'I do not suggest that the root problem is being neglected; far from it. There have been, and are, men wearing themselves out to find some means by which we can locate and destroy the enemy in our Deeps. What I do say is that with them still unable to find a way, we now face the most serious assault yet.
'It is an assault against which we have no defences. It is not susceptible of direct attack. It can be checked only by our discovery of some means of destroying its High Command, in the Deeps.
'And what is this weapon to which we can oppose no counter?
'It is the melting of the Arctic ice and a great part of the Antarctic ice, too.
'You think that fantastic? Too colossal? It is not, it is a task which we could have undertaken ourselves, had we so wished, at any time since we released the power of the atom.
'Because of the winter darkness little has been heard lately of the patches of Arctic fog. It is not generally known that, though two of them existed in the Arctic spring, by the end of the Arctic summer there were eight, in widely separated areas. Now, fog is caused, as you know, by the meeting of hot and cold currents of either air or water. How does it happen that eight novel, independent warm currents can suddenly occur in the Arctic?
'And the results? Unprecedented flows of broken ice into the Bering Sea, and into the Greenland Sea. In these two areas particularly, the pack-ice is hundreds of miles north of its usual spring maximum. In other places, the north of Norway, for instance, it is further south. And we ourselves had an unusually cold, wet winter.
'And the icebergs? We have all read a lot about them and seen a lot of pictures of them lately. Why? Obviously because there are a great many more icebergs than usual, but the question that no one has publicly answered is, why should there be more icebergs?
'Everyone knows where they are coming from. Greenland is a large island greater than nine times the size of the British Isles. But it is more than that. It is also the last great bastion of the retreating ice-age.
'Several times the ice has come south, grinding and scouring, smoothing the mountains, scooping the valleys on its way until it stood in huge ramparts, dizzy cliffs of glass-green ice, vast slow-crawling glaciers, across half Europe. Then it went back, gradually, over centuries, back and back. The huge cliffs and mountains of ice dwindled away, melted, and were known no more except in one place. Only in Greenland does that immemorial ice still tower nine thousand feet high, unconquered yet. And down its sides slide the glaciers which spawn the icebergs. They have been scattering their icebergs into the sea, season after season, since before there were men to know of it; but why, in this year, should they suddenly spawn ten, twenty times as many? There must be a reason for this. There is.
'If some means, or some several means, of melting the Arctic ice were put into operation, a little time would have to pass before its effects became mensurable. Moreover, the effects would be progressive; first a trickle, then a gush, then a torrent.
'I have seen "estimates" which suggest that if the polar ice were melted the sea-level would rise by one hundred feet. To call that an "estimate" is a shocking imposition. It is no more than a round-figure guess. It may be a good guess, or it may be widely wrong, on either side. The only certainty is that the sea-level would indeed rise.
'In this connexion I draw attention to the fact that in January of this year the mean sea-level at Newlyn, where it is customarily measured, was reported to have risen by two and a half inches.'
'Oh, dear!' said Phyllis, when she had read this. 'Of all the pertinaceous stickers-out-of-necks! We'd better go and see him.'
It did not entirely surprise us when we telephoned the next morning to find that his number was not available. When we called, however, we were admitted. Bocker got up from a desk littered with mail, to greet us.
'No earthly good your coming here,' he told us. 'There isn't a sponsor that'd touch me with a forty-foot pole.'
'Oh, I'd not say that, A. B., Phyllis told him. 'You will very likely find yourself immensely popular with the sellers of sandbags and makers of earth-shifting machinery before long.'
He took no notice of that. 'You'll probably be contaminated if you associate with me. In most countries I'd be under arrest by now.'
'Terribly disappointing for you. This has always been discouraging territory for ambitious martyrs. But you do try, don't you?' she responded. 'Now, look, A. B.,' she went on, 'do you really like to have people throwing things at you, or what is it?'
'I get impatient,' explained Bocker.
'So do other people. But nobody I know has quite your gift for going just beyond what people are willing to take at any given moment. One day you'll get hurt. Not this time because, luckily, you've messed it up, but one time certainly.'
'If not this time, then probably not at all,' he said. He bent a thoughtful, disapproving look on her. 'Just what do you mean, young woman, by coming here and telling me I "messed it up"?'
'The anti-climax. First you sounded as if you were on the point of great revelations, but then that was followed by a rather vague suggestion that somebody or something must be causing the Arctic changes and without any specific explanation of how it could be done. And then your grand finale was that the tide is two and a half inches higher.'
Bocker continued to regard her. 'Well, so it is. I don't see what's wrong with that. Two and a half inches is a colossal amount of water when it's spread over a hundred and forty-one million square miles. If you reckon it up in tons '
'I never do reckon water in tons and that's part of the point To ordinary people two and a half inches just means a very slightly higher mark on a post. After your build-up it sounded so tiddly that everyone feels annoyed with you for alarming them those that don't just laugh, and say: "Ha! ha! These professors!"'
Bocker waved his hand at the desk with its load of mail.
'Quite a lot of people, have been alarmed or at least indignant,' he said. He lit a cigarette. 'That was what I wanted. You know well enough how it has been since the beginning of this business. At every stage the great majority, and particularly the authorities, have resisted the evidence as long as they could. This is a scientific age in the more educated strata. It will therefore almost fall over backwards in disregarding the abnormal, and it has developed a deep suspicion of its own senses. Vast quantities of evidence are required before a theory based on scanty knowledge can be dislodged. Very reluctantly the existence of something in the Deeps was belatedly conceded. There has been equal reluctance to admit all the succeeding manifestations until they couldn't be dodged. And now here we are again, baulking at the newest hurdle.
'Ever since this business in the Arctic began, a number of people have been well aware of what must be going on though not, of course, of how it is being done but for one reason or another, not excluding Governmental pressure, they have been keeping quiet about it. I have myself.'
'That er doesn't sound quite true to form,' I suggested.
He grinned briefly, and then went on:
'I misjudged it. Several of us did. When the purpose of the thing was clear, I doubted it. "This time," I said to myself, "they really have bitten off more than they can chew." There wasn't any point in alarming people unnecessarily. Things are bad enough already. So, as long as it was possible to hope that the attempt on the ice was going to fail, it was better to say nothing in public. A sort of semi-voluntary censorship.'