The Kraken Wakes

'But, passing from the really important, to matters of mere worldwide interest —?' I suggested, patiently.

'He wouldn't let go of much, but what he did say wasn't encouraging. Some of it was rather horrid.'

'Tell me.'

'Well, the main situation doesn't seem to have altered a lot on the surface, but they're getting increasingly worried about what's happening below. The general flap and scare worried the authorities. It unsettled people, and they were uneasy lest what was just an excitement and a thrill might turn into a panic. From the way he spoke I think there must have been quite a bit of manoeuvring behind the way it has all calmed down.

'And he didn't actually say that investigation has made no progress either, but what he did say implied it. For instance, echo soundings don't help. You can tell where the bottom is, but that tells you nothing about what may be on the bottom there. The shallower, secondary echoes may be off large creatures, shoals of fish, or anything, but there's no means of being sure what they are off. Some of them seem to be static, but no one's sure about that.

'Depth microphones don't help much. At some levels there's practically nothing, at others there's just a meaningless pandemonium of fish-noises, like we heard from that telebath thing. And they daren't let them down really deep on a steel cable because of what happened to that research-ship and some of the others. They've tried with a cable which was a non-conductor, but the mike leads burnt out at about a thousand fathoms. They sent down a television camera adapted for infra-red instead of visible rays, on the theory that it might be less provocative, and insulated the gear from all the rest of the ship. That was a good thing because at about eight hundred fathoms up came a charge that jumped fuses and melted half their instruments.

'He says that atomic bombs are out, for the moment at any rate. You can only use them in isolated places, and even then the radio-activity spreads widely. They kill an awful lot of fish quite uselessly, and make a lot more radio-active. The fisheries experts on both sides of the Atlantic have been raising hell, and saying that it's because of the bombings that some shoals have been failing to turn up in the proper places at the proper times. They've been blaming the bombs for upsetting the ecology, whatever that is, and affecting the migratory habits. But a few of them are saying that the data aren't sufficient to be absolutely sure that it is the bombs that have done it, but something certainly has, and it may have serious effects on food supplies. And so, as nobody seems to be quite clear what the bombs were expected to do, and all they do do is to kill and bewilder lots of fish at great expense, they've become unpopular just now.'

'Most of that we already know,' I remarked, 'but when it's on parade it certainly makes a fine upstanding body of negatives.'

'Well, here's one you didn't know. Two of those bombs they've sent down haven't gone off.'

'Oh,' I said, 'and what do we infer from that?'

'I don't know. But it has them worried, very worried. You see, the way they are set to operate is by the pressure at a given depth; simple and pretty accurate.'

'Meaning that they never reached the right pressure-zone? Must have got hung up somewhere on the way down?'

Phyllis nodded. 'That alone would take a bit of explaining, but what worries them still more is that there is a secondary setting, quite independent, just in case it happens to land on a submarine mountain, or something. It works with a time-switch — only with these two it hasn't.'

'Ah,' I said, 'perfectly simple, my dear Watson — the water got in and stopped the clock,' I told her.

'It's your name that's very suitably Watson — I'm only labelled that way for the duration,' Phyllis said, coldly. 'Anyway, there's nothing perfectly simple about it; and it's made them extremely anxious.'

'Understandably, too. I'd not feel too happy myself if I'd mislaid a couple of live atom bombs,' I admitted. 'What else?'

'Three cable-repair ships have unaccountably disappeared. One of them was cut off in the middle of a radio message. She was known to be grappling for a defective cable at the time.'

'When was this?'

'One about six months ago, one about three weeks ago, and one last week.'

'They might not be anything to do with it.'

'They might not — but everyone's pretty sure they are.'

'No survivors to tell what happened?'

'None.'

Presently I asked:

'Anything more?'

'Let me sec. Oh, yes. They are developing some kind of guided depth-missile which will be high-explosive, not atomic. But it hasn't been tested yet.'

I turned to look at her admiringly. 'That's the stuff, darling. The real Mata Hari touch. Have you got the drawings?'

'You goof. It's only because they don't want people unsettled that it's not been published in the newspapers — that, and the fact that the newspapers agree. The last hullabaloo sent the sales-graphs dipping everywhere, and the advertisers didn't like it. There's no need for ordinary security measures. Nobody's going to dangle a telephone into the Mindanao Trench and ask if anybody down there would like to buy some interesting information.'

'I suppose not,' I admitted.

'Even the Services use common sense sometimes,' she said pointedly, and then added, on a second thought: 'Though there are probably several things he didn't tell me.'

'Probably,' I agreed again.

'The most important thing is that he is going to give me an introduction to Dr Matet, the oceanographer.'

I sat up. 'But, darling, the Oceanographical Society has more or less threatened to excommunicate anybody who deals with us after that last script — it's part of their anti-Bocker Line.'

'Well, Dr Matet happens to be a friend of the Captain's. He's seen his fireball-incidence maps, and he's a half-convert. Anyway, we're not convinced Bockerites, are we?'

'What we think we are isn't necessarily what other people think we are. Still, if he's willing — When can we see him?'

'I hope to see him in a few days' time, darling.'

'Don't you think I should —'

'No. But it's sweet of you not to trust me still.'

'But—'

'No. And now it's time we went to sleep,' she said, firmly.

The beginning of Phyllis's interview was, she reported, almost

standard:

'EBC?' said Doctor Matet, raising eyebrows like miniature doormats. 'I thought Captain Winters said BBC

He was a man with a large frame sparingly covered, which gave his head the appearance of properly belonging to a still larger frame. His tanned forehead was high, and well polished back to the crown. This dome was hedged about with wiry grey hair which stuck out in tufts over each ear. His bright eyes peered at one past a pronouncedly Roman nose. His large, responsive mouth surmounted a slightly cleft chin. As if all this dominating apparatus were slightly too heavy for him, he stooped. He gave one, Phyllis said, a feeling of being overhung.

She sighed inwardly, and started on the routine justification of the English Broadcasting Company's existence, with the assurances that sponsorship did not necessarily connote venality, venenosity, or even vapidity. He found this an interesting point of view. Phyllis recited examples of illustrious EBC occasions and persons, and worked him round gradually until he had reached the position of considering us nice enough people striving manfully to overcome the disadvantages of being considered a slightly second class oracle. Then, after making it quite clear that any material he might supply was strictly anonymous in origin, he opened up a bit.

The trouble from Phyllis's point of view was that he did it on a pretty academic level, full of strange words and instances which she had to interpret as best she could. The gist of what he had to tell her, however, seemed to be this: