Murray Leinster - Creatures of the Abyss

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! Ihad 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 ranch,” 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.