He swung the little boat alongside the docked Esperance and held out his hand to help Deirdre to the dock. His hand was wholly steady again. She accepted the help.
“We’ll go to the tracking station?”
“Yes. Everybody seems to be there,” said Terry.
They heard a babble of voices coming from the satellite-tracking station. As they approached the buildings, Terry looked around. Off at one side there was the very peculiar aerial system by which tiny artificial moons circling the earth could be detected by their own signals. Minute spheres and cylinders and spiky objects and foolish-looking paddle-wheels, whirling in their man-appointed rounds, sent down signals with powers of mere fractions of a watt. This system of aerials picked up those miniature broadcasts and extracted remarkable amounts of information from them. It was possible to determine the satellites’ distance more accurately, by a comparison of phase-changes in their signals, than if steel tape measures were stretched up to make physical contact with them. The accuracy was of the order of inches at hundreds of miles. Floating where the stars were bright and unwinking lights against blackness and the sun was a disk with writhing arms of fire, the small objects sent back information that men had never possessed before and did not wholly know what to do with now that they did. And there were other objects in the heavens, too. There were satellites which no longer signaled back to earth. Some had their equipment worn out. Some objects were satellites which had failed to function from the beginning. Some were mysteries.
The bolide of the night before was a mystery. As Terry and Deirdre entered the wide verandah of the recreation building for the station’s personnel, they heard Dr. Morton protesting, “But that’s out of the question! I agree that we never know any more about what the Russians throw out to space than what we find out for ourselves. That’s true! But this wasn’t a terrestrial object! If it was a satellite that wasn’t launched right, it had to be sent up from Russian territory. It wasn’t. That’s positive! If we assume it was a satellite that had already made several orbital turns, we must admit it would be an impossible shift in apogee for it to come down at the angle it did!”
Deirdre and Terry sat down as someone else said hotly, “Our observations were wrong. They had to be! The earth’s magnetic field couldn’t affect the speed of an object outside the atmosphere! Our observations say it slowed down. It couldn’t!”
Davis lifted a hand in greeting. The argument stopped for a moment Deirdre was known, but Terry had to be introduced. He was sitting beside a bald young man who explained in a low tone, as the argument resumed. “They’re having fun. They argued for days when our radar picked up an empty second stage in orbit They’re still ready to dispute for hours about a supposed retrograde satellite that was spotted last year, was watched for four turns, and then disappeared. Beer?”
“Too early,” said Terry. “Thanks just the same.”
Davis said earnestly, at the other side of the room, “I’d feel a lot better if that thing last night hadn’t splashed where it did.”
“The bolide,” said a voice humorously, “is a free animal.”
The discussion went on. Terry saw Deirdre talking to a middle-aged woman with a splendid sun-tan and a placid expression on her face. Doug and Tony sat watchfully on the side lines, listening. Doug had been offered, and had accepted, a sandwich. He ate it methodically.
Terry had a sudden feeling of unreality. Less than half an hour before he’d been in torment and, but for Deirdre, on his way to death. On the Esperance there’d been so much that was absorbing in the way of fish behavior that he’d forgotten some people were interested in other things. Here a dozen people squabbled over the behavior of a meteorite. Nothing could be of less consequence to the outside world. But in the outside world, people argued about baseball, or golf, or politics…
Doug excused himself and slipped outside. Terry joined him there a little later. Doug was smoking a cigarette, looking at the sky and the palms.
“Pretty heavy discussion,” said Terry.
“It’s over my head,” said Doug. “I got lonesome. It made me think of my girl. She likes to talk like this. That’s why…”
He stopped.
“Is there an aqualung oufit on the Esperance?” asked Terry.
“Sure! Two or three of them. Mr. Davis had an idea they’d be useful. Used one of them last week to look at the Esperance’s bottom-planks. Why?”
“I’d like to poke around the bottom of the lagoon a little,” said Terry, with unconscious grimness. “Would you help?”
“Sure!” said Doug.
They went back to the Esperance. Doug got out two aqualung outfits. They checked the valves and tanks and connections. Doug brought out two spring guns. In half an hour they were in the outboard, headed for what Doug said was the deepest part of the lagoon.
Arrived there, Terry tested the water with his finger and then went overside. Instead of a spring gun, he used one of the fish spears that seemed to be standard equipment for fishing, here. Doug stayed in the boat to watch.
Terry’d guessed that what he looked for would be in the deepest part of the lagoon. He was right. Within half an hour he’d speared five fish of types that had no business being within two thousand fathoms of the surface. He ignored the lagoon’s normal inhabitants. He picked on fish of a dark-red color, which is predominant in the depths but not elsewhere. When the fish had extremely small eyes or extremely large ones, he hunted them determinedly, knowing they were deep-sea fish. He caught five, which was a good haul, even considering his previous suspicions.
Doug inspected the catch as the outboard went back to the yacht. Terry replaced his spear under the gunwale.
“They’re queer fish,” observed Doug. “I wouldn’t want to eat them.”
“Neither would I,” agreed Terry. “But I feel a certain sympathy for them. I think we’ve shared an experience.”
He did. Fish so far from their normal environment would not have migrated unless they’d been forced to. So these fish must have been driven up from the blissful utter blackness of the abyss, which was their habitat. He had a vivid memory of the kind of urging they’d received, because of his recent swim outside the reef opening. That was the experience he believed they shared.
He got his catch onto the Esperance’s deck and found some sharp knives in the galley, while Doug put the aqualungs away. When Doug came abovedecks again, he looked distastefully at the work Terry had undertaken.
“Do you like to do that sort of thing?” he asked. “Hardly!” said Terry. “But I want to get it done.” Doug watched for a moment or two. “I’m pretty keen about poetry. Sometimes I feel I’ve got to sweat over a poem that I need to get written. It’s hard work. There’s no real sense to it. But I feel it’s got to be done. I guess that’s the way you feel now.”
“Perhaps,” said Terry.
It wouldn’t have occurred to him to liken the writing of verses to the dissection of dead deep-sea fish, but Doug had a point. He went away presently, and Terry completed the highly unpleasant task. He had just finished flushing the deck clean when Deirdre came back from the tracking station. He was already at work on the recorder when she stepped onto the deck.
“You didn’t stay,” said Deirdre. “I was waiting for a chance to tell my father about the hum outside the lagoon, but he was as deep in the meteor argument as any of them. I still haven’t told him.”