half-mile-wide patch of foam that piles up thirty feet above the sea...."

"And into which," Terry interrupted, "a sailing ship does not sink but drops out of sight as if there were a hole in the sea."

Davis turned sharply toward him.

"There were some photographs and a newspaper clipping on the cabin table," explained Terry. "I suspected they might have been put there for me to see."

"Deirdre, perhaps," said Davis. "She's resolved to involve you in this. You've got scruples, so she suspects you of having brains. Yes. You'll add those things up. You'll include the remarkable success of a fishing boat named La Rubia and the fact that she sometimes brings in very strange fish ... And then you'll add ..."

His eyes flickered aloft. A shooting star streaked across one-third of the sky leaving a trail of light behind it. Then it went out.

"You'll even be tempted," said Davis, "to include something like that in your guesses! And then you'll try to come up with a total for the lot. Then you'll be as troubled as I am."

He paused a moment.

"You said you wanted to be put ashore as soon as the gadget you made today was tested. I hope you've changed your mind, or will. That tape-recording may mean something to somebody. We wouldn't have heard that very singular noise but for you."

"I withdraw the business of going ashore," said Terry uncomfortably. "I'm going to ask another question. What are those little spheres that I saw in the photographs on the cabin table? Were they found fastened to the fish?"

"So I'm told," said Davis. "They are made of plastic. One was on a fish caught by a chief petty officer of the United States Navy. Four have been found on fish brought into the market by La Rubia. They could conceivably be a joke, but it's very elaborate! Somebody tried to cut one open and it burst to hell-and-gone. Terrific pressure inside. The metal parts inside were iridium. The others haven't been cut open. They're—" Davis' tone was dry. "They're being studied."

A figure came out of the forecastle and walked aft. It was Nick. He stopped to say, "I called Manila and got a loran fix on us. We're right at the place La Rubia heads for every time she sneaks away from the rest of the fishing fleet. It seems that she hauls her nets yonder."

He nodded toward the circular area of luminosity on the sea. "It looks smaller than when I went below deck."

Davis stared. He seemed to stiffen.

"It does. We'll make sure."

He went aft. Deirdre came up with sandwiches. Terry took the tray from her and followed her toward the others.

"Cigars, cigarettes, candy, sandwiches?" she asked cheerfully.

Davis was back at the task of measuring the angle subtended by the patch of shining sea, and then closely estimating its distance from the Esperance. He said, "It is smaller. Eleven hundred yards, now."

"When La Rubia was here today," said Terry, "it might have been a couple of miles across. Even that would be a terrific concentration of fish! They're not all at the surface."

Davis said with impatience, seemingly directed against himself, "It's narrowed two hundred yards in the past half-hour. It must be tending toward something! There has to be a conclusion to it! Something must be about to happen!"

Deirdre said slowly, "If it's the equivalent of a seine being hauled, with a hum instead of a net, what's going to happen when it's time for the fish to be boated?"

Davis ignored her for a moment. Then he said irritably, "Everyone seems to have more brains than I do! Tony, break out those gun-cameras. Nick, get back and report if the bright spot's getting any smaller. I wish you weren't here, Deirdre!"

The two crew-cuts moved to obey. Terry, alone, had no specific duty assigned to him on the yacht, unless tending to the recorder was it. He bent over the instrument which was playing in the air anything that a trailing microphone picked up under water. He raised the volume a trifle. He could still hear the singular noises of the agitated fish mixed in with the thin, strangely offensive humming sound. He heard small thumpings, and realized that they were the footfalls of his companions on the deck of the Esperance, transmitted to the water. He heard ...

Tony came abovedecks with an armful of mysterious-looking objects which could not be seen quite clearly in the slanting moonlight. He put two of them down by the wheel and passed out the others. He silently left one for Terry and another for Deirdre, while Terry adjusted tone and volume on the recorder for maximum clarity.

"What are those?" asked Terry.

"Cameras," said Deirdre. "Mounted on rifle stocks, with flashbulbs in the reflectors. You aim, pull the trigger, and the shutter opens as the flashbulb goes off. So you get a picture of whatever you aim at, night or day."

"Why ..."

"There was a time when my father thought they might be useful," said Deirdre. "Then it looked like they wouldn't. Now it looks like they may."

Terry was tempted to say, "Useful for what?" But Davis' vague talk of unpleasant wrong guesses which led to even less pleasant ones had already been an admission that no convincing answer could be given him. Davis came over to him.

"This has me worried," he said in a frustrated