“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 fights 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! Ihad 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.