The Watch Below

by James White

  "No," said Heglenni.

  "Is this necessary, sir?" said Dasdahar.

  "Unfortunately yes," replied the captain. "I realize that both of you have formed a slight emotional attachment for these beings, that you have the highest admiration for their ability to survive, and that you advocate placing them on the surface to be rescued by their friends. But they are now in possession of much vital information about us, and if the enemy realized that we were not a war fleet, they would be less cautious while hunting us and our casualties would be immeasurably greater. I dislike this step as much as you do, but this is war.

  "I understand both your feelings," Gunt went on, "and I will overlook your mishandling of the matter as well as your present insubordination. It could also be argued that the specimens would have died anyway if you hadn't discovered them, so you can allay your consciences with the knowledge that -- "

  "I won't do it!" said Heglenni angrily.

  "Neither," said Dasdahar respectfully, "will I."

  The verbal explosion which burst from the communicator was followed instants later by a second and greater explosion which smashed against their bodies like some tremendous hammer, obliterating from their minds all thoughts of gas-breathers and insubordination and questions of ethics to leave only a sudden and terrible darkness.

  It was a newly discovered wreck lying among rocks in a narrow inlet and this was their first drop on the target; otherwise the drill was very much as before. Drop the bomb, watch a large area of water turn white, try to jump skyward, wait a few minutes for it to settle, and then look for any unusual occurrence. Up to now there had been no unusual occurrences .

  "God!" said the navigator-bombardier.

  "Choppers, para-meds, hover-boats!" the pilot yelled suddenly on the emergency frequency. "Get them here fast! There's people down there, survivors of some kind, floating up! They're in some kind of plastic bag. Some of them . . . I think some of them are still moving!"

  XXIV

  There were no longer any pockets of gas trapped inside the wreck of Gulf Trader, since the shock of the explosion had opened very nearly every seam in her hull, but there was still life. Heglenni and her companion belonged to a species tough both in mind and body, and the compression effects of the depth bomb had been nullified to a certain extent by the compartmented structure of the vessel, not to mention the pockets of gas it had contained, which had also helped absorb the shock wave. But the water around the ship lightened and darkened several times before Heglenni was anything like fully conscious, and many more days would pass before her companion would be able to speak properly and move without swimming into things. They were both in considerable pain.

  The communicator was undamaged, but subsiding wreckage had cut the line to the outside. As quickly as possible -- the heat beams could not be used at full strength in the confined space without their boiling themselves alive -- Heglenni cut her way through the roof of what had been Number Ten tank and through to the weather deck. From the opening she could see into the tiny section of corridor and the two small compartments where the gas-breathers had lived before she had extended their quarters. They had been most grateful for the extra living space and Heglenni had been doubly pleased because the transparent bubble had greatly eased the problems of communication. Now all that remained of the extension was a semicircle of hardened sealing compound projecting outwards onto the weather deck to which there adhered tatters of slowly waving plastic. The explosion must have ripped it to shreds and Wah-Lass, and the others, too, of course, with it.

  Heglenni felt welling up inside her a pain which had nothing whatever to do with her many physical injuries, a pain which was a combination of anger and sorrow and helplessness at the inevitability of things.

  Self-preservation, the survival of one's self or one's race, was the prime law. Another law was that enemies must be destroyed. Even the enemies themselves agreed on this. But Heglenni had not only been unwilling, she had been unable to kill the gas-breathers in the wreck, and her feelings in the matter had gradually been transmitted to the communications officer. Basically it was a feeling of rebellion against natural and inevitable laws, reinforced by the strange but true fact that Heglenni felt much more understanding and affection for the grotesque, spindly gas-breather Wah-Lass than she did for Captain Gunt. When she looked at the captain she saw a fat, self-confident, highly efficient Unthan who was inclined to be patronizing, when he wasn't being impatient, about her background and manners. But when she looked at Wah-Lass she scarcely saw the gas-breather at all.

  Instead she saw a composite picture of the flagship and the face of her father, Deslann Five; and the blind, ravaged features of Hellseggorn of the food ship; and the shadowy faces of all the captains stretching back to the first Deslann. In the picture, too, was the conflict between the Young People and the Seniors, the generations-long war with the food ship, and the over-all suffering which had come in the wake of too much inbreeding and cramped, unnatural surroundings. The technical aptitude which made it possible to survive physically in such hostile surroundings formed only a very small part of the picture in comparison with the sheer, dogged courage and mental discipline which had kept them both going for generation after generation. The flagship had had a purpose in the shape of the target planet and journey's end to give them stability and direction, but the gas-breathers in their wreck had had nothing but the will to survive and to remain as civilized as possible while they were doing it.

  Heglenni was glad that it had been their own kind who had killed the gas-breathers. She could not, and would not, have done it.

  Moving a short distance from the wreck she found the communications cable and spliced it into the severed lead from the set. She was about to put in a call, wondering if the flagship was at the other end of the line or just another depth-bombed wreck, when there was a sudden disturbance on the surface.

  It was a slow-moving area of highly agitated water characteristic of the enemy hover-boats, probably the only kind which could pass over the submerged rocks with safety. The patch of disturbed water slowed and came to a stop almost directly overhead. A large metal object broke through the surface and began to slip down towards her, and Heglenni had a moment of the most horrible kind of fear followed by an angry fatalism. Then she noticed that there was a line attached to the object and stopping it short of the sea bottom, and that it was making loud, distorted, but intelligible noises.

  "Captain Heglenni, Captain Gunt, Communicator Dasdahar. Any Unthan person who is in contact with your flagship," it boomed in the slow, labored, and unmistakable accents of the gas-breather Wah-Lass. "This is a recording of my words, since I am still under the care of the healers, but I can assure you with all truth that my superiors wish for peaceful contact with your race and a nonviolent solution to our problems. A continuing war between us would, as well as bringing about your destruction as a civilized race, so poison our oceans and our gas envelope with radioactive material that our own species might be lethally affected.

  "Until now we had thought that our destruction of the ships in the vanguard of your fleet had committed us irrevocably to war as the only solution possible, but now that we know that the ships destroyed contained only food animals, peace is still possible between us.

  "The remaining units of your fleet will arrive ten days from now. We will not oppose their landing, but urge that you signal us before then so that we will know that you do in fact desire peace. . . ."

  It was at that point that Heglenni succeeded in getting through to the flagship. She said quickly, "Heglenni and Dasdahar here, sir. We were injured when the gas-breathers depth-bombed their wreck. I don't know how long exactly we have been unconscious, but there have been new developments. Listen, sir!"

  "No need, Heglenni," the captain replied, his voice distorted both by distance and deep emotion. "They've had one of those gadgets dangling above our heads here for the best part of a day. We are signaling them now in the manner they have suggested and we wil
l transmit the good news to the rest of the fleet.

  "This is the answer, Heglenni. I think there is going to be peace."

  "Thousands of Unthan ships landing in all the oceans of the world," said the officer wearing the spectacles, "and all we could see from the headland was what looked like three slow-moving shooting stars. It was a bit of an anti-climax."

  Smiling, the admiral said, "He's right, Surgeon Commander. You didn't miss a thing."

  Wallis looked at them without speaking. The one with the glasses was standing almost at attention beside the bed while the older one was lying across it with his weight propped on one elbow. Behind them were the red walls, ceiling, and floor which had been painted to represent rust-streaked bulkheads and the tank of tropical fish set flush with the wall in a window frame, all designed to make him feel at home. The real windows had been painted over and his only view of the outside came to him via the TV, which for some odd reason did not bring on his agoraphobia. His bed was so warm and so comfortable and so fantastically, unbelievably dry that he did not feel at home in it at all -- it felt more like Heaven. There were times -- the present moment, in fact -- when he did not feel in contact with his surroundings at all.

  One of the doctors had told him that the feeling was nothing to worry about, being due simply to massive doses of medication and the aftermath of double pneumonia, severe malnutrition, exposure, decompression, and shock through being blown to the surface by a depth charge, and that he was lucky to be alive.

  "It's a case of a big fleet landing in an enormous ocean," said the officer with the glasses. "You know, if they'd landed three or four centuries ago we might have put it down to a meteor shower and not even realized they were there. Now, however, we know they are there and vice versa. Our people are beginning to accept the idea of their being refugees rather than an invading force. But it is an extremely tenuous image. Can we really trust them not to -- "

  "You can trust them," said Wallis sharply.

  "Of course, Commander," the other said placatingly. "They're friends of yours so you should know. But what I was going to say was can we trust them not to boob and spoil things? Certainly we have oceans enough to spare so far as living space goes, and they'll be able to help us farm the seas more efficiently, thus helping relieve our food problems. There is a lot we can learn from them about spaceship design and power plants, the Cold Sleep they've developed, and undersea technology in general. And the learning process will be two-way; there'll be progress in all areas of knowledge. It wouldn't surprise me if we can go to the stars before too long, and not by putting ourselves into cold storage for a couple of centuries, either.

  "But the point I'm trying to make," he went on excitedly, "is that there is bound to be friction between us as well as cooperation. Their life-span, for instance, is much shorter than ours. A couple of centuries from now the seas may be overpopulated as well as the land. There are bound to be incidents, accidents, where humans or Unthans are injured or killed. What I'm getting at is that we must make the widest possible contact with them now, so that in the future these incidents will seem less important!"

  "What he's really getting at, Commander," said the admiral drily, "is when are you going to stop malingering in bed and go to work? Every Unthan message we've received -- and your young people have translated quite a few for us -- has asked how Wah-Lass is doing. They seem to like you as well as trust you, for some odd reason. How did you do it?"

  Wallis already knew that he was to be the human ambassador to the Unthans on earth, that he would probably spend the rest of his life living under the sea and talking to Heglenni and Gunt and the others and teaching members of his own race to talk to them, too. He knew it and accepted it. In fact, the truth was that he was horribly afraid of the open sky and the tall buildings and trees, which always seemed to be about to fall on him. Unlike the young people who had survived and who seemed more able to adapt, Wallis was going back to the sea bed. But this time, the admiral had assured him, he would be as warm and dry and well fed as he was here in the Naval hospital.

  And he knew that the admiral and the Army officer with the glasses were not criticizing him in any way, that they were deeply concerned for him and that their respect for him was quite embarrassing -- Wallis had listened to too many people talking in absolute darkness for him to be mistaken in a tone of voice. The question about malingering was simply a pleasantry and the second . . . well, how had he done it?

  "We had something in common," said Wallis. "Both our ships were at sea for a long, long time. . . ."

  The

  Watch

  Below

  They were a handful of men and women trapped in

  the hull of a sunken ship; they were miraculously alive and

  horrifyingly imprisoned by thousands of tons of water.

  There was little hope of rescue.

  No chance of escape.

  All they could do except die was survive . . . and they did.

  Not just for hours, or weeks, but for years, for

  generations. Exercising their minds to incalculable

  degrees and never giving up, they forged an

  impossible world around them -- unaware that in the

  heavens above an alien race on its own desperate

  odyssey was struggling for life.

  Cover printed in USA