The Kraken Wakes

'But the Americans —?'

'Same attitude — if anything a bit more so. Business is their national sport, and, like most national sports, semi-sacred. A still bigger slump than they have been having since the shipping troubles started wouldn't help anyone. So we all watched and waited.

'We've not been altogether idle, though. The Arctic Ocean is deep, and even more difficult to get at than the others, so there was some bombing where the fog-patches occurred, but the devil of it is there's no way of telling results.

'Also, a group of us put it to the Admiralty that there were only two ways the things could be getting into the Arctic. They wouldn't be using the Bering Sea route past Alaska because that would give them something like a couple of thousand miles in shallow water. So they must be coming up our way, between Rockall and Scotland. By cutting through one ridge south of the Faeroes they could have fairly deep water right the way up to the Polar Basin. Now, by that route there are two narrow passes they would have to use. We and the Norwegians got together over that, and between us we put down quite a lot of bombs east of Jan Mayen Island, and another lot further north, between Greenland and Spitsbergen. They may have done something, but, again, you can't tell. At best it can only have meant a bit of delay, because the trouble still went on, and new fog-patches started up.

'In the middle of all this the Muscovite, who seems to be constitutionally incapable of understanding anything to do with the sea, started making trouble. The sea, he appeared to be arguing, was causing a great deal of inconvenience to the West; therefore it must be acting on good dialectically materialistic principles, and I have no doubt that if he could contact the Deeps he would like to make a pact with their inhabitants for a brief period of dialectical opportunism. Anyway, he led off, as you know, with accusations of aggression, and then in the back-and-forth that followed began to show such truculence that the attention of our Services became diverted from the really serious threat to the antics of this oriental clown who thinks the sea was only created to embarrass capitalists.

'Thus, we have now arrived at a situation where the "bathies", as they call them, far from falling down on the job as we had hoped, are going ahead fast, and all the brains and organizations that should be working flat out at planning to meet the emergency are congenially fooling around with those ills they have, and ignoring others that they would rather know not of. There are times when one fails to see why God thought it necessary to devise the ostrich.'

'So you decided that the time had come to force their hands by — er — blowing the gaff?' I asked.

'Yes — but not alone. This time I have the company of a number of eminent and very worried men. Mine was only the opening shot at the wider public on this side of the Atlantic. My weighty companions who have not already lost their reputations over this business are working more subtly. As for the American end, well, just take a look at Life and Collier's this next week. Oh, yes, something is going to be done.'

'What?' asked Phyllis.

He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then shook his head slightly.

'That, thank God, is someone else's department — at least, it will be when the public forces them to admit the situation.'

'But what can they do?' Phyllis repeated.

He hesitated. Then he said: 'This is between ourselves. Not a word of it have you heard from me. The only possible thing that I can see for them to do is to organize salvage. To make sure that certain things and people are not lost. That, I have no doubt, they will start to do immediately the reality of the danger has been accepted. The rest will have to take their chance — and I'm afraid that for most of us it won't be much of a chance.'

'Like preparations for a war — move great works of art and important people away to safe places?' suggested Phyllis.

'Exactly — almost too exactly.'

Phyllis frowned. 'Just what do you mean by that, A. B.?'

He shook his head. 'That they will think in terms of ordinary war — and I don't trust the sense of values that will operate. Art treasures? Yes, no doubt they will try to preserve them, but at the cost of what else? Call me a Philistine, if you like, but Art really only became Art in the last two centuries. Essentially, before that, it was furniture for improving one's home. Well, we seemed to get along all right although we lost the Cro-Magnon art for some thousands of years, but should we have done so if it had been the knowledge of fire that we had lost?

'And "important people"? Who is important? Some Norman, or pre-Norman, blood must run in the veins of every Englishman of three generations' standing, but I have no doubt that those who can trace it back by a list of names on paper will be considered to have prior claims to survival. Certain eminent intellectuals are likely to be tolerated, too, on the strength of honours earned in the days when they had fresh ideas. How many will be among the elite because they still have ideas, remains to be seen. As for the ordinary man, much his wisest course would be to enlist in a regiment with a famous name. There'll be a use for him.'

'Come off it, A.B. It's many years now since you even looked like a cynical undergraduate,' said Phyllis.

Bocker grinned, and then wiped the grin off just as suddenly:

'All the same, it is going to be a very bloody business,' he said, seriously.

'What I want to know —' Phyllis and I began, simultaneously.

'Your turn, Mike,' she offered.

'Well, mine is; how do you think the thing's being done? Melting the Arctic seems a pretty formidable proposition.'

'There've been a number of guesses. They range from an incredible operation like piping warm water up from the tropics, to tapping the Earth's central heat — which I find just about as unlikely.'

'But you have your own idea?' I suggested, for it seemed improbable that he had not.

'Well, I think it might be done this way. We know that they have some kind of device that will project a jet of water with considerable force — the bottom sediment that was washed up into surface currents in a continuous flow pretty well proved that. Well then, a contraption like that, used in conjunction with a heater, say an atomic reaction pile, ought to be capable of generating a quite considerable warm current. The obvious snag there is that we don't know whether they have atomic fission or not. So far, there's been no indication that they have — unless you count our presenting them with at least one atomic bomb that didn't go off. But if they do have it, I think that might be an answer.'

'They could get the necessary uranium?'

'Why not? After all, they have forcibly established their rights, mineral and otherwise, over more than two-thirds of the world's surface. Oh, yes, they could get it, all right, if they know about it.'

'And the iceberg angle?'

'That's less difficult. In fact, there is pretty general agreement that if one has a vibratory type of weapon that can cause a ship to fall to pieces, there ought to be no great difficulty in causing a lump of ice — even a considerable sized lump of ice — to crack.'

'And nobody knows of anything we can do about it?'

'It boils down to this, we simply don't think the same way. When you consider it, practically all our strategy of defence or attack is based on our ability to deliver or resist missiles of one kind or another — whereas they don't seem to be interested in missiles at all; at least, you could scarcely call a pseudo-coelenterate a missile. Another thing, and this is one of those that keeps the backroom boys stumped, is that they don't use iron or any ferrous metals — which knocks out a whole range of possible magnetic approaches.