The Kraken Wakes

I said that I had.

'Well, that isn't good. It wouldn't be Tuny's friends selling just now. It points to a number of people who aren't satisfied with the metal-fatigue or the red-menace explanations.'

'Well, are you?' I asked.

'No, of course not, but that isn't the point. I'm not the kind of fellow who can make a difference to the price of shipping shares. The chaps who can are influentiaclass="underline" if they start a scare, people start cancelling orders, and trade bogs down. It doesn't matter a hoot whether there are things at the bottom of the sea or not. What does matter is if people swing back to thinking there are — if they do, we'll have a worse trade recession than last time.' He paused. Then he added: 'And you people haven't helped a lot, either.'

'We've not been doing world-trade a lot of harm lately,' I told him. 'We've not had the chance. I don't say we haven't got a few scripts up our sleeves against the day when truth shall be more important than world-trade, but for the last few months now not a word about those things down there has gone out from any of our transmitters; the sponsors don't like it —'

'Good for them,' interrupted Harold.

' — any more than the advertisers liked mention of Hitler when we were on the brink of World War II,' I concluded.

'Implying — just what?' asked Harold.

'Well, roughly, that if you do happen to have any money in shipping, I should take it out, and put it into aircraft.'

Harold gave a disapproving grunt.

'I know you and Phyl have been specializing in this thing and following it along. What you've learnt seems to have convinced you — but have you any solution?'

I shook my head.

'Well, then, what good do you think you'll do to anybody by simply broadcasting: "Woe! Woe!"? All that happened in that scare after the first atomic depth-bomb was that a lot of people were worried, trade fell off, and everyone suffered, to no purpose. And then it took a lot of work to get them all soothed down again. If there is anything in it, then let them worry when they have to, but leave them in peace till then.'

'If — !' I repeated. 'What do you suppose sank that ship, Harold? When did any good come of burying your head in the sand?'

'It's safer for my neck than sticking it out,' said Harold, rather pleased with himself.

I found that Phyllis, when I recounted the gist of the conversation to her later, took a not dissimilar view.

'If we had come across a single practicable suggestion for countering the things it would have been worth campaigning for it, but we haven't,' she said. 'All my life I have been surrounded by things I'd rather not know too much about, so I have come to feel that truth made naked without purpose is really a wanton. It — I say, that was rather good, wasn't it? Where did I put my notebook?'

Tuny and Harold duly departed, and we settled again to our tasks — Phyllis to the search for something which had not already been said about Beckford of Fonthill. I, to the less literary occupation of framing a series on royal love-matches, to be entitled provisionally either, The Heart of Kings, or, Cupid Wears a Crown.

A pleasant month followed. The outer world intruded little. Phyllis finished the Beckford script, and two more, and picked up the threads of the novel that never seemed to get finished. I went steadily ahead with the task of straining the royal love-lives free from any political contaminations, and writing an article or two in between, to clear the air a bit. On days that we thought were too good to be wasted we went down to the coast and bathed, or hired a sailing dinghy. The newspapers forgot about the Yatsusbiro. Local parlance had adopted the term metal-fatigue as a useful cover for various misfortunes, and the terms china-fatigue and glass-fatigue were becoming current conveniences; The deep-sea, and all our speculations concerning it, seemed very far away.

Then, on a Wednesday night, the nine o'clock bulletin announced that the Queen Anne had been lost at sea

The report was very brief. Simply the fact, followed by: 'No details are available as yet, but it is feared that the list of the missing may prove to be very heavy indeed.' There was silence for fifteen seconds, then the announcer's voice resumed: 'The Queen Anne, the current holder of the Transatlantic record, was a vessel of ninety thousand tons displacement. She was built —'

I leant forward, and switched off. We sat looking at one another. Tears came into Phyllis's eyes. The tip of her tongue appeared, wetting her lips.

'The Queen Anne! Oh, God!' she said.

She searched for a handkerchief.

'Oh, Mike. That lovely ship!'

I crossed to sit beside her, and put my arm round her. For the moment she was seeing simply the ship as we had last seen her, putting out from Southampton. A creation that had been somewhere between a work of art and a living thing, shining and beautiful in the sunlight, moving serenely out towards the high seas, leaving a flock of little tugs bobbing behind. But I knew enough of her to realize that in a few minutes she would be on board, dining in the fabulous restaurant, or dancing in the ballroom, or up on one of the decks, watching it happen, feeling what they must have felt there. I put my other arm round her, and held her closer.

I am thankful that such imagination as I, myself, have is more prosaic, and seated further from the heart.

Half an hour later the telephone rang. I answered it, and recognized the voice with some surprise.

'Oh, hullo, Freddy. What is it?' I asked, for nine-thirty in the evening was not a time that one expected to be called by the EBC's Director of Talks & Features.

'Good. 'Fraid you might be out. You've heard the news?'

'Yes.'

'Well, we want something from you on this deep-sea menace of yours, and we want it quick. Half-hour length.'

'But, look here, the last thing I was told was to lay off any hint —'

'This has altered all that. It's a must, Mike. You don't want to be too sensational, but you do want to be convincing. Make 'em really believe there is something down there.'

'Look here, Freddy, if this is some kind of leg-pull —'

'It isn't. It's an urgent commission.'

'That's all very well, but for over a year now I've been regarded as the dumb coot who can't let go of an exploded crackpot theory. Now you suddenly ring me at about the time when a fellow might have made a fool bet at a party, and say —'

'Hell, I'm not at a party. I'm at the office, and likely to be here all night.'

'You'd better explain,' I told him.

'It's like this. There's a rumour running wild here that the Russians did it. Somebody launched that one off within a few minutes of the news coming through on the tape. Why the hell anybody'd think they would want to start anything that way, heaven knows, but you know how it is when people are emotionally worked up; they'll swallow anything for a bit. My own guess is that it is the let's-have-a-showdown-now school of thought seizing the opportunity, the damn fools. Anyway, it's got to be stopped. If it isn't, there might be enough pressure worked up to force the Government out, or make it send an ultimatum, or something. So stopped it's damned well going to be. Metal-fatigue isn't good enough this time, so the line is to be your deep-sea menace. To-morrow's papers are using it, the Admiralty is willing to play, we've got several big scientific names already, the BBC's next bulletin, and ours, will have good strong hints in order to start the ball roiling, the big American networks have started already, and some of their evening editions are coming on the streets with it. So if you want to put in your own pennyworth towards stopping the atom bombs falling, get cracking right away.'