The Kraken Wakes

'Seeing that you two were on that British fishing-party, do I take it you know why we were there?'

'I'd not be surprised,' I told him.

He nodded. 'Well, look,' he said, 'I'm told it isn't possible to persuade a high charge, say a few million volts, to run up an uninsulated hawser in sea-water, so I must accept that; it's not my department. All I say is that if it were possible, then I guess the effect might be quite a bit like what we saw.'

'There'd be insulated cables, too — to the cameras, microphones, thermometers, and things,' Phyllis said.

'Sure. And there was an insulated cable relaying the TV to our ship; but it couldn't carry that charge, and burnt out — which was a darned good thing for us. That would make it look to me like it followed the main hawser — if it didn't so happen that the physics boys won't have it.'

'They've no alternative suggestions?' I asked.

'Oh, sure. Several. Some of them could sound quite convincing — to a fellow who'd not seen it happen.'

'If you are right, this is very queer indeed,' Phyllis said, reflectively.

The NBC man looked at her. 'A nice British back-hand understatement — but it's queer enough, even without me,' he said, modestly. 'However they explain this away, the physics boys are still stumped on those fused cables, because, whatever this may be, those cable severances couldn't have been accidental.'

'On the other hand, all that way down, all that pressure…?' Phyllis said.

He shook his head. 'I'm making no guesses. I'd want more data than we've got, even for that. Could be we'll get it before long.'

We looked questioning.

He lowered his voice. 'Seeing you're in this, too, but strictly under your hats, they've got a couple more probes lined up right now. But no publicity this time — the last lot had a nasty taste.'

'Where?' we asked, simultaneously.

'One off the Aleutians, some place. The other in a deep spot in the Guatemala Basin. What're your folks doing?'

'We don't know,' we said, honestly.

He shook his head. 'Always kinda close, your people,' he said, sympathetically.

And close they remained. During the next few weeks we kept our ears uselessly wide open for news of either of the two new investigations, but it was not until the NBC man was passing through London again a month later that we learnt anything. We asked him what had happened. He frowned.

'Off Guatemala they drew blank,' he said. 'The ship south of the Aleutians was transmitting by radio while the dive was in progress. It cut out suddenly. She's reported as lost with all hands.'

Official cognizance of these matters remained underground — if that can be considered an acceptable term for their deep-sea investigations. Every now and then we would catch a rumour which showed that the interest had not been dropped, and from time to time a few apparently isolated items could, when put in conjunction, be made to give hints. Our naval contacts preserved an amiable evasiveness, and we found that our opposite numbers across the Atlantic were doing little better with their naval sources. The consoling aspect was that had they been making any progress we should most likely have heard of it, so we took silence to mean that they were stalled.

Public interest in fireballs was down to zero, and few people troubled to send in reports of them any more. I still kept my files going though they were now so unrepresentative that I could not tell how far the apparently low incidence was real.

As far as I knew, the two phenomena had never so far been publicly connected, and presently both were allowed to lapse unexplained, like any silly-season sensation.

In the course of the next three years we ourselves lost interest almost to vanishing point. Other matters occupied us. There was the birth of our son, William — and his death, eighteen months later. To help Phyllis to get over that I wangled myself a travelling-correspondent series, sold up the house, and for a time we roved.

In theory, the appointment was simply mine; in practice, most of the gloss and finish on the scripts which pleased the EBC were Phyllis's, and most of the time when she wasn't dolling up my stuff she was working on scripts of her own. When we came back home, it was with enhanced prestige, a lot of material to work up, and a feeling of being set on a smooth, steady course.

Almost immediately, the Americans lost a cruiser off the Marianas.

The report was scanty, an Agency message, slightly blown up locally; but there was a something about it - just a kind of feeling. When Phyllis read it in the newspaper, it struck her, too. She pulled out the atlas, and considered the Marianas.

'It's pretty deep round three sides of them,' she said.

'That report's not handled quite the regular way. I can't exactly put my finger on it. But the approach is a bit off the line, somehow,' I agreed.

'We'd better try the grape—vine,' Phyllis decided.

We did, without result. It wasn't that our sources were holding out on us; there seemed to be a blackout somewhere. We got no further than the official handout: this cruiser, the Keweenaw, had, in fair weather, simply gone down. Twenty survivors had been picked up. There would be an official enquiry.

Possibly there was: I never heard the outcome. The incident was somehow overlayed by the inexplicable sinking of a Russian ship, engaged on some task never specified, to eastward of the Kuriles, that string of islands to the south of Kamchatka. Since it was axiomatic that any Soviet misadventure must be attributable in some way to capitalist jackals or reactionary fascist hyenas, this affair assumed an importance which quite eclipsed the more serious American loss, and the acrimonious innuendoes went on echoing for some time. In the noise of vituperation the mysterious disappearance of the survey-vessel Utskarpen, in the Southern Ocean, went almost unnoticed outside her native Norway.

Several others followed, but I no longer have my records to give me the details. It is my impression that quite half a dozen vessels, all seemingly engaged in ocean research in one way or another, had vanished before the Americans suffered again off the Philippines. This time they lost a destroyer, and, with it, their patience.

The ingenuous announcement that since the water about Bikini was too shallow for a contemplated series of deep—water atomic—bomb tests the locale of these experiments would be shifted westwards by a little matter of a thousand miles or so, may possibly have deceived a portion of the general public, but in radio and newspaper circles it touched off a scramble for assignments.

Phyllis and I had better standing now, and we were lucky, too. We flew out there, and a few days later we formed part of the complement of a number of ships lying at a strategic distance from the point where the Keweenaw had gone down off the Marianas.

I can't tell you what that specially designed depth—bomb looked like, for we never saw it. All we were allowed to see was a raft supporting a kind of semi—spherical, metal hut which contained the bomb itself, and all we were told was that it was much like one of the more regular types of atomic bomb, but with a massive casing that would resist the pressure at five miles deep, if necessary.

At first light on the day of the test a tug took the raft in tow, and chugged away over the horizon with it. From then on we had to observe by means of unmanned television cameras mounted on floats. In this way we saw the tug cast off the raft, and put on full speed. Then there was an interval while the tug hurried out of harm's way and the raft pursued a calculated drift towards the exact spot where the Keweenaw had disappeared. The hiatus lasted for some three hours, with the raft looking motionless on the screens. Then a voice through the loudspeakers told us that the release would take place in approximately thirty minutes. It continued to remind us at intervals until the time was short enough for it to start counting in reverse, slowly and calmly. There was a complete hush as we stared at the screens and listened to the voice: