“Certainly,” said Terry. “Seguramente!” He added in Spanish: “We’ll lend you a short-wave contact with Manila to make any complaints you please. I’m sure all the other fishing boats will be glad to hear where you’ve been catching fish, and where you’ve found the fish have moved to! Calm yourself, Capitan, and help yourself to the fish of the lagoon, and any time you want to call Manila we’ll arrange it!”
He moved away. He went back to the electronics shop, while Morton and Davis and the others talked encouragingly to Capitan Saavedra. Presently they suggested that he accept their hospitality, and the Capitan and his oarsmen went up to the dining hall, where they were served dinner, and a more friendly mood developed. In time the Capitan said happily that he would wait till sunrise to lower his nets, because he didn’t want to risk losing them on the coral heads. A few drinks later the Capitan boasted about his own system of fishing, as practised by La Rubia. The starving condition of his crew’s wives and children ceased to be mentioned.
In the presence of so accomplished a liar, nobody of the tracking station staff mentioned a giant squid hauled partly, but only partly, out of the water. They suspected that he would not believe it. They were sure that he would top their real feat by an imaginary one. So the four crew-cuts listened politely, and fed him more drinks, and learned much.
In the workshop the most unlikely device Terry’d described took form. In effect, it was an underwater horn which was much more powerful than it looked. Submerged, and with power from a group of amplifiers in parallel, it would create a tremendous volume of underwater noise. That sound would run through a tube shaped like a gun-barrel. It would travel in a straight line, spreading only a little.
The same projection tube could also send out the tentative beep-beep-beep of sonar gear, or the peculiar noise a depth-finder makes. So the instrument could search out a distance or find a target, and then fling at it a beam of humming torment equal to bullets from a machine gun.
It would have taken Terry, alone, a long time to build. But he had three assistants, two of whom were very competent. By dawn, they had it ready to be mounted upon the Esperance. It was placed hanging from the bow, mounted on gimbals, so that it could point in any direction. It was firmly fixed to the yacht’s planking.
There was plenty of activity on La Rubia, too, at daybreak. That squat and capable fishing boat prepared to harvest the fish in the lagoon. She got her nets over. She essayed to haul them. Some got caught on the coral heads rising from the lagoon’s bottom toward the surface. Capitan Saavedra swore, and untangled them. He tried again. Again coral heads baulked the enterprise. The nets tore.
A helicopter came rattling into view from the south. It grew in size and loudness, and presently hovered over the tracking station. Then it made a wide, deliberate circuit of the lagoon. At the inlet where the squid lay almost entirely in the water—but fastened by ropes lest it drift away—above that spot, the helicopter hovered for a long time. It must have been taking photographs. Presently, it lowered one man by a line to the ground. Obviously, the man could not endure any delay in getting at so desirable a biological specimen. Then the helicopter went droning and rattling to the tracking station, and landed with an air of weariness.
La Rubia continued to try to catch fish. They were here in plenty. But the coral heads were everywhere. Nets tore. Ropes parted. Capitan Saavedra waved his arms and swore.
The Esperance rumbled and circled away from the wharf, and headed for the lagoon entrance. The singular contrivance built during the night was in place at her bow. She passed La Rubia, on whose deck men frantically mended nets.
The Esperance passed between the small capes and the first of the ocean swells raised her bow and rocked her. She proceeded beyond the reef. The bottom of the sea dropped out of sight. Terry switched on the submarine ear and listened. The humming sound was to be expected here.
It had stopped. It was present yesterday, and even during the night, when La Rubia came into the lagoon. But now the sea held no sound other than the multitudinous random noises of fish and the washing, roaring, booming of the surf.
Deirdre was aboard, of course. She watched Terry’s face. He turned to the new instrument, and then dropped his hand.
“I think,” he said carefully to Davis, “that I’d like to make a sort of sweep out to sea. It’s just possible we’ll find the hum farther out.”
Deirdre said quickly, “I think I know what you’re up to. You want to survey a large area of the ocean while something comes up. Then you can direct that “something” to the lagoon mouth by using your sound device, so the … whatever-it-is has to take refuge in the lagoon. Since we’ve killed the squid… ”
“That’s it,” said Terry. “Something like that happened when we speared the fish. The squid took their place. Now we’ve killed the squid. Just possibly…”
They found the humming sound in the water four miles offshore. They traced it through part of a circle. If something were being driven upward, it could not pass through that wall of humming sound.
“That proves your point,” Davis said. “Now what?”
Without realizing it, he’d yielded direction of the enterprise to Terry, who had unconsciously assumed it.
“Let’s go back to the island,” said Terry thoughtfully. “I’ve got a crazy idea—really crazy! I want to be where we can duck into shallow water when we try the new projector.”
The Esperance swung about and headed back toward the island. The sea and the distant island looked comfortingly normal and beautiful in the sunshine. Under so blue a sky it did not seem reasonable to worry about anything. Events or schemes at the bottom of the sea seemed certainly the last things to be likely to matter to anyone.
Terry had the Esperance almost between the reefs before he tried the new contrivance. If it worked, it should be possible to make a relief map of the ocean bottom with every height and depth on the seabed plotted with precision.
He started to operate the new instrument. First he traced the steep descent from the flanks of the submarine mountain whose tip was Thrawn Island. He traced them down to the abyss which was the Luzon Deep. Then he began to trace the ocean bottom at its extreme depth, on what should have been submarine plains at the foot of the submerged mountain. The instrument began to give extraordinary readings. The bottom, in a certain spot, read forty-five hundred fathoms down. But suddenly there was a reading of twenty-five hundred. There was a huge obstruction, twelve thousand feet above the bottom of the sea, more than twenty thousand feet below the surface. The instrument scanned the area. Something else was found eighteen hundred fathoms up. These were objects of enormous size, floating, or perhaps swimming in the blackness. They were not whales. Whales are air-breathers. They cannot stay too long in deep waters, motionless between the top and the bottom of the sea.
The instrument picked up more and more such objects. Some were twenty-five hundred fathoms from the bottom, and two thousand from the surface. Some were twenty-two hundred up, and twenty-three hundred down. There were eighteen hundred-fathom readings, and twenty-one, and twenty-four, and nineteen. The readings were of objects bigger than whales. They rose very slowly, and appeared to rest, then rose some more, and rested…