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

tone of indecision. "We must be near the end of some process that I didn't suspect, and the conclusion of which I can't guess. I don't know what it is, and I don't know what it's for. I only know what it's tied in with."

Terry said absorbedly, "Two or three times I've picked up some new kinds of sounds. You might call them mooing noises. They're very faint, as if they were far away, and there are long intervals between them. I don't think they come from the surface."

Davis made an irresolute gesture. He seemed to hesitate over something he was inclined to accept. Deirdre protested before he could speak. "I don't think what you're thinking is right!" she said firmly. "Not a bit of it! Whatever happens will be connected with the fish. La Rubia has been around this sort of thing over and over again! We haven't been running the engine and we haven't been making any specific noises in the water to arouse curiosity! If anything were going to happen to us, it would have happened to La Rubia before now! It would be ridiculous to run away just because I'm on board!"

Terry, bent intently over the recorder, suddenly felt a cold chill run up and down his spine. His mind told him it was ridiculous to associate distant mooing sounds, underwater, with a completely unprecedented, frantic gathering of fish into one small area, and come up with the thought that something monstrous and plaintive was coming blindly to feed upon fellow creatures of the sea. There was nothing to justify the thought. It was out of all reason. But his spine crawled, just the same.

"The circle's only eight hundred yards across, now," said Davis, uneasily. "The fish can't crowd together any closer! But Doug went overboard with diving goggles, and he says there's a column of brightness as far down as he can make out."

Terry looked up.

"He went overboard? Didn't he tingle?"

"He said it was like baby nettles all over," Davis protested, as if it were someone's fault. "But he didn't sting after he came out. It must be ..."

A mooing sound came out of the recorder. It was fainter than the other sounds and very far away. It must have been of terrific volume where it originated. It lasted for many seconds, then stopped.

"I should have been recording," said Terry. "That sound comes up about every five minutes. I'll catch it next time."

Davis went away, as if he wanted to miss the noise and the decision it would force upon him. Yet Terry told himself obstinately that there was no reason to connect the mooing sound with the crazed fish herd half a mile away. But somehow he couldn't help thinking there might be a connection.

The ship's clock sounded seven bells. Deirdre said, "The brightness is really smaller now!" The patch of flashes was no more than half its original size. Terry pressed the recording button and straightened up to look more closely. Right then Deirdre said sharply, "Listen!"

Something new and quite unlike the mooing noise now came out of the recorder.

"Get your father," commanded Terry. "Something's coming from somewhere!"

Deirdre ran across the heaving deck. Terry shifted position so he could manipulate the microphone hanging over the yacht's side into the water. Davis arrived. His voice was suddenly strained and grim. "Something's coming?" he demanded. "Can you hear any engine noise?"

"Listen to it," said Terry. "I'm trying to get its bearing."

He turned the wire by which the submarine ear hung from the rail. The chirpings and squealings and squeakings changed volume as the microphone turned. But the new sound, of something rushing at high speed through the water—that did not change. Terry rotated the mike through a full circle. The fish noises dwindled to almost nothing, and then increased again. The volume of the steady hum changed with them. But the rushing sound remained steady. Rather, it grew in loudness, as if approaching. But the directional microphone didn't register any difference, whether it received sound from the north, east, south, or west.

It was a booming sound. It was a rushing sound. It was the sound of an object moving at terrific speed through the water. There was no engine noise, but something thrust furiously through the sea, and the sound grew louder and louder.

"It's not coming from any compass course," said Terry shortly. "How deep is the water here?"

"We're just over the edge of the Luzon Deep," said Davis. "Four thousand fathoms. Five. Maybe six."

"Then it can only be coming from one direction," said Terry. "It's coming from below. And it's coming up."

For three heartbeats Davis stood perfectly still. Then he said, with extreme grimness, "Since you mention it, that would be where it's coming from."

He turned away and shouted a few orders. The crewmen scurried swiftly. The yacht's head fell away from the wind. Terry listened again to the rushing sound. There seemed to be regular throbbings in it, but still no engine noise. It was a steady drone.

"Bazooka shells ought to discourage anything," Davis said in an icy voice. "If it attacks, let go at it. But try to use the gun-cameras first."

The Esperance rolled and wallowed. Her bows lifted and fell. Her sails were black against the starry sky overhead. Two of the crew-cuts settled themselves at the starboard rail. They had long tubes in their hands, tubes whose details could not be seen. The wind hummed and thuttered in the rigging. Reef-points pattered. Near the port rail the recorder poured out the amplified sounds its microphone picked up from the sea. The sound of the coming thing became louder than all the other noises combined. It was literally a booming noise. The water started to bubble furiously as it parted to let something rise to the surface from unthinkable depths.

Doug put two magazine-rifles beside Terry and Deirdre, then he moved away. Deirdre had a clumsy object in her hands. It had a rifle-stock and a trigger. What should have been the barrel was huge—six inches or more in diameter—but very short. That was the flashbulb reflector. The actual camera was small and on top, like a sight.

"We'll aim these at anything we see," said Deirdre composedly, "and pull the trigger. Then we'll pick up the real rifles and see if we must shoot. Is that all right?"

She faced the shining patch of ocean. Davis and the crew-cut at the wheel faced that way. Tony and Jug stood with the clumsy tubes of bazookas facing the same direction. Doug had taken a post forward, with a camera-gun and a magazine rifle. He had the camera in hand, to use first.

It seemed that hours passed, but it must have been just a few minutes. Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be taking place anywhere. The moon now shone down from a sky in which a few thin wisps of cloud glowed among the stars. Sharp-peaked waves came from one horizon and sped busily toward the other. The yacht pitched and rolled, its company strangely armed and expectant. The recorder gave out a droning, booming, rushing sound which grew louder with ever-increasing rapidity. Now the sound reached a climax.

From the very center of the glinting circle of sea, there was a monstrous splashing sound. A phosphorescent column rose furiously from the waves. It leaped. Water fell back and ... something soared into the air. Sharp, stabbing flashes of almost intolerably white light flared up. The gun-cameras fired their flashbulbs without a sound.

It was then that Terry saw it—in mid-air. He swung the gun-camera, and a flash from another gun showed him that he would miss. He jerked the gun to bear and pulled the trigger. The flash illuminated it vividly. Then night again.

It was torpedo-shaped and excessively slender but very long. It could have been a living thing, frozen by the instantaneous flash. It could have been something made of metal. It leaped a full fifty feet clear of the waves and then tumbled back into the ocean with a colossal splash. Then there was silence, except for the sounds of the sea. Terry had the magazine-rifle still in his hands. Tony and Jug waited with their bazookas ready. It occurred to Terry that yachts are not customarily armed with bazookas.

"That—wasn't a whale," said Deirdre unsteadily.

The recorder bellowed suddenly. It was the hum that had been heard before: the nasty, sixty-cycle hum that surrounded the captive fish. But it was ten, twenty, fifty times as loud as before.

The fish in the bright-sea area went mad. The entire surface whipped itself to spray, as fish leaped frenziedly to get out of the water, which stung and burned where it touched.

Then, very strangely, the splashing stopped. The brightness of the sea decreased. A while later the enormous snarling sound was noticeably less loud than it had been at that first horrible moment.

The wind blew. The waves raced. The Esperance's bow lifted and dipped. The noise from the loudspeaker system—the noise from the sea—decreased even more. One could hear the squeakings and chitterings of fish again. But they were very much fainter. Presently the humming was no louder than before the strange apparition. By that time the fish-sound had died away altogether. The nearer normal noises remained. The hum was receding. Downward.

Davis came to Terry, where he stood by the recording instrument.

"The fish have gone," he said in a flat voice, "they've gone away. They didn't scatter. We'd have seen it. Do you realize where they went?"

Terry nodded.

"Straight down. Do you want to hear an impossible explanation?"

"I've thought of several," said Davis.

Doug came and picked up the gun-cameras that Terry and Deirdre had used and went away with them.

"There's a kind of sound," said Terry, "that fish don't like. They won't go where it is. They try to get away from it."

Deirdre said quietly, "I would too, if I were swimming."

"Sound," said Terry, "in water as in air, can be reflected and directed, just as light can be. A megaphone turns out one's voice in a cone of noise, like a reflector on a light. It should be possible to project it. One can project a hollow cone of light. Why not a hollow cone of sound, in water?"

Davis said with an unconvincingly ironic and skeptical air, "Indeed, why not?"

"If such a thing were done," said Terry, "then when the cone of sound was turned on, the fish inside it would be captured as if by a conical net. They couldn't swim through the walls of sound. And then one can imagine the cone made smaller; the walls drawn closer together. The fish would be crowded together in what was increasingly like a vertical, conical net, but with walls of unbearable noise instead of cord. It would be as if the sea were electrified and the fish were shocked when they tried to pass a given spot."

"Preposterous, of course," said Davis. But his tone was not at all unbelieving.

"Then suppose something were sent up to the top of the cone, and it projected some kind of a cover of sound on the top of the cone and imprisoned the fish with a lid of sound they couldn't endure. And then suppose that thing sank into the water again. The fish couldn't swim through the walls of noise around them. They couldn't swim through the lid of sound above them. They'd have to swim downward, just as if a hood were closing on them from above."

"Very neat," said Davis. "But of course you don't believe anything of the sort."

"I can't imagine what would produce that sound in that way and send up a cork of sound to take the fish below. And I can't imagine why it would be done. So I can't say I believe it."

Davis said slowly, "I think we begin to understand each other. We'll stay as close to this place as we can until dawn, when we will find nothing to show that anything out of the ordinary happened here."

"Still less," said Terry, "to hint at its meaning. I've been doing sums in my head. That bright water was almost solid with fish. I'd say there was at least a pound of fish to every cubic foot of sea."

"An underestimate," said Davis judicially.

"When the bright patch was a thousand yards across—and it was even more—there'd have been four hundred tons of fish in the top three-foot layer."

Davis seemed to start. But it was true. Terry added, "The water was clear. We could see that the packing went on down a long way. Say fifty yards at least."

"Y-yes," agreed Davis. "All of that."

"So in the top fifty yards, at one time, there were at least twenty thousand tons of fish gathered together. Probably very much more. What La Rubia carried away couldn't be noticed. All those thousands of tons of fish were pushed straight down. Tell me," said Terry, "what would be the