Chana wouldn’t let herself believe it at all. Lee Colbert would wait for all the facts before he would decide, but he knew he was going to believe it.
No notice went out where the showing would be, no time announced, but just before the night came the islanders had all arrived and gathered in front of the big building Charlie Berger shared with Alley. A large portable screen from the Lotusland had been set up and silent eyes watched it uncertainly. The crew from the Tellig sat on the floor with the rest, and when the doors finally closed Mako Hooker took Judy’s hand and they both walked up to the screen.
The silence was complete.
Nobody blinked.
Hooker held the thumb activator that would turn on the projector and the audience waited.
He said, “There has been a terror out there in the ocean. It has taken ships and lives and disrupted these islands like nothing ever has before. It was silent, it was unpredictable, and it was deadly. There was nothing specific in its moves... it just came and went whenever it wanted to. It seemed haphazard, an enemy whose movements couldn’t be determined. Even our technology couldn’t locate it.” He paused for a long moment, then added, “But everybody knew it was there.”
His words generated a gentle rustling from the natives, hoping his next ones would be more comforting. They knew what Hooker had said and what Billy Bright had said, but only when they had seen the death of the eater would they truly believe it.
“Most of you here weren’t alive in the year 1914. There was a war on and Germany was running submarines in this area.” There was a subtle nodding of heads as a few remembered. “Some were destroyed off Reboka Island, as you know, either sunk by Allied gunfire or scuttled by their crews.” Again there was the nodding of heads. Those events were all part of their history.
“One wasn’t shelled by our side and it wasn’t scuttled,” Hooker said. “It went down and sat on the bottom to hide from our destroyers on the surface. Our detecting devices were crude then and nobody was able to locate it. When the enemy ships left and the way was clear, the captain gave orders to surface.”
The audience waited. They knew something critical was coming.
“At that time the flotation of submarines was activated by a Kingston valve that allowed water to flood the tanks when the air was compressed back in small cylinders in order to submerge, then blow out the water ballast to fill the tanks with air again to surface.”
Hooker let a picture of the operation set in their minds, and when he knew they all had it, he told them, “The valve had jammed. Nothing happened. They sat on that seabed, rationing the air until they were gasping for breath, until they died and that old submarine simply nestled down further in its own grave, the bottom filling in around it, creating a suction effect that was nearly permanent. The U-903 was, for all purposes, almost a dead thing.
Heads bobbed in silent acknowledgment this time.
“Almost,” Hooker said.
The heads stopped bobbing and waited.
“Like all dead things, the submarine started to decay. It wasn’t flesh as we are; so many years had to pass before a tiny hole showed in its steel skin. Now oil, its lifeblood, could leak out in tiny little blobs, but with all the oil discharges in the ocean now, nobody noticed those tiny spots with the sheen of oil.
“Oh, that ship was dying, yet it was coming alive too. Time had worked its power on that Kingston valve, and over the years a hardly noticeable leak had taken place there too and the compressed air had seeped out, and bit by bit the pressure had forced the seawater out of the flotation tanks, let the air in so the hull regained its buoyancy. A small, gentle buoyancy that would barely lift a matchstick, but it was a buoyancy, a positive effect, and every day it grew a little bit stronger, knowing that when the right time came, the buoyancy would take effect.
“Many years could have passed, or that tiny pinhole of decay could have let in more seawater than the lifting effect could handle, but it was mankind itself that caused the balance to change. Out on station was the naval ship Sentilla, engaged in a scientific investigation. When her electronic equipment had a breakdown the personnel resorted to using blasting charges to record echo soundings in the strata below the bottom.”
The audience seemed to sense what was coming next. There was no movement, no sound from the crowd, just an intense excitement, one that made them taut with anticipation.
“One by one, the shock effect of those blasts made the bottom tremor. Little by little the suction that held the U-903 in place began to erode away... until one day the positive buoyancy inside that steel hull was enough to let her rise slowly, maybe an inch at a time, from that sandy, mucky grave site until it hovered an inch or so above the seafloor like a wounded, baffled fish who has fought himself off a barbed hook, free finally, but in a strange, unknown place.
“We don’t know what the water temperature was, nor the air pressure above the surface, but we do know that the balance of the ship was so delicate that it would respond to every change in condition. It had no propulsion, so it would flow where the current took it. Pressure changes could force it to the bottom... or allow it to rise slowly, very slowly, causing no disturbance at all until it... and some other object met. How many times must it have appeared on the surface and stayed for hours without ever having been seen at all?”
Hooker saw the questioning in their eyes and answered it before they could ask it. “It didn’t look for boats to hit. Of all the hundreds of times you were out there, how many times was there a contact? That ocean is big and deep. The old hulk was subject to many variables... pressure changes in front of storms, temperature drops, current movements all determined where she could be, and when a ship and that hardened body collided, there was destruction.”
Someone from the native audience said, “The teeth. We know it had teeth! Even you saw the teeth.”
Hooker held up his hand and shook his head. “I saw what you said teeth could do.” He let his eyes drift over their heads and in the rear of the room he saw the puzzled look on Chana’s face. Burger didn’t get it either. “This was a World War One submarine. On its bow it had a device naval submarine warfare has long since abandoned. It was called a net cutter, an angled steel support of a row of sharpened toothlike cutters that could shear metal cables that were slightly underwater, used to snare submarines. Those were your teeth. But whatever they hit, even that slight pressure would sink the hulk down under again to come up somewhere else when the pressures and temperature were just right.”
That skeptical voice again. “But it breathed!”
“That small, pitted hole in the bow that decay caused was letting out pressured air. It stopped when the water covered it, then came back when the hole was exposed again.”
“Why didn’t it sink?”
“Because that Kingston valve was still letting compressed air seep out. The buoyancy was nearly neutral.”
There was a new voice now, tinged with a trace of disbelief. “You said... you killed it.”
Hooker found the person, stared at him a second and grinned. “I did,” he told him.
There was more curiosity in the voice this time. He simply said, “How?”
This time Hooker didn’t answer. He simply looked over to where Alley was sitting and nodded. Alley reached up and turned off the lights.