The Kraken Wakes

'Exactly. Well, you already know my theory of the origin of the deep-water intelligences, so we'll not go into that now. We'll deal with their present state, and I deduce that to be this: having settled into the environment best suited to them, these creatures' next thought would be to develop that environment in accordance with their ideas of what constitutes a convenient, orderly, and, eventually, civilized condition. They are, you see, in the position of — well, no, they are actually pioneers, colonists: Once they have safely arrived they set about improving and exploiting their new territory. What we have been seeing are the results of their having started work on the job.'

'By doing what?' I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. 'How can we possibly tell? But judging by the way we have received them, one would imagine that their primary concern would be to provide themselves with some form of defence against us. For this they would presumably require metals. I suggest to you, therefore, that somewhere down in the Mindanao Deep, and also somewhere in the Deep in the south-east of the Cocos-Keeling Basin, you would, if you could go there, find mining operations now in progress.'

I glimpsed the reason for his demand for anonymity.

'Er — but the working of metals in such conditions —?' I said.

'How can we guess what technology they may have developed? We ourselves have plenty of techniques for doing things which would at first thought appear impossible in an atmospheric pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch; there are also a number of unlikely things we can do under water.' —

'But, with a pressure of tons, and in continual darkness, and —' but Phyllis cut across me with that decisiveness which warns me to shut up and not argue.

'Dr Bocker,' she said, 'you named two particular Deeps then; why was that?'

He turned from me to her.

'Because that seems to me the only reasonable explanation where those two are concerned. It may be, as Mr Holmes once remarked to your husband's illustrious namesake, "a capital mistake to theorize before one has data," but it is mental suicide to funk the data one has. I know of nothing, and can imagine nothing, that could produce the effect we have here except some exceedingly powerful machine for continuous ejection.'

'But,' I said, a little firmly, for I get rather tired of being dogged by the ghost of Mr Holmes, 'if it is mining as you suggest, then why is the discoloration due to ooze, and not grit?'

'Well, firstly there would be a great deal of ooze to be shifted before one could get at the rock, immense deposits, most likely; and secondly, the density of the ooze is little more than that of the water, whereas the grit, being heavy, would begin to settle long before it got anywhere near the surface, however fine it might be.'

Before I could pursue that, Phyllis cut me off again:

'What about the other places, Doctor. Why mention just those two?'

'I don't say that the others don't also signify mining, but I suspect, from their locations, that they may have another purpose.'

'Which is —? prompted Phyllis, looking at him, all girlish expectation.

'Communications, I think. You see, for instance, close to, though far below, the area where discoloration begins to occur in the equatorial Atlantic Lies the Romanche Trench. It is a gorge through the submerged mountains of the Atlantic Ridge. Now, when one considers the fact that it forms the only deep link between the eastern and western Atlantic Basins, it seems more than just a coincidence that signs of activity should show up there. In fact, it strongly suggests to me that something down below is not satisfied with the natural state of that Trench. It is quite likely that it is blocked here and there by falls of rock. It may be that in some parts it is narrow and awkward; almost certainly, if there were a prospect of using it, it would be an advantage to clear it of ooze deposits down to a solid bottom. I don't know, of course, but the fact that something is undoubtedly taking place in that strategic Trench leaves me with little doubt that whatever is down there is concerned to improve its methods of getting about in the depths — just as we have improved our ways of getting about on the surface.'

There was a silence while we took in that one, and its implications. Phyllis rallied first.

'Er — and the other two main places — the Caribbean one, and the one west of Guatemala?' she asked.

Dr Bocker offered us cigarettes, and lit one himself.

'Well, now,' he remarked, leaning back in his chair, 'doesn't it strike you as probable that for a creature of the depths a tunnel connecting the Deeps on either side of the isthmus would offer advantages almost identical with those that we ourselves obtain from the existence of the Panama Canal?'

People may say what they like about Bocker, but they can never truthfully claim that the scope of his ideas is mean or niggling. What is more, nobody has ever actually proved him wrong. His chief trouble was that he usually provided such large, indigestible slabs that they stuck in all gullets — even mine, and I would class myself as a fairly wide-gulleted type. That, however, was a subsequent reflection. At the climax of the interview I was chiefly occupied with trying to convince myself that he really meant what he had said, and finding nothing but my own resistance to suggest that he did not.

Before we left, he gave us one more thing to think about, too. He said:

'Since you are following this along, you've probably heard of two atomic bombs that failed to go off?'

We told him we had.

'And have you heard that there was an unsponsored atomic explosion yesterday?'

'No. Was it one of them?' Phyllis asked.

'I should very much hope so — because I should hate to think it could be any other,' he replied. 'But the odd thing is that though one was lost off the Aleutians, and the other in the process of trying to give the Mindanao Deep another shake up, the explosion took place not so far off Guam — a good twelve hundred miles from Mindanao.'

'I wish,' said Phyllis, 'that I had been kinder and tried to pay more attention to dear Miss Popple who used to try to teach me geography, poor thing. Every day the world gets fuller of places I never heard of.'

'That's perfectly in order,' I told her. 'Haven't you noticed that the places mentioned in military communiqués are scarcely ever to be found on the maps? The geographers never heard of them, either.'

'Well, it says here that over sixty people were drowned when a tsunami struck Roast Beef Island. Where's Roast Beef Island? And what's a tsunami?'

'I don't know where Roast Beef Island is, though I can offer you two Plum Pudding Islands. But tsunami is Japanese for an earthquake-wave.'

She regarded me.

'You needn't look so smug, dear. It's only half marks. The thing is, would it be anything to do with us?'

'Us?'

'Well, with those things down there, I mean.'

'Not unless it was a phoney tsunami.'

'How euphonious! "Phoney tsunami!"' She went on crooning; 'Euphony — euphony — phoney — tsunami' to herself for a bit until she ended suddenly: 'How would we know?'

'Look, I'm trying to think. Know what?'

'Whether it's phoney or not, of course.'

'Well, you could ring up your learned pal, Dr Matet. Oceanographers have meters and things to tell them what kind of wave's what, and where it comes from.'

'Do they really. How?'

'How would I know how? They just do. He'd be sure to have heard if there were anything funny about it.'

'All right,' she said, and went off.

Presently she came back.

'It's okay,' she reported, disappointedly. 'There was, I quote: "a minor seismic disturbance in the neighbourhood of St Ambrose Island, longitude something, latitude something else." Anyway, off Chile. And Roast Beef Island is another name for Esperanzia Island.'