Secrets of the Deep

by Gordon R. Dickson

  With only a slight note of superiority in his voice, Robby began an explanation.

  “Well,” he said, “you see they’re small electro-radio devices that fasten adhesively to the head of the whale and send weak little electrical signals into certain parts of the whale’s brain. The connections used to be made with electrodes, which had very fine wires which actually went in and touched certain areas of the brain—you understand?”

  “Go on,” said Mr. Lillibulero. He was listening very attentively.

  “Well, even back in the twentieth century, scientists discovered that certain parts of the brain when stimulated with an electrical current would make an animal feel good, or feel hungry, or feel angry. And as they learned which parts of the brain did what, they began to use the currents to control wild animals, sort of, and even talk to them in a simple sort of way.” Once more, Robby looked at Mr. Lillibulero to see if he was following the explanation.

  “Go on, laddie.”

  “I mean,” Robby said, “if an animal or a whale did what you wanted it to, you’d send a little electrical signal to the part of his brain that made him feel good. If he tried to bite you, you sent a signal to the ‘fear’ part. And so on.”

  “Aye.”

  Robby took a deep breath, because it was taking more words to explain than he had thought it would. “The Control Caps send the signals without electrodes or wires—like a little radio station on the whale’s head that sends messages to its brain. The caps work the same way on other animals too. If you have a control box to send the proper signals with and know which signals to send you can make even wild animals do all sorts of things—”

  “Aye.” said Mr. Lillibulero, sharply and explosively; and suddenly, the little man had turned and gone.

  For a long moment, Robby stood staring at the place where Mr. Lillibulero had stood. Then the sound of feet racing up the ladder amidships, and the rasping voice calling out some-thing to Robby’s father, woke Robby out of his trance. He raced in his turn for the ladder. When he got to the top, he saw Mr. Lillibulero talking to Dr. Hoenig from the door between the Control Room and the ship’s laboratory. There was a concerned look on Dr. Hoenig’s face.

  “. . . as the Tropicans weel know,” Mr. Lillibulero was saying when Robby jumped up onto the floor of the Control Room and ran up to the two men.

  “Who’re Tropicans?” said Robby. But neither man took time out to answer him.

  “Oh, there you are,” said his father. “Pack your toothbrush and a change of underwear in your overnight bag, and put on your Outside Suit. Lillibulero’s taking you to McMurdo with him right now.”

  “McMurdo!” cried Robby. He did not in the least want to be shipped off to McMurdo, the early Antarctic base just off the Ross ice shelf that had now grown into a permanent, but rather dull city. He wanted to stay here, where things were just getting interesting. “But why? Why do I have to go to McMurdo?”

  “McMurdo,” said his father, “and then home, for you. And because your mother would skin me alive if I let you stay here now that we know it’s dangerous.”

  “But we don’t know it’s dangerous!” said Robby. “But—”

  “No buts,” said his father flady. “No buts, ifs, ands, wherefores, or otherwises. You go. I’m sorry, Robby,” he added more gently. “I’ll see that you get to come back as soon as it’s safe and have as much time here as you were supposed to have, in the long run. But for now—you go.”

  “You’re staying,” said Robby, rebelliously but sadly turning away toward the ship’s bedroom where his overnight case was.

  “I’ve got a responsibility to this ship and the whales,” said his father. “Now, jump! Mr. Lillibulero has to get to McMurdo as fast as he can.”

  Robby had no choice in the matter. Ten minutes later, without even his books on the kraken, he was sailing westward in Mr. Lillibulero’s ducted fan flyer, fifteen hundred feet above the pack ice on the edge of the Amundsen Sea. After takeoff they flew in silence for about twenty minutes, with Robby brooding on the injustice of the situation. However, he was not the sort of person who is able to brood very long. He found life too interesting.

  “Are we almost to McMurdo?” he asked Mr. Lillibulero, who sat at the controls of the flyer, his green eyes watching the ice and water ahead.

  “Aye,” said Mr. Lillibulero. “That’s the Ross ice shelf, beginning up there on the horizon. And McMurdo’s just on the far side of it, maybe twenty minutes’ flying time away.”

  “By the way,” said Robby, “I asked back on the Palship, but neither you nor Dad told me. Who are Tropicans, anyway?” But the question didn’t get answered this time either. Before Robby could close his mouth on the sentence, Mr. Lillibulero had suddenly slammed the controls of the little flyer hard over, kicked the autopilot into control, and jumped up from his bucket seat. He jerked open a locker in the wall beside him, and jerked out two copter-parachutes. He ripped open the case of one and threw the harness of it around Robby, buckling it tight.

  “Fasten y’r helmet down!” he snapped. “We’re being chased by a homing missile with explosive in its nose. When you leave the flyer, guide y’rself down to the pack ice below. Then find a flat open spot where y’can be seen, and stay put until rescued. Y’understand me, Robertson?”

  “Y-yes,” said Robby staring at him as the little man’s fingers flew about the harness, fastening it tightly to Robby’s chest and shoulders. “But—you mean I’ve got to get out of the flyer, here?”

  “I mean that,” said Mr. Lillibulero. “I mean y’ve got to jump now, laddie. Jump for y’r life!”

  Trapped by the Leopard Seal

  A copter-parachute had been the device that had landed Mr. Lillibulero at the Point Loma Research Station, back when Robby had first met the little man. Robby himself had never used one before, but he knew all about them.

  They were more copter than parachute. When you jumped from a flyer and pulled the release ring, at first a little parachute did pop out at the end of a six-foot line. But this was merely what was called a drag chute. Just like a sea anchor, which is a sort of water parachute dragged behind a boat, its purpose was merely to pull you into line with the direction you were going. The drag chute got your feet down and your head up so that you were falling straight.

  Then, the slim, eight-foot blades—all four of them—of the copter part unfolded from the pack and began to whir, driven by a little motor. The motor was not strong enough to let the wearer fly around like a helicopter, but it was enough to slow his falling to about the speed of dandelion fluff dropped from a second-story window on a day without any wind. A couple of handles let him steer himself so that he did not have to fall into someplace like the Antarctic Ocean—as might otherwise have happened in Robby’s case—and possibly be eaten by some nearby killer whale or leopard seal. Instead, he could aim, as Robby did, for a sort of small ice cliff among the great lumps of the pack ice, and land safely on that.

  Everything happened so fast, from the moment Mr. Lillibulero jumped up from the flyer’s controls, until the moment of Robby’s landing on the pack ice cliff, that Robby had only a few blurred memories of what actually had taken place. He remembered Mr. Lillibulero making sure Robby knew about the release ring and the steering handles of the copter-chute. He remembered leaving the flyer, and the first jerk of the drag chute as it straightened him out in mid-air. He remembered seeing the pack ice below him, and one monster chunk of it several miles wide, to which he steered in the beginning.

  Back the way the flyer had come, a thin trail of gray smoke had lifted from the pack ice and ended in a small black object that came toward the flyer above him at dazzling speed. And he remembered that, a few seconds later, it passed behind his drag chute so that he could no longer see it. Then, almost immediately, there had been the dull sound of an explosion and the black flickers of fragments falling toward the sea and ice. But Robby had seen no sign of another copter-chute or of Mr. Lillibulero.

  Now, safely down o
n the ice himself, Robby looked around him. But the ice and the sky were empty. He saw no sign of anything human or mechanical.

  Automatically he unbuckled the harness of the copter-parachute and stepped out of it. There was no point in trying to save the device. It would only be troublesome to carry as he scrambled over the pack ice, which was like a land of mountainous boulders, but was actually composed of huge ice chunks in all shapes and sizes that had broken off the thick crust of ice, a mile deep in some places, which covered the Antarctic continent. These chunks—some of them ice-bergs as big as the state of Connecticut—had floated around for a while, and had finally been frozen together back along the edge of the permanent ice.

  It was one of the icebergs that Mr. Lillibulero had told him to find and stay on. Such icebergs had large, flat surfaces, and Robby would show up on such a surface like a black dot on white paper when flyers from McMurdo came searching for him. And come they would—as soon as Robby’s father called to see if he had left on the big intercontinental rocket for Mexico City, Mexico, on his way home to the Point Loma Station. As soon as it was known that Robby and Mr. Lillibulero had failed to arrive at McMurdo, flyers would be searching this area.

  So now, Robby stood up on his ice cliff and turned slowly around, trying to locate the wide chunk of ice he had spotted from the air. He saw it after a moment. It was about a quarter of a mile off over the pack ice, which was a good distance to walk and climb, but nothing impossible. All the same, Robby shivered and felt very alone.

  The Antarctic pack ice was a big and unfriendly place to be lost in even when a boy knew as much about it as Robby did.

  He had a sudden temptation to sit down where he was and curl up in his Outside Suit, which would go on keeping him warm and protected long after he might have perished of hunger and thirst, and simply wait where he was for someone to come and save him. He might, in fact, have done just that, if Mr. Lillibulero’s final orders about finding a flat open space were not still ringing in his ears. Robby had grown up as much in the waters around the Point Loma Station as in the station itself, and the first safety measure that he had learned from his father and mother was: In an emergency, follow the orders of the nearest adult immediately, and without question.

  That rule had saved him several times from the danger of sharks, barracuda, and killer whales. Now it was to save him once more.

  Robby sat down and slid down off his ice cliff and began to tramp and climb through the wilderness of the lumps and boulders of ice toward the distant flat space.

  It was slow going, but not as slow as it might have been,because of one fortunate circumstance. Robby was in a section of the pack ice where relatively large chunks had frozen without being piled tightly together. As a result, there was a sort of floor of flat sea-ice out of which the big, steep-sided chunks poked and loomed. In places this flat area was narrow, but by picking his way, Robby could still wind between the steep ice walls toward his destination. Once in a while he found a chunk with walls he could climb, and by scrambling up on this he could make sure he was still heading toward the flat sheet of ice he had originally seen.

  Luckily the copter-chute had not landed him in the free-floating pack ice farther out. There he would have had to swim from ice raft to ice raft, at the risk of becoming the prey of killer whales or leopard seals.

  He was just thinking that he must be close to the flat space and was looking for a chunk he could climb to see, when he came out of a narrow alley in the chunk ice. He found himself on a sort of ice beach that sloped smoothly to the black Antarctic sea water winding between walls of chunk ice that rose sharply, three to five feet above the surface. On top of them he noticed the black, three-foot-tall forms of a number of Adelie penguins.

  They looked, as the Adelies always look, like fat, small,old men in tail coats. The water below them curved away among the tumbled ice floes to Robby’s right. But at his left it came to an end at a point where again the ice sloped down gradually like a small white beach. He could skirt that area and get around the water.

  He was not more than twenty feet from that little beach and just about to get started around it, when three Addlie penguins, swimming strongly, swung into view around the ice comer where the open water wound out of sight. For a moment it looked to Robby as if they were having a race to where the beach was. He stopped to watch.

  Then, suddenly, the reason for their hurry appeared on the scene. With a small dark bow-wave cresting just under the high-held chin, the flat, heavy dog-like head of a leopard seal emerged around the comer in pursuit. The surface of the icy water bent down and swirled behind that head above the leopard seal’s heavy, fourteen-foot body. The thin-lipped mouth,holding the sharp canine teeth with the rows of tridentated teeth behind them, was closed. But the cold, hungry eyes stared straight ahead.

  As Robby watched, the three escaping penguins reached the three-foot-high vertical edge of the ice where their companions were, ducked momentarily out of sight, and then suddenly shot up again out of the water into the air like small rockets, landing safely on the ice.

  Robby felt like applauding. He looked back at the leopard seal to see how that bloodthirsty terror of the penguin rookeries was taking his defeat. Like all of the Phocidae, or “true” seals, the great leopard seal could not climb anything vertical.Many thousands of years ago, when early ancestors of the seals returned to the sea, their back legs had grown together and their feet had fanned out to form a tail, like a fishtail only crosswise instead of up and down the way a fish’s tail is.Therefore, the leopard seal could only wriggle along a flat, or gently sloping, surface with its foreflippers helping. However, Robby remembered, the leopard seal is reported to move very fast in this way when the ice is clear, faster than a man can run.

  The reason Robby suddenly remembered this was because when he looked back at the leopard seal, it did not appear unhappy at all at losing the three penguins for its dinner. It was swimming right on past the ice-edge where they had jumped out of the water and heading for the sloping beach up which it could easily climb.

  The leopard seal was no longer looking at the penguins. Its eyes were now fixed on Robby.

  With a sudden thrill of fear, Robby started to run, just as he saw the leopard seal skid up onto the ice beach. Then the ice chunks and blocks around him hid the scene from his eyes as he hurried as fast as he could between them away from the water.

  He was no longer worrying whether he was moving toward the open ice sheet. If the leopard seal should happen to catch up with him, he did not want it to be out where the hungry creature could run him down, to make up for the meal of penguins it had missed.

  He scrambled along, running and dodging between the ice blocks that were too high and steep-sided for him to climb. Ina few minutes he was hopelessly lost, and no longer knew whether he was headed away from the water or back toward it. His heart pounded and his Outside Suit, which was so light that ordinarily he did not notice it, began to feel like a suit of heavy armor.

  He began to run out of breath. He stopped for a moment at last, in a little open space completely surrounded by straight ice walls, except for the entrance where he had come in, and

  a little opening at the top of a slope reaching halfway up one of the opposite walls.

  He felt his chest heaving under the Outside Suit. If it had not been for special heating elements he would have fogged the helmet up with his rapid breath long before this. Now that the sound of his running was stilled, he heard his own panting echoing loudly in his ears.

  The thought occurred to him that he might by this time have outrun the leopard seal, or lost it among the ice chunks.Perhaps now he was safe and could rest. He turned to look back through the opening in the ice chunks by which he had entered this little area.

  A harsh, spitting, hissing bark vibrated in the ear valves of his helmet, and the heavy body of the leopard seal, larger and longer than that of the huge Siberian tiger, slithered in through the opening. Its murderous jaws gaped. Its swo
rd-like canine teeth gleamed.

  Robby turned and went flying up the little slope through the small opening at the other end of the space. And stopped. He was in a pocket of ice. Walls as high and hard to climb as the walls of his own living room at home surrounded him. There was no escape.

  He jerked around. There was still one hope. It was that the leopard seal could not climb up the slope that led to this place. But there was a slithering noise on the ice outside, and a second later the big, slick dog-like head poked into view over the edge of the pocket.

  It stopped. It stared at Robby. And suddenly a deep, harsh,but definitely human voice sounded in the little ice pocket.

  “There you are, Boy!” it said. “You can’t slip away from me this time. I’ve got you now.”

  Prisoner of the Tropicans

  Robby stared. The leopard seal’s motionless head stared back. And then Robby noticed something.

  He had not stopped to look closely at the big carnivore before. But now he had no choice. And he saw under and behind the head a sort of belt or strap around the leopard seal’s neck. Attached to the belt and under the chin of the seal was a small box that looked like a combination television camera, transmitter, and receiver—water-transceivers, his father called them—which the Salt Water Research people sometimes put on killer whales and seals in order to observe them when they were turned loose again. Then the leopard seal lowered its head a little, and Robby caught sight of a Control Cap just like the ones that had been stolen from the Palship X Two. It was attached to the belt behind the seal’s neck,pressing against the back of its skull.

  Robby was still too scared to talk or move. The transceiver on the collar beneath the seal’s jaw spoke again.

  “All right, all right,” it said, a little impatiently. “Cerberus here won’t hurt you. Will you, Cerberus?”

  As the words came from the transceiver, the leopard seal suddenly ducked its head as if something invisible had clubbed it. It was exactly the reaction Robby had seen in creatures wearing Control Caps when someone inexperienced had stimulated too strong and sudden a feeling of fear in the creature. It was a small thing to recognize, but it had the effect of abruptly raising Robby’s spirits. He had been feeling as fear-stricken and helpless as a person could feel, but now he knew that whoever was on the other end of that transceiver knew less about Control Caps than he did. And this gave Robby hope.