The Kraken Wakes

'Okay. A half-hour feature. What angle?'

'It's to be a topical-special. Serious, but not blood-curdling. Not too technical. Intelligent man-in-the-street stuff. Above all, convincing. I suggest the line: Here is a menace more serious and more quickly developed than we had expected. A blow that has found us as unprepared as the Americans were at Pearl Harbour, but men of science are mobilizing already to give us the means to hit back, et cetera. Cautious but confident optimism. Okay?'

'I'll try — though I don't know what the optimism is to be founded on.'

'Never mind about that; just express it. Your primary job is to help fix the thing in their minds as a fact, so that it keeps out this anti-Russian nonsense. Once that is well established we can find ways to keep it going.'

'You think you'll need to?' I asked.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, after the Yatsu, and now this, it looks to me as if the things may have gone over to the offensive, and these won't be the only ones to suffer.'

'I'd not know about that. The thing is, will you get down to this right away? When you're through, ring us, and we'll have a recorder fixed ready for you. You'll give us a free hand to fiddle it around as necessary? The BBC are sure to have something along pretty similar lines.'

'Okay, Freddy. You shall have it,' I agreed, and hung up.

'Darling,' I said, 'work for us.'

'Oh, not to-night, Mike. I couldn't…'

'All right,' I said 'but it's work for me.' I handed on what Freddy Whittier had just told me. 'It looks,' I went on, 'as if the best way would be to decide the thesis and the style and approach, and then rake together the bits out of old scripts that will suit it. The devil of it is that most of the scripts and all the data are in London.'

'We can remember enough. It doesn't have to be intellectual — in fact, it mustn't,' Phyllis said. She thought for some moments. 'We've got all that organized scoffing to break down,' she added.

'If the papers really do their stuff to-morrow morning it ought to be cracked a bit. Our job is pressing home what they will have started.'

'But we need a line. The first thing people are going to ask is: "If this thing is so serious, why has nothing been done, and why have we been hoodwinked?" Well, why?'

I considered.

'I don't think that need be too difficult. Viz: the sober, sensible people of the West would have reacted wisely, and no doubt will; but the more emotional and excitable peoples elsewhere have less predictable reactions. It was therefore decided as a matter of policy that the Service Chiefs and scientists who have been studying the trouble should preserve discretion in the hope that it might be scotched before it became serious enough to cause public alarm. How's that?'

'Um — yes. As good as we're likely to get,' she agreed.

'Then we can use Freddy's unpreparedness angle as a challenge — the brains of the world getting together and turning the full force of modern science and technique on to the job of avenging the loss, and preventing any more. A duty to those who have been lost, and a crusade to make the seas safe.'

'That's what it is, Mike,' Phyllis said, quietly, and with a reproving note.

'Of course it is, darling. Why do you so often think that I say what I say by accident?'

'Well, you start off as if truth is going to be the first casualty, as usual, and then end up like that. It's kind of bewildering.'

'Never mind, my Sweet. I intend to write it the right way. Now, you run up to bed, and I'll get on with it.'

'To bed? What on earth —?'

'Well, you said you couldn't —'

'Don't be absurd, darling. Do you think I'm going to let you loose on this on your own? Now, which of us had the atlas last…?'

It was eleven o'clock the next morning when I made my mazy way into the kitchen and subconsciously got together coffee and toast and boiled eggs, and fumbled back upstairs with them.

It had been after five that morning when I had finished dictating our combined work in the recording machine in London, by which time we had both been too tired to know whether it was good or bad, or to care.

Phyllis lit a cigarette to accompany the second cup of coffee.

'I think,' she suggested, 'that we had better go into Falmouth this morning.'

So to Falmouth we went, and, in the course of duty, visited four of the most popular bars in that port.

Freddy Whittier had not exaggerated the need for swift action. The rumour of Russian responsibility for the loss of the Queen Anne was tentatively about already; noticeably stronger among the double-scotches than among the pints of beer. There could have been little doubt that it would have swept the field but for the unanimity with which the morning papers had laid responsibility on the things down below. In the circumstances, their solidarity succeeded in producing an impression that the anti-Russian talk must be an entirely local product sponsored by a few well-known local diehards and fire-eaters.

That did not mean, however, that the deep-sea menace was fully accepted. Too many people could recall their first uncritical alarm, followed by their swing to derision, to be able to make the new volte-face all at once. But the serious views in the morning's leaders had got as far as damping the derision and causing many to wonder whether there might not have been something in it after all. It looked to me as if, assuming that we had a fair sample, the first objective had been reached: the danger of a concerted popular demand for war on the wrong enemy had been averted. Undoing the effects of a year or more's propaganda, and establishing the reality of an enemy that could not even be described, were matters for steady perseverance.

'To-morrow,' said Phyllis, knocking back the fourth gin-and-lime occasioned by our researches, 'I think we ought to go back to London. You must have quite enough of those morganatic marriages in the bag to be going on with, and there'll probably be quite a lot of work for us to do on this business.' It was only in expressing the idea that she had forestalled me.

The next morning we made our customary early start.

When we arrived at the flat, and switched on the radio, we were just in time to hear of the sinkings of the aircraft-carrier Meritorious, and the liner Carib Princess.

The Meritorious, it will be recalled, went down in mid-Atlantic, eight hundred miles south-west of the Cape Verde Islands: the Carib Princess not more than twenty miles from Santiago de Cuba: both sank in a matter of two or three minutes, and from each very few survived. It is difficult to say whether the British were the more shocked by the loss of a brand-new naval unit, or the Americans by their loss of one of their best-found cruising liners with her load of wealth and beauty: both had already been somewhat stunned by the Queen Anne, for in the great Atlantic racers there was community of pride. Now, the language of resentment differed, but both showed the characteristics of a man who has been punched in the back in a crowd, and is looking round, both fists clenched, for someone to hit.

The American reaction appeared more extreme for, in spite of the violent nervousness of the Russians existing there, a great many found the idea of the deep-sea menace easier to accept than did the British, and a clamour for drastic, decisive action swelled up, giving a lead to a similar clamour at home.