They settled down on the after-cabin roof and began a discussion on the foam-patches, for which there was no hint of an explanation. Then Deirdre mentioned that when she was a little girl she’d always been fascinated by the sight of her father shaving. The foam—the lather—entranced her. And somehow that led to something else, and that to something else still. A full hour later they were talking enjoyably about matters of no conceivable relationship to large patches of foam seen floating on the ocean’s surface where the water was forty-five hundred fathoms deep.
Davis came to a halt beside them.
“Morton’s just been talking to me from Thrawn Island,” he said abruptly. “He’s very much upset. It’s about that prospective bolide that was spotted from Palomar. It’s been night there for two hours.”
Terry waited.
“Morton,” said Davis, “would like us to try to photograph it when it comes in, back where the Pelorus was this morning.”
Terry stared. Shooting stars are not rare. On an average summer night anybody can see at least three in an hour’s watch of any one quarter of the sky. Bolides are a rare kind of shooting star. Still, many people have seen one or two in their lifetime. But nobody plans ahead of time to observe a bolide, and still less does anybody ever plan in advance to watch a meteorite arrive on the earth’s surface, whether on land or sea. It is simply not thinkable.
“We’ll go back and try,” said Davis. He seemed embarrassed. “Morton says there’s no sense to it at all, and that if we do get photographs they’ll be considered fakes. He’s really wrought up. But he asked if I thought I could get a plane out from Manila to watch it fall—if it comes. I’m going to try that too.” He added, more embarrassed still, “Of course nobody’d pay attention if I explained why the plane should go there. I’ll have to say that I’m just looking for something else peculiar to happen at that spot. The Pelorus must have already reported that one peculiar thing has happened.”
Terry opened his mouth, and closed it again. Davis went away.
“You had an idea,” said Deirdre accusingly. “What?”
“I was thinking of Horta,” said Terry. “Police Captain Horta. A very honest man with no scientific knowledge at all. Nobody with a scientific education would pay any attention, but I could get him to tell a few others who know as little as he does, and if the damned thing does turn up, there’ll be proof it was foretold. If it doesn’t arrive—” Terry shrugged, “I’ve no scientific reputation to lose.”
“Wonderful!” said Deirdre warmly. “But you wouldn’t have proposed it but for me! I’ll put things in motion!”
She vanished. Within minutes the Esperance came about in a wide semicircle and headed in the direction from which she had just come. Deirdre stayed out of sight for a long while. When she came up it was to tell Terry that Nick was calling on the short-wave set. He’d raised the flattop in Manila Bay. The flattop had raised the shore. Telephone calls were being made to here and there and everywhere to get Horta to a shortwave station to take a call from Terry.
It was near sunset when the complicated call was ready and Horta’s voice came into a pair of headphones Terry was wearing in the Esperance’s radio room.
“I need,” said Terry slowly, “to have a number of people in Manila know now of something that’s going to happen out at sea tonight. They’ll be needed to testify that they knew of the prediction before the event. Can you arrange it?”
“Por supuesto,” said Horta’s voice cheerfully. “Are we not amigos? What is the prediction and who should know?”
“The prediction,” said Terry doggedly, anticipating disbelief and protest, “is that at twelve minutes after nine o’clock tonight a large meteorite will fall into the sea where—hmm—where La Rubia catches her fish. No, you’d better not locate it that way. I’ll give you the position.”
Davis, standing by, wrote the position in latitude and longitude and handed it to him. He read it into the transmitter.
“Have you got it?” he demanded. “Is it written down?”
“Ah, yes,” said Horta tranquilly. “I will see that they make a memorandum of the matter. Shall I tell three or four persons, or more? I have news for you also. Jimenez …”
“Look here!” said Terry sharply. “I want this thing to be past all doubt! Everybody who’s ever been worried about La Rubia should know about this! There should be no possible doubt about it! But there should be disbelief, so people who don’t believe will try to verify that it didn’t happen, so they can crow over the people who thought it would, or might.”
“Ah!” said Horta. “You wish you stick out the neck! It is serious! Now tell me again!”
“At twelve minutes after nine tonight,” said Terry doggedly, “A shooting star will fall into the sea at… “ He named the latitude and longitude Davis had given him. “That is where La Rubia catches her fish.”
“A shooting star will fall there?” protested Hora. “But who knows where they fall?”
“You do,” said Terry. “This one, anyhow. Now, will you see that a number of people know about it?”
“It is cr-azy!” objected Horta. Then he said, “I will do it.”
The short-wave call ended, with Horta too much disturbed to refer again to Jimenez.
By sunset Doug had gotten out the gun-cameras. Doug held an impromptu class on deck, showing the other crew-cuts exactly how to aim the cameras and expose the films, and what button to press to change film automatically between shots. He was unhappy because he did not know how bright the object to be photographed would be, for his lens-settings. He was even more unhappy because the bolide might travel at practically any angular velocity, so he didn’t know how to set the shutters. But the focus would be infinity, and if he used the fastest possible film, he could stop most motion with a hundredth second exposure.
Instead of reaching Thrawn Island shortly after sunset, then, the Esperance was back above the place where the dredge had been dropped and the bathyscaphe wrecked. The Pelorus was gone. The people on board that ship must have been very upset. The bathyscaphe had cost more money than is usually allotted to most scientific researchers, and now it was smashed. How would they justify themselves? They could hardly blame the Esperance.
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.