'That's all, boys,' he said.
'Huh,' said the voice from below, after a pause. 'Well, whatever it was we came here to find, we've not found it.'
The Commander's face was expressionless. Whether he had expected tangible results or not I couldn't tell. I imagined not. In fact, I wondered if any of us there really had. After all, these centres of activity were all Deeps. And from that it would seem to follow that the reason must lie at the bottom. The echogram gave the bottom hereabouts as still three miles or so below where the two men now dangled .
'Hullo, there, bathyscope,' said the Commander. 'We're going to start you up now. Ready?'
'Aye, aye, sir! All set,' said the two voices.
The Commander picked up his telephone.
'Haul away there!'
We could hear the winch start, and slowly gather speed.
'On your way now. All okay?'
'All correct, sir.'
There was an interval without talk for ten minutes or more. Then a voice said:
'There's something out there. Something big can't see it properly. Keeps just on the fringe of the light. Can't be that whale again not at this depth. Try to show you.'
The picture on the screen switched and then steadied. We could see the light-rays streaming out through the water, and the brilliant speckles of small organisms caught in the beam. he very limits there was a suspicion of a faintly lighter patch. It was hard to be sure of it.
'Seems to be circling us. We're spinning a bit, too, I think. I'll try ah, got a bit better glimpse of it then. It's not the whale, anyway. There, see it now?'
This time we could undoubtedly make out a lighter patch. It was roughly oval, but indistinct, and there was nothing to give it scale.
'H'm,' said the voice from below. 'That's certainly a new one. Could be a fish or maybe something else kind of turtle-shaped. Monstrous-sized brute, anyway. Circling a bit closer now, but I still can't make out any details. Keeping pace with us.'
Again the camera showed us a glimpse of the thing as it passed one of the bathyscope's ports, but we were little wiser; the definition was too poor for us to be sure of anything about it.
'It's going up now. Rising faster than we are. Getting beyond our angle of view. Ought to be a window in the top of this thing . Lost it now. Gone somewhere up above us. Maybe it'll '
The voice cut off dead. Simultaneously, there was a brief, vivid flash on the screen, and it, too, went dead. The sound of the winch outside altered as it speeded up.
We sat looking at one another without speaking. Phyllis's hand sought mine, and tightened on it.
The Commander started to stretch his hand towards the telephone, changed his mind, and went out without a word. Presently the winch speeded up still more.
It takes quite a time to reel in more than a mile of heavy cable. The party in the mess dispersed awkwardly. Phyllis and I went up into the bows and sat there without talking much.
After what seemed a very long wait the winch slowed down. By common consent we got up, and moved aft together.
At last, the end came up. We all, I suppose, expected to see the end of the wire-rope unravelled, with the strands splayed-out, brush-like.
They were not. They were melted together. Both the main and the communication cables ended in a blob of fused metal.
We all stared at them, dumbfounded.
In the evening the Captain read the service, and three volleys were fired over the spot
The weather held, and the glass was steady. At noon the next day the Commander assembled us in the mess. He looked ill, and very tired. He said, briefly, and unemotionally:
'My orders are to proceed with the investigation, using our automatic instrument. If our arrangements and tests can be completed in time, and provided the weather remains favourable, we shall conduct the operation tomorrow morning, commencing as soon after dawn as possible. I am instructed to lower the instrument to the point of destruction, so there will be no second opportunity for observation.'
The arrangement in the mess the following morning was different from that on the former occasion. We sat facing a bank of five television screens, four for the quadrants about the instrument, and one viewing vertically beneath it. There was also a cine-camera photographing all five screens simultaneously for the record.
Again we watched the descent through the ocean layers, but this time instead of a commentary we had an astonishing assortment of chirrupings, raspings, and gruntings picked up by externally mounted microphones. The deep sea is, in its lower inhabited strata, it seems, a place of hideous cacophony. It was something of a relief when at about three-quarters of a mile down silence fell, and somebody muttered: 'Huh! Said those mikes'd never take the pressure.'
The display went on. Squids sliding upwards past the cameras, shoals of fish darting nervously away, other fish attracted by curiosity, monstrosities, grotesques, huge monsters dimly seen. On and on. A mile down, a mile and a half, two miles, two and a half . And then, at about that, something came into view which quickened all attention on the screens. A large, uncertain, oval shape at the extreme of visibility that moved from screen to screen as it circled round the descending instrument. For three or four minutes it continued to show on one screen or another, but always tantalizingly ill-defined, and never quite well enough illuminated for one to be quite certain even of its shape. Then, gradually, it drifted towards the upper edges of the screens, and presently it was left behind.
Half a minute later all the screens went blank .
Why not praise one's wife? Phyllis can write a thundering good feature script and this was one of her best. It was too bad that it was not received with the immediate enthusiasm it deserved.
When it was finished, we sent it round to the Admiralty for vetting. A week later we were asked to call. It was Captain Winters who received us. He congratulated Phyllis on the script, as well he might, even if he had not been so taken with her as he so obviously was. Once we were settled in our chairs, however, he shook his head regretfully.
'Nevertheless,' he said, 'I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to hold it up for a while.'
Phyllis looked understandably disappointed; she had worked hard on that script. Not just for cash, either. She had tried to make it a tribute to the two men, Wiseman and Trant, who had vanished with the bathyscope. She looked down at her toes.
'I'm sorry,' said the Captain, 'but I did warn your husband that it wouldn't be for immediate release.'
Phyllis looked up at him.
'Why?' she asked.
That was something I was equally anxious to know about. My own recordings of the preparations, of the brief descent we had both made in the bathyscope, and of various aspects that were not on the official tape record of the dive, had been put into cold-storage, too.
'I'll explain what I can. We certainly owe you that,' agreed Captain Winters. He sat down and leant forward, elbows on knees, fingers interlaced between them, and looked at us both in turn.
'The crux of the thing and of course you will both of you have realized that long ago is those fused cables,' he said, 'Imagination staggers a bit at the thought of a creature capable of snapping through steel hawsers all the same, it might just conceivably admit the possibility. When, however, it comes up against the suggestion that there is a creature capable of cutting through them like an oxy-acetylene flame, it recoils. It recoils, and definitely rejects.
'Both of you saw what happened to those cables, and I think you must agree that their condition opens a whole new aspect. A thing like that is not just a hazard of deep-sea diving and we want to know more about just what kind of a hazard it is before we give a release on it.'