The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

I am sorry; that is the best I can do. Only the movie camera could do justice to these living kaleidoscopes. I do not know how long I watched them, so entranced by their luminous beauty that I had almost forgotten my mission. That those delicate, whiplash tentacles could not possibly have broken the grid was already obvious. Yet the presence of these creatures here was, to say the least, very curious. Karpukhin would have called it suspicious.

I was about to call the surface when I saw something incredible. It had been before my eyes all the time, but I had not realized it until now.

The squids were talking to each other.

Those glowing, evanescent patterns were not coming and going at random. They were as meaningful, I was suddenly sure, as the illuminated signs of Broadway or Piccadilly, not the ones that spell out words, but those that form pictures. Every few seconds there would be an image that almost made sense to me, but vanished before I could interpret it. I knew, of course, that even the common octopus shows its emotions with lightning-fast color changes—but this was something of a much higher order. It was pictorial—or pictographic—communication; here were two living electric signs flashing messages to each other.

When I saw an unmistakable picture of the lobster, my last doubts vanished. Though I am no scientist, at that moment I shared the feelings of a Newton or an Einstein at some moment of revelation.

Then the picture changed, in a most curious manner. There was the lobster again, but rather smaller. And there beside it, much smaller still, were two peculiar objects. Each consisted of a pair of black dots surrounded by a pattern of radiating lines.

I said that we Swiss are good at languages. However, it required little intelligence to deduce that this was a formalized squid’s-eye view of itself and that what I was seeing was a crude sketch of the situation. But why the absurdly small size of the squids?

I had no time to puzzle that out before there was another change. A third squid symbol appeared on the living screen—and this one was enormous, completely dwarfing the others. The message shone there in the eternal night for a few seconds; then the creature bearing it shot off at incredible speed and left me alone with its companion.

Now the meaning was all too obvious. “My God!” I said to myself. “They feel they can’t handle me. One of them has gone to fetch Big Brother.”

And of Big Brother’s capabilities I already had better evidence than Joe Watkins, for all his research and newspaper clippings.

That was the point, you won’t be surprised to hear, when I decided not to linger. But before I went, I thought I would try some talking myself.

After hanging there in darkness for so long, I had forgotten the power of my lights. They hurt my eyes and must have been agonizing to the unfortunate squid. Transfixed by that intolerable glare, its own illumination utterly quenched, it lost all its beauty, becoming no more than a pallid bag of jelly with two black buttons for eyes. For a moment it seemed paralyzed by the shock; then it darted after its companion, while I soared upward to a world that could never be the same again.

“I’ve found your saboteur,” I told Karpukhin when they opened the hatch of the lobster. “If you want to know all about him, ask Joe Watkins.”

I let Dimitri sweat over that for a few seconds while I enjoyed his expression; then I gave my slightly edited report. I implied—without actually saying so—that the squids I’d met were powerful enough to have done all the damage; and I said nothing about the conversation I’d overseen. That would only cause incredulity; besides, I wanted time to think matters over and to tidy up the loose ends—if I could.

Joe has been a great help, though he still knows no more than the Russians. He’s told me what wonderfully developed nervous systems squids possess—and has explained how some of them can change their appearance in a flash through what amounts to instantaneous three-color printing, thanks to the extraordinary network of “chromophores” covering their bodies. Presumably this evolved for camouflage; but it seems natural—even inevitable—that it should have developed into a communication system.

But there’s one thing that worries Joe.

“What were they doing around the grid?” he keeps asking me plaintively. “They’re cold-blooded invertebrates. You’d expect them to dislike heat as much as they object to light.”

That puzzles Joe; but it doesn’t puzzle me. Indeed, I think it’s the key to the whole mystery.

Those squids, I’m now certain, are in Trinco Deep for the same reason that there are men at the South Pole or on the Moon. Pure scientific curiosity has drawn them from their icy home to investigate this geyser of hot water welling from the sides of the canyon. Here is a strange and inexplicable phenomenon—possibly one that menaces their way of life. So they have summoned their giant cousin (servant? slave?) to bring them a sample for study. I cannot believe that they have a hope of understanding it; after all, no scientist on earth could have done so as late as a century ago. But they are trying, and that is what matters.

Tomorrow, we begin our countermeasures; I go back into Trinco Deep to fix the great lights which Shapiro hopes will keep the squids at bay. But how long will that ruse work if intelligence is dawning in the deep?

As I dictate this, I’m sitting here below the ancient battlements of Fort Frederick, watching the moon come up over the Indian Ocean. If everything goes well, this will serve as the opening of the book that Joe has been badgering me to write. If it doesn’t—then hello, Joe, I’m talking to you now. Please edit this for publication in any way you think fit, and my apologies to you and Lev for not giving all the facts before; now you’ll understand why.

Whatever happens, please remember this: They are beautiful, wonderful creatures; try to come to terms with them if you can.

to: Ministry of Power, Moscow

from: Lev Shapiro, Chief Engineer,

Trincomalee Thermoelectric Power Project

Herewith the complete transcript of the tape recording found among Herr Klaus Muller’s effects after his last dive; we are much indebted to Mr. Joe Watkins, of Time magazine, for assistance on several points.

You will recall that Herr Muller’s last intelligible message was directed to Mr. Watkins and ran as follows: “Joe! You were right about Melville! The thing is absolutely gigan-”

“I had been dreaming for nights that I could breathe water. The dreams were so realistic that I woke up each morning thinking that I was going to try it. And when I was out on that coral, I was almost tempted to start breathing.”

U.S.N. Lieut. Cmdr. Robert Thompson,

(“Room at the Bottom of the Sea,”

Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 5,1964.)

The far reaches of space are no more mysterious or inimical to the surface creatures of Earth than the much closer depths of her oceans. Alan Shepard became a national hero in 1961 by riding a pressurized rocket capsule 116.5 miles up into the troposphere. But when four Navy officers spent eleven days without pressure suits, at a depth of 192 feet, in and out of a specially designed underwater craft called Sealab I, hardly a handful of outside specialists as much as knew the project existed.

The Navy’s objective is to enable men to explore the ocean bottoms with equipment no bulkier than Scuba gear, and the only real problem the first experiment ran into was its own success. The men began to find it hard to remember that the atmosphere of the sea (even 2 feet down, let alone 200) will not support naked human life.