by Bill Schutt
The reply Christian proposed seemed bland enough on the surface, but only at first glance. There was enough room for interpretation to drive a little paranoia into anyone who intercepted it. To one degree or another, he hoped paranoia would translate into caution. This was the best he could hope for. The captain did not believe the word “scared” meant anything more to a Russian than it did to a survivor of kamikaze attacks.
Steaming toward an unknown hell in command of a ship that officially did not exist, the captain prayed that enlightened self-interest would be enough for his adversaries.
He drew in smoke from the last inch of a Lucky Strike, exhaled reflectively, gave his letter a final read-through, then set off to have it coded and transmitted:
IN REPLY TO YOUR LATEST COMMAND, I PROPOSE NO REVISIONS TO A MISSION OBJECTIVE ALONG THE PATH YOU HAVE CHOSEN.
July 9, 1948
Santorini
“If we try it,” said Yanni, “don’t you think the Russians will be waiting for us?”
“It’s possible,” Mac replied. “But that’s one of the things I’m willing to risk—if I go in alone.”
From afar, through binoculars, Mac studied the mostly abandoned marina where Alan had helped Pierre Boulle stash one of the supply bags, seven days earlier. The location seemed undisturbed and unguarded. But there was no way of knowing if Boulle was still alive, or if the commandos had tortured details out of him. “We need to build up some arms,” Mac concluded, “and make a plan until help arrives.”
Miles above, a Russian jet glinted in near silence. A different sound reached them, rising for several seconds, then dying out slowly to nothing, only to return more strongly. One by one the three fugitives turned their faces up. West, in the direction of the lagoon, two planes passed at low altitude. Mac identified them immediately: Prop planes—Navy, Grumman. He supposed that the maneuverability of the new Hellcats counted for something; still, they might be no match for a jet if it ever came down to a shooting fight.
The drone of the prop engines faded into the distance, but only one detail really mattered. “We are not so alone as we thought,” Mac said.
“So forget about Boulle’s bag!” Alan concluded.
“All we need to do is stay put,” Yanni added, in support of Alan.
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Mac. “I need to try. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“It’s a good thing I’m Chinese,” Alan said. “We’re used to hopeless situations—and to no-hoper fools!”
Mac laughed, then instantly checked himself. “Look, you two: if I’m captured, you’re both still safe. If I get into trouble, the Russians’re gonna want me alive and we won’t have lost much because it means they’re closing in anyway and probably they just get me and—again, you probably both get away safe. And besides, Alan, isn’t there a saying back home, ‘If you want to capture the tiger, you must go where the tiger lives’?”
“There’s also a saying that the tiger bides its time, and usually eats.”
Mac looked out toward the horizon. At its very edge, more than twelve miles away, three ships—including the heavy cruiser that had speared and netted one of the cephalopods—were huddled together.
“We may not have the luxury of time,” Mac said.
“Is this where you make one last try at telling me how going down there is not as bad an idea as I think?” Yanni said. “No. This is where I tell you that it’s much worse and much stupider than you imagine—isn’t that right, Russkie?”
“You should listen to her more often,” answered a familiar voice, from behind a tree.
“What do you want, Dmitri?” Mac called out. “Our surrender, I suppose.”
“No. I want to help,” the Russian said, and stepped into the open with his hands in the air.
“I don’t have time for fools.”
“Sorry, MacCready. It’s the only kind of time I have left.”
Yanni crossed her arms, giving a facial expression that Mac had often interpreted as frightful—like a manic killer about to strike—but which he had never been quite able to make her understand, or to adequately describe for her.
“If this isn’t some sort of joke you’re playing,” Yanni said, “if you’re serious about wanting to help, you can start by telling us how our friends are.”
“I’ll begin with what you call a good-faith motion,” Dmitri said, and then slowly unholstered a gun and dropped it on the ground. Conspicuously, he kept the salt grenades ready. “Our encampment was attacked by your undersea friends,” he continued. “The last time I saw your team, Cousteau and the others were all alive. I really don’t know if they still are.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Two nights.”
“And that last time you saw them, they were all safe?” Mac asked, looking at Dmitri and not quite believing him.
“I’ve told you what I know. It seems to me that our comrades were able to repel the animals.”
“And you definitely saw all of them alive?” Mac repeated.
“Da.”
“Why is it that I don’t believe you?”
“It almost does not matter what any of us believes, does it? Not beyond the fact that we now share the same enemy.”
“You mean the cephalopods?” Yanni asked.
“Not for nothing,” said Mac, “but wasn’t your mission objective something red?”
“Things change. Objectives fall apart.”
“You want them all dead,” Yanni said. “The Kraken.”
“How else should it be? I don’t want even one of them taken alive to Russia, or anywhere else.”
“Nor should we,” said the Chinese anthropologist. “We humans like to think that we’re the only conscious creatures who know we’re conscious.”
“But we’re not?” said Dmitri, with a touch of mockery.
“Not by a long shot, Ahab.”
Dmitri raised a hand and said, “I have rations here. What’s it going to take to prove that we’re all on the same side?”
“Stalin’s side?” Mac asked, incredulously.
“No. We’re all on the side of survival. Our survival,” the Russian replied. “Those things can hide all over the deep and walk on land if they want. You think they’ll stay underwater forever?” He gave a slow underhand toss to a ration packet, landing it at Mac’s feet.
Mac gave the packet a quick, suspicious look, then returned his gaze to Dmitri.
“Sure, MacCready. I knew this is how you would answer my kind gesture. And, what? You think I’ve dosed it with cyanide?”
The Americans answered him with silence.
Dmitri returned them his warmest, friendliest smile. “Cyanide’s too messy. Attracts too much attention and creates too much of an international incident if by some small chance my side should lose this island and get caught by your side, with your body. Personally, my poison of choice is a good dose of ordinary nickel dissolved in the blood.”
“Slow suffocation,” Mac said, with a hint of admiration for the idea.
“Never thought of that one, eh? Our red corpuscles prefer to pick up nickel over iron, if there’s enough of it around.”
Mac shot Dmitri a defeatist’s smirk, then thought aloud, “We’ll always have polonium.”
“Unprofessional. Radioactivity’s too easy to detect these days. No medical examiner anywhere in the world is going to check for nickel in the blood.”
“Gee . . . you really have made a study of it,” said Mac. “So, what do you want?”
“I don’t want any of this,” he said slowly. “But all along you have been asking the wrong questions. What do you think you should be asking when something has the scientists, the military, and the church scared at the same time?”
“You’re scared of Kraken. But have you given much thought to Bishop Marinatos’s worries about the red miracle?”
“I’m talking about both,” Dmitri said, and seemed to drift off into thought for several seconds—and then for several
seconds more. “Look here,” he said at last. “I have a dream . . . that one day, your children and my children shall play together.”
Then, of course, came the inevitable “but” as the food packet near Mac’s feet flashed bright and so stunningly loud that there was no time to respond. Carefully hollowed out and toxin-filled cactus needles—scores of them—had shot out like fléchettes along an arc and pierced the three Americans.
Mac dropped to his knees, feeling something like hot salt spreading through his muscles and his veins. It was laced with morphine, as if this was intended to somehow make him not care about what was happening. Before he fell onto his face and his hearing began to fade, Mac recognized the crackle of a walkie-talkie.
“But not today,” Dmitri said, before he radioed out, “Three to pick up.”
July 9, 1948
Captured MacCready Base Camp #3
Santorini
Nora Nesbitt was hungry and parched, and more than a little angry about the favoritism she saw Dmitri showing toward MacCready, by offering him a half-gallon can of water.
“Nickel or polonium?” Mac asked.
“Both, this time—with a little americium to round it out,” Dmitri replied, as if they were sharing a private joke.
Whatever that’s about, Nesbit wondered.
“If Darwin had looked upon this island,” Dmitri wondered aloud, “wouldn’t he have gone mad trying to work out the laws that govern its life?”
“Why should he?” Mac asked. “Even the Kraken are a straightforward demonstration of Darwinian evolution.”
“And the red miracle?” Dmitri asked. “Did the kind of brain we see in those monsters simply spring out of the earth?”
Nesbitt was tempted to reply with an explanation but took pride in distancing herself from acts of colossal stupidity. She did not believe she could say the same for Mac.
“Have you noticed, MacCready, what’s happening in the water?” Dmitri continued.
“Why—it’s probably just a sped-up process of random variation. It’s still Darwinian, with variation producing the raw material of change, and differential survival governing the direction of change. We’re all just living on Darwin’s biological chessboard, with an unseen player on the other end—acting by ordinary mathematics, making its moves with reptilian indifference.”
“Play the fool if you must,” Dmitri said. “But don’t take me for one.” He turned toward Nesbitt and said, “I know you came here for the red miracle. I can assure you that my side will take charge of that, very soon. As your lying friend here likes to say—Don’t you think? Or don’t you?”
Nesbitt returned the Russian her best poker face, concealing even the slightest hint that she feared her activities at Plum Island were now leaked news. To have been called a valuable bargaining chip—presumably in anticipation of some sort of prisoner exchange, Nesbitt guessed—suggested that something rather distressing must now be unfolding for the Kremlin in America. She was reasonably certain that Dmitri did not know the depth of detail in her studies—the changes that had been worked on ordinary fruit flies, and even on her own body, and Yanni’s, in only a couple of years. She knew it should have taken a couple of thousand years or more—and she could not explain yet how the biochemistry of a person could be completely reworked in one lifetime.
“What do you want?” Nesbitt demanded.
“I want the truth, of course.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” The Plum Islander studied the Russian the way she might study one of her fruit flies under a microscope. He’s a religious man, she told herself. Also holding back some deep rage. Perhaps I can use that somehow.
“Listen,” the Russian said, checking her restraints. “Right now I’m the only friend you have.”
“I don’t have friends,” said Nesbitt.
“That’s true!” Yanni chimed in, and smirked.
“You can believe us on that,” said Alan. “I’ve traveled with her before. I think the only friend she ever had was when she was a child—and he was only an imaginary friend.”
“Until he left me for someone else,” Nesbitt said, still maintaining her poker face. “The lousy bastard.”
July 9, 1948
Twenty Miles South of Santorini
From the beginning, Trofim Lysenko had refused to fool himself into believing the expedition to Santorini would go smoothly. Of course, he was not expecting the loss of a world-class mini-sub, an entire surveillance ship, and a heavy cruiser so damnably early in his mission. His regular bouts of seasickness had fallen far down along the priority scale.
Now two heavy cruisers flanked the Kursk with their hundreds-of-rounds-per-second guns. The upper decks were patrolled by trained attack dogs; originally brought along to sniff out any American marines who might attempt to slip aboard during the night, they were now pulling “squid duty” as well.
What to do next was, as always, the problem that weighed heaviest on him. He realized that he had become more a politician than a scientist. But on this mission, science was being forced upon him.
Objective number one—verifying that Nesbitt and MacCready’s “red moctus proctus” really existed—had been accomplished with relative ease. Now came the politically difficult part of the plan, made all the more complicated by the unexpected guardians of the red plumes.
We were in luck, Lysenko told himself. His ship, designed to carry political favorites, had been provisioned with everything desired, including an equipment test tank. On most days it was easily converted into an officer’s swimming pool, located conveniently alongside the officers’ sauna. The Kursk was doubly lucky in having one of the finest machine shops on the high seas, the better to keep their “special guest” locked beneath a grid of iron with squares so small that a ton of Kraken could not possibly squeeze through.
It squirted a stream of water at him angrily but elicited only a laugh. The creature was out of ink. Presently it occupied itself by breaking the pieces of a mirror into progressively smaller triangles.
“The mirror has been quite a surprise,” Lysenko’s captain said. The geneticist who at times did not believe in the importance of chromosomes had chosen the officer specifically because, in better days only three years earlier, the man had actually sailed with none other than Jacques Cousteau—as the Frenchman’s first Russian science observer.
“You put a mirror on the side of a coral reef,” the captain said, “and you’ll have crabs, eels, and various fishes attacking their reflections, because they fail to recognize themselves. But not this Kraken. Look how it moves the mirror pieces around, stares at itself, and even makes a triangle of its own skin into a reflection of the mirror.”
“And what does that tell you?”
“A high level of intelligence—which brings us back again to this.” The captain dropped a copper disk on top of the iron grid.
“And your theory?” Lysenko asked.
“I suggest—and only suggest—that you consider these animals as maybe another intelligent race, able to alter materials in their environment with very skilled tentacles, the way we make weapons with our hands.”
Lysenko examined the disk again. Its outer rim was scarcely sharper than the blade of a butter knife—which was, in terms of maximum damage, precisely correct for a mass of copper sent spinning through the air. The weapon had a distinct upper and lower surface. The top was convex and the underside slightly concave, as if someone had studied the aerodynamics of what a generation only now being born would eventually come to call “Frisbees”—in this case, killer Frisbees.
A new sound—the vibration of the animal’s barbs—must have alerted the ship’s lookouts in the sonar room. One of them came running up from below.
“May want to quiet that thing down,” he said with alarm. “If American ships are listening, they’ll hear that all the way out to Crete.”
“Any sign of the Yanks?” Lysenko asked.
“I don’t know. I could definitely hear the drumming and clicking of
other Kraken, out there. And something strange.”
The clicking and buzzing from the pool grew louder. “Strange?” the captain asked, shaking his head. “Compared to what?”
“I thought I heard something like tank treads crawling along the bottom. It was there for only about three seconds. Then it was gone. Either stopped or washed out by Kraken noise. Came on again for a few seconds more. Gone.”
Lysenko studied the expression on the young man’s face and saw worry. “Anything else?” he asked, raising his voice above the cephalopod din.
“That’s a pretty loud fish.”
“It’s no fish! And I asked you—anything else?”
“I think there’s more kinds of these animals.”
“Why?”
“Our sonar pinged something twelve miles east. It was only a little denser than water, like this animal, but as big as a whale.”
“It’s nothing to worry about,” the captain said. “We’ve three ships together and our guns can handle them if they come too near.”
The clicking and buzzing ceased abruptly and the sonar man responded as if startled. They all did. After several long seconds, the young man asked, “What do you think it was trying to say?”
“I haven’t a clue—yet,” Lysenko said. “But our comrades on the island have ‘rescued’ someone who can help us to understand.”
The boy looked at the geneticist quizzically, began to ask a question, and was waved off: “Just hold your tongue and get below.”
Then, lifting a long, almost needle-thin spear from the deck, Lysenko approached the tank—his particular interest being the wounds from the whaling lines, four days earlier. “See how quickly it heals,” he said.
“So, you think it’s been getting into the moctus proctus.”
Lysenko thrust the lance through the grate and into the base of a tentacle. Another tentacle clutched at the spear and thrust it back whence it came, faster than the scientist could drop to the deck. The blunted end passed him first, with enough force to have broken his neck had it made contact. One small part of a second later, and still as he dove for cover, the needle point passed Lysenko’s head. Gravity just could not yank him down fast enough.