Chapter 8

Echoes of the outboard’s roaring motor came back from the trunks of palm trees that lined the lagoon’s shore as the tiny boat raced across the water. Deirdre was ashen-white. She turned her eyes from the water, and they fell on the round raw places on Terry’s leg where the sucker-disks had bruised it horribly. She shuddered. She still had the sensation of being pursued by the monster. Back where Deirdre’s spear had finally liberated Terry, startled and convulsive motions continued, followed by a final gigantic splash. Terry drove the boat on at top speed.

The monster sank again in the spot where the lagoon was deepest. It had come from depths where there was no light; from an abyss where blackness was absolute. Now, having lost its victim, it returned peevishly to such darkness as it could secure.

Terry said curtly, as the small boat raced for the Esperance and the wharf, “That creature was driven up from the Luzon Deep into the lagoon to replace the gadget-carrying fish we speared!”

Deirdre stammered a little.

“Your l-leg ... You’re bleeding...”

“I’m pretty well skinned in a couple of places,” he said shortly. “That’s all.”

“Could it be poisonous?”

“Poison,” said Terry, “is a weapon for the weak. This thing’s not weak! I’m all right. And I’m lucky!”

“I’d have jumped over with my spear, if...”

“Idiot!” said Terry gently. “Never think of such a thing! Never! Never!”

“I wouldn’t want to l-live--”

A new reverberating quality came into the echoes from the shore. The pilings of the wharf were nearby, now. They multiplied the sounds they returned. The Esperance loomed up. Terry cut off the motor, the little boat drifted to contact, and Deirdre scrambled to the yacht’s deck, and then took the bow line and fastened it. This was absurdly commonplace. It was exactly what would have been done on the return from any usual ride.

“Go tell the others what we found,” said Terry. “I’m going to see if there’s more than one of those things around.”

“Not...”

“No,” he assured her. “I’m only going to use the fish-driving horn.”

Deirdre looked at him in distress.

“Be careful! Please!” She kissed him suddenly, scrambled to the wharf, and set off at a run toward the shore. Terry stared hungrily after her. They’d come to a highly personal decision the night before on the Esperance, but it still seemed unbelievable to him that Deirdre felt about him the way he felt about her.

He went forward to set up the fish-driving combination. One part of him thought vividly of Deirdre. The other faced the consequences that might follow if the bolides were not bolides, and if the plastic gadgets and the nasty-sounding underwater hums were products of an intelligence which could make bolides change their velocity in space; which made them fall in the Luzon Deep in the China Sea and nowhere else.

He set up the recorder with its loop of fish-driving hum. He put the horn overboard, carefully oriented to spread its sound through all the enclosed shallow water of the lagoon. He turned the extra amplifier to maximum output, to increase the effectiveness of the noise, and turned on the apparatus.

The glassy look of the lagoon-water vanished immediately. Fish leaped crazily everywhere, from half-inch midgets to lean-flanked predators a yard and more in length. There was no square foot in all the shallows where a creature didn’t struggle to escape the sensation of pins and needles all over its body. And these pins and needles pricked deep.

Flying-fish soared crazily, and they were the most fortunate because so long as they flew, the tormenting water-sound did not reach them. But many of them landed on the beach, and even among the palms.

In the spot where blind and snakelike arms had tried to destroy Terry and Deirdre, the lashing and swirling was of a different kind. Something there used enormous strength to offer battle to a noise. The water was whipped to froth. Twice Terry saw those rope-like arms rise above the water and flail it.

This particular sort of tumult, however, appeared only in one spot. So there was only one such creature in the lagoon.

When Davis and the others came down from the tracking station, Terry turned off the horn. He was applying soothing ointment to the raw flesh of his leg.

“There’s a monstrous creature out there,” he said evenly when a white-faced Davis demanded information. “Heaven knows how big it is, but it’s something like a huge squid. It may be the kind that sperm whales feed on, down in the depths.”

Others from the tracking station arrived, panting.

“Oh! I’m tired of being conservative!” added Terry fiercely. “I’m going to say what all of us think! There’s something intelligent down at the bottom of the sea, five miles down!”

He glared challengingly around him.

“Who doesn’t believe that?” he demanded. “Well, the reporting gadgets don’t report any more. We killed the fish that carried them. So that whatever-it-is down on the sea-bed has very cleverly sent up something we ignorant savages wouldn’t dare to meddle with! We would be terrified. But we’ll show it what men are like!”

Dr. Morton said gently, “Perhaps we should notify the Pelorus. The biologists on board there...”

“No!” said Terry grimly. “I have a private quarrel with this monster. It might have killed Deirdre! And Davis already tried to tell those biologists something! Tell them about this, and they’ll want proofs they wouldn’t look at anyhow. We’ll handle this ourselves! It’s too important for them!”

“Much too important,” said Deirdre firmly. “The shooting stars aren’t shooting stars and there’s something down in the depths just like Terry says. He’s right that we can’t consider sharing our world with--beings that come down from the sky, even if they only want our oceans and don’t care about the land. He says that we wouldn’t get along with creatures that know more than we do, and we would especially resent any space ships coming uninvited to start colonies on our world while we’re not advanced enough to stop them! If that’s what they’re doing, they have to be fought from the very first instant to the very last moment there’s one of them hiding in our seas! Terry’s right!”

“I haven’t heard him say any of those things, young lady,” said Morton drily, “but they’re true. And I don’t like the idea of a sea monster being in the lagoon anyhow. Especially one that tries to kill people. Still, fighting it...”

“There are a couple of bazookas on the Esperance,” said Terry sharply. He looked at Davis. “If you’re willing to risk the yacht, we can drive the beast aground, or at least to shallow water, with the submarine horn. Then the bazookas should be able to destroy it. Will you take the risk?”

“Of course you’ll use the Esperance,” said Davis. “Of course!”

“Then I’ll want,” said Terry, unconsciously taking command, “somebody at the engine and somebody at the wheel. I’ll run the horn. But, frankly, if that monster lays one sucker-arm on the Esperance, it may be good-bye. Any volunteers?”

In minutes the Esperance, her engine rumbling, pulled away from the dock. She had on board all her original company except Deirdre--firmly left ashore by her father and Terry--and in addition she carried Dr. Morton and the most enthusiastic amateur photographer of the tracking station staff. He was shaky but resolute, and was hanging about with an imposing array of cameras, for both still and motion pictures. The Esperance’s sails were furled and she went into battle under bare poles. Davis was busy manufacturing improvised hand grenades for himself and Morton.

The sun was nearly overhead. Terry asked Morton questions about the lagoon. They finally chose a minor inlet as the place to which the creature must be driven, if possible. There it could be immobilized by the intolerable sound from the recorder. There it could be destroyed.

“I wonder,” said Morton wryly, “if I can present a dead giant squid as part of the explanation for my computed orbits for the last two bolides!”

The Esperance moved steadily toward the place where Terry had nearly been killed.

The enterprise was risky. The Esperance was sixty-five feet long. The creature it was to attack was much larger, and if one of its kind had crushed the bathyscaphe, it had sufficient strength and ferocity to make a battle cruiser a much more suitable antagonist. But the true folly of the effort was its purpose.

It all started when a fishing boat--La Rubia--went to sea and caught remarkable quantities of fish, of which four specimens had had plastic artefacts fastened to them. Then Terry began checking on certain noises he heard in the sea which provoked an incomprehensible crowding of millions of fish into a small area, from which they swam down to depths where they could not survive. Now the killing of this squid was supposed to cast a light on the mystery of the nine bolides which had fallen into a particular part of the ocean.

Terry had the undersea horn turned vertically so that it would transmit a blade of sound wherever he aimed it, instead of spreading all through the lagoon. He turned it on.

The water before the Esperance suddenly speckled and splashed from the maddened leaps of fish of every possible size. He turned it off. He aimed it where the ripples showed the presence of something huge beneath the surface. He turned it on again.

There were convulsive writhings. A long tentacle emerged briefly and then splashed under again. The writhings continued. Terry adjusted his aim. Crazy leapings of smaller creatures showed the line of the sound-beam, as tracer-bullets show the paths of bullets from a machine gun. He cut off the sound for an instant and turned it on again at full volume, pointed where the monster must be. There was explosive tumult underwater. Huge arms flailed above the surface. But once again the creature fled.

The Esperance followed slowly, now. The monster had reacted to the stinging sound-beam as if cowed. But it was a deep-sea creature. It did not know how to move when squeezed into a shallow water which hampered its movements. It seemed frightened to discover itself trapped between the lagoon-bottom and the surface. And it was dazzled by the brightness to which it had been driven. Left unattacked, even for an instant, it tried to burrow away from the light, and again it made a dense cloud of mud from the bottom. Then it became quiet, as if hiding.

Grimly, Terry lanced it with the painful noise. The water frothed. Monstrous tentacles appeared and disappeared, and once part of the creature’s body itself emerged. It was cornered into a minor inlet, and there the water grew more shallow and the monster did not want to go to where its motions would be even more confined.

It seemed to flow into the deepest part of the miniature bay. It was as if it felt certain of a haven there. When the tormenting noise-beam struck again, the abyssal monster flung itself about crazily. A terrible, frustrated rage filled it. Its arms fumbled here and there, above water and below. It hauled itself upright so that a part of its torpedo-shaped body broke through the surface. The monster was mad with fury. It plunged toward the Esperance, not swimming now, but crawling with all its eight legs in water too shallow to submerge it. Its effort was desperate. It lifted everything from the water, and splashed everything down again, all the while crawling toward its enemy.

Terry saw Nick and Jug steady the aim of their bazookas. Davis ran toward the bow with hand grenades. The huge squid came crawling, and with every foot of advance the pain-noise grew more unendurable. Suddenly the creature uttered a mooing cry and retreated. The cry was like the mooing noise Terry had picked up from the depths.

It went aground. It struggled to climb ashore, to do anything to escape its tormentors. It foamed and splashed...

Despairing, it turned to face its tormentors. Its body reared almost entirely out of the water, now. It sagged flabbily. It reeled as its arms strained. Its eyes rose above the surface, blinded by the light. They were huge eyes. Squids alone, among the invertebrates, have eyes like those of land beasts. They flamed demoniac hatred. A beak appeared, not unlike a parrot’s, but capable of rending steel plates. The beak opened and closed with clicking sounds that were singularly horrifying. It snapped at the yacht, which was beyond reach. One of the tentacles wrenched violently at something. It gave. The arm rose above the water. A thorny mass of branched coral flew through the air and splashed close beside the Esperance.

“Shoot!” said Terry, somehow sickened. “Dammit, shoot!”

Nick and Tony aimed closely. The bazookas made their peculiar, inadequate sounds. The bazooka-shells, like small rocket-missiles, sped through the short distance. They struck. Their shaped charges detonated, again with inadequate loudness. They did not explode in a fashion to tear the creature to bits. Instead, they sent lancing flames a thousand times more deadly than bullets into the squid’s flesh.

It fought insanely. It uttered shrill cries. Its arms tore at its own wounds, at the water, at the lagoon-bed as if it would rend and shatter all the universe in its rage.

The bazookas fired again and again.

It was the eighth missile from the bazooka which ended the battle. Then the enormous body went limp. Its horny beak ceased to try to crush all creation. But the long, thick, sucker-disked arms thrashed aimlessly for a long time. Even when they ceased to throw themselves about, they quivered and rippled for a considerable period more. And when it seemed that all life had left the gigantic beast, and the men from the satellite-tracking station stepped on the monstrous body, it suddenly jerked once more, in a last attempt to murder.

The squid’s body, without the tentacles, was thirty-five feet long. The largest squid, the Atlantic variety, captured before had a mantle no longer than twenty feet. That relatively familiar creature, Architeuthis princeps, came to a maximum total length of fifty-two feet. Counting the two longest arms of this one, it reached eighty. It could not possibly swim in water less than six yards deep. It did not belong in a coral lagoon, but it was there.

It was close to sunset when the last tremors of the great mass of flesh were stilled. Terry was in no mood for eating, afterward. He skipped the evening meal altogether, and paced up and down the veranda of the dining hall, at the satellite-tracking station. Inside, there was a clatter of dishes and a humming of voices. Outside, there was a soft, warm, starlit night. The surf boomed on the reef outside the lagoon.

Deirdre came out and walked quickly into Terry’s arms. She kissed him and then drew back.

“Darling!” she said softly. Her voice changed. “How is your leg? Does it still hurt?”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” said Terry. “I’m worried about something else. Two things, in fact.”