'Less so than most, I hope,' Dr Matet replied.
We went in to dinner. Phyllis prattled lightly through the soup, and then steered gracefully back to the topic.
'The first time I came to see you was about that ooze that was coming up into currents and you were dreadfully careful. What did you really think then?'
He smiled. 'The same as I think now that if you get yourself made a kind of mental outlaw, you also make your purposes very much harder to attain. Poor old Bocker though everybody's had to come round to accepting the second part of his contention now, yet he's still out beyond the Pale. I could not afford to say it, but I believed then that he was right about the mining. One could think of nothing else that would account for it, so, as the genius of Baker Street once remarked to your husband's namesake '
I headed him off: 'But you didn't want to join Bocker in the wilderness.'
'I did not. Nor have I been by any means the only one. Bocker's miscarriage warned us all to allow full gestation. Incidentally, I suppose you know that there have been further discolorations of currents, and that those first discoloured have returned to normal?'
'Yes, Captain Winters told me. What do you think would cause that?' Phyllis asked, just as one might who had not immediately rung up Bocker the moment she heard it, to demand an explanation.
'Well, pursuing the mining theory, one would suggest that all the loose sediment near the scene of operations would gradually be washed away. Imagine sticking the end of a suction-pipe into sand. At first you'd get sand coming through it, and you'd create a funnel-shaped depression. After a while you'd reach rock, but there'd still be some sand trickling down the sides of your depression, and having to be sucked clear. In time, however, your depression would be of such a shape that very little sand which, of course, represents the sedimental ooze would trickle down, and you would be able to work on the cleared rock-face without disturbing the surrounding sand, or ooze, at all.
'But, of course, on the sea-bed the scale of such an operation would be immense, and a colossal quantity of ooze would have to be shifted before you could get to a rock-face that would remain clear. It would certainly be better to mine horizontally where possible. Once work on the rock itself had begun, the detritus would be too heavy to rise more than a few hundred feet before it began to settle, so the surface-water would no longer be discoloured.'
No one observing Phyllis's rapt attention would have suspected that she had already made use of this theory in a script.
'I see. You make it easy to understand, Doctor. Then the various discolorations will have enabled you to locate quite closely where this mining is going on?'
'With reasonable accuracy, I think,' he agreed. 'And so, of course, those spots become priority targets in fact, to be honest, the only closely-localized targets, so far.'
'There'll be an attack on them, then? Soon?' Phyllis asked.
He shook his head. 'Not my side of things, but I imagine that any delay will be due simply to technical reasons. How much of the sea can we afford to poison with atomic weapons? Are we to risk ships on the task? Or how long will it take to construct a depth-bomb light enough for air transport? The others have been exceedingly heavy, you know. There must be quite a number of points of that kind.'
'And that is all we can do as a counter-attack?' said Phyllis.
'All that I have heard of,' Dr Matet told her, cautiously. 'The emphasis at the moment is naturally defensive, and on securing safety for ships. There again, that's not my department at alclass="underline" I can only give you what I have picked up.' And he went on to do so.
It was generally agreed, it seemed, that ships were liable to two forms of attack (three forms if one included electrification, but this had occurred only to ships using cables at considerable depths for grappling or other purposes, and could be disregarded as far as the rest were concerned). Neither of these weapons was explosive: the explosions suffered by some of the ships were almost certainly due to their own boilers blowing up when the stokeholds were flooded, for there had been no similar explosions with the motor-vessels that had been lost.
One of the weapons appeared to be vibratory and capable of setting up sympathetic vibrations of such intensity in the attacked craft that she literally shook herself to pieces in a, minute or two. The other was less obscure in its nature, but even more puzzling in its capacity. It was undoubtedly some contrivance which attacked the hull below the waterline. There were several obvious ways in which a device could be made to do this: what was less comprehensible was its method of assault, since the rapidity with which its victims sank, the fact that the air trapped in the hull blew the decks upwards, and various other effects, all tended to suggest some instrument that was capable, not simply of holing a ship, but of something that must be very like slicing the bottom clean off her.
Even before the Conference had begun Bocker had suggested that these devices might be found to form strategic barrages, or minefields, about certain deep areas, and might very well be regarded as perimeter defences. There would, he pointed out, be no great difficulty in constructing a mechanism to lurk inertly at any predetermined depth, and become active only on the approach of a ship that, indeed, had been the principle of both the acoustic and magnetic mines. But on the means by which it could be made to slice through the hull of a ship with, apparently, the efficiency of a wire through cheese, even Bocker had no suggestions to make.
No one had disagreed with this, in general, but neither had anyone as yet been able to amplify it. The suddenness and success of the attacks, the small numbers of the survivors and the loose quality of their accounts gave very little data.
'To my mind,' said Dr Matet, 'the important thing at the moment is to get across to the public that the danger is not incomprehensible, and so stop this silly panicking for which we may blame the Stock Exchanges more than any other persons or institutions. The attack comes from an utterly unexpected direction, it is true, but, like any other, it can and will be met, and the sooner people can be made to realize that it is simply a matter of finding a counter to a new kind of weapon, the sooner they'll cool off. I gather your job is to cool them off, so that is why I decided to tell you all this. In a few days I imagine there will be quite full and frank reports from the various Committees that are now being set up once they have been brought to realize that here, at least, is one war in which there are no enemy spies listening.' And on that note we parted.
Phyllis and I did our best during the next few days to play our part in putting across the idea of firm hands steady on the wheel, and of the backroom boys who had produced radar, asdic, and other marvels nodding confidently, and saying in effect: 'Sure. Just give us a few days to think, and we'll knock together something that will settle this lot!' There was a satisfactory feeling that confidence was gradually being restored.
Perhaps the main stabilizing factor, however, emerged from a difference of opinion on one of the Technical Committees.
General agreement had been reached that a torpedo-like weapon designed to give submerged escort to a vessel could profitably be developed to counter the assumed mine-form of attack. The motion was accordingly put that all should pool information likely to help in the development of such a weapon.
The Russian delegation demurred. Remote control of missiles, they pointed out, was, of course, a Russian invention in any case; moreover, Russian scientists, zealous in the fight for Peace, had already developed such control to a degree greatly in advance of that achieved by the capitalist-ridden science of the West. It could scarcely be expected of the Soviets that they should make a present of their discoveries to warmongers.