'The scary part is that something is moving through that rock and water, making the noise. We haven't the faintest idea what. That doesn't make it a threat, but it sure as hell makes me nervous!'
Rutherford leaned forward on his desk, watching Isaacs perform his epicycles. 'Listen. Your seismic data were ideal to track this thing over large distances coherently and establish that it moves along a fixed direction. But with your hint of where and when to look, our sonar detections should give a higher precision. We could put a ship right on top of it and find out what we're actually up against.'
Isaacs sprawled stiffly in a chair, as if he might leap out of it again at a moment's notice. 'Actually, we could do something like that on land, too, if McMasters hadn't tied my hands,' he responded. 'You're right, though, you're in a position to proceed, and I'm not.
'There is a practical point,' Isaacs continued. 'As it stands now, you don't formally have enough information to move on your own. You need our knowledge that it behaves in a systematic way.'
Rutherford nodded his assent.
'But I can't give it to you officially because of this roadblock McMasters has thrown up.'
Isaacs smiled and leaned forward in his chair. 'I think you're going to have to wake up in the middle of the night with a sudden insight. Your past brilliant record would presage such a breakthrough.'
Rutherford gave an exaggerated 'aw shucks' gesture. 'Actually, it might be better if it didn't come directly from me. McMasters knows we're friends, and he might fit things together and give you a hard time for leaking information. I think I can handle it so that one of my associates has the inspiration.'
The two men grinned at one another and then lapsed into a contemplative silence. After several minutes, Rutherford stirred and walked over to a window and looked out.
He turned and asked, 'What in hell are we getting into here, Bob?'
Isaacs returned his look, unspeaking.
Rutherford continued, 'I keep coming back to the fact that this flung is locked to a fixed direction in space. That must be a crucial hint. And the fact that it moves easily through solid earth and miles of water. What does that mean?' He turned to the window again, anxious to express disturbing thoughts, but subconsciously unable to face his friend at the same time.
'You know the image I get? A beam. A beam of some kind, focused into the earth and playing back and forth.'
He turned suddenly, angry at a situation that departed so profoundly from his experience, forcing him to strange, uncomfortable extrapolations.
'Damn it, Bob, you know I'm a hard-nosed, practical man. But don't we have to face up to the idea that something is out there? Doing this to the earth?'
Isaacs ground his right fist into his left palm. 'I confess, Av, when I first heard about the selective orientation in space, I found myself toying with such a notion. I put it out of my mind as idle fantasy. Now I don't know. I do know the more I learn about this thing, the more scared I am.
Avery Rutherford stood next to the captain of the USS Stinson and gazed out across the ocean as it reflected the early morning sun. Rutherford delighted at being able to spend these long days of mid-June where he loved to be the most. His job was challenging and important, but it kept him behind a desk far too much. He had grown up in boats of all sizes in the waters off Newport and the only time he felt fully alive was at sea. A hectic week had been required to feed Isaacs's hint to his aide, Szkada, then to work up a plan and arrange for the ship, but it was worth it. Rutherford felt great!
The captain barked commands as they closed on the chosen position. Finally, the trim craft lay dead in the water, and they waited and watched and listened. The ship, a Spruance class destroyer, was designed for intelligence work and bristled with sophisticated tracking and detection devices. At last, word came up from the sonar room that their target had appeared, moving incredibly rapidly, headed for the surface in a scant thirty seconds. Rutherford gritted his teeth and framed his field glasses on the water a thousand yards away where they had calculated the influence would reach the surface.
The sonar data were automatically fed into the ship's computers to plot the trajectory. He listened to the tense messages on the intercom from the sonar room, the voice clipped, rapid, hurrying to keep up with something moving too fast. The new prediction showed the point of surfacing to be several hundred yards further from the ship than originally estimated, but still very close. Ten seconds. Rutherford felt a knot of tension as beads of sweat grew on his forehead. He tried to keep his mind neutral, but an image kept intruding, that of a ray guided by an unseen hand. He could sense that ray arcing through space like nighttime tracer bullets, then cutting a swath through the earth.
Over the intercom came the tinny squawk as the sonar operator counted down the time to contact with the surface:
'Five.'
'Four.'
'Three.'
'Two.'
'One.'
Rutherford held the binoculars tightly to his face, the magnified image of the water welded in his brain. He braced himself for the shock, either physical or mental.
'Zero.'
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing happened except for a small splash at the margin of his field of vision. Then he blinked and even that was gone. Faintly over the water a strange hissing carried, but that, too, quickly faded.
Rutherford and the captain exchanged amazed looks.
The captain punched a button on a console.
'What have you got?'
'Nothing, Captain, it's gone,' came the negative reply. He turned to Rutherford.
'If it's like the Seamount event, sonar should pick up something going down after some delay.'
Rutherford nodded.
The sonar man had been alerted not to increase the gain on his instrument in the interlude.
Again came the faint hiss. Rutherford raised his glasses too late to see a second rise of spray some distance from the first splash.
'Whup! There it is!' came the report of reacquisition from the sonar room. They listened as the relayed reports followed the acoustic noise to the sea bottom far below.
Rutherford spent the next two hours in the computer room overseeing the analysis of the tapes of the sonar signal. His examination of the previous underwater events suggested to him that the phenomenon did not move along precisely the same line. This data supported that view. There was a certain erratic behaviour superposed on the basic fixed direction of motion. They would never be able to tell exactly where and when the surfacing would occur. He thought to himself, so your aim's not perfect, you bastards, and took some satisfaction in that.
The estimate of the next nearest surfacing was refined on the computer and Rutherford reported that to the captain. After some discussion they agreed that for all the furore underwater, whatever it was seemed to lose potency at the surface. They agreed to get as close as possible to the next event. The destroyer headed for a spot about a hundred and ninety miles west which, in a little more than twenty-four hours, would fall along the right path at the proper phase so that the phenomenon should approach the surface.
They arrived in late afternoon and spent the remainder of the daylight hours cruising the area obtaining comparison data on the sonar background and checking for anything which could represent a precursor to the expected event. There was none.
Rutherford turned in early. He spent a restless night and dropped into sound sleep only shortly before daybreak when a young crewman awakened him.
Two thousand miles west of where the Stinson made slow circles in the mid-Atlantic, Robert Isaacs roused from a troubled sleep, carrying his dreams with him. He was watching the tops of the heads of figures as they roamed the flat terrain of satellite photos. One figure tried to turn its face upward to be recognized. Isaacs could feel the strain of its effort, and head swivelling backward, the forehead tilting upward, upward, upward, but never enough to reveal the face.