by Robb White
"Something," Pete said, slowly moving forward toward the shadowy shapes the small light showed. "Don't know what."
"Doesn't the gold shine?"
"Mike, everything down here is covered W'th gunk a foot thick," Pete said. "But there are shapes of things on the deck. Might be boxes or crates. I'll try one with the pickax. What's the time?"
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"Twenty-eight minutes."
"Yipe! I'll have to come up in a little whils." Pete took three more steps into the gloomy room and put the lamp down on one of the vague shapes rising from the floor. He was about to raise and swing the pickax when a movement caught his eye.
For a moment Pete wasn't sure whether he had actually seen anything or whether it had been the shadow of a fish or even his own shadow. He wasn't even sure of the direction. With the pickax back over his shoulder, he stood perfectly still, looking carefully into the arc of light made by the torch.
Then he saw the movement again. Advancing slowly across the flat top of the object the light was sitting on was a thinnish, grayish line. As Pete watched, it flowed toward the light like a gray stream of molasses.
And it got thicker where it came over the edge, although the tip of it going toward the light was still thin and rounded.
For a moment Pete thought that it was some sort of underwater worm. He was on the point of ignoring it and going on with the downward swing of the pickax when he suddenly saw a second thin thing beginning to stream toward the light.
Pete lowered the pickax to the floor and then stood perfectly still. Slowly, picking out the mov-
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ing streams in the black shadows, he followed them back and saw at last a shapeless mass of something only slightly less dark than the shadows. Peering at this, Pete then saw, and recognized, two pale yellow spots almost at the top of the mass of shapeless gray.
"Mike," Pete said, almost whispering. "Mike! Octopus. Hoist away. Hoist away!"
"Stand by," Mike's voice instantly replied.
As the line tightened, Pete reached out slowly for the light.
He was too late. One of the flowing streams slid up over the plastic lens, slid into the darkness behind the case. As Pete moved slowly backward toward the door, he felt a sudden hard jerk at his back where the light cord went into the battery box.
Then it was pitch-dark. Pete's knees went weak and panic swept him like a hurricane. He wanted to turn and run, to scramble out of the darkness in which that horrible thing lived.
Pete, his stomach ice-cold and reeling, fear drying his throat, stumbled over something and would have fallen except for the steady pull on the life line from Mike far above. As waves of horror kept pulsing, Pete felt as though he could not stand it down there; that he would have to get out of the suit so that he could escape.
Then Mike's familiar, flat, ordinary voice
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steadied him like a dousing with cold water. "Bear a hand, I'm hungry," Mike said.
Pete turned when he reached the area of light coming in through the broken place and squeezed back out on the ocean floor. Clearing his Lne and hose, he said, **A11 clear of the ship. Hoist away."
Then he could hear Mike talking to himself. "Down thirty-three minutes at one hundred and . .. and . . . eight feet. Thirty-three, thirty-three. Let's see . . . bring him up at twenty-five feet a minute. Stop him at thirty for four minutes. Then twenty for eight and at ten for thirteen minutes. Holy cow, half an hour before I can eat."
Then Mike said, "How big was the octopus?"
"Plenty," Pete said as he adjusted the outlet valve and started to rise steadily upward.
"Big enough to be dangerous?"
"Yep," Pete said.
"Do you think that's where the treasure is?"
"I wouldn't be surprised."
"Then we'll have to dynamite that rascal out of there."
Pete, without thinking, shook his head and banged one ear against the helmet. "Ouch," he said.
"What's the matter?"
"Bumped my head. . . . No dynamite."
"Why not?"
"Mike, the ship is absolutely teetering on the
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edge of that cliff. I believe I could push it over with a crowbar. If she goes over, she'll drop down to a thousand feet. . . and that'll be the end of the cartwheel."
Mike stopped hoisting, and Pete floated at thirty feet below the surface. Through the suit he could feel the diflference in temperature already.
**What are you going to do then? Can you snake the stuff out with the octopus in there?"
"Not me, brother," Pete said. ''Vm not going in there with him again. .. . He got the light."
"He did! Holy smoke, what are we going to use for light?"
"Search me."
Mike's voice was disgusted. "Oh, what a mess!"
"Yeah," Pete said quietly. "A mess."
Mike began hoisting again, then stopped him at twenty feet. Then for thirteen minutes at ten feet. Pete paddled over close to the Indra and, lying just under her, studied her bottom.
"The bottom's still pretty clean," he remarked.
"Come out from under there and talk to me," Mike said. "Are you just going to wait until that octopus dies of old age?"
Pete paddled out from under the boat and lay on his back looking up at the liquid silver of the sea's surface.
"You look like an overgrown sausage down
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there," Mike declared. "Can you see me? Vm waving my arms."
**Save your strength. The surface of the water is just Uke a mirror. But I can see myself beautifully. I look pretty good."
"How about taking an ax down and cutting off those arms?" Mike asked.
"There are eight of 'em. While I was cutting ofiF one, the other seven would be taking this diving suit apart, probably starting at the air hose."
"How about that shark chaser? Maybe it'll chase him out of there."
"FU try it. But I'm afraid it won't."
"How about some kind of poison?"
"Haven't got any."
"How about taking a wire down from the storage batteries? Hook one side to one arm and the other to another. Then I'd throw the switch and you could watch him fry."
"Haven't got enough wire. And who would do all the hooking up? That thing's arms are a good six feet long, Mike."
"Wow. How big around are they?"
"At the butt they're about the size of the main gafiF."
"That big! How big do those things get anyway?"
"That's a statistic in which I'm only remotely interested," Pete said. "The one down there is big enough for me."
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Pete's time was up, and Mike hoisted him to the surface. Pete climbed slowly up the little ladder over the stern and got on deck. Mike pulled the phone connection ofiF and began unscrewing the helmet. As he took it ofif, he unconsciously pushed the **talk" button on his mouthpiece and said, "Well, what are we going to do?"
Pete patted him on the shoulder. "Remember me?"
Mike looked up and then grinned as he took the telephone off. Then he stopped grinning as Pete shucked out of the heavy, hot diving suit. "What are you going to do about that octopus, Pete?"
Pete didn't look up as he unlaced the weights from his feet.
"I don't know—yet, Mike," he said. "Right now that thing's got us licked."
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JDack in the lagoon, the Indra hidden behind the mangrove reef, Pete walked slowly along the sandy beach. The sun was going down into the calm western sea, the world seemed at peace. The things which made noise
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by day became silent, and the things which made noise by night had not yet started. The only sounds were those the sea made against the white sand of the beach—a faint, liquid riffle—and the sound of the dying wind in the fronds of the coconut trees. There was also the noise made by Mike, who was trying to cut open a fresh coconut with a Boy Scout ax.
So Pete took a long time while he tried to Revise an easier way to kill the octopus. B^t at last he stopped walking, and he stopped thinking about easier ways, for there were none. There was only the one way.
He could not use any sort of explosion around
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the Santa Ybel, The sHghtest jar might s^nd her tumbUng down the precipice. He had no pois'-n. He doubted if the shark chaser would work, but he would try it first. He could make a long, sharp spear and stab the thing from a distance beyond the reach of its tentacles, but he knew that if he missed a vital spot, which was very probable, the thing would kill him.
There was only one thing to do.
Pete turned and went back down the beach. Mike was still whacking at the tough, fibrous green hull of the coconut. "I'll show you how to open one of those things," Pete said. **Sometime."
"Where you going?" Mike asked as Pete got into the boat and slipped the oars out.
"Be back in a little while," Pete sad.
Aboard the Indra Pete got a one-volume encyclopedia and took it up to the cockpit. There was just enough light left to read by, and he found the entry "Octopus" and read it slowly and then read it again. One sentence stuck in his mind:
"The sucker-bearing arms, strong jaws, secreted poison, and sinister appearance of these animals have given them a name for ferocity which is not undeserved as their attacks on men are sufficiently well attested."
But, Pete thought, an octopus is only a cepha-lopod; it's kin to an oyster. It has a very small,
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rudimentary brain, and everything it does must follow a simple pattern of reflex action.
Pete shut the book and just sat looking vaguely at the island. In his mind he cleared away all other thoughts—as though sweeping debris from the floor of an empty room—and concentrated on the problem.
The octopus had a radula—a tongue—strong and sharp enough to tear through the twill and rubber of the diving suit. It had a paralyzing poison with which it killed its food. It had enormous strength. These were the things against which he must fight. These, and the fact that the battle would be fought far below the surface of the sea where he was dependent on an artificial supply of oxygen and would be greatly limited in his normal movements, whereas the octopus would be completely free.
What could he pit against these things? Pete thought. Compared to the strength of the octopus, his own strength was puny. There was no antidote for the poison once it was injected into him. He could not stop the radula from tearing his suit open if he got within range of it.
Pete had nothing but the mind of a human, a mind trained to think, to plan, to reason. A mind capable of foretelling the future by the events of the present and past. This was his only weapon. He knew a little about reflexes, about the be-
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havior of animals, about the instinctive reactions of brains unable to reason.
With this weapon Pete planned his attack, established in his mind the pattern which would enable him to predict with accuracy what the octopus would do when confronted with a chain of circumstances which Pete would try to rigidly control and present to the animal.
As he rowed back to the beach, Pete remembered again the week-end leave he had taken on Hawaii, the Big Island. With a rubber-and-glass face mask he had gone swimming in the lava-strewn sea around Hilo and had come upon some Hawaiian boys spear fishing. They were marvelous in the water, and he had seen some of them swim down as far as thirty feet to spear an uloa or some other big fish.
And then one of them had found an octopus— a small one—in a crevice. Pete had watched the boy as he calmly reached into the crevice and let the octopus wrap tentacles around his bare arm. Then, swiftly, he had jerked the animal out and held it up above water.
Pete remembered his revulsion at the sight of the squirming, slimy, shapeless thing as it had writhed in the boy's grip.
Then the boy had put the octopus to his face— just for a second—and the thing died and became perfectly limp, the tentacles dangling.
Pete had gone over and asked him what he had
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done to kill the thing so swiftly and the boy had showed him where he had simply bitten the animal close behind the pale yellow eyes, crushing the brain.
On the beach Mike had almost shucked the coconut and was sitting with it between his knees, scraping and pulling off the tough gray fibers. Pete, pulling out the Marine Corps combat knife, went up under the trees and got another nut and came back to sit beside Mike.
Without saying anything, Pete held the coconut, little end down, and swiftly whacked off green slices of the hull with the combat knife. Finally down into the white part, he took one more whack and sliced a clean round hole in the top of the nut itself. The sweet juice flowed slowly around the hole and Pete held it out to Mike.
"Boy, are you superior!" Mike said. "Know any more tricks?"
"Millions of 'em," Pete said, pulling a whetstone out of his hip pocket and a small can of oil out of his shirt pocket.
The double-edged stiletto blade of the knife gleamed almost gold in the dying light. Pete turned the seven-inch blade slowly over and looked at the scroll and the letters USMC on it. Then, with careful, slow strokes, he sharpened it.
The rest of that night was bad. Before they went to bed, he and Mike chatted a while, but Pete could not remember what they talked about.
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In his bunk he Hstened to the soft lapping of the lagoon against the hull of the bidra while he fought back waves of fear which, in the darkness, tried to engulf him.
In the morning he did not tell Mike what he planned to do, because he knew that it would start an argument and he did not want to bother with that.
Pete waited until long past noon, for he wanted the sun to be in the western sky so that it would throw a little more light into the interior of the ship.
Then it was time to go down. Pete put on the self-contained suit, strapped the knife on the belt on his right side. Then he put on a pair of heavy, flexible rubber gloves. He did not want the octopus to be able to touch his bare skin anywhere, or to feel the warmth of a living being.
As Mike lifted the helmet, ready to lower it over his head, Pete said quietly, "Mike, I'm going to try to get the octopus. There's nothing you can do to help me."
"What do you mean?"
"Just that. Okay, put it on."
"Wait a minute, wait a minute," Mike said, lifting the helmet. "What's going on, Pete?"
"I've got it figured out. Put the helmet on."
The helmet came down. Pete could hear Mike screwing the connections on, snapping on the life line.
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"One, two, three..." Mike said over the telephone.
"Five by five," Pete said in his microphone. "Lower away."
Pete looked up once at the silver surface of the water, broken by the hull of the Indra. Then, paddling, he went over to the black line of the anchor chain and held it lightly. Like sliding down the banisters, he thought.
On the bottom Pete adjusted the valves until he was featherlight, for he wanted the least possible resistance. Then into the mouthpiece he said, "Mike, I'm disconnecting the phone and the life line now. I'm snapping the end of the life line to the ri
ngbolt in the anchor. I might need it again sometime.
"But if I don't, Mike ... if you don't hear from me within an hour and a half .. . just. . . call it a day. Remember those numbers, and get someone else to help you get the stuff. It'll be here."
"Pete! Wait a minute, ^ete, listen. . . ."
Pete unscrewed the watertight plug and heard the phone connection go dead. He unsnapped the life line and snapped it again on the ringbolt. Then he was completely free of any connection with the Indra.
"I feel naked," Pete said to himself as he stood looking at the life line and the bright brass prongs of the phone connection.
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Then he turned and walked toward the Santa Ybel,
He squeezed between the encrusted frames and stood in the first room. The slanting sunlight lit it well, and it was empty.
Pete was sick and weak with fear as he walked slowly through the room to the gaping door of the next one. At the door he hesitated for a moment and then stepped, carefully, through the opening and to one side so as not to block the light.
He stood for a long time waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom. Gradually, as he waited, he again became able to see the boxes and crates and lumps piled on the floor of the room, and at last he was able to make out the back wall and the two side walls.
Then, on the floor he saw the empty shells of many mollusks—cockles, whelks, limpets, mu-rices, cowries—and the empty hulls of crabs. And, lying in a space empty of objects he made out the bones of a man.
He had adjusted his buoyancy so that he almost floated as he walked, and now he took a step forward into the room. Then another. As he went away from the wall at his back, he felt lost and desolate. He took two more steps and reached a large, squarish lump crusted with sea growth.
And then—as though it had suddenly appeared there, and yet there had been no visible
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movement—he saw the rounded dome of the octopus and the hooded eyes, pale yellow with black slits, staring out at him from the darkness of the room with an intensity so baleful that he felt almost nauseated.