The Watch Below

by James White

  "The whole idea of an invasion from space is tactically unsound," a quieter voice broke in. "Perhaps this is an assumption we were too quick to make. The aliens have begun to send what appear to be signals, a continuous audio-frequency note, containing patterned interruptions, like Morse in reverse. If we assume instead that . . ."

  His voice was drowned suddenly in a flood of objections, which condensed after a few minutes into the quiet, sardonic voice and objections of one man.

  "There is no peaceful solution to this problem, General," he said. "At their present rate of deceleration, the vanguard of the enemy fleet is just fifty-six hours away. If they were broadcasting messages of peace and good will in perfect English with an accent of one of your better public schools, we could act no differently: it would be the same as saying that Overlord had been mounted so that the men could picnic on the Normandy beaches. Their presence and behavior here is plainly, unmistakably hostile."

  "Our launching sites aren't positioned for an attack from space," said another voice worriedly. "But it would be good tactics for them to orbit a few times to get a closer look at their objectives, and perhaps do a little softening-up, in which case all our sites would get a crack at them as they went over. The thing bothering me is if they try to soften us up with H-bombs -- "

  "Not likely, I would say," another voice broke in. "The size of the fleet alone would make it seem certain that they intend landing and that they should not want to dirty up their bridgehead with fallout. Of course, we may have been under surveillance without knowing it for a long time. They might know enough about our physical make-up to use nerve gases or bacteria -- "

  "No matter what they send, we'll have to soak it up," the first officer broke in. "If they come straight in so that the majority of our launchers cannot be brought to bear, we'll have to hit them with jets and ground artillery. If they become established we may be forced to use nuclear weapons, which would be very bad if the area were densely populated. But if they make the mistake of going into orbit, especially if it is a low, bombing orbit -- "

  ". . . We'll clobber them," someone finished for him.

  The vanguard of the Unthan fleet did not go into orbit. It did not have the fuel reserves to do so. In the flagship's forward screens the surface features of the target world -- layers of water vapor hanging in the gas envelope, details of the drab, useless land masses and the tremendous blue oceans -- grew steadily larger and crawled over the edges of the picture. The casualties they suffered were reflected in the computer room, where lights went out quietly and guidance systems died at the other end and from where it was difficult to realize the true extent of the devastation and death taking place all around them. Looking out of the direct vision panels it was hard for Gunt to realize that anything at all was happening or that there were beings down there doing their best to kill him . . . until the detectors showed a missile climbing towards them, closing fast.

  It was over so quickly that by the time his lagging brain realized that he was about to die they had been reprieved and he was free to work out what had actually happened.

  Obviously the missile's target-seeker had equated size with importance and turned it at the penultimate instant onto the larger food ship, which had been keeping close station on them for so many generations. The missile must have penetrated the hull before exploding, because the ship seemed to jerk apart silently as the force of the explosion was transmitted through the water to every single corner of its structure. It opened out slowly, hurling great masses of metal, gobbets of coldly steaming water, and the twitching bodies of the food animals in all directions. Gunt cringed as several times debris narrowly missed the flagship, but unknown to him, the expanding sphere of wreckage was confusing the ground radar, making it impossible to detect a whole ship among the falling pieces, so it saved his ship.

  The flagship dived through the cloud layer into heavy precipitation and strong winds and near darkness, to hang poised for an instant above the storm-tossed sea before sliding quietly below the surface.

  Now they would have to spend precious time hunting for shelter and hope that their movements and eventual hiding place did not register on the detecting instruments of the enemy. Gunt intended to camouflage the ship, if he had time, and arrange a system of communications, but before that happened his colonists would form into their preselected survival groups and scatter themselves up and down this rocky, beautiful subcoastline. They would not scatter too far because the captain wanted to know what to expect in the way of weapons and general nastiness from the enemy so that he, or the person who survived him, could tell the later arrivals what to expect. They were little more than experimental animals, Gunt thought sickly, being tested to destruction.

  Captain Heglenni and her females had been given a much more positive assignment, that of obtaining specimens of the enemy life-form together with whatever artifacts and mechanisms became available for study. It was accepted that Heglenni would have to kill the specimens and take the mechanisms by force, and that the war was only just beginning, but Captain Gunt did not allow himself to think about that too much. The future was too horrible for any sane person to dwell in it mentally for any longer than was necessary.

  His ship was down, safely.

  XXII

  More than eighty per cent of the Unthan vanguard escaped the anti-missiles and reached the ocean safely. The earth defenses, with no previous experience of invasion from space, had deployed as best they could against expected landings in force in desert or thinly populated areas. They were thrown badly off balance by the fact that the enemy did not make a single preliminary orbit, that instead of a concentration of force they came down in single units scattered all over the surface of the globe, and that the landings did not take place on land but in the sea around the world's coastlines. Except for one ship, that was.

  This one had escaped the anti-missiles to land, owing to a fault in its guidance system, in a large park in one of the larger coastal cities. It thundered down to a perfect landing less than a quarter of a mile from the water's edge, to stand like some tremendous metal lighthouse among the smoldering trees and bushes. When the echoes of its touchdown had died away and before the city could recover from its shocked silence there could be heard a muffled, erratic pounding coming from the interior of the great ship. The beings packing the refrigerated holds of the ship, warmed automatically to full consciousness on the way down, had begun to panic. Quarters which had been barely large enough to hold their frozen, unconscious bodies were now jammed solid with the normally placid food animals biting and tearing at themselves and each other in their efforts to escape.

  But the mechanism that should have caused large sections of the hull to fall open and allow the beings inside the freedom of the sea refused to operate because of certain built-in safety devices. While the ship was surrounded, not by water but by a completely unbreathable gas, the opening mechanism refused to operate and the ship's hull remained tightly and stubbornly closed.

  For all of six minutes . . .

  That was how long it took for the jets to arrive, screaming in from tree-top height and hurling against the towering alien hull a veritable rain of armor-piercing missiles, small HE bombs, and napalm. There were certain tactical atomic weapons which could have been brought to bear, but out of consideration for the city's inhabitants, lesser forms of frightfulness were being tried first. The ship stood against the onslaught for less than a minute before it burst open, toppled heavily, and began to disintegrate. The napalm fires hissed furiously and died in the torrents of water pouring from the stricken ship; and from the subsiding masses of metal, great slick-bodied alien shapes fell heaving and rolling and flapping into the steaming mud. And still the jets maintained their attack, saturating the tiny landing area with a rain of HE, tearing the ship and its contents into smaller and smaller pieces. When they finally pulled out, remade their formations, and began to circle warily, the section of the park where the enemy ship had landed had been conve
rted into a ghastly, steaming stew of mud, riven metal, and shapeless pieces of raw meat.

  It was a shock, somehow, to find that the blood of the enemy was red.

  "Until the present moment," said the officer whose uniform showed dark blue between the heavy incrustations of gold, "I had thought that this was to be a space battle, with no place at all in it for the Navy. It seems I was wrong."

  "As soon as they saw the ship was filled with water they should have stopped the attack!" said the gray-haired civilian who had just finished making his report. Angrily, he went on, "The beings would have died anyway, suffocated like landed fish. Now, as things are, you haven't left us with a single whole specimen. We have only the vaguest idea of their size or mass or limb arrangement, and the destruction of their ship was so thorough that its power plant was wrecked along with everything else, and now the level of radiation from the wreckage is so high that we can't get near it! Potentially the greatest scientific find in all history and we can't even -- "

  "The implications of a water-dwelling species who have crossed interstellar space are not lost on us, Doctor," a bespectacled officer broke in smoothly. "In their culture the attainment of space travel would represent a much greater technical achievement and would come at a much later stage of civilization -- always assuming they are civilized -- and would represent a double barrier to be surmounted, from sea to air or land surface, then from land or sea surface to space. Moreover, their invasion fleet would require a high degree of technical cooperation in the building, and cooperation implies civilization, although its presence here is not a civilized act -- at least, not according to our ideas of civilized behavior -- "

  "Well now," said the civilian expert, "we've done some odd things in the name of civilization -- "

  "This is no time for philosophy!" another officer broke in. "These people live in the sea and they will fight in the sea. Their weapons are designed for that medium, which is probably why they took no offensive or defensive action on the way in. Our problem is that we cannot possibly interdict every square mile of ocean surface. We were lucky this time to inflict twenty per cent casualties. If we can't stop their landing, then this will be predominantly a naval war. I agree with the admiral."

  "We have a little experience with the noises produced by dolphins," the bespectacled officer resumed, "which is a form of language. Also, even if we could surmount the second double barrier of air-water communications, there must be basic differences in psychology. We may have nothing in common with them at all."

  "Except possibly the instinct for survival," the civilian expert put in.

  "But it could be argued, Doctor, that survival in its fullest sense requires cooperation rather than conflict. If we could communicate . . ."

  "You are philosophizing again," said the admiral drily, "and at present we should be dealing with the more practical aspects of this problem. We can philosophize later, after we have drawn up some sort of plan to deal with this invasion. Inasmuch as only few if any of you can think in terms of naval strategy, I propose to outline the problem from my own point of view."

  He glanced quickly around the table, received nods, grunts of assent, and stony silences, and then went on, "To begin with, we must assume that their main force will reach our oceans with only minor losses. They will then establish undersea bases and observation posts, and the opening stages of the war will involve action between our surface craft and submarines and the vessels and weapons of the enemy. Even though we will be fighting in our own oceans, I'm afraid the enemy will be more at home in them than we are, so to begin with our casualties will be heavy and the enemy will seem to have things all his own way. This situation will change, however, as we gain experience of their weapons, tactics, physical and mental capabilities.

  "Acquiring dead specimens and live prisoners is of immediate importance," he continued, looking steadily at the bespectacled officer. "If at all possible we must communicate with them. We must know the enemy.

  "With this knowledge," he resumed to the table in general, "we will be in a position to hunt down the enemy and try to exterminate him completely. I say 'try to' deliberately because I don't think it possible to kill each and every one of them. But we must aim to keep them from becoming established to the point where they can take the offensive against us by launching missiles from the sea bed, and so on. Also, from the admittedly cursory examination of enemy remains made by the doctor here I think it safe to assume that these beings are not capable of surviving at great depths, which means that they will tend to congregate near coastlines and in other fairly shallow areas. This simplifies the job of detecting and destroying their installations, but it will in no sense make the job easy. This is going to be a long, hard, and undecisive war.

  "Even with perfect communication between both sides," he went on grimly, "I see no way of stopping, it. The situation has deteriorated beyond the possibility of peaceful settlement since their leading contingent has already been attacked and suffered heavy casualties. What I propose is the mounting of a maximum effort operation against this relatively weak force of the enemy before the main force of the enemy arrives, in an attempt to devise and perfect tactics suited to a form of warfare which will be utterly strange to us."

  He paused briefly for comment, then went on, "If we assume this initial landing to have been a test of our defenses and an attempt to gather on-the-spot intelligence regarding us, we are going to encounter the enemy close inshore -- at least, to begin with. It should be no problem to detect a large mass of metal the size and shape of the enemy ships with the detection gear already available to us; however, the Western Approaches, the Med, and large areas of the Pacific are practically carpeted with masses of metal the shape and size of the enemy ships -- the naval and merchant-shipping losses of World War Two. In a very short time we can expect the enemy to put these relics to good use, as forward observation posts in the shallows and for purposes of camouflage at greater depths -- two masses of metal lying close together on the sea bed being difficult to distinguish from one. Even the metal of a small sunken vessel would serve to screen the weapons and smaller transport vehicles of an enemy patrol, so our first step must be to depth-bomb each and every sunken hulk around our coastlines, and to do so repeatedly at the shortest possible intervals.

  "The compression effects of a large explosion would undoubtedly kill anyone sheltering in or near a wreck," he went on quickly, answering the questions which several of them were about to ask, "but two weeks later, or even hours later, it would still be there and available for use as a shelter or screen for enemy metal. So every wreck or suspicious mass of metal that it is possible to detect will be hit repeatedly with depth bombs -- chemical explosives, of course, unless we suspect a concentration of enemy in the area -- "

  "Just a minute, sir," said the officer with the glasses, whose specialty was communications. "The population is such that we depend on offshore fishing to a large extent for food. If we contaminate the sea with radioactives . . . As well as killing the fish there is the problem of evaporation and later precipitation over land. You're going to make this a very dirty war, sir."

  "Yes," said the admiral, "a long, dirty war."

  The fighter bomber hugged the tops of the waves all the way to the target area, then climbed slightly, pivoted its jets, and slid to a stop two hundred feet above a marker placed there by a fast detector boat. The boat had dropped a magnet to which was attached a line and a quantity of marker dye, and had then left in a hurry. It was said now that the Navy expected torpedoes to come straight up at them, so their lookouts used glass-bottomed buckets instead of binoculars. A heavy depth charge splashed into the sea where it was stained yellow by the marker. A few minutes later the surface turned white, bulged upward, and slowly subsided to leave a great, pale, circular stain where once there had been a tiny yellow one.

  "That's the second time this month we've hit that thing, whatever it is," said the navigator-bombardier. "It's not very exciting or dramatic, is
it? I keep expecting to see wreckage or bodies floating up."

  "After 150 years," said the pilot, "any loose wood or bedding would be too waterlogged to rise. The only bodies you could expect to see would be concussed fish or aliens."

  "But for argument's sake suppose we saw human bodies floating up. . . ."

  "Don't be ridiculous! Much more of these morbid imaginings and I'll sic the station psychologist onto you. Now, the next wreck on the list is that tanker off Bertrand's Head. Give me a course, please."

  The inhabited world of Gulf Trader had shrunk to the two cabins comprising Richard's Rooms and the upper half of Number Twelve tank. It was a cold, dank, dying world, shivering and starving and strangling in its own waste products. The air was fresher near the roof of Number Ten, but nobody wanted to take the risk of diving into the inky water of Twelve, groping their way through the submerged door, and swimming up to the surface in Ten just for the sake of breathing air which did not stink.

  Instead they huddled together in their pile of damp and filthy hair, trying to talk themselves into starting a Game but more often keeping silent except for the chattering of their teeth. During daylight they watched the scummed-over porthole waiting for something, anything, to happen. Then one day, incredibly, it did.