The Kraken Wakes

Phase One

I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation — which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about. Almost the only people I know who agree word for word on what they saw on the night of 15 July are Phyllis and I. And, as Phyllis happens to be my wife, people said, in their kindly way behind our backs, that I 'over-persuaded' her: a thought and a euphemism that could only proceed from someone who did not know Phyllis.

The time was 11.15 p.m.; the place, latitude 35, some 24 degrees west of Greenwich; the ship, the Guinevere; the occasion, our honeymoon. About these facts there is no dispute. The cruise had taken us to Madeira, the Canaries, Cape Verde Islands, and had then turned north to show us the Azores on our way home. We, Phyllis and I, were leaning on the rail, taking a breather. From the saloon came the sound of the dance continuing, and the crooner yearning for somebody. The sea stretched in front of us like a silken plain in the moonlight. The ship sailed it as smoothly as if she were on a river. We gazed out silently at the infinity of sea and sky. Behind us the crooner went on baying.

'I'm so glad I don't feel like him; it must be devastating,' Phyllis said. 'Why, do you suppose, do people keep on mass-producing these decadent moanings?'

I had no answer ready for that one, but I was saved the trouble of trying to find one when her attention was suddenly caught elsewhere.

'Mars is looking pretty angry to-night, isn't he? I hope it isn't an omen,' she said.

I looked where she pointed at a red spot among myriads of white ones, and with some surprise. Mars does look red, of course, though I had never seen him look quite as red as that — but then, neither were the stars, as seen at home, quite as bright as they were here. Being practically in the tropics might account for it.

'Certainly a little inflamed,' I agreed.

We regarded the red point for some moments. Then Phyllis said:

'That's funny. It seems to be getting bigger.'

I explained that that was obviously an hallucination formed by staring at it. We went on staring, and it became quite indisputably bigger. Moreover:

'There's another one. There can't be two Marses,' said Phyllis.

And sure enough there was. A smaller red point, a little up from, and to the right of, the first. She added:

'And another. To the left. See?'

She was right about that, too, and by this time the first one was glowing as the most noticeable thing in the sky.

'It must be a flight of jets of some kind, and that's a cloud of luminous exhaust we're seeing,' I suggested.

We watched all three of them slowly getting brighter and also sinking lower in the sky until they were little above the horizon line, and reflecting in a pinkish pathway across the water towards us.

'Five now,' said Phyllis.

We've both of us been asked many times since to describe them, but perhaps we are not gifted with such a precise eye for detail as some others. What we said at the time, and what we still say, is that on this occasion there was no real shape visible. The centre was solidly red, and a kind of fuzz round it was less so. The best suggestion I can make is that you imagine a brilliantly red light as seen in a fairly thick fog so that there is a strong halation, and you will have something of the effect.

Others besides ourselves were leaning over the rail, and in fairness I should perhaps mention that between them they appear to have seen cigar-shapes, cylinders, discs, ovoids, and, inevitably, saucers. We did not. What is more, we did not see eight, nine, or a dozen. We saw five.

The halation may, or may not, have been due to some kind of jet drive, but it did not indicate any great speed. The things grew in size quite slowly as they approached. There was time for people to go back into the saloon and fetch their friends out to see, so that, presently, a line of us leant all along the rail, looking at them and guessing.

With no idea of scale, we could have no judgement of their size or distance; all we could be sure of was that they were descending in a long glide which looked as if it would take them across our wake. The fellow next to me was talking know-all about St Elmo's fire to a partner who had never heard of St Elmo and didn't feel she had missed anything, when the first one hit the water.

A great burst of steam shot up in a pink plume. Then, swiftly, there was a lower, wider spread of steam which had lost the pink tinge, and was simply a white cloud in the moonlight. It was beginning to thin out when the sound of it reached us in a searing hiss. The water round the spot bubbled and seethed and frothed. When the steam drew off, there was nothing to be seen there but a patch of turbulence, gradually subsiding.

Then the second of them came in, in just the same way, on almost the same spot. One after another all five of them touched down on the water with great whooshes and hissings of steam. Then the vapour cleared, showing only a few contiguous patches of troubled water.

Aboard the Guinevere, bells clanged, the beat of the engines changed, we started to change course, crews turned out to man the boats, men stood by to throw lifebelts.

Four times we steamed slowly back and forth across the area, searching. There was no trace whatever to be found. But for our own wake, the sea lay all about us in the moonlight, placid, empty, unperturbed

The next morning I sent my card in to the Captain. In those days I had a staff job with the EBC, and I explained to him that they would be pretty sure to take a piece from me on the previous night's affair. He gave the usual response:

'You mean BBC?' he suggested.

The EBC was younger then, and it was necessary to explain almost every time. I did so, and added:

'As far as I've been able to tell, every passenger has a different version, so I thought I'd like to check mine with your official one.'

'A good idea,' he approved. 'Go ahead, and tell me yours.'

When I had finished, he nodded, and then showed me his entry in the log. Substantially we were agreed; certainly in the view that there had been five, and on the impossibility of attributing a definite shape to them. His estimates of speed, size, and position were, of course, technical matters. I noticed that they had registered on the radar screens, and were tentatively assumed to have been aircraft of an unknown type.

'What's your own private, opinion?' I asked him. 'Did you ever see anything at all like them before?'

'No. I never did,' he said, but he seemed to hesitate.

'But what —?' I asked.

'Well, but not for the record,' he said, 'I've heard of two instances, almost exactly similar, in the last year. One time it was three of the things by night; the other, it was half a dozen of them by daylight — even so, they seem to have looked much the same; just a kind of red fuzz. Both lots were in the Pacific though, not over this side.'

'Why "not for the record"?' I asked.

'In both cases there were only two or three witnesses — and it doesn't do a seaman any good to get a reputation for seeing things, you know. The stories just got around professionally, so to speak — among ourselves we aren't quite as sceptical as landsmen: some funny things can still happen at sea, now and then.'

'You can't suggest an explanation I can quote?'

'On professional grounds I'd prefer not. I'll just stick to my official entry. But reporting it is a different matter this time. We've a couple of hundred witnesses and more.'

'Do you think it'd be worth a search? You've got the spot pinpointed.'

He shook his head. 'It's deep there. Over three thousand fathoms: that's a long way down.'

'There wasn't any trace of wreckage in those other cases, either?'

'No. That would have been evidence to warrant an inquiry. But they had no evidence.'

We talked a little longer, but I could not get him to put forward any theory. Presently I went away, and wrote up my account. Later, I got through to London, and dictated it to an EBC recorder. It went out on the air the same evening as a filler, just an oddity which was not expected to do more than raise a few eyebrows.

So it was by chance that I was a witness of that early stage — almost the beginning, for I have not been able to find any references to identical phenomena earlier than those two spoken of by the Captain. Even now, years later, though I am certain enough in my own mind that this was the beginning, I can still offer no proof that it was not an unrelated phenomenon. What the end that will eventually follow this beginning may be, I prefer not to think too closely: I would also prefer not to dream about it, either, if dreams were within my control.

It began so unrecognizably. Had it been more obvious — and yet it is difficult to see what could have been done effectively even if we had recognized the danger. Recognition and prevention don't necessarily go hand in hand. We recognized the potential dangers of atomic fission quickly enough — yet we could do little about them.

If we had attacked immediately — well, perhaps. But until the danger was well established we had no means of knowing that we should attack — and then it was too late.

However, it does no good to cry over our shortcomings. My' purpose is to give as good a brief account as I can of how the present situation arose — and, to begin with, it arose very scrappily….

In due course the Guinevere docked at Southampton without being treated to any more curious phenomena. We did not expect any more, but the event had been memorable; almost as good, in fact, as having been put in a position to say, upon some remote future occasion: 'When your grandmother and I were on our honeymoon we saw a sea-serpent,' though not quite. Still, it was a wonderful honeymoon, I never expect to have a better: and Phyllis said something to much the same effect as we leant on the rail, watching the bustle below.

'Except,' she added, 'that I don't see why we shouldn't have one nearly as good, now and then.'

So we disembarked, sought our brand new home in Chelsea, and I turned up at the EBC offices the following Monday morning to discover that in absentia I had been rechristened Fireball Watson. This was on account of the correspondence. They handed it to me in a large sheaf, and said that since I had caused it, I had better do something about it.

There must, I think, be a great many people who go around just longing to be baffled, and who, moreover, feel a kind of immediate kin to anyone else who admits bafflement along roughly similar lines. I say 'roughly' because it became clear to me as I read the mail that classifications are possible. There are strata of bafflement. A friend of mine, after giving a talk on a spooky experience, was showered with correspondence on levitation, telepathy, materialization, and faith-healing. I, however, had struck a different layer. Most of my correspondents assumed that the sight of the fireballs must have roused me to a corollary interest not only in saucers, but showers of frogs, mysterious falls of cinders, all kinds of lights seen in the sky, and also sea-monsters. After I had sifted through them, I found myself left with half a dozen which might possibly have reference to fireballs similar to those we had seen. One, referring to a recent experience off the Philippines, I identified with fair certainty as being a confirmation of what the Captain of the Guinevere had told me. And the others seemed worth following up, too — particularly a rather cagey approach which invited me to meet the writer at La Plume d'Or, where lunch is always worth having.

I kept that appointment a week later. My host turned out to be a man two or three years older than myself who ordered four glasses of Tio Pepe, and then opened up by admitting that the name under which he had written was not his own, and that he was a Flight-Lieutenant, RAF.

'It's a bit tricky, you see,' he said. 'At the moment I am considered to have suffered some kind of hallucination, but if enough evidence turns up to show that it was not an hallucination, then they're almost certain to make it an official secret. Awkward, you see.'

I agreed that it must be.

'Still,' he went on, 'the thing worries me, and if you're collecting evidence, I'd like you to have it — though maybe not to make direct use of it. I mean, I don't want to find myself on the carpet. I don't suppose there's a regulation to stop a fellow discussing his hallucinations, but you can never be sure.'

I nodded understandingly. He went on:

'It was about three months ago. I was flying one of the regular patrols, a couple of hundred miles or so east of Formosa —'

'I didn't know we —' I began.

'There are a number of things that don't get publicity, though they're not particularly secret,' he said. 'Anyway, there I was. The radar picked these things up when they were still out of sight behind me, but coming up fast from the west.'

He had decided to investigate, and climbed to intercept. The radar continued to show the craft on a straight course behind and above him. He tried to communicate, but couldn't raise them. By the time he was getting the ceiling of them they were in sight, as three red spots, quite bright, even by daylight, and coming up fast though he was doing close to five hundred himself. He tried again to radio them, but without success. They just kept on coming, steadily overtaking him.

'Well,' he said, 'I was there to patrol. I told base that they were a completely unknown type of craft — if they were craft at all — and as they wouldn't talk I proposed to have a pip at them. It was either that, or just let 'em go — in which case I might as well not have been patrolling at all. Base agreed, kind of cautiously.

'I tried them once more, but they didn't take a damn bit of notice of either me or my signals. And as they got closer I was doubtful whether they were craft at all. They were just as you said on the radio — a pink fuzz, with a deeper red centre: might have been miniature red suns for all I could tell. Anyway, the more I saw of them the less I liked 'em, so I set the guns to radar-control and let 'em get on ahead.

'I reckoned they must be doing seven hundred or more as they passed me. A second or two later the radar picked up the foremost one, and the guns fired.

'There wasn't any lag. The thing seemed to blow up almost as the guns went off. And, boy, did it blow! It suddenly swelled immensely, turning from red to pink to white, but still with a few red spots here and there — and then my aircraft hit the concussion, and maybe some of the debris, too. I lost quite a lot of seconds, and probably had a lot of luck, because when I got sorted out I found that I was coming down fast. Something had carried away three-quarters of my starboard wing, and messed up the tip of the other. So I reckoned it was time to try the ejector, and rather to my surprise it worked.'

He paused reflectively. Then he added:

'I don't know that it gives you a lot besides confirmation, but there are one or two points. One is that they are capable of travelling a lot faster than those you saw. Another is that, whatever they are, they are highly vulnerable.'

And that, as we talked it over in detail, was about all the additional information he did provide — that, and the fact that when hit they did not disintegrate into sections, but exploded completely, which should, perhaps, have conveyed more than it seemed to at the time.

During the next few weeks several more letters trickled in without adding much, but then it began to look as if the whole affair were going the way of the Loch Ness monster. What there was came to me because it was generally conceded at EBC that fireball stuff was my pigeon. Several observatories confessed themselves puzzled by detecting small red bodies travelling at high speeds, but were extremely guarded in their statements. None of the newspapers ran it because, in editorial opinion, the whole thing was suspect in being too similar to the flying-saucer business, and their readers would prefer more novelty in their sensations. Nevertheless, bits and pieces did slowly accumulate — though it took nearly two years before they acquired serious publicity and attention.

This time it was a flight of thirteen. A radar station in the north of Finland picked them up first, estimating their speed as fifteen hundred miles per hour, and their direction as approximately south-west. In passing the information on they described them simply as 'unidentified aircraft'. The Swedes picked them up as they crossed their territory, and managed to spot them visually, describing them as small red dots. Norway confirmed, but estimated the speed at under thirteen hundred miles per hour. A Scottish station logged them as travelling at a thousand miles per hour, and just visible to the naked eye. Two stations in Ireland reported them as passing directly overhead, on a line slightly west of south-west. The more southerly station gave their speed as eight hundred and claimed that they were 'clearly visible'. A weather-ship at about 6 5 degrees North, gave a description which tallied exactly with that of the earlier fireballs, and calculated a speed close to 500 m.p.h. They were not sighted again after that.

The reason that this particular flight got on to the front pages when others had been ignored was not simply that this time there had been a series of observations which plotted its track; it lay more in the implications of the line that had been drawn. However, in spite of innuendo and direct suggestion, there was silence to the east. Ever since their hurried and unconvincing explanation which followed the first atomic explosion in Russia, her leaders had found it convenient to feign at least a temporary deafness to questions on such matters. It was a policy which had the advantages of calling for no mental exertion while at the same time building up in the minds of the general public a feeling that inscrutability must mask hidden power. And since those who were well acquainted with Russian affairs were not going to publish the degree of their acquaintanceship, the game of aloofness was easily able to continue.

The Swedes announced, with careful lack of particularizing, that they would take action against any similar violation of their sky, whoever might be the violators. The British papers suggested that a certain great power was zealous enough in guarding its own frontiers to justify others in taking similar measures to protect theirs. American journals said that the way to deal with any Russian aircraft over US territory was to shoot first. The Kremlin apparently slept.

There was a sudden spate of fireball observation. Reports came in from so far and wide that it was impossible to do more than sort out the more wildly imaginative and put the rest aside to be considered at more leisure, but I noticed that among them were several accounts of fireballs descending into the sea that tallied well with my own observation — so well, indeed, that I could not be absolutely sure that they did not derive from my own broadcast. All in all, it appeared to be such a muddle of guesswork, tall stories, third-hand impressions, and thoroughgoing invention that it taught me little. One negative point, however, did strike me — not a single observer claimed to have seen a fireball descend on land. Ancillary to that, not a single one of those descending on water had been observed from the shore: all had been noticed from ships, or from aircraft well out to sea.

For a couple of weeks reports of sightings in groups large or small continued to pour in. The sceptics were weakening; only the most obstinate still maintained that they were hallucinations. Nevertheless, we learnt nothing more about them than we had known before. No pictures. So often it seemed to be a case of the things you see when you don't have a gun. But then a flock of them came up against a fellow who did have a gun — literally.

The fellow in this case happened to be the USN Carrier, Tuskegee. The message from Curacao that a flight of eight fireballs was headed directly towards her reached her when she was lying off San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Captain breathed a short hope that they would commit a violation of the territory, and made his preparations. The fireballs, true to type, kept on in a dead straight line which would bring them across the island, and almost over the ship herself. The Captain watched their approach on his radar with great satisfaction. He waited until the technical violation was indisputable. Then he gave the word to release six guided missiles at three-second intervals, and went on deck to watch, against the darkling sky.

Through his glasses he watched six of the red dots change as they burst, one after another, into big white puffs.

'Well, that's settled them,' he observed, complacently. 'Now it's going to be mighty interesting to see who squeals,' he added, as he watched the two remaining red dots dwindle away to the northward.

But the days passed, and nobody squealed. Nor was there any decrease in the number of fireball reports.

For most people such a policy of masterly silence pointed only one way, and they began to regard the responsibility as good as proved.

In the course of the following week, two more fireballs that had been incautious enough to pass within range of the experimental station at Woomera paid for that temerity, and three others were exploded by a ship off Kodiak after flying across Alaska.

Washington, in a note of protest to Moscow regarding repeated territorial violations, ended by observing that in several cases where drastic action had been taken it regretted the distress that must have been caused to the relatives of the crews aboard the craft, but that responsibility lay at the door not of those who dealt with the craft, but with those who sent them out apparently under orders which transgressed international agreements.

The Kremlin, after a few days of gestation, produced a rejection of the protest. It proclaimed itself unimpressed by the tactic of attributing one's own crime to another, and went on to state that its own weapons, recently developed by Russian scientists for the defence of Peace, had now destroyed more than twenty of these craft over Soviet territory, and would, without hesitation, give the same treatment to any others detected in their work of espionage

The situation thus remained unresolved. The non-Russian world was, by and large, divided sharply into two classes — those who believed every Russian pronouncement, and those who believed none. For the first class no question arose; their faith was firm. For the second, interpretation was less easy. Was one to deduce, for instance, that the whole thing was a lie? Or merely that, when the Russians claimed to have accounted for twenty fireballs, they had only, in fact, exploded five or so?

An uneasy situation, constantly punctuated by an exchange of notes, drew out over months. Fireballs were undoubtedly more numerous than they had been, but just how much more numerous, or more active, or more frequently reported was difficult to assess. Every now and then a few more were destroyed in various parts of the world, and from time to time, too, it would be announced that numbers of capitalistic fireballs had been effectively shown the penalties that waited those who conducted espionage upon the territory of the only true People's Democracy.

Public interest must feed to keep alive; without fresh nourishment it soon begins to decline. The things existed; they buzzed through the air at high speed; they blew up if you hit them; but, beyond that, what? They didn't appear to do Anything — at least nothing that anyone seemed to know about. Nor did they do anything to fulfil the sensational role they had seemed to promise.

Novelty waned, and an era of explaining-away set in. Presently we were back to something very like the St Elmo's fire position, for the most widely accepted view was that they must simply be some new form of natural electrical manifestation. As time went on, ships and shore-stations ceased to fire at them, and let them continue on their mysterious ways, noting merely their speed, time, and direction. They were, in fact, a disappointment.

Nevertheless, in Admiralty and Air Force Headquarters all over the world these notes and reports came together. Courses were plotted on charts. Gradually a pattern of a kind began to emerge.

At EBC I was still regarded as the natural silting-place for anything to do with fireballs, and although the subject was dead mutton for the moment I kept up my files in case it should revive. Meanwhile, I contributed in a small way to the building up of the bigger picture by passing along to the authorities such snippets of information as I thought might interest them.

In due course I found myself invited to the Admiralty to be shown some of the results.

It was a Captain Winters who welcomed me there, explaining that while what I should be shown was not exactly an official secret, it was preferred that I should not make public use of it yet. When I had agreed to that, he started to bring out maps and charts.

The first one was a map of the world hatched over with fine lines, each numbered and dated in minute figures. At first glance it looked as if a spider's web had been applied to it; and, here and there, there were clusters of little red dots, looking much like the money-spiders who had spun it.

Captain Winters picked up a magnifying-glass and held it over the area south-east of the Azores.

'There's your first contribution,' he told me.

Looking through it, I presently distinguished one red dot with a figure 5 against it, and the date-time when Phyllis and I had leant over the Guinevere's rail watching the fireballs vanish in steam. There was quite a number of other red dots in the area, each labelled, and more of them were strung out to the north-east.

'Each of these dots represents the descent of a fireball?' I asked.

'One or more,' he told me. 'The lines, of course, are only for those on which we have had good enough information to plot the course. What do you think of it?'

'Well,' I told him truthfully, 'my first reaction is to realize that there must have been a devil of a lot more of them than I ever imagined. The second is to wonder why in thunder they should group in spots, like that.'

'Ah!' he said. 'Now stand back from the map a bit. Narrow your eyes, and get a light and shade impression.'

I did, and saw what he meant.

'Areas of concentration,' I said.

He nodded. 'Five main ones, and a number of lesser. The densest of the lot to the south-west of Cuba; another, six hundred miles south of the Cocos Islands; pretty heavy concentrations off the Philippines, Japan, and the Aleutians. I'm not going to pretend that the proportions of density are right — in fact, I'm pretty sure that they are not. For instance, you can see a number of courses converging towards an area north-east of the Falklands, but only three red dots there. It very likely means simply that there are precious few people around those parts to observe them. Anything else strike you?'

I shook my head, not seeing what he was getting at. He produced a bathymetric chart, and laid it beside the first. I looked at it.

'All the concentrations are in deep-water areas?' I suggested.

'Exactly. There aren't many reports of descents where the depth is less than four thousand fathoms, and none at all where it is less than two thousand.'

I thought that over, without getting anywhere.

'So — just what?' I inquired.

'Exactly,' he said again. 'So what?'

We contemplated the proposition awhile.

'All descents,' he observed. 'No reports of any coming up.'

He brought out maps on a larger scale of the various main areas. After we had studied them a bit I asked:

'Have you any idea at all what all this means — or wouldn't you tell me if you had?'

'On the first part of that, we have only a number of theories, all unsatisfactory for one reason or another, so the second doesn't really arise.'

'What about the Russians?'

'Nothing to do with them. As a matter of fact, they're a lot more worried about it than we are. Suspicion of capitalists being part of their mother's milk, they simply can't shake themselves clear of the idea that we must be at the bottom of it somehow, and they just can't figure out, either, what the game can possibly be. But what both we and they are perfectly satisfied about is that the things are not natural phenomena, nor are they random.'

'And you'd know if it were any other country pulling it?'

'Bound to — not a doubt of it.'

We considered the charts again in silence.

'People,' I told him, 'are continually quoting to me things that the illustrious Holmes said to my namesake, but this time I'll do the quoting: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Which is to say that if it is no terrestrial nation that is doing this, then—?'

'That isn't the kind of solution I like,' he said.

'It's not the kind of solution anyone would like,' I agreed. 'And yet,' I went on, 'it does seem somewhat far-fetched to suggest that something in the deeps has been following an evolutionary line of its own, and has now blossomed out with a well-developed technology. That appears to be the only remaining possibility.'

'And slightly less credible even than the other,' he remarked.

'In which case, we must have eliminated a possible along with some of the impossibles. The bottom of the sea would be a very good place to hide — if one could manage the technical difficulties,' I said.

'Undoubtedly,' he agreed, 'but among those technical difficulties happens to be pressure of four or five tons per square inch in the interesting areas.'

'H'm. Perhaps we'd better think some more about that,' I conceded. 'The other obvious question is, of course, what do they seem to be doing?'

'Yes,' he said.

'Meaning, no clue?'

'They come,' he said. 'Maybe they go. But preponderantly they come. That's about all.'

I looked down at the maps, the criss-crossing lines, and the red-dotted areas.

'Are you doing anything about it? Or shouldn't I ask?'

'Oh, that's why you're here. I was coming round to that,' he told me. 'We're going to try an inspection. Just at the moment it is not considered to be a matter for a direct broadcast, nor even for publication, but there ought to be a record of it, and we shall need one ourselves. So if your people happened to feel interested enough to send you along with some gear for the job…'

'Where would it be?' I inquired.

He circled his finger round an area.

'Er — my wife has a passionate devotion to tropical sunshine: the West Indian kind, in particular,' I said.

'Well, I seem to remember that your wife has written some pretty good documentary scripts,' he remarked.

'And it's the kind of thing EBC might be very sorry about afterwards if they'd missed it,' I reflected.

Not until we had made our last call and were well out of sight of land were we allowed to see the large object which rested in a specially constructed cradle aft. When the Lieutenant-Commander in charge of technical operations ordered the shrouding tarpaulin to be removed, there was quite an unveiling ceremony. But the mystery revealed was something of an anti-climax: it was simply a sphere of metal some ten feet in diameter. In various parts of it were set circular, porthole-like windows; at the top, it swelled into a protuberance which formed a massive lug. The Lieutenant-Commander, after regarding it awhile with the eye of a proud mother, addressed us in the manner of a lecturer.

'This instrument that you now see,' he said, impressively, 'is what we call the Bathyscope.' He allowed an interval for appreciation.

'Didn't Beebe —?' I whispered to Phyllis.

'No,' she said. 'That was the bathysphere.'

'Oh,' I said.

'It has been constructed,' he went on, 'to resist a pressure approaching two tons to the square inch, giving it a theoretical floor of fifteen hundred fathoms. In practice we do not propose to use it at a greater depth than twelve hundred fathoms, thus providing for a safety factor of some 720 pounds to the square inch. Even at this it will considerably surpass the achievements of Dr Beebe who descended a little over five hundred fathoms, and Barton who reached a depth of seven hundred and fifty fathoms…' He continued in this vein for a time, leaving me somewhat behind. When he seemed to have run down for a bit I said to Phyllis:

'I can't think in all these fathoms. What is it in God's feet?'

She consulted her notes.

'The depth they intend to go to is seven thousand two hundred feet; the depth they could go to is nine thousand feet.'

'Either of them sounds an awful lot of feet,' I said.

Phyllis is, in some ways, more precise and practical.

'Seven thousand two hundred feet is just over a mile and a third,' she informed me, 'the pressure will be a little more than a ton and a third.'

'That's my continuity-girl,' I said. 'I don't know where I'd be without you.' I looked at the bathyscope. 'All the same — ' I added doubtfully.

'What?' she asked.

'Well, that chap at the Admiralty, Winters; he was talking in terms of four or five tons pressure — meaning, presumably, four or five miles down.' I turned to the Lieutenant-Commander. 'How deep is it where we're bound for?' I asked him.

'It's an area called the Cayman Trench, between Jamaica and Cuba,' he said. 'Parts of it go below five thousand.'

'But — ' I began, frowning.

'Fathoms, dear,' said Phyllis. 'Thirty thousand feet.'

'Oh,' I said. 'That'll be — er — something like five and a half miles?'

'Yes,' he said.

'Oh,' I said, again.

He returned to his public address manner.

'That,' he told the assembled crowd of us, 'is the present limit of our ability to make direct visual observations. However —' He paused to make a gesture somewhat in the manner of a conjuror towards a party of A.B.'s, and watched while they pulled the tarpaulin from another, similar, but smaller sphere. '— here,' he continued, 'we have a new instrument with which we hope to be able to make observations at something like twice the depth attainable by the bathyscope, perhaps even more. It is entirely automatic. In addition to registering pressures, temperature, currents, and so on, and transmitting the readings to the surface, it is equipped with five small television cameras, four of them giving all round horizontal coverage, and one transmitting the view vertically beneath the sphere.'

'This instrument,' continued another voice in good imitation of his own, 'we call the telebath.'

Facetiousness could not put a man like the Commander off his stroke. He continued his lecture. But the instrument had been christened, and the telebath it remained.

The three days after we reached our position were occupied with tests and adjustments of both the instruments. In one test Phyllis and I were allowed to make a dive of three hundred feet or so, cramped up in the bathyscope, 'just to get the feel of it'. We did that, and it gave us no envy of anyone making a deeper dive. Then, with all the gear fully checked, the real descent was announced for the morning of the fourth day.

Soon after sunrise we were clustering round the bathyscope where it rested in its cradle. The two naval technicians, Wiseman and Trant, who were to make the descent, wriggled themselves in through the narrow hole that was the entrance. The warm clothing they would need in the depths was handed in after them, for they could never have squeezed in wearing it. Then followed the packets of food and the vacuum-flasks of hot drinks. They made their final checks, gave their okays. The circular entrance-plug was swung over by the hoist, screwed gradually down into its seating, and bolted fast. The bathyscope was hoisted outboard, and hung there, swinging slightly. One of the men inside switched on his hand television-camera, and we ourselves, as seen from within the instrument, appeared on the screen.

'Okay,' said a voice from the loudspeaker. 'Lower away now.'

The winch began to turn. The bathyscope descended, and the water lapped at it. Presently it had disappeared from sight beneath the surface.

The descent was a long business which I do not propose to describe in detail. Frankly, as seen on the screen in the ship, it was a pretty boring affair to the non-initiate. Life in the sea appears to exist in fairly well-defined levels. In the better inhabited strata the water is full of plankton which behaves like a continuous dust-storm and obscures everything but creatures that approach very closely. At other levels where there is no plankton for food, there are consequently few fish. In addition to the tediousness of very limited views or dark emptiness, continuous attention to a screen that is linked with a slightly swinging and twisting camera has a dizzying effect. Both Phyllis and I spent much of the time during the descent with our eyes shut, relying on the loud-speaking telephone to draw our attention to anything interesting. Occasionally we slipped on deck for a cigarette.

There could scarcely have been a better day for the job. The sun beat fiercely down on decks that were occasionally sluiced with water to cool them off. The ensign hung limp, barely stirring. The sea stretched out flat to meet the dome of the sky which showed only one low bank of cloud, to the north, over Cuba, perhaps. There was scarcely a sound, either, except for the muffled voice of the loudspeaker in the mess, the quiet drone of the winch, and from time to time the voice of a deck-hand calling the tally of fathoms.

The group sitting in the mess scarcely spoke; they left that to the men now far below.

At intervals, the Commander would ask:

'All in order, below there?'

And simultaneously two voices would reply:

'Aye, aye, sir!'

Once a voice inquired:

'Did Beebe have an electrically-heated suit?'

Nobody seemed to know.

'I take my hat off to him if he didn't,' said the voice.

The Commander was keeping a sharp eye on the dials as well as watching the screen.

'Half-mile coming up. Check,' he said.

The voice from below counted:

'Four thirty-eight… Four thirty-nine… Now! Half-mile, sir.'

The winch went on turning. There wasn't much to see. Occasional glimpses of schools of fish hurrying off into the murk. A voice complained:

'Sure as I get the camera to one window a damn great fish comes and looks in at another.'

'Five hundred fathoms. You're passing Beebe now,' said the Commander.

'Bye-bye, Beebe,' said the voice. 'But it goes on looking much the same.'

Presently the same voice said:

'More life around just here. Plenty of squid, large and small. You can probably see 'em. There's something out this way, keeping on the edge of the light. A big thing. I can't quite — might be a giant squid — no! my God! It can't be a whale! Not down here!'

'Improbable, but not impossible,' said the Commander.

'Well, in that case — oh, it's sheered off now, anyway. Gosh! We mammals do get around a bit, don't we?'

In due course the moment arrived when the Commander announced:

'Passing Barton now,' and then added with an unexpected change of manner: 'From now on it's all yours, boys. Sure you're quite happy there? If you're not perfectly satisfied you've only to say.'

'That's all right, sir. Everything functioning okay. We'll go on.'

Up on deck the winch droned steadily.

'One mile coming up,' announced the Commander. When that had been checked he asked: 'How are you feeling now?'

'What's the weather like up there?' asked a voice.

'Holding well. Flat calm. No swell.'

The two down below conferred.

'We'll go on, sir. Could wait weeks for conditions like this again.'

'All right — if you're both sure.'

'We are, sir.'

'Very good. About three hundred fathoms more to go, then.'

There was an interval. Then:

'Dead,' remarked the voice from below. 'All black and dead now. Not a thing to be seen. Funny thing the way these levels are quite separate. Ah, now we can begin to see something below…. Squids again…. Luminous fish…. Small shoal, there, see?… There's — Gosh! —'

He broke off, and simultaneously a nightmare fishy horror gaped at us from the screen.

'One of nature's careless moments,' he remarked.

He went on talking, and the camera continued to give us glimpses of unbelievable monstrosities, large and small.

Presently the Commander announced:

'Stopping you now. Twelve hundred fathoms.' He picked up the telephone and spoke to the deck. The winch slowed and then ceased to turn.

'That's all, boys,' he said.

'Huh,' said the voice from below, after a pause. 'Well, whatever it was we came here to find, we've not found it.'

The Commander's face was expressionless. Whether he had expected tangible results or not I couldn't tell. I imagined not. In fact, I wondered if any of us there really had. After all, these centres of activity were all Deeps. And from that it would seem to follow that the reason must lie at the bottom. The echogram gave the bottom hereabouts as still three miles or so below where the two men now dangled….

'Hullo, there, bathyscope,' said the Commander. 'We're going to start you up now. Ready?'

'Aye, aye, sir! All set,' said the two voices.

The Commander picked up his telephone.

'Haul away there!'

We could hear the winch start, and slowly gather speed.

'On your way now. All okay?'

'All correct, sir.'

There was an interval without talk for ten minutes or more. Then a voice said:

'There's something out there. Something big — can't see it properly. Keeps just on the fringe of the light. Can't be that whale again — not at this depth. Try to show you.'

The picture on the screen switched and then steadied. We could see the light-rays streaming out through the water, and the brilliant speckles of small organisms caught in the beam. he very limits there was a suspicion of a faintly lighter patch. It was hard to be sure of it.

'Seems to be circling us. We're spinning a bit, too, I think. I'll try — ah, got a bit better glimpse of it then. It's not the whale, anyway. There, see it now?'

This time we could undoubtedly make out a lighter patch. It was roughly oval, but indistinct, and there was nothing to give it scale.

'H'm,' said the voice from below. 'That's certainly a new one. Could be a fish — or maybe something else kind of turtle-shaped. Monstrous-sized brute, anyway. Circling a bit closer now, but I still can't make out any details. Keeping pace with us.'

Again the camera showed us a glimpse of the thing as it passed one of the bathyscope's ports, but we were little wiser; the definition was too poor for us to be sure of anything about it.

'It's going up now. Rising faster than we are. Getting beyond our angle of view. Ought to be a window in the top of this thing…. Lost it now. Gone somewhere up above us. Maybe it'll — '

The voice cut off dead. Simultaneously, there was a brief, vivid flash on the screen, and it, too, went dead. The sound of the winch outside altered as it speeded up.

We sat looking at one another without speaking. Phyllis's hand sought mine, and tightened on it.

The Commander started to stretch his hand towards the telephone, changed his mind, and went out without a word. Presently the winch speeded up still more.

It takes quite a time to reel in more than a mile of heavy cable. The party in the mess dispersed awkwardly. Phyllis and I went up into the bows and sat there without talking much.

After what seemed a very long wait the winch slowed down. By common consent we got up, and moved aft together.

At last, the end came up. We all, I suppose, expected to see the end of the wire-rope unravelled, with the strands splayed-out, brush-like.

They were not. They were melted together. Both the main and the communication cables ended in a blob of fused metal.

We all stared at them, dumbfounded.

In the evening the Captain read the service, and three volleys were fired over the spot

The weather held, and the glass was steady. At noon the next day the Commander assembled us in the mess. He looked ill, and very tired. He said, briefly, and unemotionally:

'My orders are to proceed with the investigation, using our automatic instrument. If our arrangements and tests can be completed in time, and provided the weather remains favourable, we shall conduct the operation tomorrow morning, commencing as soon after dawn as possible. I am instructed to lower the instrument to the point of destruction, so there will be no second opportunity for observation.'

The arrangement in the mess the following morning was different from that on the former occasion. We sat facing a bank of five television screens, four for the quadrants about the instrument, and one viewing vertically beneath it. There was also a cine-camera photographing all five screens simultaneously for the record.

Again we watched the descent through the ocean layers, but this time instead of a commentary we had an astonishing assortment of chirrupings, raspings, and gruntings picked up by externally mounted microphones. The deep sea is, in its lower inhabited strata, it seems, a place of hideous cacophony. It was something of a relief when at about three-quarters of a mile down silence fell, and somebody muttered: 'Huh! Said those mikes'd never take the pressure.'

The display went on. Squids sliding upwards past the cameras, shoals of fish darting nervously away, other fish attracted by curiosity, monstrosities, grotesques, huge monsters dimly seen. On and on. A mile down, a mile and a half, two miles, two and a half…. And then, at about that, something came into view which quickened all attention on the screens. A large, uncertain, oval shape at the extreme of visibility that moved from screen to screen as it circled round the descending instrument. For three or four minutes it continued to show on one screen or another, but always tantalizingly ill-defined, and never quite well enough illuminated for one to be quite certain even of its shape. Then, gradually, it drifted towards the upper edges of the screens, and presently it was left behind.

Half a minute later all the screens went blank….

Why not praise one's wife? Phyllis can write a thundering good feature script — and this was one of her best. It was too bad that it was not received with the immediate enthusiasm it deserved.

When it was finished, we sent it round to the Admiralty for vetting. A week later we were asked to call. It was Captain Winters who received us. He congratulated Phyllis on the script, as well he might, even if he had not been so taken with her as he so obviously was. Once we were settled in our chairs, however, he shook his head regretfully.

'Nevertheless,' he said, 'I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to hold it up for a while.'

Phyllis looked understandably disappointed; she had worked hard on that script. Not just for cash, either. She had tried to make it a tribute to the two men, Wiseman and Trant, who had vanished with the bathyscope. She looked down at her toes.

'I'm sorry,' said the Captain, 'but I did warn your husband that it wouldn't be for immediate release.'

Phyllis looked up at him.

'Why?' she asked.

That was something I was equally anxious to know about. My own recordings of the preparations, of the brief descent we had both made in the bathyscope, and of various aspects that were not on the official tape record of the dive, had been put into cold-storage, too.

'I'll explain what I can. We certainly owe you that,' agreed Captain Winters. He sat down and leant forward, elbows on knees, fingers interlaced between them, and looked at us both in turn.

'The crux of the thing — and of course you will both of you have realized that long ago — is those fused cables,' he said, 'Imagination staggers a bit at the thought of a creature capable of snapping through steel hawsers — all the same, it might just conceivably admit the possibility. When, however, it comes up against the suggestion that there is a creature capable of cutting through them like an oxy-acetylene flame, it recoils. It recoils, and definitely rejects.

'Both of you saw what happened to those cables, and I think you must agree that their condition opens a whole new aspect. A thing like that is not just a hazard of deep-sea diving — and we want to know more about just what kind of a hazard it is before we give a release on it.'

We talked it over for a little time. The Captain was apologetic and understanding, but he had his orders. He assured us that he would make it his business to see that we were notified of release at the earliest possible moment; and with that we had to make do. Phyllis hid her disappointment under her usual philosophic good sense. Before we left, she asked:

'Honestly, Captain Winters — and off the record, if you like — have you any idea what can have done it?'

He shook his head. 'On or off the record, Mrs Watson, I can think of no explanation that approaches being possible — and, though this is not for publication, I doubt whether anyone else in the Service has an idea, either.'

And so, with the affair left in that unsatisfactory state, we parted.

The prohibition, however, lasted a shorter time than we expected. A week later, just as we were sitting down to dinner, he rang through. Phyllis took the call.

'Oh, hullo, Mrs Watson. I'm glad it's you. I have some good news for you,' Captain Winters' voice said. 'I've just been talking to your EBC people, and giving them the okay, so far as we are concerned, to go ahead with that feature of yours, and the whole story.'

Phyllis thanked him for the news. 'But what's happened?' she added.

'The story's broken, anyway. You'll hear it on the nine o'clock news tonight, and see it in tomorrow's papers. In the circumstances it seemed to me that you ought to be free to take your chance as soon as possible. Their Lordships saw the point — in fact, they would like your feature to go out as soon as possible. They approve of it. So there it is. And the best of luck to you.'

Phyllis thanked him again, and rang off.

'Now what do you suppose can have happened?' she inquired.

We had to wait until nine o'clock to find that out. The notice on the news was scanty, but sufficient from our point of view. It reported simply that an American naval unit conducting research into deep-sea conditions somewhere off the Philippines had suffered the loss of a depth-chamber, with its crew of two men.

Almost immediately afterwards EBC came through on the telephone with a lot of talk about priorities, and altered pro? gramme schedules, and available cast.

Audio-assessment told us later that the feature had an excellent reception figure. Coming so soon after the American announcement, we hit the peak of popular interest. Their Lordships were pleased, too. It gave them the opportunity of showing that they did not always have to follow the American lead — though I still think there was no need to make the US a present of the first publicity. Anyway, in view of what has followed, I don't suppose it greatly matters.

In the circumstances, Phyllis rewrote a part of the script, making greater play with the fusing of the cables than before. A flood of correspondence came in, but when all the tentative explanations and suggestions had been winnowed none of us was any wiser than before.

Perhaps it was scarcely to be expected that we should be. Our listeners had not even seen the maps, and at this stage it had not occurred to the general public that there could be any link between the diving catastrophes and the somewhat demode topic of fireballs.

But if, as it seemed, the Royal Navy was disposed simply to sit still for a time and ponder the problem theoretically, the US Navy was not. Deviously we heard that they were preparing to send a second expedition to the same spot where their loss had occurred. We promptly applied to be included, and were refused. How many other people applied, I don't know, but enough for them to allocate a second small craft. We couldn't get a place on that either. All space was reserved for their own correspondents and commentators who would cover for Europe, too.

Well, it was their own show. They were paying for it. All the same, I'm sorry we missed it because, though we did think it likely they would lose their apparatus again, it never crossed our minds that they might lose their ship as well….

About a week after it happened one of the NBC men who had been covering it came over. We more or less shanghaied him for lunch and the personal dope.

'Never saw anything like it — never want to,' he said. 'They were using an automatic instrument pretty much like the one you people lost. The idea was to send that down first, and if it came up again okay, then they'd take another smack at it with a manned depth-chamber — what's more, they had a couple of volunteers for it, too; funny the way you can always find a few guys who seem kind of bored with life on Earth.

'Anyway, that was the project. We lay off a couple of hundred yards or more from the research ship, but we had a cable slung between us to relay the television, so we could watch it on our screens just as well as they could on theirs.

'We did — awhile, but I guess it's one of those subjects you have to have majored in to keep the interest up. The way we saw it, it was more of a test-out. We were aiming to get our real stuff from the depth-chamber dive where there'd be the human angle, even though it'd not go down so far.

'Well, we watched the thing slung overside, then we went into our saloon to look at the screens. I guess what we saw'd likely be what you saw; sometimes it was foggy, sometimes clear, and sometimes there'd be quite a few screwy-looking fish and squids, and whole flocks of things that don't have any names I ever heard of, and, I'd say, don't need 'em, either.

'Over the screens was a lighted panel recording the depth — which was a good idea on account of it all looked like it might be going around on an endless band, anyway. By one mile down all the guys with better-trained consciences had taken them up on deck under the awning, with smokes and cold drinks. By two miles down, I was out there, with them, leaving two or three puritanical characters to cover it and tell us if anything new showed up. After a bit more, one of them quit, too, and joined me.

'"Two and a half miles, and the last half-mile as dark as the Tunnel of Love — arid that wouldn't interest even fish a lot, from what they tell me," he said.

'He drew himself a coke and started to move over towards me. Then he stopped short.

'"Christ!" he said. And simultaneously there was some kind of yell from inside the saloon.

'I turned my head and looked the way he was looking — at the research ship.

'A moment before she had been lying there placid, without a visible movement aboard her, and only the sound of the winch coming over the water to tell you she wasn't derelict. And now she was

'Well, I don't know what kind of thunderstorms you folks have over here, but in some places they have a kind where the lightning looks like it's running around all over a building. And that was the way the research ship looked just then. You could hear it crackle, too.

'She can't have looked that way for more than a few seconds, though it seemed a lot longer. Then she blew up….

'I don't know what they had aboard her, but she sure did blow. Every one of us hit the deck in a split second. And then there was spray and scrap coming down all over. When we looked again there wasn't anything there but a lot of water just getting itself smoothed out.

'We didn't have a lot to pick up. A few bits of wood, half a dozen lifebuoys, and three bodies, all badly burnt. We collected what there was, and came home.'

During the longish pause Phyllis poured him another cup of coffee.

'What was it?' she asked.

He shrugged. 'It could have been coincidence, but say we rule that out, then I'd guess that if ever lightning were to strike upwards from the sea, that'd be about the way it'd look.'

'I never heard of anything like that,' Phyllis said.

'It certainly isn't on the record,' he agreed. 'But there has to be a first time.'

'Not very satisfactory,' Phyllis commented.

He looked us over.

'Seeing that you two were on that British fishing-party, do I take it you know why we were there?'

'I'd not be surprised,' I told him.

He nodded. 'Well, look,' he said, 'I'm told it isn't possible to persuade a high charge, say a few million volts, to run up an uninsulated hawser in sea-water, so I must accept that; it's not my department. All I say is that if it were possible, then I guess the effect might be quite a bit like what we saw.'

'There'd be insulated cables, too — to the cameras, microphones, thermometers, and things,' Phyllis said.

'Sure. And there was an insulated cable relaying the TV to our ship; but it couldn't carry that charge, and burnt out — which was a darned good thing for us. That would make it look to me like it followed the main hawser — if it didn't so happen that the physics boys won't have it.'

'They've no alternative suggestions?' I asked.

'Oh, sure. Several. Some of them could sound quite convincing — to a fellow who'd not seen it happen.'

'If you are right, this is very queer indeed,' Phyllis said, reflectively.

The NBC man looked at her. 'A nice British back-hand understatement — but it's queer enough, even without me,' he said, modestly. 'However they explain this away, the physics boys are still stumped on those fused cables, because, whatever this may be, those cable severances couldn't have been accidental.'

'On the other hand, all that way down, all that pressure…?' Phyllis said.

He shook his head. 'I'm making no guesses. I'd want more data than we've got, even for that. Could be we'll get it before long.'

We looked questioning.

He lowered his voice. 'Seeing you're in this, too, but strictly under your hats, they've got a couple more probes lined up right now. But no publicity this time — the last lot had a nasty taste.'

'Where?' we asked, simultaneously.

'One off the Aleutians, some place. The other in a deep spot in the Guatemala Basin. What're your folks doing?'

'We don't know,' we said, honestly.

He shook his head. 'Always kinda close, your people,' he said, sympathetically.

And close they remained. During the next few weeks we kept our ears uselessly wide open for news of either of the two new investigations, but it was not until the NBC man was passing through London again a month later that we learnt anything. We asked him what had happened. He frowned.

'Off Guatemala they drew blank,' he said. 'The ship south of the Aleutians was transmitting by radio while the dive was in progress. It cut out suddenly. She's reported as lost with all hands.'

Official cognizance of these matters remained underground — if that can be considered an acceptable term for their deep-sea investigations. Every now and then we would catch a rumour which showed that the interest had not been dropped, and from time to time a few apparently isolated items could, when put in conjunction, be made to give hints. Our naval contacts preserved an amiable evasiveness, and we found that our opposite numbers across the Atlantic were doing little better with their naval sources. The consoling aspect was that had they been making any progress we should most likely have heard of it, so we took silence to mean that they were stalled.

Public interest in fireballs was down to zero, and few people troubled to send in reports of them any more. I still kept my files going though they were now so unrepresentative that I could not tell how far the apparently low incidence was real.

As far as I knew, the two phenomena had never so far been publicly connected, and presently both were allowed to lapse unexplained, like any silly-season sensation.

In the course of the next three years we ourselves lost interest almost to vanishing point. Other matters occupied us. There was the birth of our son, William — and his death, eighteen months later. To help Phyllis to get over that I wangled myself a travelling-correspondent series, sold up the house, and for a time we roved.

In theory, the appointment was simply mine; in practice, most of the gloss and finish on the scripts which pleased the EBC were Phyllis's, and most of the time when she wasn't dolling up my stuff she was working on scripts of her own. When we came back home, it was with enhanced prestige, a lot of material to work up, and a feeling of being set on a smooth, steady course.

Almost immediately, the Americans lost a cruiser off the Marianas.

The report was scanty, an Agency message, slightly blown up locally; but there was a something about it - just a kind of feeling. When Phyllis read it in the newspaper, it struck her, too. She pulled out the atlas, and considered the Marianas.

'It's pretty deep round three sides of them,' she said.

'That report's not handled quite the regular way. I can't exactly put my finger on it. But the approach is a bit off the line, somehow,' I agreed.

'We'd better try the grape—vine,' Phyllis decided.

We did, without result. It wasn't that our sources were holding out on us; there seemed to be a blackout somewhere. We got no further than the official handout: this cruiser, the Keweenaw, had, in fair weather, simply gone down. Twenty survivors had been picked up. There would be an official enquiry.

Possibly there was: I never heard the outcome. The incident was somehow overlayed by the inexplicable sinking of a Russian ship, engaged on some task never specified, to eastward of the Kuriles, that string of islands to the south of Kamchatka. Since it was axiomatic that any Soviet misadventure must be attributable in some way to capitalist jackals or reactionary fascist hyenas, this affair assumed an importance which quite eclipsed the more serious American loss, and the acrimonious innuendoes went on echoing for some time. In the noise of vituperation the mysterious disappearance of the survey-vessel Utskarpen, in the Southern Ocean, went almost unnoticed outside her native Norway.

Several others followed, but I no longer have my records to give me the details. It is my impression that quite half a dozen vessels, all seemingly engaged in ocean research in one way or another, had vanished before the Americans suffered again off the Philippines. This time they lost a destroyer, and, with it, their patience.

The ingenuous announcement that since the water about Bikini was too shallow for a contemplated series of deep—water atomic—bomb tests the locale of these experiments would be shifted westwards by a little matter of a thousand miles or so, may possibly have deceived a portion of the general public, but in radio and newspaper circles it touched off a scramble for assignments.

Phyllis and I had better standing now, and we were lucky, too. We flew out there, and a few days later we formed part of the complement of a number of ships lying at a strategic distance from the point where the Keweenaw had gone down off the Marianas.

I can't tell you what that specially designed depth—bomb looked like, for we never saw it. All we were allowed to see was a raft supporting a kind of semi—spherical, metal hut which contained the bomb itself, and all we were told was that it was much like one of the more regular types of atomic bomb, but with a massive casing that would resist the pressure at five miles deep, if necessary.

At first light on the day of the test a tug took the raft in tow, and chugged away over the horizon with it. From then on we had to observe by means of unmanned television cameras mounted on floats. In this way we saw the tug cast off the raft, and put on full speed. Then there was an interval while the tug hurried out of harm's way and the raft pursued a calculated drift towards the exact spot where the Keweenaw had disappeared. The hiatus lasted for some three hours, with the raft looking motionless on the screens. Then a voice through the loudspeakers told us that the release would take place in approximately thirty minutes. It continued to remind us at intervals until the time was short enough for it to start counting in reverse, slowly and calmly. There was a complete hush as we stared at the screens and listened to the voice:

' — three — two — one — NOW!'

On the last word a rocket sprang from the raft, trailing red smoke as it climbed.

'Bomb away!' said the voice.

We waited.

For a long time, as it seemed, everything was intensely still. Around the vision screens no one spoke. Every eye was on one or another of the frames which showed the raft calmly afloat on the blue, sunlit water. There was no sign that anything had occurred there, save the plume of red smoke drifting slowly away. For the eye and the ear there was utter serenity; for the feelings, a sense that the whole world held its breath.

Then it came. The placid surface of the sea suddenly belched into a vast white cloud which spread, and boiled, writhing upwards. A tremor passed through the ship.

We left the screens, and rushed to the ship's side. Already the cloud was above our horizon. It writhed and convolved upon itself in a fashion that was somehow obscene as it climbed monstrously up the sky. Only then did the sound reach us, in a buffeting roar. Much later, amazingly delayed, we saw the dark line which was the first wave of turbulent water rushing towards us.

That night we shared a dinner-table with Mallarby of The Tidings and Bennell of The Senate. I claim no credit for being included in such illustrious company except in so far as I had had the good sense to marry Phyllis and got her used to having me around before she perceived how widely she could have chosen. This was her show. We have a technique for that. I come off the sidelines just enough to show sociable, but not enough to interfere with her plan of campaign. The rest of the time I watch and admire. It is something like a combination of skilled juggling with expert chess, and her recoveries from an unexpected move are a delight to follow. She seldom loses. This time she had them more or less where she wanted them between the entree and the joint.

'It's been the reluctance to postulate an intelligence that's been the chief stumbling block,' Mallarby remarked, 'but here, at last, we have a half-admission.'

'I'd still question "intelligence",' Bennell replied. 'The line between instinctive action and intelligent action, particularly as regards self-defence, can be very uncertain — if only because both may often produce the same response.'

'But you can't deny that whatever is the cause of it, it is an entirely new factor,' Mallarby said.

At this point I saw Phyllis relax from her efforts to get them going, and settle down to listen.

'I could,' Bennell told him. 'I could say that the factor may have been down there for centuries, but that it remained uninterested in us so long as we did not disturb it by probing into its environment.'

'You could,' agreed Mallarby, 'but if I were you, I wouldn't Beebe and Barton went down deep, and nothing happened to them. You're disregarding the fused cables, too. There's certainly nothing instinctive there.'

Bennell grinned. 'They're awkward, I admit, but any theory I've heard so far has half a dozen factors quite as troublesome.'

'And the electrification of that American ship? — just static, I suppose?'

'Well — do we know enough of the conditions to be sure that it wasn't?'

Mallarby snorted.

'For heaven's sake! Lulling is for babes and nitwits.'

'Uh-huh. But if the choice lies between that and accepting the Bocker line, I'm inclined to prefer it.'

'I'm no Bocker champion. I doubt whether the thing as presented by him sounds more ludicrous to you than it does to me, but look what we're facing: a lot of explanations that will neither wash singly nor hang together; or Bocker's line. And however we feel about it, he does tie in more factors than anyone else.'

'So, without a doubt, would Jules Verne,' observed Bennell.

The introduction of this Bocker element set me all at sea, and Phyllis, too, though it would have been hard to guess it from the way she said:

'Surely the Bocker line can't be altogether dismissed?' frowning a little as she spoke.

It worked. In a little time we were adequately briefed on the Bocker view, and without either of them guessing that as far as we were concerned he had come into it for the first time.

The name of Alastair Bocker was not, of course, entirely unknown to us: it was that of an eminent geographer, customarily followed by several groups of initials. However, the information on him that Phyllis now prompted forth was something quite new to us. When re-ordered and assembled it amounted to this:

Almost a year earlier Bocker had presented a memorandum to the Admiralty in London. Because he was Bocker it succeeded in getting itself read at some quite important levels although the gist of its argument was as follows:

The fused cables and electrification of certain ships must be regarded as indisputable evidence of intelligence at work in certain deeper parts of the oceans.

Conditions, such as pressure, temperature, perpetual darkness, etc., in those regions made it inconceivable that any intelligent form of life could have evolved there — and this statement he backed with several convincing arguments.

It was to be assumed that no nation was capable of constructing mechanisms that could operate at such depths as indicated by the evidence, nor would they have any purpose in attempting to do so.

But, if the intelligence in the depths were not indigenous, then it must have come from elsewhere. Also, it must be embodied in some form able to withstand a pressure of two tons per square inch, or possibly twice as much. Now, where else on earth could a form find conditions of such pressure wherein to evolve? Clearly, nowhere.

Very well, then if it could not have evolved on earth, it must have evolved somewhere else — say, on a large planet where the pressures were normally very high. If so, how did it cross space and arrive here?

Bocker then recalled attention to the 'fireballs' which had aroused so much speculation a few years ago, and were still occasionally to be seen. None of these had been known to descend on land; none, indeed, had been known to descend anywhere but in areas of very deep water. Moreover, such of them as had been struck by missiles had exploded with such violence as to suggest that they had been retaining a very high degree of pressure.

It was significant, also, that these 'fireball' globes invariably sought the only regions of the earth in which high-pressure conditions compatible with movement were available.

Therefore, Bocker deduced, we were in the process, while almost unaware of it, of undergoing a species of interplanetary invasion. If he were to be asked the source of it, he would point to Jupiter as being most likely to fulfil the conditions of pressure.

His memorandum had concluded with the observation that such an incursion need not necessarily be regarded as hostile. There was such a thing as flight to refuge from conditions that had become intolerable. It seemed to him that the interests of a type of creation which existed at fifteen pounds to the square inch were unlikely to overlap seriously with those of a form which required several tons per square inch. He advocated, therefore, that the greatest efforts should be made to develop some means of making a sympathetic approach to the new dwellers in our depths with the aim of facilitating an exchange of science, using the word in its widest sense.

The views expressed by Their Lordships upon these elucidations and suggestions are not publicly recorded. It is known, however, that no long interval passed before Bocker withdrew his memorandum from their unsympathetic desks, and shortly afterwards presented it for the personal consideration of the Editor of The Tidings. Undoubtedly The Tidings, in returning it to him, expressed itself with its usual tact. It was only for the benefit of his professional brethren that the Editor remarked:

'This newspaper has managed to exist for more than one hundred years without a comic-strip, and I see no reason to break that tradition now.'

In due course, the memorandum appeared in front of the Editor of The Senate, who glanced at it, called for a synopsis, lifted his eyebrows, and dictated an urbane regret.

Subsequently it occurred upon two other editorial desks of the more cloistered kind, but after that it ceased to circulate, and was known only by word of mouth within a small circle.

'What I have never understood about it,' Phyllis said, with a slight frown and an air of having been familiar with the situation for years, 'is why something like The Daily Tape or The hens hasn't run it? Isn't it just their stuff? Or what about the American tabloids?'

'The Tape very nearly did,' Mallarby told her. 'Only Bocker said he'd sue them if they mentioned his name — he's after, respectable publication, or none at all. So the Tape tried to get some other well-known figure to sponsor the idea as if it were his own. Nobody was keen. Bocker got his stuff printed, deposited it, and claimed copyright, so that was off. They dropped it because without some weighty kind of backing it would be just another Tape scare, and the circulation figures hadn't justified their last two scares. The Lens and the others are in roughly the same jamb. One small American paper did use a chewed-up version, but as it was their third interplanetary danger in four months it didn't register well. The others thought it over and reckoned that it would be too easy to be accused of making cheap capital out of the loss of American lives in the Keweenaw, so they threw it out. But it will come. Before long, one or another of them is bound to splash it, with or without Bocker's name and consent — and almost certainly without his main point, which was to try to make some kind of contact. They'll stress just what Bennell, here, stressed just now — the comic-horrific-strip aspect. Make-your-flesh-creep stuff.'

'And what other use can you make of a farrago like that?' Bennell inquired.

'Well, you can at least say, as I said before, that he does include more factors than anyone else has — and that anything that includes even most of the factors is, ipso facto, bound to be fantastic. We may decry it, but, for all that, until something better turns up, it's the best we have.'

Bennell shook his head.

'You begged the whole thing at the start. Suppose I concede for the moment that there does seem to be intelligence of some kind down there — you've no solid proof that intelligence couldn't evolve at a few tons to the square inch as easily 'as at fifteen pounds. You've nothing to support you but sheer common sense — the same kind of common sense that was satisfied that heavier-than-air craft could never fly. Prove to me —'

'You've got it wrong. He claims that the intelligence must have evolved under high pressure, but that it couldn't do so under the other conditions obtaining in our Deeps. But whatever you concede, and whatever the top naval men may think about Bocker, it is clear enough that they must have been assuming for some time that there is something intelligent down there. You don't design and make a special bomb like that all in five minutes, you know. Anyway, whether the Bocker theory is sheer hot air or not, he's lost his main point. This bomb was not the amiable and sympathetic approach that he advocated.'

Mallarby paused, and shook his head.

'I've met Bocker several times. He's a civilized, liberal-minded man — with the usual trouble of liberal-minded men; that they think others are, too. He has an interested, inquiring mind. He has never grasped that the average mind when it encounters something new is scared, and says: "Better smash it, or suppress it, quick." Well, he's just had another demonstration of the average mind at work.'

'But,' Bennell objected, 'if, as you say, it is officially believed that these ship losses have been caused by an intelligence, then there's something to be scared about, and you can't put to-day's affair down as anything stronger than retaliation.'

Mallarby shook his head again.

'My dear Bennell, I not only can, but I do. Suppose, now, that something were to come dangling down to us on a rope out of space; and suppose that that thing was emitting rays on a wavelength that acutely discomforted us. perhaps even caused us physical pain. What should we do? I suggest that the first thing we should do would be to snip the rope and put it out of action. Then we should examine the strange object and find out what we could about it.

'Then suppose that more strange objects began to be reported dangling down from above and causing discomfort to our citizens. We should argue: "This looks like a kind of invasion, or reconnaissance for one. Anyway it is extremely painful to us, so whatever is up there doing it has got to be stopped." And we should forthwith take what steps we could to discourage it. It might be done simply in the spirit of ending a nuisance, or it might be done with some animosity, and regarded as — retaliation. Now, would it be we, or the thing above, that was to blame?

'In the present case, and after to-day's performance the question becomes simply academic. It is difficult to imagine any kind of intelligence that would not resent what we've just done. If this were the only Deep where trouble has occurred, there might well be no intelligence left to resent it — but this isn't the only place, as you know; not by any means. So, what form that very natural resentment will take remains for us to see.'

'You think there really will be some kind of response, then?' Phyllis asked.

He shrugged. 'To take up my analogy again: suppose that some violently destructive agency were to descend from space upon one of our cities. What should we do?'

'Well, what could we do?' asked Phyllis, reasonably enough.

'We could turn the backroom boys on to it. And if it happened a few times more, we should soon be giving the backroom boys full priorities.'

'You're assuming a lot, Mallarby,' Bennell put in. 'For one thing, an almost parallel state of development. The significance of the word "priority", even, has a semantic dependence on conditions. It could scarcely mean a thing a century ago, and in the eighteenth century you could have howled "priority" until you were blue in the face without creating any technical advance whatever because our modern idea of research wasn't there — nobody would even understand what you were after.'

'True,' agreed Mallarby, 'but after what happened to those ships I'm justified in assuming quite a degree of technology there, I think.'

Phyllis said: 'Is it really too late — for some such approach as Bocker wanted, I mean? There's only been one bomb. If there isn't another they might think it was a natural disaster, an eruption or something.'

Mallarby shook his head.

'It won't be just one bomb. And it was always too late, my dear. Can you imagine us tolerating any form of rival intelligence on earth, no matter how it got here? Why, we can't even tolerate anything but the narrowest differences of views within our own race. No,' he shook his head, 'no, I'm afraid Bocker's idea of fraternization never had the chance of a flea in a furnace.'

That was, I think, very likely as true as Mallarby made it sound; but if there ever had been any chance at all it was gone by the time we reached home. Somehow, and apparently overnight, the public had put several twos together at last. The halfhearted attempt to represent the depth-bomb as one of a series of tests had broken down altogether. The vague fatalism with which the loss of the Keweenaw and the other ships had been received was succeeded by a burning sense of outrage, a satisfaction that the first step in vengeance had been taken, and a demand for more.

The atmosphere was similar to that at a declaration of war. Yesterday's phlegmatics and sceptics were, all of a sudden, fervid preachers of a crusade against the — well, against whatever it was that had had the insolent temerity to interfere with the freedom of the seas. Agreement on that cardinal point was virtually unanimous, but from that hub speculation radiated in every direction, so that not only fireballs, but every other unexplained phenomenon that had occurred for years was in some way attributed to, or at least connected with, the mystery in the Deeps.

The wave of worldwide excitement struck us when we stopped off for a day at Karachi on our way home, the place was bubbling with tales of sea-serpents and visitations from space, and it was clear that whatever restrictions Bocker might have put on the circulation of his theory, a good many million people had now arrived at a similar explanation by other routes. This gave me the idea of telephoning to the EBC in London to find out if Bocker himself would now unbend enough for an interview.

He did — to the representatives of a few carefully selected organs — but it added little to the script we had already put together on the journey from Karachi to London. His repeated plea for the sympathetic approach was so contrary to the public mood as to be almost unusable.

Once more, however, we had a demonstration that bellicose indignation is not self-sustaining. You just can't have a rousing fight for long with a sandbag, and little happened to animate the situation. The only step for weeks was that the Royal Navy, partly in deference to public feeling, but probably more for reasons of prestige, also sent down a bomb. It went off quite spectacularly, I understand, but the only recorded result was that the shores of the South Sandwich Islands were so littered with dead and decaying fish for weeks afterwards that they stank to heaven.

Then, by degrees, a feeling began to get about that this was not at all the way anyone had expected an interplanetary war to be; so, quite possibly, it was not an interplanetary war after all. From there, of course, it was only a step to deciding that it must be the Russians.

The Russians had all along discouraged, within their dictatorate, any tendency for suspicion to deviate from its proper target of capitalistic warmongers. When whispers of the interplanetary notion did in some way penetrate their curtain, they were countered by the statements that (a) it was all a lie: a verbal smoke screen to cover the preparations of warmongers; (b) that it was true: and the capitalists, true to type, had immediately attacked the unsuspecting strangers with atom bombs; and (c) whether it were true or not, the USSR would fight unswervingly for Peace with all the weapons it possessed, except germs.

The swing continued. People were heard to say: 'Huh — that interplanetary stuff? Don't mind telling you that I very nearly fell for it at the time. But, of course, when you start to actually think about it — I Wonder what the Russian game really is? Must've been something pretty big to make 'em use a-bombs on it.' Thus, in quite a short time, the status quo ante helium hypotheticum was restored, and we were back on the familiarly comprehensible basis of international suspicion. The only lasting result was that marine insurance stayed up I per cent.

'Things,' Phyllis complained, 'sort of die on us. We looked like being the popular authorities on fireballs — in fact, for a week or two we were. Then the interest faded away, and there were fewer of them until now, if anyone sees one, he just regards it as a hallucination that he's not going to be taken in by. We didn't do so badly on that first dive — but you can't go on sustaining interest in just a couple of fused cables. We fell down badly somehow on not hearing of the Bocker business until it was practically stale — and I still don't understand how we missed it. At the bomb-dropping we were simply two of the crowd. When all the excitement boiled up it did look as if we might come into our own — but now that's all fizzled out. Everything's gone quiet again everywhere; it can't be that there's nothing happening.'

'It isn't,' I said. 'If you'd read the papers properly you'd see that two more bombs have gone down in the last week: one in the Cocos-Keeling Basin, and the other in the Prince Edward Deep.'

'I didn't see that.'

'News value practically nil at the moment. You have to read the small print.'

'It doesn't help when they choose outlandish places to send them down, either. There must be plenty of deep places somebody's heard of.'

'Presumably none of the civilized regions will put up with bombs on their own doorsteps — and who's to blame them? I wouldn't fancy a coastline that's all radio-active water full of dead fish by the million, myself.'

'But it does show that they've not shelved the whole thing — the Navy, I mean.'

'Apparently not.'

'Mightn't it be worth going to Whitehall and seeing your Admiral again?'

'He's a captain,' I told her, but I considered the idea. 'Last time we met it wasn't really I that had the success with him,' I pointed out.

'Oh. Oh, I see,' said Phyllis. 'H'm. Dinner Tuesday?'

'I'll put it to him, from you.'

'I'm sure there must be a name for this kind of thing,' she said. 'The way I have to work! One day you'll find it's misfired and you've cut yourself out.'

'Darling, you know you thoroughly enjoy the art of the little finger. And you'd be furious if I concealed you under a bushel.'

'That's all very well,' she said. 'But I'd just like to feel a little more certain whose little finger we're talking about.'

Captain Winters came to dinner.

'Would you,' asked Phyllis, leaning back on her pillow with her hands behind her head, and studying the ceiling, 'would you call Mildred attractive?'

'Yes, darling,' I replied, promptly.

'Oh,' said Phyllis, 'I thought perhaps so.'

We pondered.

'It looked mutual,' she observed.

'It was meant to look — er — absorbed,' I told her.

'Oh, it did,' she assured me.

'Darling, the position is awkward,' I pointed out. 'If I were to tell you that one of your best friends is unattractive —'

'I'm not at all sure that she is one of my best friends. But she's not unattractive.'

'Your own appearance,' I remarked, 'I would describe as rapt. The manner trustful, the eyes a little starry, the smile a little enchanted, the overall effect quite bewitching. You know that, of course, but I thought I'd mention it; it was so well done — unusually well, I thought.'

She shifted slightly.

'The Captain's a very attractive man,' she said.

'Ah, well, then we've had a nice evening with two attractive people, haven't we? And they had to be stopped from attracting one another; channelled, as it were.'

'H'm,' she said.

'Darling, you're not jealous of my poor little histrionic talent?'

'No — it just seemed to have improved, that's all.'

'Sweetie,' I said, 'I am almost constantly treated to the spectacle of a variety of men wrestling with the pangs of temptation, and I feel great sympathy for them.'

She let the nearer hand stray from behind her head.

'I don't want them,' she said

'Darling,' I remarked, somewhat later, 'I begin to wonder if we ought not to see more of Mildred.'

'M'm,' she said, doubtfully, 'but the Captain, too.'

'Which reminds me, if you aren't too sleepy — what did the Captain have to say?'

'Oh, lots of nice things. Irish blood there, I think.'

'But, passing from the really important, to matters of mere worldwide interest —?' I suggested, patiently.

'He wouldn't let go of much, but what he did say wasn't encouraging. Some of it was rather horrid.'

'Tell me.'

'Well, the main situation doesn't seem to have altered a lot on the surface, but they're getting increasingly worried about what's happening below. The general flap and scare worried the authorities. It unsettled people, and they were uneasy lest what was just an excitement and a thrill might turn into a panic. From the way he spoke I think there must have been quite a bit of manoeuvring behind the way it has all calmed down.

'And he didn't actually say that investigation has made no progress either, but what he did say implied it. For instance, echo soundings don't help. You can tell where the bottom is, but that tells you nothing about what may be on the bottom there. The shallower, secondary echoes may be off large creatures, shoals of fish, or anything, but there's no means of being sure what they are off. Some of them seem to be static, but no one's sure about that.

'Depth microphones don't help much. At some levels there's practically nothing, at others there's just a meaningless pandemonium of fish-noises, like we heard from that telebath thing. And they daren't let them down really deep on a steel cable because of what happened to that research-ship and some of the others. They've tried with a cable which was a non-conductor, but the mike leads burnt out at about a thousand fathoms. They sent down a television camera adapted for infra-red instead of visible rays, on the theory that it might be less provocative, and insulated the gear from all the rest of the ship. That was a good thing because at about eight hundred fathoms up came a charge that jumped fuses and melted half their instruments.

'He says that atomic bombs are out, for the moment at any rate. You can only use them in isolated places, and even then the radio-activity spreads widely. They kill an awful lot of fish quite uselessly, and make a lot more radio-active. The fisheries experts on both sides of the Atlantic have been raising hell, and saying that it's because of the bombings that some shoals have been failing to turn up in the proper places at the proper times. They've been blaming the bombs for upsetting the ecology, whatever that is, and affecting the migratory habits. But a few of them are saying that the data aren't sufficient to be absolutely sure that it is the bombs that have done it, but something certainly has, and it may have serious effects on food supplies. And so, as nobody seems to be quite clear what the bombs were expected to do, and all they do do is to kill and bewilder lots of fish at great expense, they've become unpopular just now.'

'Most of that we already know,' I remarked, 'but when it's on parade it certainly makes a fine upstanding body of negatives.'

'Well, here's one you didn't know. Two of those bombs they've sent down haven't gone off.'

'Oh,' I said, 'and what do we infer from that?'

'I don't know. But it has them worried, very worried. You see, the way they are set to operate is by the pressure at a given depth; simple and pretty accurate.'

'Meaning that they never reached the right pressure-zone? Must have got hung up somewhere on the way down?'

Phyllis nodded. 'That alone would take a bit of explaining, but what worries them still more is that there is a secondary setting, quite independent, just in case it happens to land on a submarine mountain, or something. It works with a time-switch — only with these two it hasn't.'

'Ah,' I said, 'perfectly simple, my dear Watson — the water got in and stopped the clock,' I told her.

'It's your name that's very suitably Watson — I'm only labelled that way for the duration,' Phyllis said, coldly. 'Anyway, there's nothing perfectly simple about it; and it's made them extremely anxious.'

'Understandably, too. I'd not feel too happy myself if I'd mislaid a couple of live atom bombs,' I admitted. 'What else?'

'Three cable-repair ships have unaccountably disappeared. One of them was cut off in the middle of a radio message. She was known to be grappling for a defective cable at the time.'

'When was this?'

'One about six months ago, one about three weeks ago, and one last week.'

'They might not be anything to do with it.'

'They might not — but everyone's pretty sure they are.'

'No survivors to tell what happened?'

'None.'

Presently I asked:

'Anything more?'

'Let me sec. Oh, yes. They are developing some kind of guided depth-missile which will be high-explosive, not atomic. But it hasn't been tested yet.'

I turned to look at her admiringly. 'That's the stuff, darling. The real Mata Hari touch. Have you got the drawings?'

'You goof. It's only because they don't want people unsettled that it's not been published in the newspapers — that, and the fact that the newspapers agree. The last hullabaloo sent the sales-graphs dipping everywhere, and the advertisers didn't like it. There's no need for ordinary security measures. Nobody's going to dangle a telephone into the Mindanao Trench and ask if anybody down there would like to buy some interesting information.'

'I suppose not,' I admitted.

'Even the Services use common sense sometimes,' she said pointedly, and then added, on a second thought: 'Though there are probably several things he didn't tell me.'

'Probably,' I agreed again.

'The most important thing is that he is going to give me an introduction to Dr Matet, the oceanographer.'

I sat up. 'But, darling, the Oceanographical Society has more or less threatened to excommunicate anybody who deals with us after that last script — it's part of their anti-Bocker Line.'

'Well, Dr Matet happens to be a friend of the Captain's. He's seen his fireball-incidence maps, and he's a half-convert. Anyway, we're not convinced Bockerites, are we?'

'What we think we are isn't necessarily what other people think we are. Still, if he's willing — When can we see him?'

'I hope to see him in a few days' time, darling.'

'Don't you think I should —'

'No. But it's sweet of you not to trust me still.'

'But—'

'No. And now it's time we went to sleep,' she said, firmly.

The beginning of Phyllis's interview was, she reported, almost

standard:

'EBC?' said Doctor Matet, raising eyebrows like miniature doormats. 'I thought Captain Winters said BBC

He was a man with a large frame sparingly covered, which gave his head the appearance of properly belonging to a still larger frame. His tanned forehead was high, and well polished back to the crown. This dome was hedged about with wiry grey hair which stuck out in tufts over each ear. His bright eyes peered at one past a pronouncedly Roman nose. His large, responsive mouth surmounted a slightly cleft chin. As if all this dominating apparatus were slightly too heavy for him, he stooped. He gave one, Phyllis said, a feeling of being overhung.

She sighed inwardly, and started on the routine justification of the English Broadcasting Company's existence, with the assurances that sponsorship did not necessarily connote venality, venenosity, or even vapidity. He found this an interesting point of view. Phyllis recited examples of illustrious EBC occasions and persons, and worked him round gradually until he had reached the position of considering us nice enough people striving manfully to overcome the disadvantages of being considered a slightly second class oracle. Then, after making it quite clear that any material he might supply was strictly anonymous in origin, he opened up a bit.

The trouble from Phyllis's point of view was that he did it on a pretty academic level, full of strange words and instances which she had to interpret as best she could. The gist of what he had to tell her, however, seemed to be this:

A year ago there had begun to be reports of discolorations in certain ocean currents. The first observation of the kind had been made in the Kuro Siwo current in the North Pacific — an unusual muddiness flowing north-east, becoming less discernible as it gradually widened out along the West Wind Drift until it was no longer perceptible by the naked eye.

'Samples were taken and sent for examination, of course, and what do you think the discoloration turned out to be?' said Dr Matet.

Phyllis looked properly expectant. He told her:

'Mainly radiolarian ooze, but with an appreciable percentage of diatomaceous ooze.'

'How very remarkable!' Phyllis said, safely. 'Now what on earth could produce a result like that?'

'Ah,' said Dr Matet, 'that is the question. A disturbance on a quite remarkable scale — even in samples taken on the other side of the ocean, off the coast of California, there was still quite a heavy impregnation of both these oozes.'

'That's astonishing, isn't it?' said Phyllis. 'The effects —?'

'One cannot hope to foresee more than the most obvious effects. Some changes in fish migrations are already becoming noticeable, and a certain increase in sea vegetation along the course, as one would expect. Naturally, with the water diatomaceously richer —'

He went on for some time, with Phyllis trying not to look too much as if she were grasping straws behind him. At last he said: 'This, obviously, is of immense interest and the greatest importance, but naturally the most interesting question to us is why it should happen at all, and is continuing to happen. What, in fact, can have occurred that could be responsible for sending this sediment from the greatest depths to the surface in such amazing quantities?'

Phyllis felt that it was time she made a contribution.

'Well, there was that atomic bomb off the Marianas. I should think that would have made quite a stir down below,' she said.

Dr Matet regarded her severely. 'That bomb was dropped after the phenomenon had been observed, and in any case it is highly doubtful whether the results of a disturbance there would have been concentrated into the Kuro Siwo.'

'Oh,' said Phyllis.

'It is, as you know, an actively volcanic area,' Dr Matet launched off again, 'so that one's natural inclination would be to attribute the disturbance to the opening of some new vent, or vents, on the sea-bottom. The seismograph records, however, give no support to that view. No major seismic shock has been registered —'

Phyllis went on listening patiently while he demolished earthquakes as a possible cause.

'And yet,' she remarked at the end of it, 'something not only was, but still is, going on down there?'

'Something is,' he agreed, looking at her. Then, with a sudden descent to the vernacular, he added: 'But, to be honest with, you, Lord knows what it is.'

He went on. Phyllis learned that, since then, similarly unexplained somethings had been throwing up deep-sea sediments into the Monsoon Drifts, off Guatemala; and also across the other side of the isthmus into the Mosquito Current. A thickening of the waters in equatorial mid-Atlantic had been observed, and the most recent report was of ooze appearing in the West Australian Current. There were also several minor irregularities of the same kind. Phyllis did her best to list them for possible reference, but just before she left she managed to put in a question on the aspect which seemed to her most interesting and important.

'Tell me this, Dr Matet,' she asked. 'Do you think it is serious — I mean, is it a thing that worries you?'

He smiled at her. 'It doesn't keep me awake at night, if that's what you mean. No, our worry about it, if you can call it that, is that we don't like having to admit that we are utterly baffled in our own bailiwick. As for its effect — well, I should think that might be beneficial. There is a great deal of nutritious ooze lying wasted on the sea-bottom. The more of it that comes up, the more the plankton will thrive; and the more the plankton thrives, the more the fish will thrive; consequently the price of fish ought to go down, which will be very nice for those who like fish — of which I am not one. No, what troubles me is that I feel I ought to be able to answer a simple "why?" on the matter — after all, I am supposed to have been an expert for a number of years now…'

'Too much geography,' said Phyllis, 'and too much oceanography, and too much bathyography: too much of all the ographies, and lucky to escape ichthyology.'

'Tell me,' I said.

She did, with notes. 'And,' she concluded, 'I'd like to see even Mrs Hawkes scribe a script out of that lot.'

'H'm,' I said.

'There's no h'm about it. Some kind of ographer might give a talk on it to highbrows and low listening figures, but even if he were intelligible, where'd it get anybody?'

'That,' I remarked, 'is the key question each time. But little by little the bits do accumulate. This is another bit. You didn't really expect to come back with the stuff for a whole script, anyway. He didn't suggest how this might link up with the rest of it?'

'No. I said it was sort of funny how everything seemed to be happening down in the most inaccessible parts of the ocean lately, and a few things like that, but he didn't rise. Very cautious. I think he was rather wishing he had not agreed to see me, so he stuck to verifiable facts. Eminently non-wheedlable — at first meeting, anyhow. He admitted he doesn't know, but he is not going to make any guesses that might send his reputation the way Bocker's has gone. What it amounts to is that he'd like it to be volcanic, but it can't be because of the evidence, and it's not likely that it is due to an explosion, or series of explosions, of any kind because it keeps on coming up in a more or less steady flow which suggests that the force at work is both immense and continuous. Now you have a shot at it.'

'Look,' I said. 'Bocker must have got to know about this as soon as anyone did. He ought to have some views on it, and it might be worth trying to find out what they are. That select Press-Conference of his that we went to was almost an introduction.'

'He went very coy after that,' she said, doubtfully. 'Not surprising, really. Still, we weren't among the ones who panned him publicly — in fact, we were very objective.'

'Toss you which of us rings him up,' I offered.

'I'll do it,' she said.

'I suppose it's being a victim of the charm myself that stops me being jealous of the supreme self-confidence it inspires,' I said, 'Okay. Go ahead.'

So I leant back comfortably in my chair, and listened to her going through the opening ceremony of making it clear that she was the EBC, not the BBC.

I will say for Bocker that having proposed his mouthful of a theory and then sold it to himself, he had not ratted on the deal when he found it unpopular. At the same time he had no great desire to be involved in a further round of controversy when he would be pelted with cheap cracks and drowned in the noise from empty vessels. He made that quite clear when we met. He looked at us earnestly, his head a little on one side, a lock of his grey hair hanging slightly forward, his hands clasped together. He nodded thoughtfully, and then said:

'You want a theory from me because nothing you can think of will explain this phenomenon. Very well, you shall have one. I don't suppose you'll accept it, but I do ask you if you use it at all to use it anonymously. When people come round to my view again, I shall be ready, but I prefer not to be thought of as keeping my name before the public by letting out sensational driblets — is that quite clear?'

We nodded.

'What we are trying to do,' Phyllis explained, 'is to fit a lot of bits and pieces into a puzzle. If you can show us where one of them should go, we're very grateful. If you would rather not have the credit for it, well, that is your own affair, and we'll respect it.'

'Exactly. Well, you already know my theory of the origin of the deep-water intelligences, so we'll not go into that now. We'll deal with their present state, and I deduce that to be this: having settled into the environment best suited to them, these creatures' next thought would be to develop that environment in accordance with their ideas of what constitutes a convenient, orderly, and, eventually, civilized condition. They are, you see, in the position of — well, no, they are actually pioneers, colonists: Once they have safely arrived they set about improving and exploiting their new territory. What we have been seeing are the results of their having started work on the job.'

'By doing what?' I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. 'How can we possibly tell? But judging by the way we have received them, one would imagine that their primary concern would be to provide themselves with some form of defence against us. For this they would presumably require metals. I suggest to you, therefore, that somewhere down in the Mindanao Deep, and also somewhere in the Deep in the south-east of the Cocos-Keeling Basin, you would, if you could go there, find mining operations now in progress.'

I glimpsed the reason for his demand for anonymity.

'Er — but the working of metals in such conditions —?' I said.

'How can we guess what technology they may have developed? We ourselves have plenty of techniques for doing things which would at first thought appear impossible in an atmospheric pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch; there are also a number of unlikely things we can do under water.' —

'But, with a pressure of tons, and in continual darkness, and —' but Phyllis cut across me with that decisiveness which warns me to shut up and not argue.

'Dr Bocker,' she said, 'you named two particular Deeps then; why was that?'

He turned from me to her.

'Because that seems to me the only reasonable explanation where those two are concerned. It may be, as Mr Holmes once remarked to your husband's illustrious namesake, "a capital mistake to theorize before one has data," but it is mental suicide to funk the data one has. I know of nothing, and can imagine nothing, that could produce the effect we have here except some exceedingly powerful machine for continuous ejection.'

'But,' I said, a little firmly, for I get rather tired of being dogged by the ghost of Mr Holmes, 'if it is mining as you suggest, then why is the discoloration due to ooze, and not grit?'

'Well, firstly there would be a great deal of ooze to be shifted before one could get at the rock, immense deposits, most likely; and secondly, the density of the ooze is little more than that of the water, whereas the grit, being heavy, would begin to settle long before it got anywhere near the surface, however fine it might be.'

Before I could pursue that, Phyllis cut me off again:

'What about the other places, Doctor. Why mention just those two?'

'I don't say that the others don't also signify mining, but I suspect, from their locations, that they may have another purpose.'

'Which is —? prompted Phyllis, looking at him, all girlish expectation.

'Communications, I think. You see, for instance, close to, though far below, the area where discoloration begins to occur in the equatorial Atlantic Lies the Romanche Trench. It is a gorge through the submerged mountains of the Atlantic Ridge. Now, when one considers the fact that it forms the only deep link between the eastern and western Atlantic Basins, it seems more than just a coincidence that signs of activity should show up there. In fact, it strongly suggests to me that something down below is not satisfied with the natural state of that Trench. It is quite likely that it is blocked here and there by falls of rock. It may be that in some parts it is narrow and awkward; almost certainly, if there were a prospect of using it, it would be an advantage to clear it of ooze deposits down to a solid bottom. I don't know, of course, but the fact that something is undoubtedly taking place in that strategic Trench leaves me with little doubt that whatever is down there is concerned to improve its methods of getting about in the depths — just as we have improved our ways of getting about on the surface.'

There was a silence while we took in that one, and its implications. Phyllis rallied first.

'Er — and the other two main places — the Caribbean one, and the one west of Guatemala?' she asked.

Dr Bocker offered us cigarettes, and lit one himself.

'Well, now,' he remarked, leaning back in his chair, 'doesn't it strike you as probable that for a creature of the depths a tunnel connecting the Deeps on either side of the isthmus would offer advantages almost identical with those that we ourselves obtain from the existence of the Panama Canal?'

People may say what they like about Bocker, but they can never truthfully claim that the scope of his ideas is mean or niggling. What is more, nobody has ever actually proved him wrong. His chief trouble was that he usually provided such large, indigestible slabs that they stuck in all gullets — even mine, and I would class myself as a fairly wide-gulleted type. That, however, was a subsequent reflection. At the climax of the interview I was chiefly occupied with trying to convince myself that he really meant what he had said, and finding nothing but my own resistance to suggest that he did not.

Before we left, he gave us one more thing to think about, too. He said:

'Since you are following this along, you've probably heard of two atomic bombs that failed to go off?'

We told him we had.

'And have you heard that there was an unsponsored atomic explosion yesterday?'

'No. Was it one of them?' Phyllis asked.

'I should very much hope so — because I should hate to think it could be any other,' he replied. 'But the odd thing is that though one was lost off the Aleutians, and the other in the process of trying to give the Mindanao Deep another shake up, the explosion took place not so far off Guam — a good twelve hundred miles from Mindanao.'

'I wish,' said Phyllis, 'that I had been kinder and tried to pay more attention to dear Miss Popple who used to try to teach me geography, poor thing. Every day the world gets fuller of places I never heard of.'

'That's perfectly in order,' I told her. 'Haven't you noticed that the places mentioned in military communiqués are scarcely ever to be found on the maps? The geographers never heard of them, either.'

'Well, it says here that over sixty people were drowned when a tsunami struck Roast Beef Island. Where's Roast Beef Island? And what's a tsunami?'

'I don't know where Roast Beef Island is, though I can offer you two Plum Pudding Islands. But tsunami is Japanese for an earthquake-wave.'

She regarded me.

'You needn't look so smug, dear. It's only half marks. The thing is, would it be anything to do with us?'

'Us?'

'Well, with those things down there, I mean.'

'Not unless it was a phoney tsunami.'

'How euphonious! "Phoney tsunami!"' She went on crooning; 'Euphony — euphony — phoney — tsunami' to herself for a bit until she ended suddenly: 'How would we know?'

'Look, I'm trying to think. Know what?'

'Whether it's phoney or not, of course.'

'Well, you could ring up your learned pal, Dr Matet. Oceanographers have meters and things to tell them what kind of wave's what, and where it comes from.'

'Do they really. How?'

'How would I know how? They just do. He'd be sure to have heard if there were anything funny about it.'

'All right,' she said, and went off.

Presently she came back.

'It's okay,' she reported, disappointedly. 'There was, I quote: "a minor seismic disturbance in the neighbourhood of St Ambrose Island, longitude something, latitude something else." Anyway, off Chile. And Roast Beef Island is another name for Esperanzia Island.'

'Where's Esperanzia Island?' I inquired.

'I don't know,' she said, happily.

She sat down and picked up the paper. 'Everything seems to have gone very quiet lately,' she said.

'I hadn't noticed it. I might, if you would try to do some work, too,' I replied.

A few minutes' silence ensued. Then she said:

'Captain Winters rang up yesterday. Did you know there hasn't been a single fireball reported for over two months?'

Evidently this was one of those mornings. I put my pen into its holder, and took out a cigarette.

'I didn't, but it's not very surprising; they've been rare for quite a time now. Had he any comments?'

'Oh, no. He just sort of mentioned it.'

'I suppose the Bocker view would be that the first phase of colonization has been completed: the pioneers have established themselves, and the settlement is now on its own to sink or swim.'

'Predominantly, sink,' said Phyllis.

'Anybody who happened to overhear the home twitterings of EBC's clever feature-script writer could blackmail us for years,' I told her.

It passed her by.

'I've been thinking about what Mallarby said,' she remarked, 'and I don't see why people couldn't make up their minds to leave those things down there alone. I mean, if there is one part of the world that can be of no conceivable use to us, a part we can't even reach, and it happens to suit them, then why not let them have it?'

'That's reasonable — superficially, at any rate,' I agreed, 'but Mallarby's point was, and I agree with that, that it's a matter of instinct, not reason. The instinct of self-protection is opposed to the very idea of an alien intelligence — and not without pretty good cause. It's difficult to imagine any kind of intelligence, except a sheer abstraction, that wouldn't be concerned to modify its environment for its own betterment. But it is very unlikely that the ideas of betterment held by two different types would be identical — so unlikely that it suggests a hypothesis that, given two intelligent species with differing requirements on one planet, it is inevitable that, sooner or later, one will exterminate the other.'

Phyllis thought it over.

'That has a pretty grim, Darwinian sound, Mike,' she remarked.

'"Grim" isn't an objective word, darling. It's simply the way things usually work. If one species lived in salt water, and the other in fresh, you would, in the course of time, inevitably reach a situation where the interests of the races demanded that one should freshen the sea while the other was doing its damnedest to salt the lakes and rivers. It looks to me as if that is bound to apply unless the needs are identical — and if the needs are identical, then they are not a different species.'

'You mean, you're in favour of going on sending down atom bombs, and that kind of thing?' she said.

'Darling, if I happen to mention that, as a process, autumn follows summer, it does not follow that I am all for getting a ladder and pulling the leaves off the trees.'

'I don't see why you should want to.'

'I don't.'

'You mean, you're not in favour of sending down atom bombs? By the way you were talking before, I thought —'

'Look, let's drop atom bombs for the moment — no, damn it, I mean, let's leave them out of it. The thing is that once we had developed intelligence we weren't satisfied with the world as we found it; so, are the things down there likely to be satisfied with it as they find it? Such evidence as we have suggests that they are not — they don't like being bombed by us, for instance. Then the real point is, how long will it be before the efforts to change it for the convenience of both parties come into serious opposition?'

'Well, since you've asked me, I should say you have answered your own question: it happened when we prodded them with the first atom bomb. That's what I'm complaining about.'

'Scarcely a matter for complaint, darling, and anyway, it's too late. We must have gone down then on their environment-improvement list with a high priority, even if we hadn't before. There was a certain ominousness in the speed with which they took up the defensive — as if they might have expected something of the kind and prepared for it. What really remains to be seen is whether the natural obstacles that now separate us will defeat their abilities — as they almost defeat ours — and, if they do not, then how we can meet them when they come.'

'Then, on the whole, you are in favour of dropping bombs?' suggested Phyllis.

'For goodness sake! Let's get this thing straight. Darling, I and the Royal Navy are not in favour of dropping atom bombs: we think it poisons too much water, for problematical results. But I, and, I hope, the Royal Navy, too, are prepared to take up arms against this sea of troubles, as and when it may appear necessary and effective. In this I have no doubt that others will join us. The weapons to be chosen will be dictated largely by the time, place, and nature of the need.'

Phyllis sat with her head propped on her left hand, her eyes unseeingly on the newspaper.

'You said, "inevitable". Do you really think that?' she asked, after a time.

'Yes. Even if only part of what Bocker thinks is right. We can't both inherit the Earth.'

'When, do you think?'

I shrugged my shoulders. 'When you think of the difficulties that both lots must overcome to get at the other effectively, it looks as if it might be a long time coming to a head — a generation or two, perhaps, or a century or two. I don't see how anybody could hope to get nearer than a wild guess.'

Phyllis picked up a pencil, and watched her fingers abstractedly as they twiddled it. Presently she became quite still, staring rigidly at nothing. I knew the symptoms, and forbore to interrupt. After a time she said:

'How would this be? Start with sounds of a tearing wind and an angry sea. Perhaps a lifeboat putting out, with the men's words blown away as they speak. Then fade out all but the natural sounds of wind and sea. Then — how would you contrive the effect of sinking under the water? Keep the water-sounds, and diminish the wind? Then give the water-sounds a slower rhythm, diminishing, too, gradually. Voice counts: " — three fathoms — four fathoms — full fathom five — and down — down — down — " There's only a slow, indefinite surge to suggest water movement now. As it gets fainter you begin to hear the chirruping fish, then the squawking ones, and the others until there's fish pandemonium, which gradually diminishes to a final chirrup. Then — I'm not sure whether it ought to be the voice telling the fathoms, or whether a mysterious silence would be more effective — but next, deep grunts, some snarls, and galumphing noises. Voice intones about Leviathan and the monsters of the deep, and repeats " — down — down — down —" Occasional, indefinable sounds until absolute silence, out of which Voice says:

'"The deep-sea bottom! The uttermost part of the Earth! It is dark; it has always been dark; it will always be dark until the seas dry up and the arid Earth spins on her endless way, with life a tale that has long been told and finished.

'"But now, that is far away in the future, as far away in time as it will take the sun to scorch up the five miles of water above our heads; and it is dark.

'"It is cold, too, as cold as any glacier; and quiet… and still… It has been still for aeons

' "We have brought down light with us from the world far above, and we switch it on. We see a wide floor flanked by gigantic rocky cliffs. But it is not a solid floor. If we were to try to step on it we should sink through many feet of ooze before it became solid enough to support us.

' "All the time, in the beam of our lights we can see motes endlessly descending and descending to make the great bed of ooze.

'"It is an eerie place, an awful place, death's own place; for the floor, the rock shelves, everything but the perpendicular faces of the cliffs, is drifted deep with the mortal remains of untold billion millions of minute creatures. 'Nothing,' you would say, 'absolutely nothing could live here. This is beyond the reach of life: the nethermost pit.'

'"But —" and then some stuff about the improbable places you do find life, leading up to: "— is this, the most secret womb in the world, not barren, after all?" Er, well, words to that effect, anyway. And then, giving the Bocker line a complete miss: 'Is a new form of life — and not only of life, but of intelligent life — about to emerge from these depths, from this slime, and struggle up through the miles of water to the sunlight, perhaps to challenge the supremacy of man himself? Millions of years ago our own ancestors crawled from the sea on to the land —" Then sprinkle in some bits which support the possibility. Then you can follow on with a piece about the inevitable animosity, and I can take the line that should the two forms of intelligence be complementary they may be able to solve all the riddles of the universe between them. What about something along those lines?'

I considered. 'Well, to be frank, darling, I don't quite see the over-all form, and conclusion.'

'I'm seeing it rather as one of those "Whither —?" things, only not highbrow. You know, ending on a question.'

'As well it may. If I may say so, Voice doesn't seem to have quite made up his mind whether he is a florid moralist, or a metaphorical guide. But I think I see the mood you're after — the picture of a new kind of life emerging from the mysteries of a sort of super Celtic-twilight — that kind of thing?'

'Well, allowing for the fact that I shouldn't express it at all like that — roughly, yes, I suppose.'

'Well, Phyl, you'd have an awful handful there, because, honestly, I don't think this thing can be made to lend itself to a romantic treatment. Why not wait until we get a few more facts to add to it, and then try again along more documentary lines? They're always your real hits, you know.'

She thought it over. 'You're probably right, Mike. But I'd like to get in first with that angle, so I hope we don't have to wait too long for the extra facts.'

'I, on the other hand, would prefer that we should never have them at all. I should be a lot happier if I were to hear that the things down there had simply drowned themselves, but I'm prepared to be disappointed.'

And I thought I was. Nobody, however, was really prepared for the next day's news.