"But "I began, frowning.
"Fathoms, dear," said Phyllis. "Thirty thousand feet."
"Oh," I said. "That"ll be-er-something like five and a half miles?"
"Yes," he said.
"Oh," I said, again.
He returned to his public address manner.
"That," he told the a.s.sembled crowd of us, "is the present limit of our ability to make direct visual observations. However-" He paused to make a gesture somewhat in the manner of a conjuror towards a party of A. B."s, and watched while they pulled the tarpaulin from another, similar, but smaller sphere. "-here," he continued, "we have a new instrument with which we hope to be able to make observations at something like twice the depth attainable by the bathyscope, perhaps even more. It is entirely automatic. In addition to registering pressures, temperature, currents, and so on, and transmitting the readings to the surface, it is equipped with five small television cameras, four of them giving all round horizontal coverage, and one transmitting the view vertically beneath the sphere."
"This instrument," continued another voice in good imitation of his own, "we call the telebath."
Facetiousness could not put a man like the Commander off his stroke. He continued his lecture. But the instrument had been christened, and the telebath it remained.
The three days after we reached our position were occupied with tests and adjustments of both the instruments. In one test Phyllis and I were allowed to make a dive of three hundred feet of so, cramped up in the bathyscope, "just to get the feel of it". We did that, and it gave us no envy of anyone making a deeper dive. Then, with all the gear fully checked, the real descent was announced for the morning of the fourth day.
Soon after sunrise we were cl.u.s.tering round the bathyscope where it rested in its cradle. The two naval technicians, Wiseman and Trant, who were to make the descent, wriggled themselves in through the narrow hole that was the entrance. The warm clothing they would need in the depths was handed in after them, for they could never have squeezed in wearing it. Then followed the packets of food and the vacuum-flasks of hot drinks. They made their final checks, gave their okays. The circular entrance-plug was swung over by the hoist, screwed gradually down into its seating, and bolted fast. The bathyscope was hoisted outboard, and hung there, swinging slightly. One of the men inside switched on his hand television-camera, and we ourselves, as seen from within the instrument, appeared on the screen.
"Okay," said a voice from the loudspeaker. "Lower away now."
The winch began to turn. The bathyscope descended, and the water lapped at it. Presently it had disappeared from sight beneath the surface.
The descent was a long business which I do not propose to describe in detail. Frankly, as seen on the screen in the ship, it was a pretty boring affair to the non-initiate. Life in the sea appears to exist in fairly well-defined levels. In the better inhabited strata the water is full of plankton which behaves like a continuous dust-storm and obscures everything but creatures that approach very closely. At other levels where there is no plankton for food, there are consequently few fish. In addition to the tediousness of very limited views or dark emptiness, continuous attention to a screen that is linked with a slightly swinging and twisting camera has a dizzying effect. Both Phyllis and I spent much of the time during the descent with our eyes shut, relying on the loud-speaking telephone to draw our attention to anything interesting. Occasionally we slipped on deck for a cigarette.
There could scarcely have been a better day for the job. The sun beat fiercely down on decks that were occasionally sluiced with water to cool them off. The ensign hung limp, barely stirring. The sea stretched out flat to meet the dome of the sky which showed only one low bank of cloud, to the north, over Cuba, perhaps. There was scarcely a sound, either, except for the m.u.f.fled voice of the loudspeaker in the mess, the quiet drone of the winch, and from time to time the voice of a deck-hand calling the tally of fathoms.
The group sitting in the mess scarcely spoke; they left that to the men now far below.
At intervals, the Commander would ask: "All in order, below there?"
And simultaneously two voices would reply: "Aye, aye, sir!"
Once a voice enquired: "Did Beebe have an electrically-heated suit?"
n.o.body seemed to know.
"I take my hat off to him if he didn"t," said the voice.
The Commander was keeping a sharp eye on the dials as well as watching the screen.
"Half-mile coming up. Check," he said.
The voice from below counted: "Four thirty-eight... Four thirty-nine...Now! Half-mile, sir."
The winch went on turning. There wasn"t much to see. Occasional glimpses of schools of fish hurrying off into the murk. A voice complained: "Sure as I get the camera to one window a d.a.m.n great fish comes and looks in at another."
"Five hundred fathoms. You"re pa.s.sing Beebe now," said the Commander.
"Bye-bye, Beebe," said the voice. "But it goes on looking much the same."
Presently the same voice said: "More life around just here. Plenty of squid, large and small. You can probably see "em. There"s something out this way, keeping on the: edge of the light. A big thing. I can"t quite might be a giant squid-no! my G.o.d! It can"t be a whale! Not down here!"
"Improbable, but not impossible," said the Commander.
"Well, in that case-oh, it"s sheered off now, anyway. Gosh! We mammals do get around a bit, don"t we?"
In due course the moment arrived when the Commander announced: "Pa.s.sing Barton now," and then added with an unexpected change of manner: "From now on it"s all yours, boys. Sure you"re quite happy there? If you"re not perfectly satisfied you"ve only to say."
"That"s all right, sir. Everything functioning okay. We"ll go on."
Up on deck the winch droned steadily.
"One mile coming up," announced the Commander. When that had been checked he asked: "How are you feeling now?"
"What"s the weather like up there?" asked a voice.
"Holding well. Flat calm. No sweat."
The two down below conferred.
"We"ll go on, sir. Could wait weeks for conditions like this again."
"All right-if you"re both sure."
"We are, sir."
"Very good. About three hundred fathoms more to go, then."
There was an interval. Then: "Dead," remarked the voice from below. "All black and dead now. Not a thing to be seen. Funny thing the way these levels are quite separate. Ah, now we can begin to see something below... Squids again... Luminous fish... Small shoal, there, see?... There"s Gosh!"
He broke off, and simultaneously a nightmare fishy horror gaped at us from the screen.
"One of nature"s careless moments," he remarked.
He went on talking, and the camera continued to give us glimpses of unbelievable monstrosities, large and small.
Presently the Commander announced: "Stopping you now. Twelve hundred fathoms." He picked up the telephone and spoke to the deck. The winch slowed and then ceased to turn.
"That"s all, boys," he said.
"Huh," said the voice from below, after a pause. "Well, whatever it was we came here to find, we"ve not found it."
The Commander"s face was expressionless. Whether he had expected tangible results or not I couldn"t tell. I imagined not. In fact, I wondered if any of us there really had. After all, these centres of activity were all Deeps. And from that it would seem to follow that the reason must lie at the bottom. The echogram gave the bottom hereabouts as still three miles or so below where the two men now dangled...
"Hullo, there, bathyscope," said the Commander. "We"re going to start you up now. Ready?"
"Aye, aye, sir! All set," said the two voices.
The Commander picked up his telephone.
"Haul away there!"
We could hear the winch start, and slowly gather speed.
"On your way now. All okay?"
"All correct, sir."
There was an interval without talk for ten minutes or more. Then a voice said: "There"s something out there. Something big-can"t see it properly. Keeps just on the fringe of the light. Can"t be that whale again-not at this depth. Try to show you."
The picture on the screen switched and then steadied. We could see the light-rays streaming out through the water, and the brilliant speckles of small organisms caught in the beam. At the very limits there was a suspicion of a faintly lighter patch. It was hard to be sure of it.
"Seems to be circling us. We"re spinning a bit, too, I think. I"ll try-ah, got a bit better glimpse of it then. It"s not the whale, anyway. There, see it now?"
This time we could undoubtedly make out a lighter patch. It was roughly oval, but indistinct, and there was nothing to give it scale.
"H"m," said the voice from below. "That"s certainly a new one. Could be a fish-or maybe something else kind of turtle-shaped. Monstrous-sized brute, anyway. Circling a bit closer now, but I still can"t make out any details. Keeping pace with us."
Again the camera showed us a glimpse of the thing as it pa.s.sed one of the bathyscope"s ports, but we were little wiser; the definition was too poor for us to be sure of anything about it.
"It"s going up now. Rising faster than we are. Getting beyond our angle of view. Ought to be a window in the top of this thing... Lost it now. Gone somewhere up above us. Maybe it"ll-"
The voice cut off dead. Simultaneously, there was a brief, vivid flash on the screen, and it, too, went dead. The sound of the winch outside altered as it speeded up.
We sat looking at one another without speaking. Phyllis"s hand sought mine, and tightened on it.
The Commander started to stretch his hand towards the telephone, changed his mind, and went out without a word. Presently the winch speeded up still more.
It takes quite a time to reel in more than a mile of heavy cable. The party in the mess dispersed awkwardly. Phyllis and I went up into the bows and sat there without talking much.
After what seemed a very long wait the winch slowed down. By common consent we got up, and moved aft together.
At last, the end came up. We all, I suppose, expected to see the end of the wire-rope unravelled, with the strands splayed-out, brush-like.
They were not. They were melted together. Both the main and the communication cables ended in a blob of fused metal.
We all stared at them, dumbfounded.
In the evening the Captain read the service, and three volleys were fired over the spot...
The weather held, and the gla.s.s was steady. At noon the next day the Commander a.s.sembled us in the mess. He looked ill, and very tired. He said, briefly, and unemotionally: "My orders are to proceed with the investigation, using our automatic instrument. If our arrangements and tests can be completed in time, and provided the weather remains favourable, we shall conduct the operation tomorrow morning, commencing as soon after dawn as possible. I am instructed to lower the instrument to the point of destruction, so there will be no second opportunity for observation."
The arrangement in the mess the following morning was different from that on the former occasion. We sat facing a bank of five television screens, four for the quadrants about the instrument, and one viewing vertically beneath it. There was also a cine-camera photographing all five screens simultaneously for the record.
Again we watched the descent through the ocean layers, but this time instead of a commentary we had an astonishing a.s.sortment of chirrupings, raspings, and gruntings picked up by externally mounted microphones. The deep sea is, in its lower inhabited strata, it seems, a place of hideous cacophony. It was something of a relief when at about three-quarters of a mile down silence fell, and somebody muttered: "Huh! Said those mikes"d never take the pressure."
The display went on. Squids sliding upwards past the cameras, shoals of fish darting nervously away, other fish attracted by curiosity, monstrosities, grotesques, huge monsters dimly seen. On and on. A mile down, a mile and a half, two miles, two and a half... And then, at about that, something came into view which quickened all attention on the screens. A large, uncertain, oval shape at the extreme of visibility that moved from screen to screen as it circled round the descending instrument. For three or four minutes it continued to show on one screen or another, but always tantalisingly ill-defined, and never quite well enough illuminated for one to be quite certain even of its shape. Then, gradually, it drifted towards the upper edges of the screens, and presently it was left behind.
Half a minute later all the screens went blank....
Why not praise one"s wife? Phyllis can write a thundering good feature script-and this was one of her best. It was too bad that it was not received with the immediate enthusiasm it deserved.
When it was finished, we sent it round to the Admiralty for vetting. A week later we were asked to call. It was Captain Winters who received us. He congratulated Phyllis on the script, as well he might, even if he had not been so taken with her as he so obviously was. Once we were settled in our chairs, however, he shook his head regretfully.
"Nevertheless," he said, "I"m afraid I"m going to have to ask you to hold it up for a while."
Phyllis looked understandably disappointed; she had worked hard on that script. Not just for cash, either. She had tried to make it a tribute to the two men, Wiseman and Trant, who had vanished with the bathyscope. She looked down at her toes.
"I"m sorry," said the Captain, "but I did warn your husband that it wouldn"t be for immediate release."
Phyllis looked up at him.
"Why?" she asked.
That was something I was equally anxious to know about. My own recordings of the preparations, of the brief descent we had both made in the bathyscope, and of various aspects that were not on the official tape record of the dive, had been put into cold-storage, too.
"I"ll explain what I can. We certainly owe you that," agreed Captain Winters. He sat down and leant forward, elbows on knees, fingers interlaced between them, and looked at us both in turn.
"The crux of the thing-and of course you will both of you have realised that long ago-is those fused cables," he said. "Imagination staggers a bit at the thought of a creature capable of snapping through steel hawsers-all the same, it might just conceivably admit the possibility. When, however, it comes up against the suggestion that there is a creature capable of cutting through them like an oxy-acetylene flame, it recoils. It recoils, and definitely rejects.
"Both of you saw what happened to those cables, and I think you must agree that their condition opens a whole new aspect. A thing like that is not just a hazard of deep-sea diving-and we want to know more about just what kind of a hazard it is before we give a release on it."
We talked it over for a little time. The Captain was apologetic and understanding, but he had his orders. He a.s.sured us that he would make it his business to see that we were notified of release at the earliest possible moment; and with that we had to make do. Phyllis hid her disappointment under her usual philosophic good sense. Before we left, she asked: "Honestly, Captain Winters-and off the record, if you like-have you any idea what can have done it?"
He shook his head. "On or off the record, Mrs Watson, I can think of no explanation that approaches being possible-and, though this is not for publication, I doubt whether anyone else in the Service has an idea, either."
And so, with the affair left in that unsatisfactory state, we parted.
The prohibition, however, lasted a shorter time than we expected. A week later, just as we were sitting down to dinner, he rang through. Phyllis took the call.
"Oh, hullo, Mrs Watson. I"m glad it"s you. I have some good news for you," Captain Winters" voice said. "I"ve just been talking to your EBC people, and giving them the okay, so far as we are concerned, to go ahead with that feature of yours, and the whole story."
Phyllis thanked him for the news. "But what"s happened?" she added.
"The story"s broken, anyway. You"ll hear it on the nine o"clock news tonight, and see it in tomorrow"s papers. In the circ.u.mstances it seemed to me that you ought to be free to take your chance as soon as possible. Their Lordships saw the point-in fact, they would like your feature to go out as soon as possible. They approve of it. So there it is. And the best of luck to you."
Phyllis thanked him again, and rang off.
"Now what do you suppose can have happened?" she enquired.
We had to wait until nine o"clock to find that out. The notice on the news was scanty, but sufficient from our point of view. It reported simply that an American naval unit conducting research into deep-sea conditions somewhere off the Philippines had suffered the loss of a depth-chamber, with its crew of two men.
Almost immediately afterwards EBC came through on the telephone with a lot of talk about priorities, and altered programme schedules, and available cast.