The Atlantic Abomination (6 page)

T
HE PLACID
New England fall moved quietly in on the land. But it was still warm enough to breakfast outdoors, if one did not get up ridiculously early.

“And who,” asked. Peter of the trees around the little lodge, “gets up early on their honeymoon?”

“Queen Victoria and Prince Albert,” said Mary mysteriously, coming out of the door on to the sun porch with a plate of pancakes.

“What?”

“’S a fact,” she nodded, portioning out maple syrup. “I read somewhere that they got up early on the first morning after their wedding, and the lord chamberlain or some bigwig wrote disapprovingly in his diary that this was no way to ensure an heir to the throne.”

Their eyes met across the table. For a moment they kept straight faces, but at length they burst into helpless laughter.

“Poor Victoria!” Mary said when at last she could speak.

“Poor Albert, don’t you mean?” Peter contradicted. “Or
maybe not. He always seemed like a straitlaced kind of prig to me. Say, these are delicious.”

“What did you expect?” Mary stretched her sweater-clad arms gracefully. “Did you go down for the mail yet?”

“No. And I don’t much feel like going, either. It’s a long walk down to the highway, you know.”

“I do know. And that’s what I thought you’d say. So I went before you woke up.” Like a conjurer with a rabbit, she produced envelopes she had been sitting on. Fanning them like a poker hand, she proffered them. “Pick a card, any card, and I’ll tell your fortune, pretty gentleman. Only first you have to cross my path with silver, or something.”

“I have my fortune,” said Peter, grinning, and gave her outstretched hand a squeeze. He glanced at the envelopes. “One, two, three from the Foundation. Damnation, can’t they leave us in peace even on our honeymoon?”

“Maybe they’re private, from people who wrote in the office and snitched the envelopes. Aren’t you going to open them?”

When he had done justice to the breakfast, he lit a cigaret with a contented sigh, tipped back the chair, and ripped open the envelopes while Mary cleared the dishes. He left the Foundation ones till last.

“Best wishes from Hartlund and the crew of the
Alexander Bache
,” he reported. “Mailed in Panama, when they were done there meeting the Russians and taking them out to the site. With regrets that they missed the ceremony.”

“Anything from the Russians?” Mary called jokingly.

“You’re not kidding, honey. Right here under Hartlund’s signature there’s a sort of scribble labeled ‘Captain, bathynef
Pavel Ostrovsky
.’”

“That’s nice! What else?”

“Invitation from a cousin of mine to see him in Florida, and a note from—” He broke off, and whistled under his breath. “You don’t say! Honey, here’s the analysis of the hide of that monster we brought up. It’s made of carbon, silicon,
oxygen, and
boron
of all things, in the damnedest sort of arrangement. I wish I was a biochemist. And”—he turned the page—”they’ve done up the bones, too. They’ve got chromium in them, so help me, and cobalt and nickel and God knows what. But wait till you get to this bit! The chemists say these materials are basically different from the organic substances found in any high life-form anywhere on Earth. Their tentative conclusion is that they originated elsewhere …”

A sudden chill seemed to blow through the trees. Mary came out with a dishtowel in her hands and sat down opposite him, her face sober. “Martians, huh?” she said. But her attempt to keep her tone light was a failure.

Suddenly anxious to know what else was in the letters from the Foundation, Peter thrust the first one at her and attacked the second. Casual news and good wishes from Eloise Vander-plank. He threw it aside after the first glance and took up the last remaining envelope.

The color drained from his face and he sat for a very long time staring at the paper, so long that Mary had to touch his arm twice before bringing him back to reality. He gave her the letter to read herself.

Over Dr. Gordon’s signature, it said:

You may have heard by now that the biologists assign a nonterrestrial origin to the creature you brought up from Atlantica (that’s the name we’ve bestowed on the city, by the way). It won’t be announced publicly yet; flying saucers on top of what we already have would be too much
.

What you will not have heard is that we have found the bathynef. It was discovered accidentally during the search for the Gondwana, the Mapping Department sub we last saw at the site waiting for the ’nef to reappear
.

I only have this at secondhand. I was in the Pacific on the way back from my visit to the Russian bathynef expedition, which is due at the site of operations in a few days. But it appears that the Gondwana went down to six or seven hundred feet after a suspicious sonar echo, losing contact with the
British ship, and failed to come back
.

Two days later and a hundred miles west, a Navy patrol plane spotted the abandoned bathynef, which looked as though someone had laid into its most delicate equipment with a sledge hammer. It will be weeks, perhaps months, before it is again fit for use. There has been no sign of the Gondwana for more than two weeks. This is being kept quiet for obvious reasons. There may be no connection, But
—

And, of course, there was no sign of Luke Wallace
.

I cannot, and do not want to, say anything more to you than this: Hartlund told me you wanted a trip in the Russian bathynef, and we are very short of people who have had the Ostrovsky-Wong treatment. The pattern emerging is an ugly one. Before we are finished, we shall need all the help we can get. I don’t know what has converted me to wild speculation instead of my old methodical scepticism, but something has
.

I’m worried
.

Mary folded the letter and handed it back. “That’s the nearest thing to panic I can imagine from the Chief,” she said.

Peter nodded, his eyes on his bride’s face. “Well?”

She sighed heavily and pushed back her chair. “Well,” she echoed, “we’d better get packed.”

They had been out of touch with events altogether for just over two weeks. On their return, they had spent a week answering questions; decided to get married; made the arrangements and taken off for the country. In that time, much had happened.

The
Gondwana’s
disappearance had involved the Navy. The scientific data presented to them had involved the First Soviet Pacific Bathygraphic Expedition, which was the official name of the
Pavel Ostrovsky
and its mother ship. An appeal by Dr. Gordon had involved the oceanographic institutes of every nation that had an Atlantic seaboard and one that had
not, to wit, Monaco, which has a royalty-sponsored tradition of deepsea exploration.

And the extraterrestrial nature of the creature from Atlantica had involved the United Nations, whose banner flew proudly above the inaccessible rocky islet that had suddenly been promoted to the dignity of base for the new arrivals because a freak of nature had endowed it with fresh water.

The aircraft bringing Peter and Mary was a Navy seaplane flying out a brand-new fifteen-ton underwater TV camera intended to carry the search far below the level a bathynef could attain. It dropped them out of sunlight and into sight of the scene of operations through an overcast at five thousand feet.

Peter gasped, and caught at Mary’s arm.
“Look
at that!”

There were more than thirty vessels riding here. Dominating them was the Russian bathynef’s mother ship, gleaming white like a cross between a luxury liner and a whaling ship—the latter, because of the hinged bows and miniature dry dock where the bathynef was carried. Her American cousin was still fitting out; they had decided to go ahead during the summer using the inefficient system of towing so as not to waste time.

Larger, but less conspicuous because of her gray paint, was the aircraft carrier
Cape Wrath
. And there were others, from giant nuclear submarines and the Russian cruiser escorting the survey ship, to the tiny but ultramodern Monegasque floating biology laboratory.

They put down, and as soon as the TV camera had been loaded aboard a lighter, Peter and Mary were whisked in a fast launch across to the Russian mother ship. Its facilities were about comparable with those of the
Alexander Bache
, Peter judged, but it was obvious why the HQ had been established here and not there. Here they had more room.

Gordon greeted them delightedly, showered them with thanks and apologies, introduced them to Captain Vassiliev—the man who had added his signature to the greeting card from
Panama—and took them on a quick tour to familiarize them with the set-up.

“The
Ostrovsky
went down just before you arrived,” he said. “Ostrovsky himself, and Wong, are both across on the island where we’ve set up our base, processing relief crews from Woods Hole, Darwin and the Chinese station at Tienling. But that’s not a quarter of it. People have come up with gadgets nobody knew existed except the owners. That British sub is back again. Right now, it’s a thousand feet down with an insane new German invention tied to its snout; an underwater crawler which they’re going to dump in the mud at the bottom of the submarine’s range and which they hope will be able to crawl down the side of the Ridge as far as the city. It’s got a bulldozer blade on it. If this works, we’ll be able to shift the ooze ten times as fast as we can now.”

He bustled on. “Then there’s this TV camera you flew in with. It has four thousand fathoms of cable on it and if we can find a self-propelled drogue to stand the pressure we can get right down across the valley floor. There may be nothing to see but mud—or there may be anything.”

Their amazement grew as they really began to take in the extent of the effort being invested here, until finally Mary could bear it no longer. “Chief!” she said. “I’m not going to believe that this is all due to scientific curiosity. I think somebody’s not just worried, but frightened!”

Gordon paused and fixed her with his eyes. “Frightened?” he said solemnly. “Yes, you could say that.

“I told you in my letter that there was no sign of the
Gondwana
. That was only a half-truth. She was reported two days ago by the liner
Queen Alexandra
, thirty hours out from New York for Southampton and Cherbourg.

“But we haven’t found her again. And now we’ve lost the
Alexandra
, with eighteen hundred passengers aboard. …”

A
T FIRST
he had been very weak. Naturally. He had prepared himself for this as he would have prepared for a long trip between the stars, cutting down his metabolism to near-zero, accumulating reserves, planning the trigger which would awaken him when it was once more safe to walk the surface of this world.

Only he had not bargained for what he found.

He had come aware with the memories of the fall of his city as fresh in his mind as though they had been yesterday’s. It seemed that no more than hours had gone by since he left that foolish one who had come pleading for help amid the wreck of his hopes, while the earth shook and shivered.

He was cautious as he reached out mentally into the great dark, prepared to return himself to hibernation if the alarm had been false. It was not.

Normally he would not have been able to gain much information from a human mind. And this mind, he noted, was altogether similar to those he had known before the cataclysm. It was easier to whip these dull mentalities into speech. Their languages had never conveyed subtleties, but they were so easy to analyse and understand.

This mind, though, was dulled by a great shock, perhaps unconscious. It offered no hindrance to his inquiry. He was even able to drive it down still further, inhibiting the processes responsible for heartbeats, breathing, digestion, in order to lessen the “noise” he received.

He was under water, he gathered, and under mud, and still
secure in his refuge, undiscovered by prying animals. Under water. There was no problem. He had reserves available for just such an eventuality, but the picture he received of the extent and depth of the ocean above him implied that he could not rely on them to get him to land.

But he must get to land. The myriads, the hordes of human beings crawling and pullulating like bacteria across the face of the planet had never known the lash of one of his kind. Instead of building to the glory of and for the appreciation of higher beings, they served only themselves or each other. This was insupportable. If he could get free, he could take to himself, bit by bit, perhaps half the planet. They were so numerous he could not handle more. Then, and only then, he could see whether any more of his kind had survived, and magnanimously allow them to share what was left. If he was alone, then it would be simple enough to thin the population out to manageable levels.

This device the man had employed to bring him down here; it would be necessary to utilize that. He gathered facts about it, very slowly because he was weak. Possibly a full day had passed before he had enough facts to formulate a plan. The device would be returning. Let it take back this man, and get rid of its other occupants. Let there be a compulsion in the man’s mind to bring it down by himself. He cautiously opened that floodgate in his mind behind which was stored his power to inflict pain, and judged his available strength. Yes. One of these creatures was as many as he could handle for the time being.

And while he was awaiting the completion of the order, he would have to burrow out of his hiding place, using up his entire surviving reserves. Which meant that if the man failed to obey his command, he would die as that weakling Ruagh had died. He debated, again measured the pain-giving power he could call on, and decided that it was enough.

He
hurt
the man to prove it. Yes, that would suffice! He could not remember when last he had lashed a human mind
that had never before known such powers. Even infants in the womb had learned it before birth in the day when his kind ruled the planet. But this one was a stranger to the pain. He had no resistance.

He overlaid the pain temporarily, implanted his commands, and began, satisfied, to work his way out of his refuge.

The thickness of the layer of mud startled him when he compared it with the apparent rate of deposition. He had been in the refuge longer than he had ever anticipated. But it was not until the device had duly returned to bring him to the surface, and he had commanded the man to take it well away from the ship that had launched it overhead, that he was able to get a sight of the stars and know the real duration of his imprisonment.

Not less than a hundred and ten thousand years, he judged. Even by the standards of his race—to whom human beings were mere mayflies, hatched at morning, dead at sunset—that was a long time.

Still, no matter. The first essential was to gather his strength. Then to get servants and extend his dominion. He commanded the man to feed him, and by lashing him now and again drove him to select suitable articles of diet. There were molluscs on the shore of a lonely, rocky islet, whose succulent flesh gave him a little of the metals he needed. Their shells helped to provide silicon, and carbon he could absorb in plenty. It would need more than a single servant to provide him with all his requirements. Nonetheless, he had made a beginning. And he had time to spare.

Patiently, he looked for means of adding to his retinue. He found it, together with a superior means of transport. His strength grew. Sooner than he had hoped, he was in a position to conquer his first city. It was a floating city, a technological achievement he would have thought beyond these short-lived grubs of Earth, crude though it might be by his standards. But here he had enough to feed him, and he could turn his mind to the question of making men aware of their
inferior status. Proper homage was the next thing to command.

Every now and again other human-filled vessels passed as he consolidated himself. He was not yet ready to trouble himself with them. He blinded them, and they turned aside.

“This I find significant,” the Chinese statistician said in his dulcet tenor voice. He put his thumb on the strange gap in the center of the North Atlantic chart he had prepared. “I do not know if it means anything important. Certainly it is to be investigated.”

He sat down abruptly, and a hum of conversation went up around the room. The room was the operations center of the aircraft carrier, the
Cape Wrath
, which had become the brain, behind the entire project. More than forty people were assembled. Some of them sat with simultaneous translation phones on their heads, and two interpreters were still completing their account of the Chinese’s remarks when Lampion spoke. He was the official UN representative. French by birth, international by adoption, he had become accepted as neutral president of the mixed bag of investigators.

“We are extremely busy,” he reminded the audience in his matter-of-fact manner. “The list of items we have on the agenda is conclusive, I think. Nonetheless, this is a major discovery; to find that for days past not one of our search units has reported a single sighting in that area. It looks as if it has been deliberately avoided. And yet we know that no less than four ships should have sent in news from there. Yes, Dr. Gordon?”

“You mentioned ships only,” Gordon said, leaning forward. “How about patrol planes?”

The Chinese signalled that he would reply, received Lampion’s nod, and said, “Air surveys are included, Dr. Gordon. They too show the curious hole in the network of reports.”

“In other words,” Gordon suggested, “the
Queen Alexandra
and the
Gondwana
are probably slap in the middle, and something
is deliberately preventing the search parties that sight the missing vessels from informing us.”

There was a chorus of objections, belated from those present who did not speak English. Lampion stilled it with a wave of his hand.

“Let us not race ahead of our knowledge,” he said. “Let us merely send a further expedition to see.”

The thrumming of the engine shook the whole fabric of the helicopter. Peter had found it hard to get used to at first, and the pilot had sympathetically asked if he felt all right.

“It’s smoother underwater!” Peter had replied. “And it feels a hell of a sight safer there, too.”

“Same difference,” the pilot shrugged. “Down there if something goes wrong, the pressure mashes you flat. Up here, if something goes wrong, at least you have a parachute. Matter of taste, most likely.”

Peter nodded. He had inveigled his way aboard the ’copter between dives of the Russian ’nef—their own was still being refitted. The work of clearing the site of Atlantica was heartbreakingly slow, even with the German submarine bulldozer shifting mud by the scores of tons. And so far the TV camera, hunting on its robot drogue a thousand fathoms further down, had failed to reveal anything but mud, mud and more mud, dotted with the thinly scattered flora and fauna of the deeps.

“Right,” the pilot said, and flipped a switch. He took his hands off the controls and sat back in a relaxed fashion. Noticing Peter’s look of alarm, he grinned.

“George has taken over,” he said. “He’s quite a box of tricks; a whole lot more than just an automatic pilot. He’ll take us right into the middle of the blank area, circle us round, and bring us out again dead on course without my doing another hand’s turn. He was secret until they turned him loose for our benefit.”

“So we’re just passengers!” Peter commented. “Like you said, it must be a matter of taste.”

They were flying at about a thousand feet, a reading of 130 showing on the air-speed indicator. There was almost nothing to be seen except sea. An occasional island showed the course of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. A few ships passed within their view, but it was dull today and visibility was poor. Foul weather would be hindering their work soon. Indeed, there was a small storm of rain a few miles to starboard, which they were skirting by courtesy of their robot pilot’s radar eyes.

He found the trip restful, and was half dozing, dreaming of the few short days of the honeymoon he had enjoyed with Mary, and making plans for picking up where they had left off, when the pilot leaned forward and pointed.

“There. See?”

“Why, it
is
the
Alexandra!
” Peter exclaimed. “Of all the crazy things! To think a ship that size could have been lost in the main Atlantic traffic lanes for so long …”

She was enormous; she was the biggest liner on the Atlantic run, a thousand and ninety feet long, a hundred and four thousand tons burden, nuclear engines, and a speed of at least forty-five knots average port-to-port.

The pilot snapped on the film cameras which would record what they saw, and touched a button on the casing of the automatic pilot. “Course correction,” he said briefly. “This is to let George know the ship ahead is the one we want. He’ll take us in and bring us back right away now.”

“Any sign of the
Gondwana
?” Peter was staring through binoculars. The distance was closing rapidly.

“Not a thing. Probably been sunk.” The pilot was casual.

“You seem to have some preconceived ideas,” Peter commented. “But what in hell is going on down there?”

They were close enough now to see movement on the liner’s great promenade deck. There were lines of people all round, in a sort of horseshoe formation. They moved rhythmically,
like grass as the wind blows across it. They seemed to be shuffling back and forth. The distance closed further. They began to take on individual features. Some of them were crew in company uniform. Others were passengers in miscellaneous casual clothing. Now and then one or two would walk forward together to face something dark, canopied under an awning, in the middle of the horseshoe’s open end.

Suddenly, one of those called forward turned and tried to run. The lines broke. Men and women surged forward, seized him, dragged him to the rail and flung him bodily down to the leaden sea.

A shout so loud that it overcame the droning of the ’copter engine rang out, and they exclaimed together. Now they were circling in close enough to see faces through their binoculars; haggard, drawn faces, eyes ringed with dark circles indicative of sleeplessness. A group of stewards in soiled white jackets was beating on trays as though they were gongs.

“Have they all gone raving mad?” the pilot demanded.

“No …” said Peter, his stomach churning in revulsion. “Can’t you see what that is under the awning? It’s another of those creatures like the one we dragged up from Atlantica—only this one’s alive. …”

And at the moment he uttered the words, a blast of raw pain hit him, not in his body, but in his mind. In an instant he and the pilot both were slumped unconscious.

Uncaring, unknowing, George flew the ’copter on.