The Atlantic Abomination

by John Brunner

  “What you want to come back for so soon?” he whispered over the headsets. In the bathynef itself sound travelled well enough to speak in an ordinary voice, but stray pickup by the throat mikes had got them into the habit of whispering all the time. “Me and Mary were getting along fine!”

  “Don’t give me that!” said Peter, forcing himself to adapt to Luke’s irrepressible manner. “I know they’ve done some investigation into possibilities in free fall, though it’s only theoretical till they start sending up mixed spaceship crews. But here!”

  “What a chance we had for research, anyway!” said Luke.

  Mary cut in impatiently. “Peter, you be serious. Does the process work?”

  “A hundred per cent,” Peter confirmed soberly. “I can’t quite believe it, even after going through God knows how many pressure-tank tests and the shallower descents we made before. If they ever get around to giving prizes for oceanography, Ostrovsky and Wong had better share the first even though they aren’t oceanographers. I think they’ve revolutionized our whole damn job.”

  Luke’s whisper cut in. “I’m still damn glad it was you who had to make the first open-water trial, Petey. But I’d like to do the first field-test, so to speak. How close are we to bottom? Or rather, to side?”

  “What?”

  “Well, we’re in the East Atlantic Basin, aren’t we? When did you see a basin without sides?”

  “Not bad, Luke,” Mary said with a grudging chuckle. “I’ll check.” She pressed a control on the sonar panel, and a pattern of dots like dim stars showed behind a quartz screen.

  “I get eleven hundred yards to the nearest at our level.”

  “Right. Let’s paddle over. I want to go and grub about a bit, shift some ooze and pick up a few samples of fauna if I can spot any.”

  “Well—” Mary seemed hesitant, and Peter spoke up.

  “I think it’s an excellent idea.”

  Mary nodded, and began to let water into the reactor pile.

  “Steady! Right, that’s it. I’ve just got the mountain wall in the light from the beacon.” Luke was hanging on the hull of the ’nef beside the lock, peering forward into the green gloom. “I don’t think I’ll need a handlight when you’re so close, but I’ll take it along in case I want to get to the bottom of the ooze.”

  There was silence. Peter shifted in his cramped space, and stared at Mary, thinking about the more-than-equality, the indistinguishability, which the technological wonders surrounding them had imposed on the sexes. The throat mikes took the richness out of Mary’s voice; the suit took it from her shapely figure. He could catch only glimpses of her face behind her helmet. She had large expressive eyes, flat and almost Oriental cheekbones, a full soft-looking mouth. She was freckled in all shades of brown from near-orange to near-black, and her hair was a lustrous light brown. Amazing.

  He made sure that his mike was set for in-ship calling only. “Mary, can I ask you a personal question?”

  The helmet turned toward him. He thought a smile twitched at her mouth, but it was hard to be sure. “Just one. As a reward.”

  “Reward? For what?” Peter was as puzzled as he sounded.

  “For being the first to go out. The fact that I got into oceanography at all was due to hero-worship. So I suppose when I run across a small case of heroism I suffer an attack of renewed adolescence.” The second sentence seemed to embarrass her, and to be added in mitigation of her remark about a reward in spite of that.

  “Well, I’ll be—As a matter of fact, that half answers my personal question. Mary, you’re a very attractive girl, you know. What in hell are you doing here, instead of being back home having dinner with prosperous boy friends?”

  There was a long pause. “All right, I’ll tell you,” she said. She began to giggle. “I warn you, you’ll think it’s very silly.

  “It goes way back to when I was fourteen and in school. I had a crush on an older boy. He must have been about seventeen. I tried to throw myself at him. And boy, did he know how to duck! Why not? I was a kid. He was nearly a man.

  “Only, being the way fourteen-year-olds sometimes are, I wasn’t convinced of that. I made like I was older than my age, tried to look and talk and act sophisticated. He laughed at me. No wonder. It must have been a real farce. But in the end I really got mad. First at him and then at myself for being a mousy little frump. Well, I knew what this boy was going to do when he graduated; he wanted to join the staff of the Scripps Institute. He was friendly with one of the submarine geologists who knew his father, and he even got permission to go along on a survey ship one summer vacation. I said: right! What’s the Scripp’s Institute? Institute for Oceanography. Never heard of it. But so help me, I’ll learn more about it than he ever will!”

  A dry chuckle. “And darn it, I did. Oh, I got over the boy within a few months. But I’d got interested by then, and I’d convinced myself I was going to be a lonely spinster all my life, so I decided I’d have to have a career anyway and this looked like a good one. When boys did start dating me and making passes instead of ignoring my existence I nearly died of surprise. Truly! And here I am.”

  Peter was grinning, but keeping his face averted. He was on the verge of saying that he did find it silly but perfectly logical, when there was an interruption. Not more than a mutter. But it came from Luke, out in the deep water.

  “Oh-oh!” It was like the calm but annoyed exclamation of a man who sees a cat or a small child endangering a valuable ornament.

  Mary put her helmet plate hard against the quartz window, but the field of vision from inside the ’nef was almost nil. For seeing things instead of registering them on sonar, the crew had to go out of the lock. “Luke!” she called. “You all right?”

  “Personally, I’m fine, just as well as Peter was.” Luke sounded calm, but the fact that he said “Peter” and not “Pete” or “Petey” was betraying. “Exertion is possible, but not for long periods. My co-ordination is slipping a bit. There’s a sort of cave I poked into, found a few unlikely barnacles or something. I chipped a few of them off, and maybe I hit too hard, or something. Half a ton of sludge has shifted across the mouth of the cave.”

  “Can you get out?” Mary demanded anxiously.

  “I think so. The opening’s wide enough, and I can see the beacon clear as anything. The trick will be to swim straight through without touching the sides of the hole. It’s balanced like a juggling act! Have to do it now—or never!”

  The last word was accompanied by a grunt, as though in the same moment he had lanced towards the mouth of the cave.

  Suddenly the ’nef shifted like a balloon in a gale, outwards and away from the mountainside where Luke had been exploring. A vast grumbling noise at the edge of hearing troubled their ears with the psychological disturbance of subsonics. A cloud of slow mud blanked the narrow windows of the ’nef.

  Mary was better prepared for the shock than Peter, being at her control post, securely seated, while he was stretched out and consequently floundering in the resistant water that filled the cabin. But all the time he was trying to regain his place, he was aware of what must have happened. The cave must have been on a sloping outcrop of rock, with tons upon tons of ooze above it, undisturbed for eons by anything except the gentle deep-ocean currents which rounded it like weather-eroded hills, but ready to collapse and thunder into the abyss like a slow-motion avalanche if triggered off.

  He was shouting, “Luke! Luke!” Then he realized he had set his mike for in-ship transmission only. But it probably made no difference at all. Luke couldn’t hear their cries.

  III

  “OH MY GOD!” Mary was whispering. “Oh my God!” She was awakening the reactor and controlling the tossing of their craft as she spoke. It was probably a defense against expected tears. Peter crammed his faceplate hard against the window and tried to see into the murky water. There was nothing, except for a lump of something solid but not very heavy tumbling through the edge of the light from the beacon. It moved, sl
owly, but it vanished forever towards the ooze of the Atlantic floor.

  “I think it’s stopped,” he said harshly, and then remembered to relapse into whispering. “Have we been moved far?”

  “Not very,” Mary managed to reply.

  “Could you relocate the spot we were at before?”

  “Oh God, I don’t know.” She made a gesture as though to brush hair out of her eyes. Her hand fetched up short against the hardness of her helmet. “I can try. You’re going out?”

  “Of course! If there’s the remotest chance he’s still in reach … He may only have been trapped in sludge. Maybe he’s still in the cave, unable to pick us up or get his signals through.” He was starting to operate the lock door.

  Mary stopped with her hand poised to open the reactor pipe. For a long moment she remained still. Then she turned away shaking her head. “It’s not worth the risk. There may be another fall coming.”

  “Not worth it? What do you mean? So long as there’s any hope—”

  Then a sudden light dawned on him. Mary must be about twenty-seven. He knew for sure Luke was thirty.

  “Mary, wasn’t Luke at Scripps Institute before he came to us at Atlantic?”

  Her answering “yes” was barely breathed.

  “Was it Luke who got you down here? Like you said?”

  Again, fainter, “Yes.”

  “All right. It may not be worth it for you, he may not be the godlike ideal you thought he was when you were fourteen, but he’s a human being and a damn fine oceanographer. I won’t give him up till I’ve seen for myself! Now get the ’nef moving!”

  He passed through the lock and seized the handholds on the hull, staring ahead towards the Ridge. The bathynef’s speed was at most two knots. He could barely feel the pressure difference caused by their slow advance, but it was enough to make suspended mud deposit on his faceplate and force him to scrape it off every minute or two.

  Nonetheless, the brilliance of the beacon sheared through the muddy fog, and he was able to deduce that although the shock had been violent, the fall had been comparatively small. Only a few hundred tons of ooze would have taken part in the slithering redistribution of weight. Only! Peter shuddered. The Ostrovsky-Wong process enabled the human body to resist enormous pressures, but the weight of a hundred tons of mud was another question altogether.

  Almost without doubt, it was hopeless.

  “Right. Steady!” he commanded Mary. “I can see the wall ahead.” He surveyed the gradually widening area that the beacon illuminated. “It looks like we’re coming back at the same spot, okay. There’s a vague color difference between the mud ahead and the rest, like it was reflecting more light from an irregular surface.”

  “How close do you think we can go?” Mary’s voice showed restrained tension.

  “As close as your nerves will let you bring her,” Peter answered grimly. “Okay, hold it. I don’t see where another fall could come from. The ooze has slipped over a hundred square yards. I’ll cast off now and survey the surface without touching anything. If it seems to have settled I’ll go over with the sonar and see if I can get a reflection off Luke’s helmet or oxygen bottles.”

  There was practically no risk of further slipping, he decided after carefully circling the area of the disaster. Accordingly, he set the little sonar device which normally served for communication so that it would receive its own impulses, and began laboriously to quarter the surface of the shifted mud, back and forth, back and forth. …

  He was on the point of signalling to Mary that he must give up, when a last thought struck him. Maybe the ooze had slipped clear of the mouth of the cave where Luke had been trapped, slipped all the way to a lower level. They could well be a little below the cave.

  He kicked himself round and jetted upwards, towards the rocks laid bare by the movement of the ooze. In answer to a curt request, Mary made the ’nef imitate him. The beacon lit bare rock, without sign of a cave mouth.

  Rock?

  He was so intent on what he was searching for that it took him a long moment to recognize the incongruity. Rock? Since when had rock of any kind distorted itself into small level areas at slightly different angles to one another, each area square?

  Molten rock, lava, pouring fast and cooling quickly, will crystallize into hexagons: witness the famous Giant’s Causeway and other such formations. But squares? Of identical sizes? Like flagstones under which the ground has subsided?

  In that instant, Peter forgot his missing comrade, and knew after that Luke would have forgiven him; would willingly have sacrificed his life to reveal what might otherwise have gone undetected for still more centuries. He plunged forward and scraped at the thin film of mud still covering the incredible surface of the stone.

  Marble. But not just marble. Slabs of marble carved with grooves and inlaid with something harder than marble. The pattern of the inlay, standing out black on the lighter background, was not accidental.

  The first one he managed to trace was similar to the Seal of Solomon, except that instead of two triangles interlocked it consisted of two squares. The next was something very like the caduceus, the serpent-twined staff of Mercury which is the symbol of the medical profession. Except that Peter hoped no such snakes had ever crawled on Earth. Their very curves seemed unnatural, improbable.

  “Mary! I’ve found something fantastic! Unbelievable! You can float the ’nef over, but gently! I want some pictures, good ones, and lots of them.”

  It was not cynicism, but scientific enthusiasm which reminded him at this point that without Luke there would be plenty of oxygen for the return to the surface. If only there were some means of communicating with the mother ship! But radio was impossible, of course, and they had avoided tethering the ’nef on a phone cable because that hindered its unique power to range along the bottom in search of interesting fauna.

  Feverishly he worked at clearing the thin slimy ooze. He frustrated himself with the vigor of his work, for if he scrubbed too hard he fogged the water near the—the pavement, he was already calling it. He had to find a smooth rhythm which would disperse the fine particles in the water long enough for the ’nef’s camera to capture the mysterious symbols.

  There were some that were quite familiar, the concentric circles, isosceles triangles arranged in a star pattern, and straightforward groups of intersecting lines. There were some that were tantalizingly reminiscent, like the caduceus. There were forked symbols like the Chinese ideogram for “Man,” and a thing like a three-legged swastika which reminded him of the coat of arms of the Isle of Man. And there were things he could not compare to anything he had ever seen before, which, in one or two cases, gave him a peculiar sense of disquiet.

  “Peter!” Mary warned him, seemingly against her will. “I think we’ll have to start the ascent soon. I’d prefer not to have to bleed oxygen off the beacon to get us home—we’d have to be decontaminated of fission products, you know. I think this will still be here when we come back. Suppose you survey the area and see if there’s anything else of interest.”

  He circled the area lit by the beacon, prodding several times at what might conceivably have been relics of masonary showing under the mud, but which he dared not try to scrape clean for fear they might be holding back another avalanche of ooze. Finally, he returned to the ship.

  Mary was waiting silently for him. When he was safely in the cabin, she at once set in train the device that fed the water from the buoyancy tank into the beacon’s magnetic bottle. The raging power instantly dissociated the elements into gases. Charged with this gas, the tank began to lift them the slow, slow way to the surface.

  Peter settled in his place, thinking what the pictures would show when they applied the necessary correction factors to them and could screen them in full color.

  “Mary,” he said, awed by his own reasoning, “you realize we’ve stumbled across something that’s obviously far older than Atlantis is supposed to be; older than any known human civilization?”


  She nodded. “If they were builders before—before we were,” she said. “what could they have been?”

  “Who,” Peter corrected. “Iklot what.’ If they were builders, then they were our cousins, whatever shape they had.”

  He paused, and then added awkwardly, “You know, I think Luke is going to have a finer memorial than any man ever had.”

  For just a second he didn’t realize what he was seeing. Then, just in time, he made the appropriate movements with his arms. Sobbing blindly, Mary fell into them, and under thousands of feet of ocean and hampered by the suits which kept them alive, he tried to comfort her grief.

  In the very great depths, in the vastness of the Eastern Atlantic Basin, there was the second event in millenniums.

  Awareness. Inquiry. Hope. Amazed delight.

  Why, the planet was teeming with life! A richness! Such a richness had never been known before, anywhere.

  And the awareness knew.

  IV

  COLOR-CORRECTED according to the Land principle, the pictures of the unbelievable submerged flagstones shone out vividly on the screen, filling the hastily darkened messroom of the Alexander Bache. Now it could be seen that their pink, yellow, mottled white hues almost glowed under their layer of mud.

  Peter stared at them dazedly. This was burial in a hundred thousand years of globigerina ooze, which had doubtless mummified them as efficiently as the peaty water of the bog had embalmed the body of Tollund Man, dead only for centuries. Allow that this hard stone was ten times more durable than human skin and bone, and it was credible.

  There were six other people in the room besides himself and Mary. Of the ship’s permanent crew, there was Captain Hartlund, First Officer Ellington, and Engineer Officer Piatt. Even though their jobs demanded that they be much more than seamen only—Piatt, for instance, having to service the bathynef, was no mean atomic physicist and could carbon datings with his eyes shut—they were laymen when it came to this sort of problem. Correction: to this problem. It was without precedent. Unique.