The Atlantic Abomination

by John Brunner

  Peter looked about him at the other people on deck. They were all talking except Mary, of course, and also except the Chief. He had not moved from his rigid stance, hands grasping the rail.

  Now the launch was coming alongside; Platt had secured the ’nef’s painter to the mooring line almost without slowing in his haste to get his strange passenger aboard. He came up first into a chorus of questions, but ignored them and turned to help Luke.

  Peter had expected Mary to rush forward and throw herself round his neck. Only she did not; she had not even joined the group helping him up the ladder. She was just staring at him. Assuredly, Peter reflected, she had been right to tell him he didn’t understand her.

  Eloise and Dick followed, to be plagued with loud questions by those who had not got answers out of Luke. He wasn’t giving any, in fact, except a shake of the head.

  But before Eloise and Dick could sort out the inquiries and reply to them, the Chief had thrust his way between Ellington and Hartlund and was dominating the scene, as if he had a power to dominate that he could turn on at will.

  “Enough!” he said sharply. “Hartlund, your head’s screwed on properly. Get Luke to sick bay and have him checked head to toe. I’ll be down in a minute. Dick, Eloise, you two come to my cabin and report on what happened. All right, the rest of you. We’ll get at the answers quicker if you stop bothering us. Break it up!”

  Obediently, they dispersed, glancing back reluctantly. As Peter moved off, he looked for Mary, and found she was nowhere to be seen.

  It was seventeen hundred when the hear-this announced there would be a staff conference in the messroom immediately. Peter was already in the messroom, having a beer with First Officer Ellington and hypothesizing about what was being said by Dick, Eloise and Platt in the Chief’s office. They had been there without interruption since the Chief returned from interviewing Luke.

  In a couple of minutes the company was complete. Gordon was at the head of the table. No sign of Luke. Everyone looked for him, sighed, and composed himself or herself to listen.

  Gordon was smiling. Almost beaming. But there was a hint of self-satisfaction in the smile which Peter disliked.

  “All right!” the Chief began. “Eloise, let’s deal with the first things first. What happened? Tell us as you told me.”

  Eloise seemed withdrawn, far away. There was a continual puzzlement in her high voice. “The descent had been perfectly normal, of course,” she said. “And we had very little trouble locating the site of these flagstones Peter found. They gave a real shout on the sonar because they were almost clear of ooze. We’d better beacon the place, though, next time—I’m sorry.

  “You were quite right about what you thought were walls, Peter. We were afraid of starting an avalanche if we weren’t careful, so we thought we’d forestall it, and we set off a couple of four-ounce charges in the water near the site. Nothing happened, except that some of the ooze was cleared by the shock wave, so we judged it was safe and started following the line of the walls.

  “They outline a gigantic square; a sort of piazza, which may well be a hundred yards on a side. What’s more, it continues downwards. There’s a sort of enormous step higher than I am, on the downhill side. Since you left, presumably the loose ooze which slipped has settled or washed away a bit. Anyway, when we got there the edge of this ‘step’ was showing above the pile of mud.

  “Well, that’s as far as we got. Dick was outside clearing the base of a wall, when something that gave a sonar pulse came towards us. From the deep side, more or less on our level. I called Dick back. It was big, and if it was big it was probably also hungry, because down there the fish population eat each other more often than not. Anyway, it came into view. It was Luke.”

  Dick picked up the story in response to a cue from Gordon. “Well, I went out to him, not believing my eyes, and tried to talk, but he showed me that his sonar was full of mud and not working. I brought him inboard, and changed his oxygen cylinders right away, and we tried to get sense out of him by giving him the spare sonar set, but that didn’t help either, so we judged his mike must be out, as well.

  “We decided this whole thing was so incredible that we must head back at once. So we did. On the way, we managed to exchange messages with Luke by writing, but he was rather weak, and couldn’t write very clearly. All we got was that he had been trapped under the mud fall and lost all track of time. He seems to have been unconscious. When he finally recovered and managed to work free, there was no sign of the ’nef. He waited, hoping it would come back, but just before our arrival, he’d got lightheaded and decided to swim off. Catching sight of the beacon brought him back to sanity.”

  “And he is sane,” said Gordon. “We’ve examined him with all the facilities we have. He’s not only sane, but he’s in good health aside from bruises and weakness due to hunger. By the time he’s rested up—he’s asleep, so I haven’t asked him to speak for himself at this conference—he’ll likely be in perfect shape again.”

  Peter leaned forward. “Chief, something important. Can I ask Fred Platt a question?”

  Annoyed at being interrupted, Gordon grunted consent.

  “Fred, did you check Luke’s discarded oxygen tanks? How much reserve did he have left when Dick changed them?”

  “The meters said two hours,” Platt answered, and there was a murmur of incredulity. “So I checked them on the master gauge. Same result. Pressure was worth two hours.”

  “In which case,” said Peter as calmly as he could, “either he found a means of recharging them six thousand feet under the Atlantic—or we have a resurrected corpse aboard.”

  “Good, Peter! Good!” burst out Gordon, slamming his hand delightedly on the table. “It’s fine to hear you reasoning sensibly like that.”

  Peter blinked. “It’s inescapable,” he began, but the Chief cut him short.

  “Yes, of course it’s inescapable. I said it was even before this happened. Luke is back, and well, from a situation that ought to have killed him. It’s not accidental. Can’t be. And he himself says he doesn’t remember finding what I suppose is just conceivable; an oxygen generator left behind by the builders of the city and still in working order. Yes, I agree that is ridiculous, but it’s just not out of the question. Dismissing that, though, we are left with the likely truth.”

  “Which is?” grunted Hartlund needlessly.

  “That something—or rather someone—down there helped Luke and either resuscitated him or kept him alive.”

  VII

  Kept him alive.

  For Peter the words had an ominous ring, and a picture came unbidden to his mind. A picture of a coelacanth, caught when “old fourlegs” was still regarded as a fantastic impossibility in the living state, moving despondently in the tank where his captors had placed him, dying by inches because they did not know and he could not say that sunlight was unbearable to him.

  And after it came impressions of specimens in an aquarium. Because if this were true, and something intelligent did move and live down there, it could only be alien to man.

  A babble of excited talk, half contradictory, half in agreement with the logic of Gordon’s remarks, was running round the table. The Chief let it continue for a moment, then snapped its thread.

  “All right. Unless someone really has a valid counter-explanation, I want discussion of further activities. We are limited by supplies and the capacity of our equipment. I want to know what really is down there. On the other hand, it looks beyond doubt that it’s far too big for us few to handle with what we’ve got.” A hand went up. “Ellington?”

  “Chief, I’d like to hear what Luke has to say.”

  “Impossible. We’re going to let him sleep the clock round. I’ve had the bones of his story, and Eloise gave them to you, and so did Dick. We can only hope sleep will clear his mind. On his own admission, he’d become delirious by the time he was found. If not, we’ll have to hunt for ourselves. Platt?”

  The engineer officer was frown
ing. “I wish I could see for myself what’s under us. All I can do is make suggestions. I, vote we undertake one more dive, with every bit of equipment I can secure to the ’nef. I’m divided between sending two as crew, for the sake of the longer time they could stay under, or three, allowing two to be working outside.”

  “It’ll have to be two. Dick and Eloise have to rest for forty-eight hours, and Luke isn’t going to be fit. Or even if he is, I won’t let him dive again till he’s had a proper hospital examination. That leaves Mary and Peter. By the way, where is Mary?” The Chief glanced round.

  “Keeping guard on Luke,” said Peter,

  “All right. Yes, for a full-scale exploration we’d need the Russian ’nef as well as our own, and I’m pretty sure they will agree to come. And for lack of anything better we must invite the French to loan a couple of their ’scaphes. Too, the British have been trying out a new ultradeep TV drogue, which will go down deeper than a ’nef has been taken so far.”

  “And which won’t show much except ooze,” said Dick Loescher baldly. “Chief, to get at all there is down there, we’ll have to invent whole new fleets of gadgets. Hell, burrowing into four thousand feet of mud above water would be a problem!”

  “Agreed. But for the first time,” Gordon pointed out, “we have something as spectacular as the space research program can offer. More so! I’ve been wondering, actually, if they will find traces of this civilization on the moon. Perhaps, if they got so far as they seem to have done. And besides, in view of what happened to Luke, do you think we’ll have to do it all ourselves?”

  “You think there may be a friendly intelligent race down there?” Hartlund put it into words.

  “If we accept the only reasonable explanation for Luke’s escape,” shrugged Gordon, “there must be.”

  As they neared their goal, while Mary hunted for the distinctive sonar echo that would guide them in, Peter stared through the exiguous windows. He wondered if he would see anything, if Luke had seen anything. Luke was still asleep when the ’nef had started down.

  They had long ago left the levels at which the sea teemed in a manner befitting its role as the cradle of life. Not that even the deeps were barren. They were just quite thinly populated, and one of the few disadvantages of the beacon was that the marked local rise in warmth it communicated to the water seemed to make fish steer away from it. Or maybe the magnetic bottle produced ultrasonics they could sense, thus frightening them. They were still arguing the point.

  “Homing in,” said Mary suddenly. “Gotchal” she added—Peter presumed—to the city-site beyond the port. He acknowledged her words and went to the lock to supervise the fine manoeuvring of the last few hundred feet.

  This time they moored the ’nef so that if it were necessary they could both leave the cabin for a short while. But they were under strict orders not to take risks when doing so. The first task was to find a suitable site for the sonar beacon they would activate when they left.

  Peter went out first, and began by surveying the same area Dick and Eloise had covered. They seemed to have done most of what was possible. Short of some gadget like a super vacuum cleaner, there was no means of laying bare the walls around the plaza further than had been done already.

  His mind busy with atomic-powered suction devices, he returned to the ’nef and collected sample bags, boxes and nets. Meantime, Mary was “photographing” by sonar-scanning the exact nature of the ground about them.

  The first six-hour shift passed in careful, patient consolidation of what had been done previously. The next would be spent differently, Peter decided.

  “Let’s face it,” he said, “we’ve done what we can here. The rest is for later. I propose we cast off and move down the mountainside, to see if we can locate a similar site to this, one where we might set off a slipping in the accumulated ooze and let gravity shift it for us. It won’t be funny if the really interesting stuff turns out to be in the valley at the bottom, but by the time we get there a few more tons on top of the natural load won’t bother us.”

  Mary agreed without argument, and with Peter clinging to the hull they descended by stages of a hundred feet at a time. Each time, taking it in turns, they swam away from the ’nef and surveyed the mountainside, but each time the sonar told them that ooze lay thick over the rock, and over any more remains that might be in the area.

  They had descended nearly a thousand feet when they drew blank for the last time in this direction. They were moving and breathing comfortably and freely; Mary made a note of the indicated depth in confirmation of the success of the Ostrovsky-Wong treatment.

  “No show,” Peter shrugged. “Okay. We’ll try going sideways.”

  They went back to the original site, and began to move out from it horizontally instead of vertically. At their arbitrary limit of a thousand foot range, they found something new; the broken-off stump of a round tower, around which ooze was piled. But the vast hollow shaft of the tower was clogged full with mud, and nothing else in the area was detectable.

  Nonetheless, they passed more than three hours in mapping its shape with sonar, as far as they could, in measuring it and in chipping off odd pieces for study and analysis. It was very hard, but it did not seem to be stone. Peter wondered what cataclysm had snapped it off. Perhaps half a mountain had fallen on it. It was hard to see what else, short of a heavy bomb, could have managed the job.

  They retraced their steps and worked once more in the opposite direction. Here and there objects registered on the sonar, but most of them they disregarded, being too near the surface of the mud, and therefore having been embedded quite recently.

  “Well, that leaves up,” said Peter when they had reached the end, once more, of a thousand-foot sweep. “Do we set the beacon going to save coming down again, or not yet?”

  “Not yet. I prefer to be able to talk. Besides, at this short range it would quite probably foul our own probes with harmonics.”

  “Right. Let’s go straight to the head of the slip which buried Luke. It might have faulted at the outcrop of some wall-foundation, or at another ‘step’ like the one we’ve seen.”

  Ruagh and his kind had powers.

  Once they had been able to look after themselves; to forage and feed themselves. They did not need to eat often, but when they did, they ate vastly. But because they had powers, they could compel others to labor for them, to feed them. It had been a long time since they had descended to shift for themselves. Even before they had come to Earth, it had been long.

  And once on Earth—that fantastic, seemingly inexhaustible paradise—they had grown careless, even gluttonous. They had eaten for the pleasure of eating, and they had grown beyond the limit at which they could possibly have gathered for themselves the amount they consumed at a single meal.

  Thus it was with Ruagh. Thus it was that, although he set out when his fellows abandoned him to try and find stragglers from the other’s city whom he could compel to find food for him, he weakened before he had gone halfway. Besides, it was centuries since he had had to carry his own weight more than a few yards …

  His dying was unspectacular. He became still. The bacteria which cause earthly things to putrefy invaded his alien flesh and found it unwholesome. So, for a long time, he did not change visibly. That was why the men who still roamed that country, some of whom had been subjects of Ruagh’s kind and could voice a warning, gave him a wide berth.

  Eventually, though, the symbiotic bacteria in his own body began to decay him. When at last the sea burst into that valley, the body was full of gases of decomposition, and floated on the stormily rising waters like an obscene rubber toy. He drifted so for a little while.

  Then a gust hurled him against the broken shards of a tower in the city he had been laboring to reach. Gases whined out of a rent in his hide. Water-filled, he sank.

  In the water, the bacteria which had reduced him to a hollow ceased their work, and their terrestrial cousins could not complete it. Slowly the ooze gave him burial.<
br />
  There was something here, all right! Peter’s heart jumped. The mud had indeed slipped at the site of another wall. It looked curved, maybe the base of another round tower. And in the heap of mud that had not slipped and fallen, there was something embedded. Something large, a little shiny, quite smooth, slightly yielding to pressure. And enormous.

  It was so enormous that he had laid the whole thing bare from end to end and still not realized what it was, when a choking cry came to him from Mary. Automatically he spun in the water and plunged towards the ’nef.

  “No, Peter! I’m all right! But look!”

  He turned, looked, and was suddenly afraid.

  Thirty or more feet long, with legs, swollen belly, a head whose dull and mud-crusted eyes seemed to fix them with a stare, it was an animal.

  But such an animal as only nightmares breed. …

  VIII

  THERE WAS a vast silence, as vast as the ocean around.

  At last Mary broke in, her voice shaking. “You know, I’d just figured out another explanation for Luke’s survival. I was going to suggest it could be an unexpected result of the Ostrovsky-Wong process. I was rehearsing the scorn I meant to pour on the Chief’s theories. And now—”

  “And now we find a life-form absolutely and utterly different from anything known before.” Peter put grimness into the words. “It’s so different I’m even prepared to accept it could be intelligent.”

  “I’m glad it’s dead,” Mary whispered.

  “So am I. … Think the ’nef will lift it?”

  She took a moment to understand him. “Are you out of your mind? You want to take that thing to the surface? We can’t dig it out of the mud by ourselves, for heaven’s sake! And even if we did, if it’s built for this kind of pressure it will just break to pieces on the way up.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Peter murmured. He plunged back towards the dead beast, and began to survey it cautiously, scraping away ooze by the shovelful from around its legs. Under its bloated belly he discovered a triangular rent, where a flap of the tough hide had been ripped on a sharp rock or stone. He went almost headfirst into the mud while struggling to see more clearly.