Later on Terry found himself alone on the Esperance’s deck, except for Nick at the wheel—a mere dark figure seen only by the light of the binnacle lamp. There was a diffused, faint glow coming from the after-cabin hatch. Up forward, one of the crew-cuts plucked a guitar, and Terry could imagine Doug dourly trying to read poetry despite the noise. The sails were black against the sky. The deck was darker than the sea.
Terry’s guesses haunted him. He assured himself that he did not entertain them even for an instant. They were absurd! A part of his mind argued speciously that if they were absurd there was no reason not to test them. If he was afraid to try, it would imply that at least part of him believed them.
He picked up one of the plastic objects, and moved the recorder close to the lee rail. It still transmitted faithfully, at minimum volume, the washing of the waves as heard from beneath, and occasional small sounds from living creatures, generally far away in the sea. Heeled over as the Esperance was, his hand could reach down into the rushing waters overside.
He came to a resolution. He felt foolish, but by now he was determined to try an experiment. Tiny light-blue sparks flashed where the water raced past the yacht’s planking. When he dipped his hand, water piled up against his wrist and a streak of brightness trailed away behind.
He tapped the plastic object against the hull. One tap, two taps, three taps, four taps. Then five, six, seven, eight. He went back to one. One tap, two, and three and four. Five and six and seven and eight.
The recorder gave out the tappings the underwater microphone had picked up. It seemed to Terry that the loudspeaker struggled to emit the shrillest imaginable sounds in strict synchrony with the tappings.
Then Deirdre’s voice came quietly, very near.
“I don’t think,” she said evenly, “that that’s a fan-thing to do.”
He’d been bent over the rail in an awkward position. He straightened up, guiltily.
“I know it’s nonsense, but I was… ashamed to admit …”
“To admit,” Deirdre concluded for him, “that by tapping numbers with a plastic spy-device, you hoped to say to whom it might concern that we’ve found a communicator, and we know what it is, and we’re trying to get in touch with the intelligent creatures who made it.”
To hear his own self-denied guesses spoken aloud was appalling. Terry instantly disbelieved them entirely.
“It’s ridiculous, of course,” he protested. “It’s childish…”
“But it could be true,” said Deirdre. “And, if true, it could be dangerous. Suppose whatever put those plastic gadgets on the fish doesn’t want to be communicated with? Suppose it feels that it should defend the secret of its existence by killing those who suspect it? I wasn’t spying on you,” she added. “I heard the tappings down below.”
Then she was gone. He saw the interruption in the light from the after-cabin hatch as she went below.
He was suddenly filled with horror at the idea that if his guesses did prove to be right, he might have endangered Deirdre. And then he ceased to feel foolish. He felt like a criminal instead.
For a long, long time he listened with desperate intensity to the recorder, lest he hear some reply to his signals.
But no answer came. The sounds from undersea remained utterly commonplace.
When morning arrived he was in a state of desperate gloom. At breakfast Deirdre acted as if she considered the incident closed. And, such being the nature of men, Terry felt worse than before.
He was not wholly at ease again, even when that afternoon the Esperance sailed in past Cavite and Corregidor and into Manila Bay. A new ship was at anchor in the harbor. It was a stubby, stocky ship which Davis regarded with interest.
“That’s the Pelorus,” he told Terry as the yacht passed within a mile, on the way to her former anchorage. “She’s the hydrographic ship with the bathyscaphe on board. We’ll visit her. I’ll get Nick to call her on shortwave.”
He went forward, where Nick was making ready to drop the anchor. Davis took over the chore, and Nick went below.
“Are you going ashore?” asked Deirdre.
Terry shrugged. “I’ve no reason to.”
She looked relieved. “Then you’ll stay with the Esperance until—things are settled one way or another? I mean, you’re really enlisted?”
“Until there are no more ways left for me to blunder,” said Terry distastefully. “I’m about through the list, though.”
“Not at all!” protested Deirdre. “Tapping numbers was really a very good idea. I was horrible! I scolded because you’d kept it a secret from me. I’d have been proud if I’d thought of it first!”
Nick came back and spoke to Davis. Davis came aft.
“The Pelorus will send a boat as soon as we’ve anchored,” he told them. “They’ve heard something and want to see the plastic objects.”
“I’d like the long end of a bet that they don’t believe in them, or us,” Terry said abruptly. “They’re established authorities on the ocean bottom. They know a lot. They probably know so much they can’t really believe there’s anything more to know than what they’re busy finding out now.”
Davis shook his head. He was confident. The Esperance anchored, almost exactly where she’d been when Terry first came on board. Within half an hour a boat arrived from the Pelorus. Terry repeated his refusal to go along. Deirdre went along with her father.
They came back a little over an hour later. At first Davis was almost speechless with fury. Then he told Terry, choking on his rage, “According to them, the plastic objects are a hoax. The hum is a school of fish. We aren’t trained observers. At Thrawn Island they’re astronomers and they simply don’t know anything about biology. And we should realize that it’s starkly impossible for intelligence to develop where the oxygen supply is limited. It’s unthinkable that abyssal fish should have their swim bladders punctured so they won’t explode from release of pressure when they come to the surface. Those in the lagoon aren’t abyssal fish, just unfamiliar species!”
“Well?” Terry asked.
“Oh, they’re going to make a bathyscaphe dive!” said Davis as angrily as before. “As a matter of courtesy to somebody—not us. They’ll make it where we found fish packed in a circle. That happens to be the deepest part of the Luzon Deep, in any case. They don’t object to our sending our dredge down first. They will be politely interested if it comes back up.”
“I,” announced Deirdre, “I am so mad I could spit!”
“There’s no use in our staying here,” said Davis, seething. “Our dredge should be ready. We’ll go up to Barca and tow it to the point we want to send it down.”
He ordered Nick to get ready to lift anchor.
“One question,” Terry said finally. “Did you mention the bolides?”
“No!” snapped Davis. “Would I want them to think I was crazy?”
He stamped away.
The Esperance put to sea again. She sailed north along the coast. At dinner everybody was quiet. It was the only meal, since Terry’s joining, that had not been enlivened by an elaborate argument on some subject or other. Davis was still in an abominable mood. He knew it, and held himself to silence.
Later, Terry and Deirdre talked together. They refrained tacitly from speaking of marine biology or any reasons for tapping plastic objects against the Esperance’s hull. They discussed only trivia, but somehow Terry found any subject absorbing, when he was with Deirdre.
After a while she went below, and he stayed above-decks, smoking. The moon had not yet risen when he turned in.