In the south-west of England, and up the more difficult west coast of Scotland similar preparations were going on.
They did not seem greatly to deter the sea-tanks. Night after night, down the Irish coast, on the Brittany coast, up out of the Bay of Biscay, along the Portuguese seaboard they came crawling in large or small raids. But they had lost their most potent weapon, surprise. The leaders usually gave their own alarm by blowing themselves up in the minefields; by the time a gap had been created the defences were in action and the townspeople had fled. The sea-tanks that did get through did some damage, but found little prey, and their losses were not infrequently one hundred per cent.
Across the Atlantic serious trouble was almost confined to the Gulf of Mexico. Raids on the east coast were so effectively discouraged that few took place at all north of Charleston; on the Pacific side there were few higher than San Diego. In general, it was the two Indies, the Philippines, and Japan that continued to suffer most; but they, too, were learning ways of inflicting enormous damage for very small returns.
Bocker spent a great deal of time dashing hither and thither trying to persuade various authorities to include traps among their defences. He had little success. It was agreed that a full knowledge of the enemy's nature would be a useful asset, but there were practical difficulties. Scarcely any place was willing to contemplate the prospect of a sea-tank, trapped on its foreshore, but still capable of throwing out coelenterates for an unknown length of time, nor did even Bocker have any theories on the location of traps beyond the construction of enormous numbers of them on a hit-or-miss basis. A few of the pitfall type were dug, but none ever made a catch. Nor did the more hopeful-sounding project of preserving any stalled or disabled sea-tank for examination turn out any better. In a few places the defenders were persuaded to cage them with wire-netting instead of blowing them to pieces, but that was the easy part of the problem. The question what to do next was not solved. Any attempt at broaching invariably caused them to explode in geysers of slime. Very often they did so before the attempt was made the effect, Bocker maintained, of exposure to bright sunlight, though there were other views. Whatever the cause, it could not be said that anyone knew any more about their nature than when we first encountered them on Escondida.
It was the Irish who took almost the whole weight of the north-European attack which was conducted, according to Bocker, from a base somewhere in the Deep, south of Rockall. They rapidly developed a skill in dealing with them that made it a point of dishonour that even one should get away. Scotland suffered only a few minor visitations in the Outer Isles, with scarcely a casualty. England's only raids occurred in Cornwall, and they, too, were small affairs for the most part the one exception was an incursion in Falmouth Harbour where a few did succeed in advancing a little beyond high-tide mark before they were destroyed; but much larger numbers, it was claimed, were smashed by depth-charges before they could even reach the shore.
Then, only a few days after the Falmouth attack, the raids ceased. They stopped quite suddenly, and, as far as the larger land-masses were concerned, completely.
A week later there was no longer any doubt that what someone had nicknamed the Low Command had called the campaign off. The continental coasts had proved too tough a nut, and the attempt had flopped. The sea-tanks withdrew to less dangerous parts, but even there their percentage of losses mounted and their returns diminished.
A fortnight after the last raid came a proclamation ending the state of emergency. A day or two later Bocker made his comments on the situation over the air:
'Some of us,' he said, 'some of us, though not the more sensible of us, have recently been celebrating a victory. To them I suggest that when the cannibal's fire is not quite hot enough to boil the pot, the intended meal may feel some relief, but he has not, in the generally accepted sense of the phrase, scored a victory. In fact, if he does not do something before the cannibal has time to build a better and bigger fire, he is not going to be any better off.
'Let us, therefore, look at this "victory". We, a maritime people who rose to power upon shipping which plied to the furthest corners of the earth, have lost the freedom of the seas. We have been kicked out of an element that we had made our own. Our ships are only safe in coastal waters and shallow seas and who can say how long they are going to be tolerated even there? We have been forced by a blockade, more effective than any experienced in war, to depend on air-transport for the very food by which we live. Even the scientists who are trying to study the sources of our troubles must put to sea in sailing-ships to do their work. Is this victory?
'What the eventual purpose of these coastal raids may have been, no one can say. It may be that those who referred to them as "shrimping" were not so far from the mark that they have been trawling for us as we trawl for fish it may be, though I do not think so myself; there is more to be caught more cheaply in the sea than on the land. But it may even have been part of an attempt to conquer the land an ineffectual and ill-informed attempt, but, for all that, rather more successful than our attempts to reach the Deeps. If it was, then its instigators are now better informed about us, and therefore potentially more dangerous. They are not likely to try again in the same way with the same weapons, but I see nothing in what we have been able to do to discourage them from trying in a different way with different weapons. Do you?
'The need for us to find some way in which we can strike back at them is therefore not relaxed, but intensified.
'It may be recalled by some that when we were first made aware of activity in the Deeps I advocated that every effort should be made to establish understanding with them. That was not tried, and very likely it was never a possibility, but there can be no doubt that the situation which I had hoped we could avoid now exists and is in the process of being resolved. Two intelligent forms of life are finding one another's existence intolerable. I have now come to believe that no attempt at rapprochement could have succeeded. Life in all its forms is strife; the better matched the opponents, the harder the struggle. The most powerful of all weapons is intelligence; any intelligent form dominates by, and therefore survives by, its intelligence: a rival form of intelligence must, by its very existence, threaten to dominate, and therefore threaten extinction. Any intelligent form is its own absolute; and there cannot be two absolutes.
'Observation has shown me that my former view was lamentably anthropomorphic; I say now that we must attack as swiftly as we can find the means, and with the full intention of complete extermination. These things, whatever they may be, have not only succeeded in throwing us out of their element with ease, but already they have advanced to do battle with us in ours. For the moment we have pushed them back, but they will return, for the same urge drives them as drives us the necessity to exterminate, or be exterminated. And when they come again, if we let them, they will come better equipped . 'Such a state of affairs, I repeat, is not victory .'
I ran across Pendell of Audio-Assessment the next morning. He gave me a gloomy look.
'We tried,' I said, defensively. 'We tried hard, but the Elijah mood was on him.'
'Next time you see him just tell him what I think of him, will you?' Pendell suggested. 'It's not that I mind his being right just that I never did know a man with such a gift for being right at the wrong time, and in the wrong manner. When his name comes on our programme again, if it ever does, they'll switch off in their thousands. As a bit of friendly advice, tell him to start cultivating the BBC