Part 9

The yacht sailed in a closed pattern over this area of the Luzon Deep. Deirdre served dinner on deck. Stars shone down almost instantly after a sunset of unusual magnificence, even for the China Sea. Tony brought his guitar aft, and a contagious feeling of exhilaration spread about the _Esperance_ and an improvised party took place on deck. Maybe the mood for festivity arose from the realization that at least nine-tenths of the world's population would have graded them as lunatics, had it known their project for the evening.

It would have been unjust, of course. Terry reflected that it had not been their idea to make an appointment with a shooting star. They were doing it out of some sort of professional courtesy, "from one set of crackpots to another," Terry phrased it in his own mind. It was a wild attempt to secure proof of the starkly impossible. So there was chatter, singing, and some dancing. The high spot was perhaps the time when Jug bashfully serenaded the rigging and the stars above it with howling melodies he'd learned in college.

Eventually, Nick went down to the short-wave set. Doug passed out the gun-cameras again, after checking each one. Nick popped his head out of the hatch.

"Dr. Morton's been calling like crazy," he reported. "The bolide's made four orbital turns, coming in all the while. It ought to touch the atmosphere next time around. ETO is nine-twelve-seventeen-seconds. I told him we're all set."

His head disappeared.

"Don't forget!" Doug said anxiously. "The cameras will feel like shotguns but don't lead your target! And don't forget to press the film-changer!"

Terry lifted his gun-camera experimentally. It did feel like a shotgun. And then, suddenly, he disbelieved everything: the purpose of the _Esperance's_ original investigation; the phenomena that had been observed; the guesses that had been made. It was pure insanity! He felt a quick impatience with himself for becoming entangled in anything so ridiculous.

Deirdre leaned toward him and whispered forlornly, "Terry! It's dreadful! I've just had an attack of common sense! What are we doing here? We're crazy!"

He put his hand consolingly over hers. The act was unpremeditated and the sensation was startling. He found that they were staring at each other intently in the starlight.

"I think ..." said Terry, unsteadily, "that it's very sensible to be crazy. We've got to ... talk this over."

Deirdre smiled at him shakily.

"Y-yes, we will."

Then Davis pointed out positions for the camera operators. The bolide's course should be three hundred fifty degrees, not quite on a north-south line. It might land short of, or beyond, the _Esperance_. Or it might pass many miles to the east or west. Dr. Morton needed as many pictures of it against recognizable stars as could possibly be secured.

Suddenly, there was a faint, dull rumbling in the heavens. It grew louder. Presently, cruising lights appeared in the sky. They maintained a fixed relationship to each other. They looked like moving stars, flying in formation from star-cluster to star-cluster.

Nick popped abovedecks again.

"The planes just called us," he reported. "They've just had a Loran position-check and they're on the mark. They've got orders to observe any unusual phenomena occurring around nine-twelve P.M., Manila time. Using civilian terminology, it sounds like they're saying the Philippine Government asked them to come out and take a look."

"It's five after nine now," said Davis.

The _Esperance_ headed into the wind. Her bow rose and fell. Waves washed past, and roarings trundled about under the stars overhead, and very tiny lights moved in a compact group across the firmament.

Time passed.

At twenty-two seconds after nine-twelve--which is to say at twenty-one hours, twelve minutes, twenty-two seconds--a light appeared in the sky from the north. It grew steadily brighter. It suddenly flared very brightly indeed, then dimmed, and continued to rise above the horizon. Seconds later it flared again, very briefly.

Terry found himself aiming the gun-camera. He pulled trigger and changed film and pulled trigger and changed film.

The bright light ceased to climb. It grew steadily brighter and brighter, and then it flared for the third time--Terry's mind asked skeptically, 'Braking rockets?'--and the light was so intense that the cracks in the yacht's deck-planking could be seen. Then the extra brilliance vanished, and suddenly the moving light was no longer white, but reddish.

Terry aimed again and fired the gun-camera.

The light passed almost directly overhead. Terry had the impression that he felt its heat upon his skin.

It plunged into the sea two miles beyond the _Esperance_. The shock-wave caused by the impact tapped on the yacht's side-planking a few seconds later. Starlight shone upon a plume of steam.

Then there was nothing but the noise of the circling planes above. Then a sound, as of thunder. It disappeared northward. It was the sound of the bolide's passage, arriving after the object itself had dived into the sea.

The people on the _Esperance_ were dumfounded. Nick went below and came up again a few minutes latter.

"The planes were calling," he reported. "They say they noted the unusual phenomenon. They ask if they should stay around for something else."

"I think," said Davis caustically, "that that's all that's scheduled just now. Tell them so."

The _Esperance_ went on steadily again, a trifle west of north. Davis was below, talking via radio to Dr. Morton at the satellite tracking base.

Terry and Deirdre went to look for a place where they could talk over something privately. It was of enormous importance to them, but it was not connected with fish or meteorites or plastic objects or anything at all but the two of them. And to them the yacht seemed crowded with people, even though there was nobody else abovedecks but one of the crew-cuts at the wheel.

When the _Esperance_ entered the lagoon the next morning, though, their private talk had evidently come to a satisfactory conclusion. Deirdre smiled at Terry without any reason whatever, and he looked at once smug and embarrassed and uneasy, as if he possessed a new status to which he was still unaccustomed.

The recorder, trailing a submarine ear overboard, had duly reported the presence of the hum in the water, just outside the lagoon. It had not been operating for forty hours or thereabouts. During that time the fish inside could go out of the lagoon, if they chose. And other fish could come in. Terry said suddenly, as the yacht went under power toward the tracking station wharf, "Suppose there was a cone of noise just outside the lagoon, and the flanks of the submarine mountain under us were included in the cone? And suppose the cone grew smaller, like the other one. What would happen?"

Deirdre shook her head, smiling at him.

"The fish," said Terry, "could escape into the lagoon."

"Probably," agreed Deirdre.

"And if fish could be driven downward along a certain path," said Terry, "the way we saw it happen, why, fish could be driven up in a certain path, too."

"Obviously," said Deirdre.

"So if something wanted to replace the fish in the lagoon, or to add to their number, why, it would puncture their swim bladders far, far down, and then drive them up to the surface and into the lagoon, and then keep the noise going to keep them inside."

"Is this a new idea?" asked Deirdre.

"N-n-o," admitted Terry. "I've had it for some time."

"So," said Deirdre, "have I."

The _Esperance's_ engine stopped, and she floated to gentle contact with the wharf. Members of the tracking station staff made the yacht fast. With others, Dr. Morton came on board. His expression was the picture of unrelieved gloom.

"I'm in a nice spot!" he told Davis. "I predicted a second bolide correctly! I had to use a different retardation factor to make the math come out right. Now I'm asked to explain that! How can I tell them I knew where it would fall, and only had to compute when?"

"Come below and look at the pictures we got," said Davis.

They disappeared down the after-cabin hatch. Terry knew about the pictures. Doug had developed them with sweating care, developing each negative separately and adjusting the development-time to the varying exposures of the bright object.

There was a total of twenty reasonably good pictures of the bolide, from its first appearance to its plunge into the ocean, two miles from the _Esperance_. Doug had enlarged some of them. There were distinct star-patterns in most. In nearly all, though, the object was more or less blurred by its own motion. In those taken when it flared most brightly, the blurriness was especially marked. There was only one picture of professional, if accidental, quality, and it was the least convincing of all. It showed the fore-part of a conical shape traveling point-first. Nobody would conceivably believe that it was a meteorite. It looked artificial.

Terry and Deirdre, as it happened, stayed on deck. The people of the tracking station made a babbling uproar. It appeared that the most important event in history, as history was viewed on Thrawn Island, had taken place the night before. It was revealed--Terry had not suspected his own success--that in asking Horta to see that there was foreknowledge of a meteoric fall, Terry had arranged for the matter to be taken immediately to high Philippine Government officials. The American flattop, at their request, had sent planes to the place of the fall, with orders which were enigmatic only until the descending object appeared. Then every man in every plane knew that he'd been sent there to see it.

So there could be no question but that Dr. Morton had predicted it. That meant that he knew more about meteoric objects than anybody else in the world. What he had to say was of vast importance, and Thrawn Island shared in his achievement. But it was a strictly professional triumph. The news would not break in the newspapers. No ordinary reader would believe in it. And nobody anywhere would believe in Morton's knowledge of the place of the fall before he began to calculate.

Terry observed that the people of Thrawn Island were definitely no longer interested in fish. They'd kept their eyes open for oddities because a deep-sea fish with a plastic object attached had been caught in the lagoon a long while before. They'd been intensely interested when Terry herded all the lagoon fish into one small inner bay, and they speared sixty fish that had no business being at the surface. They'd found eight more plastic objects. Such things had been interesting, if not important. But now the head of the Thrawn Island staff had computed the place and time of arrival of a meteoric mass from space! And he did it when that mass was five thousand miles out! From a professional standpoint, this was stupendous! They tried to make Terry see how important it was.

Davis and Morton came up from below. They headed for the shore. The crew-cuts trailed off to the land with most of the visitors. Only Deirdre and Terry remained on the yacht, with a mere short-wave operator from the island.

"We're going to have a fancy lunch, with champagne and speeches," the operator said hopefully. "You'll come?"

"Naturally!" said Terry. "But first we're going swimming. We haven't had a chance to be overboard since the last time we were here."

"We'll be back in time for lunch," Deirdre assured the operator, "but swimming here is so wonderful! We've been talking about it for days!"

She went below to change. The operator shrugged. After a further attempt to interest Terry in the celebration of an astronomical first, he went ashore. Terry went with him to get the outboard motorboat he and Deirdre had used before. He was already wearing swimming trunks.

A little later the small boat putt-putted away from the _Esperance_ upon the glassy-rippled waters of the lagoon.

There was a very great tranquillity everywhere. The booming roar of the surf came from unseen rollers on the reef outside. Seabirds squawked. Palms along the edge of the lagoon waved their fronds very, very gently.

"How far will you go before we swim?" asked Deirdre. "All the lagoon's perfect. One place is as good as another."

He cut off the motor.

"Hmmm. There's a deep place yonder," he observed. "That's where I went with the aqualung and speared the freak fish. Stay away from it."

She jumped over in a clean dive. He joined her in the water. She came up, blowing bubbles.

"All right, Terry. What are your troubles?"

"That bolide bothers me," he told her. "It had a specific destination! It was meant to hit the water over the Luzon Deep!"

She dived again. This time Terry followed her. The underwater world was beautifully bright, with ripplings making everything seem to shimmer because of the changing light. When they came up again Deirdre said, "Funny!"

"It had a purpose!" insisted Terry. "There were others before it, and they had a purpose too! That's not funny!"

"I didn't mean that," said Deirdre. "I meant ... just now, under the water.... What's that?"

There was a swirling at the surface, some tens of yards away. It was not the curling eddy made by a fish about to break surface. It was too big a disturbance for that. It looked as if something stirred, barely submerged, but something very large. Terry, staring, thought of a porpoise cavorting just below the ripples. Or perhaps a shark. But sharks and porpoises are too small to have made this eddying. It reappeared.

"Get in the boat!" snapped Terry. "Quick!"

While she climbed in he let himself sink, his eyes open. There was a clouding of the water underneath, where the surface-disturbance had been. It was mud from the bottom which had been stirred up. He could see nothing clearly through it, though nearby and around him he could easily see the colorings of coral and fan sponges, and he could see small fish darting here and there.

He broke surface. Deirdre bent anxiously over the gunwale.

"What is it?"

"I don't know," he said curtly. "But give me a fish spear."

"You won't...."

"I just want to have something in my hand," he told her impatiently, "while I look."

He took the spear she handed him, and sank once more. Again something moved in the deeper part of the lagoon. It was a fretful motion, as if a creature or creatures tried to burrow away from the light shining through the water. Whatever moved, a thick cloud of debris from the bottom floated all the way up to the surface.

Terry came up for air.

"There's something queer there," he said shortly. "I don't know what."

He went under and swam cautiously nearer to the disturbance. He was within a few feet of the curling cloud of obscurity when something like a gigantic worm came out of it. Or maybe it was like an elephant's trunk, only no elephant ever had a trunk so huge. It was a dull and glistening writhing object. Its end was rounded. The tip of the worm-like thing must have been a foot in diameter, and it came out of the mud cloud for four feet, then six, then, fifteen feet. It thickened only slightly in that length. It groped blindly in the brightness.

Terry swam back quickly, and the object reared up and made a groping sweep through the clear water. Some peculiar white disks suddenly appeared on the underside of the long tentacle. They looked like sucker-disks, able to grip anything at all. The monstrous tentacle fumbled for Terry, as if guided by the pressure-waves his movements generated.

Terry froze. Deirdre moved in the boat almost directly overhead. Something clanked in the boat and he heard it. The boat was probably rocking, making the pressure-waves that a creature from the abyss would depend upon for guidance where eyes would not serve at all.

The thick, bulging tentacle reached toward the sound at the surface, now ignoring Terry, though he was nearer. He was still. The white sucker-disks on its under side had several rings of a horny, tooth-like substance at their rims. The smallest were about four inches wide. The fumbling object felt blindly in the water. Deirdre stirred again in the boat. The visible portion of the groping monstrosity was already longer than the boat. The whole creature would be enormous! If this groping arm rested upon the gunwale of the boat, it could easily swamp it.

It groped for the boat, coming horribly out of a cloud of mud. It reached out. In another instant it would touch....

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...."