The Kraken Wakes

If we had attacked immediately — well, perhaps. But until the danger was well established we had no means of knowing that we should attack — and then it was too late.

However, it does no good to cry over our shortcomings. My' purpose is to give as good a brief account as I can of how the present situation arose — and, to begin with, it arose very scrappily….

In due course the Guinevere docked at Southampton without being treated to any more curious phenomena. We did not expect any more, but the event had been memorable; almost as good, in fact, as having been put in a position to say, upon some remote future occasion: 'When your grandmother and I were on our honeymoon we saw a sea-serpent,' though not quite. Still, it was a wonderful honeymoon, I never expect to have a better: and Phyllis said something to much the same effect as we leant on the rail, watching the bustle below.

'Except,' she added, 'that I don't see why we shouldn't have one nearly as good, now and then.'

So we disembarked, sought our brand new home in Chelsea, and I turned up at the EBC offices the following Monday morning to discover that in absentia I had been rechristened Fireball Watson. This was on account of the correspondence. They handed it to me in a large sheaf, and said that since I had caused it, I had better do something about it.

There must, I think, be a great many people who go around just longing to be baffled, and who, moreover, feel a kind of immediate kin to anyone else who admits bafflement along roughly similar lines. I say 'roughly' because it became clear to me as I read the mail that classifications are possible. There are strata of bafflement. A friend of mine, after giving a talk on a spooky experience, was showered with correspondence on levitation, telepathy, materialization, and faith-healing. I, however, had struck a different layer. Most of my correspondents assumed that the sight of the fireballs must have roused me to a corollary interest not only in saucers, but showers of frogs, mysterious falls of cinders, all kinds of lights seen in the sky, and also sea-monsters. After I had sifted through them, I found myself left with half a dozen which might possibly have reference to fireballs similar to those we had seen. One, referring to a recent experience off the Philippines, I identified with fair certainty as being a confirmation of what the Captain of the Guinevere had told me. And the others seemed worth following up, too — particularly a rather cagey approach which invited me to meet the writer at La Plume d'Or, where lunch is always worth having.

I kept that appointment a week later. My host turned out to be a man two or three years older than myself who ordered four glasses of Tio Pepe, and then opened up by admitting that the name under which he had written was not his own, and that he was a Flight-Lieutenant, RAF.

'It's a bit tricky, you see,' he said. 'At the moment I am considered to have suffered some kind of hallucination, but if enough evidence turns up to show that it was not an hallucination, then they're almost certain to make it an official secret. Awkward, you see.'

I agreed that it must be.

'Still,' he went on, 'the thing worries me, and if you're collecting evidence, I'd like you to have it — though maybe not to make direct use of it. I mean, I don't want to find myself on the carpet. I don't suppose there's a regulation to stop a fellow discussing his hallucinations, but you can never be sure.'

I nodded understandingly. He went on:

'It was about three months ago. I was flying one of the regular patrols, a couple of hundred miles or so east of Formosa —'

'I didn't know we —' I began.

'There are a number of things that don't get publicity, though they're not particularly secret,' he said. 'Anyway, there I was. The radar picked these things up when they were still out of sight behind me, but coming up fast from the west.'

He had decided to investigate, and climbed to intercept. The radar continued to show the craft on a straight course behind and above him. He tried to communicate, but couldn't raise them. By the time he was getting the ceiling of them they were in sight, as three red spots, quite bright, even by daylight, and coming up fast though he was doing close to five hundred himself. He tried again to radio them, but without success. They just kept on coming, steadily overtaking him.

'Well,' he said, 'I was there to patrol. I told base that they were a completely unknown type of craft — if they were craft at all — and as they wouldn't talk I proposed to have a pip at them. It was either that, or just let 'em go — in which case I might as well not have been patrolling at all. Base agreed, kind of cautiously.

'I tried them once more, but they didn't take a damn bit of notice of either me or my signals. And as they got closer I was doubtful whether they were craft at all. They were just as you said on the radio — a pink fuzz, with a deeper red centre: might have been miniature red suns for all I could tell. Anyway, the more I saw of them the less I liked 'em, so I set the guns to radar-control and let 'em get on ahead.

'I reckoned they must be doing seven hundred or more as they passed me. A second or two later the radar picked up the foremost one, and the guns fired.

'There wasn't any lag. The thing seemed to blow up almost as the guns went off. And, boy, did it blow! It suddenly swelled immensely, turning from red to pink to white, but still with a few red spots here and there — and then my aircraft hit the concussion, and maybe some of the debris, too. I lost quite a lot of seconds, and probably had a lot of luck, because when I got sorted out I found that I was coming down fast. Something had carried away three-quarters of my starboard wing, and messed up the tip of the other. So I reckoned it was time to try the ejector, and rather to my surprise it worked.'

He paused reflectively. Then he added:

'I don't know that it gives you a lot besides confirmation, but there are one or two points. One is that they are capable of travelling a lot faster than those you saw. Another is that, whatever they are, they are highly vulnerable.'

And that, as we talked it over in detail, was about all the additional information he did provide — that, and the fact that when hit they did not disintegrate into sections, but exploded completely, which should, perhaps, have conveyed more than it seemed to at the time.

During the next few weeks several more letters trickled in without adding much, but then it began to look as if the whole affair were going the way of the Loch Ness monster. What there was came to me because it was generally conceded at EBC that fireball stuff was my pigeon. Several observatories confessed themselves puzzled by detecting small red bodies travelling at high speeds, but were extremely guarded in their statements. None of the newspapers ran it because, in editorial opinion, the whole thing was suspect in being too similar to the flying-saucer business, and their readers would prefer more novelty in their sensations. Nevertheless, bits and pieces did slowly accumulate — though it took nearly two years before they acquired serious publicity and attention.

This time it was a flight of thirteen. A radar station in the north of Finland picked them up first, estimating their speed as fifteen hundred miles per hour, and their direction as approximately south-west. In passing the information on they described them simply as 'unidentified aircraft'. The Swedes picked them up as they crossed their territory, and managed to spot them visually, describing them as small red dots. Norway confirmed, but estimated the speed at under thirteen hundred miles per hour. A Scottish station logged them as travelling at a thousand miles per hour, and just visible to the naked eye. Two stations in Ireland reported them as passing directly overhead, on a line slightly west of south-west. The more southerly station gave their speed as eight hundred and claimed that they were 'clearly visible'. A weather-ship at about 6 5 degrees North, gave a description which tallied exactly with that of the earlier fireballs, and calculated a speed close to 500 m.p.h. They were not sighted again after that.