The Kraken Wakes

'I'm so glad I don't feel like him; it must be devastating,' Phyllis said. 'Why, do you suppose, do people keep on mass-producing these decadent moanings?'

I had no answer ready for that one, but I was saved the trouble of trying to find one when her attention was suddenly caught elsewhere.

'Mars is looking pretty angry to-night, isn't he? I hope it isn't an omen,' she said.

I looked where she pointed at a red spot among myriads of white ones, and with some surprise. Mars does look red, of course, though I had never seen him look quite as red as that — but then, neither were the stars, as seen at home, quite as bright as they were here. Being practically in the tropics might account for it.

'Certainly a little inflamed,' I agreed.

We regarded the red point for some moments. Then Phyllis said:

'That's funny. It seems to be getting bigger.'

I explained that that was obviously an hallucination formed by staring at it. We went on staring, and it became quite indisputably bigger. Moreover:

'There's another one. There can't be two Marses,' said Phyllis.

And sure enough there was. A smaller red point, a little up from, and to the right of, the first. She added:

'And another. To the left. See?'

She was right about that, too, and by this time the first one was glowing as the most noticeable thing in the sky.

'It must be a flight of jets of some kind, and that's a cloud of luminous exhaust we're seeing,' I suggested.

We watched all three of them slowly getting brighter and also sinking lower in the sky until they were little above the horizon line, and reflecting in a pinkish pathway across the water towards us.

'Five now,' said Phyllis.

We've both of us been asked many times since to describe them, but perhaps we are not gifted with such a precise eye for detail as some others. What we said at the time, and what we still say, is that on this occasion there was no real shape visible. The centre was solidly red, and a kind of fuzz round it was less so. The best suggestion I can make is that you imagine a brilliantly red light as seen in a fairly thick fog so that there is a strong halation, and you will have something of the effect.

Others besides ourselves were leaning over the rail, and in fairness I should perhaps mention that between them they appear to have seen cigar-shapes, cylinders, discs, ovoids, and, inevitably, saucers. We did not. What is more, we did not see eight, nine, or a dozen. We saw five.

The halation may, or may not, have been due to some kind of jet drive, but it did not indicate any great speed. The things grew in size quite slowly as they approached. There was time for people to go back into the saloon and fetch their friends out to see, so that, presently, a line of us leant all along the rail, looking at them and guessing.

With no idea of scale, we could have no judgement of their size or distance; all we could be sure of was that they were descending in a long glide which looked as if it would take them across our wake. The fellow next to me was talking know-all about St Elmo's fire to a partner who had never heard of St Elmo and didn't feel she had missed anything, when the first one hit the water.

A great burst of steam shot up in a pink plume. Then, swiftly, there was a lower, wider spread of steam which had lost the pink tinge, and was simply a white cloud in the moonlight. It was beginning to thin out when the sound of it reached us in a searing hiss. The water round the spot bubbled and seethed and frothed. When the steam drew off, there was nothing to be seen there but a patch of turbulence, gradually subsiding.

Then the second of them came in, in just the same way, on almost the same spot. One after another all five of them touched down on the water with great whooshes and hissings of steam. Then the vapour cleared, showing only a few contiguous patches of troubled water.

Aboard the Guinevere, bells clanged, the beat of the engines changed, we started to change course, crews turned out to man the boats, men stood by to throw lifebelts.

Four times we steamed slowly back and forth across the area, searching. There was no trace whatever to be found. But for our own wake, the sea lay all about us in the moonlight, placid, empty, unperturbed

The next morning I sent my card in to the Captain. In those days I had a staff job with the EBC, and I explained to him that they would be pretty sure to take a piece from me on the previous night's affair. He gave the usual response:

'You mean BBC?' he suggested.

The EBC was younger then, and it was necessary to explain almost every time. I did so, and added:

'As far as I've been able to tell, every passenger has a different version, so I thought I'd like to check mine with your official one.'

'A good idea,' he approved. 'Go ahead, and tell me yours.'

When I had finished, he nodded, and then showed me his entry in the log. Substantially we were agreed; certainly in the view that there had been five, and on the impossibility of attributing a definite shape to them. His estimates of speed, size, and position were, of course, technical matters. I noticed that they had registered on the radar screens, and were tentatively assumed to have been aircraft of an unknown type.

'What's your own private, opinion?' I asked him. 'Did you ever see anything at all like them before?'

'No. I never did,' he said, but he seemed to hesitate.

'But what —?' I asked.

'Well, but not for the record,' he said, 'I've heard of two instances, almost exactly similar, in the last year. One time it was three of the things by night; the other, it was half a dozen of them by daylight — even so, they seem to have looked much the same; just a kind of red fuzz. Both lots were in the Pacific though, not over this side.'

'Why "not for the record"?' I asked.

'In both cases there were only two or three witnesses — and it doesn't do a seaman any good to get a reputation for seeing things, you know. The stories just got around professionally, so to speak — among ourselves we aren't quite as sceptical as landsmen: some funny things can still happen at sea, now and then.'

'You can't suggest an explanation I can quote?'

'On professional grounds I'd prefer not. I'll just stick to my official entry. But reporting it is a different matter this time. We've a couple of hundred witnesses and more.'

'Do you think it'd be worth a search? You've got the spot pinpointed.'

He shook his head. 'It's deep there. Over three thousand fathoms: that's a long way down.'

'There wasn't any trace of wreckage in those other cases, either?'

'No. That would have been evidence to warrant an inquiry. But they had no evidence.'

We talked a little longer, but I could not get him to put forward any theory. Presently I went away, and wrote up my account. Later, I got through to London, and dictated it to an EBC recorder. It went out on the air the same evening as a filler, just an oddity which was not expected to do more than raise a few eyebrows.

So it was by chance that I was a witness of that early stage — almost the beginning, for I have not been able to find any references to identical phenomena earlier than those two spoken of by the Captain. Even now, years later, though I am certain enough in my own mind that this was the beginning, I can still offer no proof that it was not an unrelated phenomenon. What the end that will eventually follow this beginning may be, I prefer not to think too closely: I would also prefer not to dream about it, either, if dreams were within my control.

It began so unrecognizably. Had it been more obvious — and yet it is difficult to see what could have been done effectively even if we had recognized the danger. Recognition and prevention don't necessarily go hand in hand. We recognized the potential dangers of atomic fission quickly enough — yet we could do little about them.