Murray Leinster - Creatures of the Abyss

Terry came upon him sitting gloomily before a cup of coffee in the tracking station. Davis was there too.

“I wish I hadn’t done it,” Morton confided. “It’s one of those things that shouldn’t happen. It’s bad enough to have a giant squid to account for. They tell me it’s a new species, by the way. Never found or even described before. One of the Pelorus men tells me it’s an immature specimen, too. It’s not full-grown! What will a grown-up one be like?”

“I have a hunch we’ll find out when those submerged giants reach the surface,” said Davis unhappily.

Terry said, “The one we killed couldn’t get out of the water. I wonder if the adult forms can walk over the land!”

Davis stared. “Should we send Deirdre to safety on the Esperance?”

“Safety?” asked Terry. “On a boat? When a mass of bubbles from undersea could provoke such a turmoil in the water that no ship could stay afloat? That’s how one ship disappeared. It might be the Esperance’s turn next. Who knows?” Then he added, “There’s no limit to the size of a swimming creature!”

A bald-headed member of the tracking station staff walked in. He carried an object of clear plastic. It was a foot and a half long, about six inches in diameter. There was an infinite complexity of metallic parts enclosed in the plastic.

“I caught one of the fishermen making off with this,” he said in a flat voice. “It was fastened to one of the squid’s shorter arms. The fishermen didn’t want to give it up. The skipper claimed it as treasure-trove.”

He put it down on the table. Davis, Terry and Morton looked at it. Then Morton shrugged his shoulders, almost up to his ears.

“The intelligent being that made it,” said Davis, “apparently came down from the sky in a bolide. That’s easier to believe than that a submarine civilization of earthly origin lives down in the depths. But why would anybody prefer the bottom of the sea to—anywhere else on earth? Where would such a creature come from?”

Deirdre walked in and stood by the table, watching Terry’s face. The bald-headed man said, “I could believe some pretty strange things, but you can’t make me believe that a creature can develop intelligence without plenty of oxygen. There’s not much free oxygen at the bottom of the sea.”

“But there’s something intelligent down there,” said Davis doggedly. “If it has to have free oxygen, you’ve only raised the question of where it gets it. Maybe it brings it.”

Deirdre shook her head. “Foam,” she said.

The four men stared at her. Then Terry said sharply, “That’s it! On the Esperance there’s a picture of a huge mass of foam on the sea. A ship dropped right out of sight right into it. Deirdre found the answer! Something down below needs free oxygen. In quantity. Why not get it from the water? What to do with the hydrogen that is left? Let it loose! It’ll come to the surface, make a foam-patch…”

Dr. Morton said with a sort of mirthless geniality, “I add a stroke of pure genius! Davis just asked what would be the origin of a creature which preferred the depths of the sea to any other place on earth. What’s to be found down there that’s missing everywhere else? Cold? No. Moisture? No. Just two things! Darkness and pressure! At the bottom of the Luzon Deep the pressure is over seven tons to the square inch. There’s no light—I repeat, none—below three hundred fathoms. Down at the sea-bottom it’s black, black, black! Now, where in the universe could there be creatines capable of riding down here in a bolide, and in need of an environment like that?”

Terry shook his head. He remembered seeing a book on the solar planets, in the after-cabin of the Esperance. He hadn’t read it. The others on the yacht must have.

“How about Jupiter?” asked Deirdre. “The gravity’s four times the earth’s, and the atmosphere is thousands of miles thick. The pressure at the surface should be tons to the square inch.”

Morton nodded. With the same false geniality he added, “And there’ll be no light. Sunlight will never get through that muggy thick atmosphere! So we consider ourselves to be rational beings and guess that the bolides come from Jupiter! But I must admit that the last bolide was headed inward toward the sun, and from the general direction of Jupiter. So-o-o-o, do we warn the world that creatures from Jupiter are descending in space ships and are settling down under water, at a depth of forty-five hundred fathoms? Like hell we do!”

He got up and walked abruptly away.

“I… “ said the bald-headed man, shaking his head incredulously, “will put this gadget away and go back to carve some more squid.”

“I’ll talk to Manila,” said Davis drearily. “Something is coming up from below. There shouldn’t be any ships allowed to come this way until we find out what’s happening.”

Deirdre smiled at Terry, now that they were alone. “Have you anything very important to do just now?” He shook his head.

“If the things that are coming up are—space ships, we can’t fight them. If they’re anything else, they can’t very well fight us. If we wanted to attack something at the bottom of the sea we’d have to fumble at the job. We wouldn’t know where to begin. So maybe, if a submarine power wants to attack at the surface of the sea, it may find it difficult, too.”

He frowned. Deirdre said, “Let’s go look at the sea and think things over!”

She very formally took his arm and they walked out. Presently, they stood on the white coral beach on the outer shore, and talked. Terry’s mind came back, now and then, to how inadequate his previous guesses about the impending menace had been. It seemed now that the menace must be much worse than he had imagined. But there were many things he wanted to say to Deirdre.

As they talked, they were disturbed. The helicopter, which had left before noon loaded down with biological material for Manila, was approaching again. It landed by the tracking station. Then they were alone again.

When night fell, they were astonished at how quickly time had passed. They went back to the station. The helicopter was on the ground. The biologists had stopped their work, exhausted but very excited by their discovery of a new species of squid, of which an immature specimen measured eighty feet. It had offered extremely interesting phylogenic material for the Cephalopoda in general. The photographs they’d taken were invaluable, from a scientific viewpoint.

The crew of La Rubia had returned to their boat The Esperance had been out beyond the reef once more. The unidentified objects were still rising. They had risen to less than a thousand fathoms from the surface, well before sundown. At this same rate of rise, they should reach the surface some time after midnight. What would happen after that?

“What will happen depends,” said Terry, “on how accurate their information about us is. It depends on their instruments, really. I suspect their ideas about us are weird. I find I haven’t any ideas about them.”

At dinner, Davis said worriedly, “I talked to Manila. The mine layer that was in the Bay left harbor yesterday. The flattop picked it up by radio and they’re both going to come on here tomorrow. I had to talk about the foam. They weren’t impressed. The squid does impress them, but the foam—no. I hate,” he said indignantly, “to try to convince people of things I couldn’t possibly be convinced of myself!”

They talked leisurely. Somebody mentioned La Rubia.

It had been more or less expected that her skipper would turn up for drinks and conversation again. But he hadn’t. The conversation turned to the plastic objects. They might or might not pick up sounds. It was not likely they’d respond to light. Certainly, complete images would be meaningless to creatures who had evolved in blackness and without a sense of sight. They might respond to pressure-waves, such as are known to be picked up by fish when something struggles in the water, even though man-made instruments have not yet detected them. They might furnish data of a sensory kind that is meaningless to humans, as pictures would be to Jovians. If there were such things…