Chapter V: Part 5

Terry plunged his fish spear into the worm. It jerked violently. There were enormous thrashings. Other similar white-disked arms thrust into view, fumbling somehow angrily for the creature--Terry--which had dared to attack it.

He darted for the surface. Something unspeakably horrible touched him, but it was the smooth and not the suckered side of the groping worm. Terry's head was now above water. He grasped the gunwale to pull himself in, in a fever of haste. But the thing that had touched him before came back. It grazed his leg, for just a second. Where it touched, his flesh burned like fire.

"Start ... motor!" gasped Terry. "Get away!"

Something touched the stern-board of the boat. Deirdre pulled the starter of the motor.

"Get in!" she said tensely. "Quickly!"

She saw him, straining every muscle by pure, agonized instinct against the irresistible force of whatever clung to his skin. The horrible tentacle stretched, and part of its length took a new grip. It crawled upon him.... Deirdre saw the look on his face.

She snatched up the second spear and stabbed past him, into the crawling beast. There was a most violent jerking. She stabbed again. She panted. She gasped. She stabbed and stabbed, sobbing with fear and horror. And Terry tumbled in over the gunwale, released. As soon as he fell onto the floor-boards he painfully dragged himself toward the motor at the stern. Something bumped the boat underneath. Terry pulled the starter and the motor suddenly roared. But the boat didn't start immediately, and it jerked once more. The whirling propeller-blades had touched one of the groping tentacles and cut it. Tumult arose.

The boat surged into motion and Terry, with clenched teeth, sent it into a crazy, skidding turn to avoid a surface swirl, and then another frantic swerve when something showed momentarily above the surface. The boat zig-zagged along. A grisly, writhing object rose above the water, flailing, a fish-spear sticking in it. The small, skimming boat dodged and twisted at its topmost speed.... It suddenly straightened out and almost flew across the water toward the land.

_Eight_

Echoes of the outboard's roaring motor came back from the trunks of palm trees that lined the lagoon's shore as the tiny boat raced across the water. Deirdre was ashen-white. She turned her eyes from the water, and they fell on the round raw places on Terry's leg where the sucker-disks had bruised it horribly. She shuddered. She still had the sensation of being pursued by the monster. Back where Deirdre's spear had finally liberated Terry, startled and convulsive motions continued, followed by a final gigantic splash. Terry drove the boat on at top speed.

The monster sank again in the spot where the lagoon was deepest. It had come from depths where there was no light; from an abyss where blackness was absolute. Now, having lost its victim, it returned peevishly to such darkness as it could secure.

Terry said curtly, as the small boat raced for the _Esperance_ and the wharf, "That creature was driven up from the Luzon Deep into the lagoon to replace the gadget-carrying fish we speared!"

Deirdre stammered a little.

"Your l-leg.... You're bleeding...."

"I'm pretty well skinned in a couple of places," he said shortly. "That's all."

"Could it be poisonous?"

"Poison," said Terry, "is a weapon for the weak. This thing's not weak! I'm all right. And I'm lucky!"

"I'd have jumped over with my spear, if ..."

"Idiot!" said Terry gently. "Never think of such a thing! Never! Never!"

"I wouldn't want to l-live--"

A new reverberating quality came into the echoes from the shore. The pilings of the wharf were nearby, now. They multiplied the sounds they returned. The _Esperance_ loomed up. Terry cut off the motor, the little boat drifted to contact, and Deirdre scrambled to the yacht's deck, and then took the bow line and fastened it. This was absurdly commonplace. It was exactly what would have been done on the return from any usual ride.

"Go tell the others what we found," said Terry. "I'm going to see if there's more than one of those things around."

"Not ..."

"No," he assured her. "I'm only going to use the fish-driving horn."

Deirdre looked at him in distress.

"Be careful! Please!" She kissed him suddenly, scrambled to the wharf, and set off at a run toward the shore. Terry stared hungrily after her. They'd come to a highly personal decision the night before on the _Esperance_, but it still seemed unbelievable to him that Deirdre felt about him the way he felt about her.

He went forward to set up the fish-driving combination. One part of him thought vividly of Deirdre. The other faced the consequences that might follow if the bolides were not bolides, and if the plastic gadgets and the nasty-sounding underwater hums were products of an intelligence which could make bolides change their velocity in space; which made them fall in the Luzon Deep in the China Sea and nowhere else.

He set up the recorder with its loop of fish-driving hum. He put the horn overboard, carefully oriented to spread its sound through all the enclosed shallow water of the lagoon. He turned the extra amplifier to maximum output, to increase the effectiveness of the noise, and turned on the apparatus.

The glassy look of the lagoon-water vanished immediately. Fish leaped crazily everywhere, from half-inch midgets to lean-flanked predators a yard and more in length. There was no square foot in all the shallows where a creature didn't struggle to escape the sensation of pins and needles all over its body. And these pins and needles pricked deep.

Flying-fish soared crazily, and they were the most fortunate because so long as they flew, the tormenting water-sound did not reach them. But many of them landed on the beach, and even among the palms.

In the spot where blind and snakelike arms had tried to destroy Terry and Deirdre, the lashing and swirling was of a different kind. Something there used enormous strength to offer battle to a noise. The water was whipped to froth. Twice Terry saw those rope-like arms rise above the water and flail it.

This particular sort of tumult, however, appeared only in one spot. So there was only one such creature in the lagoon.

When Davis and the others came down from the tracking station, Terry turned off the horn. He was applying soothing ointment to the raw flesh of his leg.

"There's a monstrous creature out there," he said evenly when a white-faced Davis demanded information. "Heaven knows how big it is, but it's something like a huge squid. It may be the kind that sperm whales feed on, down in the depths."

Others from the tracking station arrived, panting.

"Oh! I'm tired of being conservative!" added Terry fiercely. "I'm going to say what all of us think! There's something intelligent down at the bottom of the sea, five miles down!"

He glared challengingly around him.

"Who doesn't believe that?" he demanded. "Well, the reporting gadgets don't report any more. We killed the fish that carried them. So that whatever-it-is down on the sea-bed has very cleverly sent up something we ignorant savages wouldn't dare to meddle with! We would be terrified. But we'll show _it_ what men are like!"

Dr. Morton said gently, "Perhaps we should notify the _Pelorus_. The biologists on board there...."

"No!" said Terry grimly. "I have a private quarrel with this monster. It might have killed Deirdre! And Davis already tried to tell those biologists something! Tell them about this, and they'll want proofs they wouldn't look at anyhow. We'll handle this ourselves! It's too important for them!"

"Much too important," said Deirdre firmly. "The shooting stars aren't shooting stars and there's something down in the depths just like Terry says. He's right that we can't consider sharing our world with--beings that come down from the sky, even if they only want our oceans and don't care about the land. He says that we wouldn't get along with creatures that know more than we do, and we would especially resent any space ships coming uninvited to start colonies on our world while we're not advanced enough to stop them! If that's what they're doing, they have to be fought from the very first instant to the very last moment there's one of them hiding in our seas! Terry's right!"

"I haven't heard him say any of those things, young lady," said Morton drily, "but they're true. And I don't like the idea of a sea monster being in the lagoon anyhow. Especially one that tries to kill people. Still, fighting it...."

"There are a couple of bazookas on the _Esperance_," said Terry sharply. He looked at Davis. "If you're willing to risk the yacht, we can drive the beast aground, or at least to shallow water, with the submarine horn. Then the bazookas should be able to destroy it. Will you take the risk?"

"Of course you'll use the _Esperance_," said Davis. "Of course!"

"Then I'll want," said Terry, unconsciously taking command, "somebody at the engine and somebody at the wheel. I'll run the horn. But, frankly, if that monster lays one sucker-arm on the _Esperance_, it may be good-bye. Any volunteers?"

In minutes the _Esperance_, her engine rumbling, pulled away from the dock. She had on board all her original company except Deirdre--firmly left ashore by her father and Terry--and in addition she carried Dr. Morton and the most enthusiastic amateur photographer of the tracking station staff. He was shaky but resolute, and was hanging about with an imposing array of cameras, for both still and motion pictures. The _Esperance's_ sails were furled and she went into battle under bare poles. Davis was busy manufacturing improvised hand grenades for himself and Morton.

The sun was nearly overhead. Terry asked Morton questions about the lagoon. They finally chose a minor inlet as the place to which the creature must be driven, if possible. There it could be immobilized by the intolerable sound from the recorder. There it could be destroyed.

"I wonder," said Morton wryly, "if I can present a dead giant squid as part of the explanation for my computed orbits for the last two bolides!"

The _Esperance_ moved steadily toward the place where Terry had nearly been killed.

The enterprise was risky. The _Esperance_ was sixty-five feet long. The creature it was to attack was much larger, and if one of its kind had crushed the bathyscaphe, it had sufficient strength and ferocity to make a battle cruiser a much more suitable antagonist. But the true folly of the effort was its purpose.

It all started when a fishing boat--_La Rubia_--went to sea and caught remarkable quantities of fish, of which four specimens had had plastic artefacts fastened to them. Then Terry began checking on certain noises he heard in the sea which provoked an incomprehensible crowding of millions of fish into a small area, from which they swam down to depths where they could not survive. Now the killing of this squid was supposed to cast a light on the mystery of the nine bolides which had fallen into a particular part of the ocean.

Terry had the undersea horn turned vertically so that it would transmit a blade of sound wherever he aimed it, instead of spreading all through the lagoon. He turned it on.

The water before the _Esperance_ suddenly speckled and splashed from the maddened leaps of fish of every possible size. He turned it off. He aimed it where the ripples showed the presence of something huge beneath the surface. He turned it on again.

There were convulsive writhings. A long tentacle emerged briefly and then splashed under again. The writhings continued. Terry adjusted his aim. Crazy leapings of smaller creatures showed the line of the sound-beam, as tracer-bullets show the paths of bullets from a machine gun. He cut off the sound for an instant and turned it on again at full volume, pointed where the monster must be. There was explosive tumult underwater. Huge arms flailed above the surface. But once again the creature fled.

The _Esperance_ followed slowly, now. The monster had reacted to the stinging sound-beam as if cowed. But it was a deep-sea creature. It did not know how to move when squeezed into a shallow water which hampered its movements. It seemed frightened to discover itself trapped between the lagoon-bottom and the surface. And it was dazzled by the brightness to which it had been driven. Left unattacked, even for an instant, it tried to burrow away from the light, and again it made a dense cloud of mud from the bottom. Then it became quiet, as if hiding.

Grimly, Terry lanced it with the painful noise. The water frothed. Monstrous tentacles appeared and disappeared, and once part of the creature's body itself emerged. It was cornered into a minor inlet, and there the water grew more shallow and the monster did not want to go to where its motions would be even more confined.

It seemed to flow into the deepest part of the miniature bay. It was as if it felt certain of a haven there. When the tormenting noise-beam struck again, the abyssal monster flung itself about crazily. A terrible, frustrated rage filled it. Its arms fumbled here and there, above water and below. It hauled itself upright so that a part of its torpedo-shaped body broke through the surface. The monster was mad with fury. It plunged toward the _Esperance_, not swimming now, but crawling with all its eight legs in water too shallow to submerge it. Its effort was desperate. It lifted everything from the water, and splashed everything down again, all the while crawling toward its enemy.

Terry saw Nick and Jug steady the aim of their bazookas. Davis ran toward the bow with hand grenades. The huge squid came crawling, and with every foot of advance the pain-noise grew more unendurable. Suddenly the creature uttered a mooing cry and retreated. The cry was like the mooing noise Terry had picked up from the depths.

It went aground. It struggled to climb ashore, to do anything to escape its tormentors. It foamed and splashed....

Despairing, it turned to face its tormentors. Its body reared almost entirely out of the water, now. It sagged flabbily. It reeled as its arms strained. Its eyes rose above the surface, blinded by the light. They were huge eyes. Squids alone, among the invertebrates, have eyes like those of land beasts. They flamed demoniac hatred. A beak appeared, not unlike a parrot's, but capable of rending steel plates. The beak opened and closed with clicking sounds that were singularly horrifying. It snapped at the yacht, which was beyond reach. One of the tentacles wrenched violently at something. It gave. The arm rose above the water. A thorny mass of branched coral flew through the air and splashed close beside the _Esperance_.

"Shoot!" said Terry, somehow sickened. "Dammit, shoot!"

Nick and Tony aimed closely. The bazookas made their peculiar, inadequate sounds. The bazooka-shells, like small rocket-missiles, sped through the short distance. They struck. Their shaped charges detonated, again with inadequate loudness. They did not explode in a fashion to tear the creature to bits. Instead, they sent lancing flames a thousand times more deadly than bullets into the squid's flesh.

It fought insanely. It uttered shrill cries. Its arms tore at its own wounds, at the water, at the lagoon-bed as if it would rend and shatter all the universe in its rage.

The bazookas fired again and again.

It was the eighth missile from the bazooka which ended the battle. Then the enormous body went limp. Its horny beak ceased to try to crush all creation. But the long, thick, sucker-disked arms thrashed aimlessly for a long time. Even when they ceased to throw themselves about, they quivered and rippled for a considerable period more. And when it seemed that all life had left the gigantic beast, and the men from the satellite-tracking station stepped on the monstrous body, it suddenly jerked once more, in a last attempt to murder.

The squid's body, without the tentacles, was thirty-five feet long. The largest squid, the Atlantic variety, captured before had a mantle no longer than twenty feet. That relatively familiar creature, _Architeuthis princeps_, came to a maximum total length of fifty-two feet. Counting the two longest arms of this one, it reached eighty. It could not possibly swim in water less than six yards deep. It did not belong in a coral lagoon, but it was there.

It was close to sunset when the last tremors of the great mass of flesh were stilled. Terry was in no mood for eating, afterward. He skipped the evening meal altogether, and paced up and down the veranda of the dining hall, at the satellite-tracking station. Inside, there was a clatter of dishes and a humming of voices. Outside, there was a soft, warm, starlit night. The surf boomed on the reef outside the lagoon.

Deirdre came out and walked quickly into Terry's arms. She kissed him and then drew back.

"Darling!" she said softly. Her voice changed. "How is your leg? Does it still hurt?"

"It's nothing to worry about," said Terry. "I'm worried about something else. Two things, in fact."

"Name one!" said Deirdre, smiling.

"I'd like to get married soon," said Terry ruefully.

"To whom?" she asked, jokingly.

"But I have to have a business or an income first. I think, though, that with a little hard work I can start up my _especialidades electrónicas y físicas_ again, and if you don't mind skimping a little ..."

"I'll adore it," said Deirdre enthusiastically. "What else would I want? What's the other thing you worry about?"

"That monster," said Terry with some grimness.

"Pouf!" said Deirdre. "You've killed it!"

"I don't mean that one," said Terry more grimly. "I mean the one that sent it. I wish I knew what it is and what it intends to do!"

"You've already found out more than anybody else even dared to guess!" she protested.

"But not enough. We've stirred it up. It sent small fish in the lagoon here and elsewhere to report back to it. We can't guess what the fish reported, but we know some of it was about human beings. Whatever is down at the bottom of the sea must be interested in men. Remember? It made a patch of foam that swallowed up one ship and all its crew. It's interested in men, all right!"

"True, but...."

"We dropped the dredge, which implied that we were interested in it. The bathyscaphe indicated more interest on our part. To discourage that interest--or perhaps in self-defense--it wrecked the bathyscaphe."

"It, Terry?" asked Deirdre. "Or _ellos_, they?"

"They," he corrected himself coldly. "We killed the fish that were reporting men's doings from here. That was insolence on our part. So the hum at the lagoon entrance went off and, after two nights, started again--and then this huge squid was found in the lagoon. It should have been able to defend itself against us. It was sent up here because it was capable of defending itself! But we've killed it just the same. So now what will come up out of the depths? And what will it do?"

Deirdre said firmly, "You'll be ready for it when it comes!"

"Maybe," said Terry. "Your father once mentioned an instrument he'd like to have to take a relief map of the ocean bottom. Changed around a little, it might be something we need very badly indeed. The horn we've got is good, but not good enough. I'll talk to the electronics men here."

There was a noise of scraping chairs, inside the dining hall. People came out, talking cheerfully. There was much to talk about on Thrawn Island today. The killing of a giant squid had been preceded by a specific guess that linked it to meteoric falls in the Luzon Deep. Logically, the excitement had grown.

Terry found his electronics specialists, and explained to them the type of apparatus he was interested in. He asked if it was included in the island's technical stores. He wanted to assemble something capable of emitting underwater noises of special quality and unprecedented power. There is not much power involved in sound through the air. A cornet player manages with much effort to convert four-tenths of a watt of power into music. A public-address system for a large area may give out fifteen watts of noise. Terry described a device which could use a small amount of power, serving as a sonar or a depth-finding unit, and then, with the throw of a switch, turn kilowatts into vibrations underneath the sea. If powerful and shrill enough, such vibrations could be lethal.

A technical argument ensued. Terry's demands were toned down to fit the equipment at hand. Then three men went with him to the island's workshop. They took off their coats and set to work.

Three hours later someone noticed an unknown vessel making its way into the lagoon. She was stubby and small, and had short thick masts with heavy booms tilted up at steep angles. Her Diesel engines boomed hollowly, louder than the surf. As she entered the lagoon, a searchlight winked on and flicked here and there. It finally found the wharf where the _Esperance_ was moored.

Men of the tracking station staff went down to the wharf to meet the small row boat that was now coming ashore.

A short, stout, irate fishing boat skipper waved his arms and shouted angrily. What had _los americanos_ done to keep _La Rubia_ from catching fish? Why had they changed the arrangement by which the starving wives and children of _La Rubia's_ crew were fed? He would protest to the Philippine Government! He would expose the villainy of _los americanos_ to the world! He demanded that now, instantly, the original state of affairs be restored!

A fish leaped out of the water nearby. Where it leaped, and where it fell back, bright specks of luminosity appeared. Even the ripples of the splashes glowed faintly as they spread outward. The skipper of _La Rubia_ stared. And now the people of the island realized that the look of the water was not altogether commonplace. Little bluish flames under the surface showed that many fish darted there. There were more fish than usual in the lagoon. Many more. The lagoon had suddenly become a fine place to catch fish. Some care would be needed, of course. There were doubtless coral heads in plenty. But still ...

The skipper of _La Rubia_ abruptly returned to his fury and his protests. _La Rubia_ had gone to the place where she always found fish. Always! There was a humming in the water there, and fish were to be found in quantity. But yesterday the American ship had been there, and also this very yacht! _La Rubia_ stayed out of sight lest the _americanos_ learn her fishing secrets. But it was useless. When the two American ships were gone, there was no longer a humming in the sea and no more fish for the crew of _La Rubia_ to capture for their hungry wives and children. And therefore he, Capitán Saavedra, demanded that the _americanos_ restore the previous state of affairs.

Davis would have intervened, but the chubby skipper erupted into wilder and more theatrical accusations still.

Let them not deny what they had done! Fish were always to be found where there was a humming in the sea that _las orejas de ellos_ heard and reported to him. But that humming was not in its former place. It was here! At the entrance of the lagoon! The fish were here, also! _Los americanos_ had moved the fish so the crewmen of _La Rubia_ could not feed their wives and children. _Los americanos_ wished to take all the fish for themselves! But fish were the property of all men, especially fishermen with starving wives and children. So he, Capitán Saavedra, would fish in this lagoon, and he defied anyone to stop him.

"Certainly," said Terry. "_Seguramente!_" He added in Spanish: "We'll lend you a short-wave contact with Manila to make any complaints you please. I'm sure all the other fishing boats will be glad to hear where you've been catching fish, and where you've found the fish have moved to! Calm yourself, Capitán, and help yourself to the fish of the lagoon, and any time you want to call Manila we'll arrange it!"

He moved away. He went back to the electronics shop, while Morton and Davis and the others talked encouragingly to Capitán Saavedra. Presently they suggested that he accept their hospitality, and the Capitán and his oarsmen went up to the dining hall, where they were served dinner, and a more friendly mood developed. In time the Capitán said happily that he would wait till sunrise to lower his nets, because he didn't want to risk losing them on the coral heads. A few drinks later the Capitán boasted about his own system of fishing, as practised by _La Rubia_. The starving condition of his crew's wives and children ceased to be mentioned.

In the presence of so accomplished a liar, nobody of the tracking station staff mentioned a giant squid hauled partly, but only partly, out of the water. They suspected that he would not believe it. They were sure that he would top their real feat by an imaginary one. So the four crew-cuts listened politely, and fed him more drinks, and learned much.

In the workshop the most unlikely device Terry'd described took form. In effect, it was an underwater horn which was much more powerful than it looked. Submerged, and with power from a group of amplifiers in parallel, it would create a tremendous volume of underwater noise. That sound would run through a tube shaped like a gun-barrel. It would travel in a straight line, spreading only a little.

The same projection tube could also send out the tentative beep-beep-beep of sonar gear, or the peculiar noise a depth-finder makes. So the instrument could search out a distance or find a target, and then fling at it a beam of humming torment equal to bullets from a machine gun.

It would have taken Terry, alone, a long time to build. But he had three assistants, two of whom were very competent. By dawn, they had it ready to be mounted upon the _Esperance_. It was placed hanging from the bow, mounted on gimbals, so that it could point in any direction. It was firmly fixed to the yacht's planking.

There was plenty of activity on _La Rubia_, too, at daybreak. That squat and capable fishing boat prepared to harvest the fish in the lagoon. She got her nets over. She essayed to haul them. Some got caught on the coral heads rising from the lagoon's bottom toward the surface. Capitán Saavedra swore, and untangled them. He tried again. Again coral heads baulked the enterprise. The nets tore.

A helicopter came rattling into view from the south. It grew in size and loudness, and presently hovered over the tracking station. Then it made a wide, deliberate circuit of the lagoon. At the inlet where the squid lay almost entirely in the water--but fastened by ropes lest it drift away--above that spot, the helicopter hovered for a long time. It must have been taking photographs. Presently, it lowered one man by a line to the ground. Obviously, the man could not endure any delay in getting at so desirable a biological specimen. Then the helicopter went droning and rattling to the tracking station, and landed with an air of weariness.

_La Rubia_ continued to try to catch fish. They were here in plenty. But the coral heads were everywhere. Nets tore. Ropes parted. Capitán Saavedra waved his arms and swore.

The _Esperance_ rumbled and circled away from the wharf, and headed for the lagoon entrance. The singular contrivance built during the night was in place at her bow. She passed _La Rubia_, on whose deck men frantically mended nets.

The _Esperance_ passed between the small capes and the first of the ocean swells raised her bow and rocked her. She proceeded beyond the reef. The bottom of the sea dropped out of sight. Terry switched on the submarine ear and listened. The humming sound was to be expected here.

It had stopped. It was present yesterday, and even during the night, when _La Rubia_ came into the lagoon. But now the sea held no sound other than the multitudinous random noises of fish and the washing, roaring, booming of the surf.

Deirdre was aboard, of course. She watched Terry's face. He turned to the new instrument, and then dropped his hand.

"I think," he said carefully to Davis, "that I'd like to make a sort of sweep out to sea. It's just possible we'll find the hum farther out."

Deirdre said quickly, "I think I know what you're up to. You want to survey a large area of the ocean while something comes up. Then you can direct that "something" to the lagoon mouth by using your sound device, so the ... whatever-it-is has to take refuge in the lagoon. Since we've killed the squid...."

"That's it," said Terry. "Something like that happened when we speared the fish. The squid took their place. Now we've killed the squid. Just possibly...."

They found the humming sound in the water four miles off-shore. They traced it through part of a circle. If something were being driven upward, it could not pass through that wall of humming sound.

"That proves your point," Davis said. "Now what?"

Without realizing it, he'd yielded direction of the enterprise to Terry, who had unconsciously assumed it.

"Let's go back to the island," said Terry thoughtfully. "I've got a crazy idea--really crazy! I want to be where we can duck into shallow water when we try the new projector."

The _Esperance_ swung about and headed back toward the island. The sea and the distant island looked comfortingly normal and beautiful in the sunshine. Under so blue a sky it did not seem reasonable to worry about anything. Events or schemes at the bottom of the sea seemed certainly the last things to be likely to matter to anyone.

Terry had the _Esperance_ almost between the reefs before he tried the new contrivance. If it worked, it should be possible to make a relief map of the ocean bottom with every height and depth on the sea-bed plotted with precision.

He started to operate the new instrument. First he traced the steep descent from the flanks of the submarine mountain whose tip was Thrawn Island. He traced them down to the abyss which was the Luzon Deep. Then he began to trace the ocean bottom at its extreme depth, on what should have been submarine plains at the foot of the submerged mountain. The instrument began to give extraordinary readings. The bottom, in a certain spot, read forty-five hundred fathoms down. But suddenly there was a reading of twenty-five hundred. There was a huge obstruction, twelve thousand feet above the bottom of the sea, more than twenty thousand feet below the surface. The instrument scanned the area. Something else was found eighteen hundred fathoms up. These were objects of enormous size, floating, or perhaps swimming in the blackness. They were not whales. Whales are air-breathers. They cannot stay too long in deep waters, motionless between the top and the bottom of the sea.

The instrument picked up more and more such objects. Some were twenty-five hundred fathoms from the bottom, and two thousand from the surface. Some were twenty-two hundred up, and twenty-three hundred down. There were eighteen hundred-fathom readings, and twenty-one, and twenty-four, and nineteen. The readings were of objects bigger than whales. They rose very slowly, and appeared to rest, then rose some more, and rested....

Blank faces turned to Terry. He licked his lips and looked for Deirdre. Then he said evenly, "We go into the lagoon. And if we come out again--if!--we leave Deirdre ashore, unless these readings have been cleared up. There are chances I'm not willing to take."

The _Esperance_ headed in. It was not possible for the new instrument to tell what the large objects were. They could be monstrous living creatures, perhaps squids, and one could only guess that their errand was to deal with the surface-creatures--men--who speared fish and giant squids and set off explosions in the Luzon Deep.

Or the rising objects could be, say, bolides which had dived into the Deep from outer space and were now coming to the surface to make sure that the natives of the earth did not again disturb the depths taken over by beings from another planet.

_Nine_

The sun rose high in the sky as the _Esperance_ returned to the wharf. Davis went ashore and held lengthy conversations with Manila by short-wave radio. The biologists essayed to investigate the squid. _La Rubia_ still attempted to catch fish. All efforts seemed to tend toward frustration.

When Terry walked over to see his victim at close range, he found the biologists balked by the mere huge size of the squid. There were literally tens of tons of flesh to be handled. Squid have no backbone, but a modified internal shell is important to biologists for study. The biologists wanted it. The gills needed to be examined, and their position under the mantle noted, and their filaments counted. The nervous system of the huge creature must have its oddities. But the actual preservation of the squid was out of the question. The mere handling of so large an object was an engineering problem.

Terry consulted the frenziedly swearing Capitán Saavedra, who was ready to weep with sheer rage as he contemplated torn nets, and fish he could not capture. Squids were an article of commerce. Terry took the Capitán to view this one. His crew would help the biologists get at the scientifically important items, and for reward they would have the rest of the giant--more than they could load upon _La Rubia_. This would make their voyage profitable, and the Capitán would have the opportunity to tell the most stupendous story of his capture and killing of the giant. With the evidence he'd have, people might believe him.

Presently, the crewmen of _La Rubia_ clambered over the monster, huge knives at work under the direction of the men from Manila. There was bitter dispute with the tracking station cook, who objected to the use of his refrigeration space to freeze biological material before it was sent to Manila by helicopter.

In mid-afternoon the _Esperance_ left the lagoon again. The sonar-depth-finder probed the depths delicately. The objects in mid-sea, it appeared, had been rising steadily. Their previous position had averaged twenty-five hundred fathoms deep. They were now less than two thousand fathoms down, and there were many of them. Unfortunately, the _Esperance_ was not a steady enough platform for the instrument. But a fairly accurate calculation was made, and if the unidentified objects continued their ascent at their present rate, they would surface not long after sunrise. Then what?

Increasingly urgent queries came by short-wave, asking for Dr. Morton's explanation of how he had computed the landing place and time of the latest bolide. His accuracy was not disputed. But astronomers and physicists wanted to be able to do it themselves. How had he done it?

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

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

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

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

Davis stared. "Should we send Deirdre to safety on the _Esperance_?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deirdre shook her head. "Foam," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

He got up and walked abruptly away.

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

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

Deirdre smiled at Terry, now that they were alone.

"Have you anything very important to do just now?"

He shook his head.

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

He frowned. Deirdre said, "Let's go look at the sea and think things over!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why argue only for Jupiter?" asked Deirdre. "Venus is supposed to be mostly ocean. There could be abyssal life there."

The crew-cuts joined in the argument, but tentatively, because there were many experts present.

Midnight came. The open sea outside the reef showed nothing unusual. The waves glittered palely at their tips. There were little flashings in the water where an occasional surface fish darted. The stars shone. The moon was not yet risen.

Two o'clock came. The _Esperance_ people were divided. Terry and Davis were too apprehensive to sleep. Deirdre'd gone confidently to the yacht to turn in. The crew-cuts slept peacefully, too. Davis said uneasily, "I've got a feeling that the ... objects are at the surface, or very close to it, but that they simply aren't showing themselves. I think they're lying in ambush. The squid that was killed must have had trouble getting into the lagoon. They probably won't try to get the big ones in. They'll wait...."

Terry shook his head.

"We killed that little one--save the mark!--and its death was probably reported in some fashion. So maybe they'll use the big ones on the surface as bait for another kind of weapon. Foam, for example. We know how a ship simply dropped out of sight, as if into a hole."

"I know!" said Davis drearily. "I told the flattop about that. But I don't think they really believe it."

At two-thirty Davis and Terry went down to the yacht. They stood on the deck. They kept watch by mere instinct. There was no activity anywhere. Faint noises were coming from _La Rubia_. Maybe her crew was repacking the hastily loaded masses of squid-flesh. The last-quarter moon rose at long last, and shone upon the glassy-rippled water of the lagoon. Star-images danced beside its reflection.

A little after three, quite abruptly, the Diesels of _La Rubia_ rumbled and boomed. The dark silhouette of the ship headed across the lagoon toward its opening. Terry swore.

"She lifted her anchor without making a noise," he said angrily. "Her skipper wants to get to Manila with his catch before it spoils! Damnation! I told him not to leave without warning. Anything could be waiting outside!"

He raced for the shore and the outboard motorboat. Davis shouted down the forecastle and pelted after him. Terry had the outboard in the water by the time Davis arrived. He jumped in and pulled the starter. The motor caught.

The outboard went rushing across the water. Its wake was a brilliant bluish luminescence.

The booming of the Diesels grew louder. Capitán Saavedra thought he had put over a fast one on _los americanos_, who had moved the fish from where he regularly captured them in vast quantities and gathered them in a lagoon where his nets tore. They had given him most of a monster squid, true, but they had reserved certain parts for themselves. They were undoubtedly the most valuable parts. So when labor officially ceased at sundown, _La Rubia's_ skipper only pretended to accept the idea. In the last hour his crew had quietly completed loading _La Rubia_ with squid. They'd been carefully silent. They'd lifted anchor without noise. Now _La Rubia_ headed for the lagoon entrance, heavy in the water but with precise information about what coral heads needed to be dodged. She had on board a cargo history had no parallel for. Her skipper expected to be rewarded with fame, as well as cash.

When the outboard motor rushed toward _La Rubia_, Capitán Saavedra zestfully gave his engines full throttle. When the racketing, roaring motorboat arrived beside his ship, and Terry shouted to him to stop, he chuckled and drove on. In fact, he left _La Rubia's_ pilot-house to wave cheerfully at the two men. They frantically ran close and shouted to him above the rat-tat-tatting of their own motor and the rumble of his Diesels.

_La Rubia_ reached the lagoon entrance with the smaller boat close at her side, and Terry still shouting.

But Capitán Saavedra did not believe. Maybe he did not understand. Certainly he did not obey. Ocean swells lifted and tossed the motorboat. It became necessary to slow down, for safety. But _La Rubia_ went grandly on, into the open sea.

"We can't force him to stop," said Davis in a despairing voice. "He won't. I only hope we're wrong, and he gets through!"

The outboard stayed where it was, and swells tossed it haphazardly. _La Rubia_ switched on her navigation lights. She drove zestfully to the southward. She sailed on, dwindling in size, as the drone of her Diesels diminished in volume.

Looking back, Terry saw the _Esperance_ approaching from the lagoon, dark figures on her deck. Terry shouted, cries answered him, and the _Esperance_ came to a stop as the motorboat drew alongside.

Terry and Davis scrambled to her deck while one of the crew-cuts led the smaller boat astern and tethered it.

"We're safe enough here," Terry said bitterly, "and since you've come, we can stay and watch if anything happens. If only she keeps on going...."

But _La Rubia_ did not. Her lights showed that she had changed course. She changed course again. Her masthead light began to waver from side to side. She wallowed in such a way that it was clear she was neither on course nor in motion any longer.

Nobody gave orders, but the _Esperance's_ engine roared. The action from this point on became an automatic and quick response to an emergency.

The schooner-yacht plunged ahead at top speed. Terry switched on the recorder and the ultrapowerful sound projector. Davis bent over the searchlight. Two of the crew-cuts readied the bazookas.

Suddenly, a flare went off on _La Rubia's_ deck. Her stubby masts and spars became startlingly bright. Screams came across the waves, even above the growling of the surf and above the noise of the _Esperance's_ engine.

The flare shot through the air. It arched in a high parabola, bright in the sky, and fell into the sea. Another flare was ignited.

The _Esperance's_ searchlight flicked on. A long pencil of light reached across the waves as she raced on. More screamings were heard. Another flare burned. It arched overside. The _Esperance_ plunged on, shouldering aside the heavier waves of open water.

A half-mile. A quarter-mile. _La Rubia_ wallowed crazily, and more shrieks came from her deck. Then the fishing boat seemed to swing. Beyond her, a conical, glistening and utterly horrifying monster emerged, a mere few yards from her rail. Enormous eyes glittered in the searchlight rays. A monstrous tentacle with a row of innumerable sucker-disks reached over the stern of _La Rubia_.

Another flare swept from the fishing boat's deck in the direction of the giant squid. It fell upon wetted, shining flesh. The monster jerked, and _La Rubia_ was shaken from stem to stern. Hurriedly, Terry pressed the power-feed button, and the sound projector was on. Its effect was instantaneous. The monster began to writhe convulsively. It was gigantic. It was twice, three times the size of the squid captured in the lagoon. Terry heard his own voice cry out, "Bazookas! Use 'em! Use 'em!"

Flaring rocket missiles sped toward the giant. Davis flung one of the hand grenades he'd manufactured. The yacht plunged on toward the clutched, half-sunk fishing boat. The hand grenade exploded against the monster's flesh. Simultaneously, the bazooka-missiles hit their target and flung living, incandescent flame deep into the creature's body. Those flames would melt steel. They bored deeply into the squid, and they were infinitely more damaging than bullets.

The creature leaped from the water, as chunks of its flesh exploded. It was a mountainous horror risen from the sea. As it leaped, it had squirted the inky substance which is the squid's ultimate weapon of defense. But, unlike small squid, this beast of the depths squirted phosphorescent ink.

The beast splashed back into the sea, and the wave of its descent swept over the deck of _La Rubia_. The fishing boat nearly capsized. But the monster had not escaped the anguish of its wounds. It fought the injured spots as though an enemy still gnawed there. It was a struggling madness in the sea.

The _Esperance_ swung to approach the half-sunken trawler, and Terry kept the searchlight on the turmoil. The beast knew panic. It was wounded, and the abyss is not a place where the weak or wounded can long survive. Its fellows would be coming....

They did. Something enormous moved swiftly under the sea toward the wounded monster. It could be seen by the phosphorescence its motion created, as it approached the surface. There was a jar, a jolt. Some part of it actually touched the _Esperance's_ keel. The huge monster moved ahead, but a trailing tentacle flicked up to what it had touched a moment before.

The ugly tentacle trailed over the yacht's rail. The rail shattered. The forecastle hatch was wiped out. The bowsprit became mere debris which dangled foolishly from the standing rigging.

The _Esperance_ bucked wildly at this fleeting contact. Nick fired a bazooka-shell, but it missed. Holding fast, Davis flung a grenade. It detonated uselessly. It was then that Deirdre screamed.

Terry froze for an instant. There had simply been no time for him to think that Deirdre might be aboard. It was inexcusable, but nothing could be done now.