There was no comment by anybody on the Esperance.
Half a mile from the oceanographic ship, Davis said in a peculiarly flat voice, “Cut away the dredge. We won’t try to use it again.”
Someone slashed the inflated canvas bag. It collapsed. Somebody cut away a rope. The free dredge sank, slowly. It would never come up again.
The Esperance changed course. She headed north by west There was still no conversation at all. The yacht seemed to tiptoe away from the scene of the bathyscaphe’s destruction.
A long time later, Deirdre said tentatively, “Have you been making guesses, Terry?”
“Guesses, yes,” he admitted.
“Such as?”
“Your father denied that the dredge was designed to stir up whatever gathered the fish together and then carried them down to the bottom of the sea. I was right there with him in the denial, but that’s what we intended, just the same. We said we didn’t believe there was anything there, so it couldn’t do any harm to poke it. We poked, all right! Our dredge, and then the bathyscaphe…”
“But what…”
“And a bolide fell right there a couple of nights ago,” said Terry irrelevantly. “I wonder what the entity on the ocean-bottom thought of the bolide. Hm.” He paused. “I wonder, too, what the bolide thought of what it found down there. Is that too crazy for a sane man to think, Deirdre?” She shook her head.
“Why is my father working on this business?” she asked. “And why are the boys helping, and why do radar stations tell us what they find out, and why did the Philippine Government ask the Pelorus to make a bathyscaphe dive at just that spot?”
Terry blinked at her.
“Too crazy for official notice, eh?” he said, “but too dangerous not to check up on! Is it absolutely certain that the bolides are bolides?”
“No.”
“Thanks,” said Terry. He pursed his lips as if to whistle. “I’ve been thinking of this thing as a puzzle. But it isn’t. I’m very much afraid it’s a threat!” He paused. “Y-y-es. I’ve just made a new guess. It adds everything together. I do hope it’s wrong, Deirdre! I’ve got cold chills running up and down my spine!”
Seven
As the Esperance sailed northward, she looked almost unreal. From a distance she might have been an artist’s picture of an imaginary yacht heeled over in the wind, sailing splendidly over a non-existent ocean. The sky was a speckless blue, the sun was high.
But she was real enough, and the China Sea around her was genuine, and what had taken place where the Pelorus lay now hull-down, stowing a ruined bathyscaphe in her hold, had unquestionably taken place.
Something monstrous and terrible was hidden in the dark abyss below the yacht. The ferocity of its attack on the bathyscaphe was daunting. And ferocity has always, somehow, a suggestion of madness about it. But the humming sound in the sea was not the product of madness. It was a technical achievement. And plastic objects with metal inclusions …
Davis joined Deirdre and Terry. Before Davis could speak she said, “I can’t imagine any guess that will add everything together, Terry.” Davis made a jerky gesture.
“Today’s business is beyond all reason,” he said unhappily, “and if there ever was an understatement, that’s it! If there can be any conceivable motive for the plastic objects, which the Pelorus dismisses as hoaxes, the motive is to use them to find out something about surface conditions; that is, for surface conditions to be reported back. And that’s not easy to imagine. But try to think of something easier! And yet, such mindless ferocity as attacked the bathyscape… that wouldn’t be curious about the surface!”
“No-o-o-o,” agreed Terry. “It wouldn’t. But we’d set off a bomb down below to stir things up. A couple of hours later the bathyscaphe went down. A stupid and merely ferocious thing of the depths wouldn’t associate a bomb that exploded with a bathyscaphe that came down two hours later. It took intelligence to make the association of two falling objects with danger.”
Deirdre beamed suddenly.
“Of course! That’s it! Go on!”
“Curiosity implies intelligence,” said Terry carefully, “and intelligence is a substitute for teeth or claws. We don’t assume that the fish that carry the plastic gadgets made them. Why assume that whatever attacked the bathyscaphe did it of its own accord? We believe that something else makes the deep-sea fish come up into the Thrawn Island lagoon, don’t we? Or do we?”
“We pretend we don’t,” said Deirdre.
Davis nodded reluctantly.
“Yes, we pretend we don’t,” he agreed. “But if intelligence is involved, I find myself getting frightened! We humans are always terrified of strange types of intelligence, anyhow. If it’s intelligence that isn’t human …”
Nick came up from below.
“Thrawn Island calling,” he reported. “They say the hum at the lagoon opening stopped for some forty-odd hours and then started again. They ask if we’re coming. I said we were on the way. They’re standing by. Anything we should tell them?”
“We’ll get there some time after sunset,” said Davis.
“And maybe you should tell them about the Pelorus and the bathyscaphe.”
Nick grinned briefly. “I did. And the guy on Thrawn Island said ‘Hooray’ and then explained that he said that because he couldn’t think of anything that fitted the idea of something biting holes in three-inch steel.” He added, “I can’t think of a proper comment, either.”
“We’ll get to Thrawn Island after sunset,” repeated Davis. “Then we’ll see what we find in the lagoon—if anything.”
Nick started back toward the bow. He stopped.
“Oh, yes! It wasn’t a scientific guy talking, just the short-wave operator. The science staff is all busy. He said they heard an hour ago that another possible bolide’s been spotted by a space-radar back in the US. It was picked up farther out than one’s ever been spotted before. Five thousand miles high.”
Davis nodded without comment. Nick went forward and disappeared below.
A school of porpoises appeared astern. They caught up with the Esperance. They went rocketing past, leaping exuberantly for no reason whatever. They cut across the yacht’s bow and zestfully played around her two or three times, then went on, toward a faraway horizon. They managed somehow to give the impression of creatures who have done something they consider important.
“It’s said,” said Terry, “that porpoises have brains as good as men’s. I wish I could get one or two to talk! They might answer everything! I’m getting obsessed by this infernal business!”
“I’ve been at it for months,” said Davis. “In the past week, though, with you on board, I have found out more things I don’t understand than I believed existed!”
He walked away. Deirdre smiled at Terry.
“My father paid you a tribute,” she said. “I think we’ve been wasting time, you and I. We do a lot of talking to each other, but we haven’t been applying our massive brains to matters of real importance.”
“Such as what?” asked Terry dourly.
“Foam,” said Deirdre. “Big masses of foam seen to be floating on the sea. Always over the Luzon Deep. Photographed by a plane less than a month ago. Reported by fishermen much more often than you’d suspect. At least once a ship sailed into a foam-patch and dropped out of sight, exactly as if there were a hole in the sea there. Let’s talk about that.”