The Kraken Wakes

'This newspaper has managed to exist for more than one hundred years without a comic-strip, and I see no reason to break that tradition now.'

In due course, the memorandum appeared in front of the Editor of The Senate, who glanced at it, called for a synopsis, lifted his eyebrows, and dictated an urbane regret.

Subsequently it occurred upon two other editorial desks of the more cloistered kind, but after that it ceased to circulate, and was known only by word of mouth within a small circle.

'What I have never understood about it,' Phyllis said, with a slight frown and an air of having been familiar with the situation for years, 'is why something like The Daily Tape or The hens hasn't run it? Isn't it just their stuff? Or what about the American tabloids?'

'The Tape very nearly did,' Mallarby told her. 'Only Bocker said he'd sue them if they mentioned his name — he's after, respectable publication, or none at all. So the Tape tried to get some other well-known figure to sponsor the idea as if it were his own. Nobody was keen. Bocker got his stuff printed, deposited it, and claimed copyright, so that was off. They dropped it because without some weighty kind of backing it would be just another Tape scare, and the circulation figures hadn't justified their last two scares. The Lens and the others are in roughly the same jamb. One small American paper did use a chewed-up version, but as it was their third interplanetary danger in four months it didn't register well. The others thought it over and reckoned that it would be too easy to be accused of making cheap capital out of the loss of American lives in the Keweenaw, so they threw it out. But it will come. Before long, one or another of them is bound to splash it, with or without Bocker's name and consent — and almost certainly without his main point, which was to try to make some kind of contact. They'll stress just what Bennell, here, stressed just now — the comic-horrific-strip aspect. Make-your-flesh-creep stuff.'

'And what other use can you make of a farrago like that?' Bennell inquired.

'Well, you can at least say, as I said before, that he does include more factors than anyone else has — and that anything that includes even most of the factors is, ipso facto, bound to be fantastic. We may decry it, but, for all that, until something better turns up, it's the best we have.'

Bennell shook his head.

'You begged the whole thing at the start. Suppose I concede for the moment that there does seem to be intelligence of some kind down there — you've no solid proof that intelligence couldn't evolve at a few tons to the square inch as easily 'as at fifteen pounds. You've nothing to support you but sheer common sense — the same kind of common sense that was satisfied that heavier-than-air craft could never fly. Prove to me —'

'You've got it wrong. He claims that the intelligence must have evolved under high pressure, but that it couldn't do so under the other conditions obtaining in our Deeps. But whatever you concede, and whatever the top naval men may think about Bocker, it is clear enough that they must have been assuming for some time that there is something intelligent down there. You don't design and make a special bomb like that all in five minutes, you know. Anyway, whether the Bocker theory is sheer hot air or not, he's lost his main point. This bomb was not the amiable and sympathetic approach that he advocated.'

Mallarby paused, and shook his head.

'I've met Bocker several times. He's a civilized, liberal-minded man — with the usual trouble of liberal-minded men; that they think others are, too. He has an interested, inquiring mind. He has never grasped that the average mind when it encounters something new is scared, and says: "Better smash it, or suppress it, quick." Well, he's just had another demonstration of the average mind at work.'

'But,' Bennell objected, 'if, as you say, it is officially believed that these ship losses have been caused by an intelligence, then there's something to be scared about, and you can't put to-day's affair down as anything stronger than retaliation.'

Mallarby shook his head again.

'My dear Bennell, I not only can, but I do. Suppose, now, that something were to come dangling down to us on a rope out of space; and suppose that that thing was emitting rays on a wavelength that acutely discomforted us. perhaps even caused us physical pain. What should we do? I suggest that the first thing we should do would be to snip the rope and put it out of action. Then we should examine the strange object and find out what we could about it.

'Then suppose that more strange objects began to be reported dangling down from above and causing discomfort to our citizens. We should argue: "This looks like a kind of invasion, or reconnaissance for one. Anyway it is extremely painful to us, so whatever is up there doing it has got to be stopped." And we should forthwith take what steps we could to discourage it. It might be done simply in the spirit of ending a nuisance, or it might be done with some animosity, and regarded as — retaliation. Now, would it be we, or the thing above, that was to blame?

'In the present case, and after to-day's performance the question becomes simply academic. It is difficult to imagine any kind of intelligence that would not resent what we've just done. If this were the only Deep where trouble has occurred, there might well be no intelligence left to resent it — but this isn't the only place, as you know; not by any means. So, what form that very natural resentment will take remains for us to see.'

'You think there really will be some kind of response, then?' Phyllis asked.

He shrugged. 'To take up my analogy again: suppose that some violently destructive agency were to descend from space upon one of our cities. What should we do?'

'Well, what could we do?' asked Phyllis, reasonably enough.

'We could turn the backroom boys on to it. And if it happened a few times more, we should soon be giving the backroom boys full priorities.'

'You're assuming a lot, Mallarby,' Bennell put in. 'For one thing, an almost parallel state of development. The significance of the word "priority", even, has a semantic dependence on conditions. It could scarcely mean a thing a century ago, and in the eighteenth century you could have howled "priority" until you were blue in the face without creating any technical advance whatever because our modern idea of research wasn't there — nobody would even understand what you were after.'

'True,' agreed Mallarby, 'but after what happened to those ships I'm justified in assuming quite a degree of technology there, I think.'

Phyllis said: 'Is it really too late — for some such approach as Bocker wanted, I mean? There's only been one bomb. If there isn't another they might think it was a natural disaster, an eruption or something.'

Mallarby shook his head.

'It won't be just one bomb. And it was always too late, my dear. Can you imagine us tolerating any form of rival intelligence on earth, no matter how it got here? Why, we can't even tolerate anything but the narrowest differences of views within our own race. No,' he shook his head, 'no, I'm afraid Bocker's idea of fraternization never had the chance of a flea in a furnace.'

That was, I think, very likely as true as Mallarby made it sound; but if there ever had been any chance at all it was gone by the time we reached home. Somehow, and apparently overnight, the public had put several twos together at last. The halfhearted attempt to represent the depth-bomb as one of a series of tests had broken down altogether. The vague fatalism with which the loss of the Keweenaw and the other ships had been received was succeeded by a burning sense of outrage, a satisfaction that the first step in vengeance had been taken, and a demand for more.