Normally he would not have been able to gain much information from a human mind. And this mind, he noted, was altogether similar to those he had known before the cataclysm. It was easier to whip these dull mentalities into speech. Their languages had never conveyed subtleties, but they were so easy to analyse and understand.
This mind, though, was dulled by a great shock, perhaps unconscious. It offered no hindrance to his inquiry. He was even able to drive it down still further, inhibiting the processes responsible for heartbeats, breathing, digestion, in order to lessen the “noise” he received.
He was under water, he gathered, and under mud, and still secure in his refuge, undiscovered by prying animals. Under water. There was no problem. He had reserves available for just such an eventuality, but the picture he received of the extent and depth of the ocean above him implied that he could not rely on them to get him to land.
But he must get to land. The myriads, the hordes of human beings crawling and pullulating like bacteria across the face of the planet had never known the lash of one of his kind. Instead of building to the glory of and for the appreciation of higher beings, they served only themselves or each other. This was insupportable. If he could get free, he could take to himself, bit by bit, perhaps half the planet. They were so numerous he could not handle more. Then, and only then, he could see whether any more of his kind had survived, and magnanimously allow them to share what was left. If he was alone, then it would be simple enough to thin the population out to manageable levels.
This device the man had employed to bring him down here; it would be necessary to utilize that. He gathered facts about it, very slowly because he was weak. Possibly a full day had passed before he had enough facts to formulate a plan. The device would be returning. Let it take back this man, and get rid of its other occupants. Let there be a compulsion in the man’s mind to bring it down by himself. He cautiously opened that floodgate in his mind behind which was stored his power to inflict pain, and judged his available strength. Yes. One of these creatures was as many as he could handle for the time being.
And while he was awaiting the completion of the order, he would have to burrow out of his hiding place, using up his entire surviving reserves. Which meant that if the man failed to obey his command, he would die as that weakling Ruagh had died. He debated, again measured the pain-giving power he could call on, and decided that it was enough.
He hurt the man to prove it. Yes, that would suffice! He could not remember when last he had lashed a human mind that had never before known such powers. Even infants in the womb had learned it before birth in the day when his kind ruled the planet. But this one was a stranger to the pain. He had no resistance.
He overlaid the pain temporarily, implanted his commands, and began, satisfied, to work his way out of his refuge.
The thickness of the layer of mud startled him when he compared it with the apparent rate of deposition. He had been in the refuge longer than he had ever anticipated. But it was not until the device had duly returned to bring him to the surface, and he had commanded the man to take it well away from the ship that had launched it overhead, that he was able to get a sight of the stars and know the real duration of his imprisonment.
Not less than a hundred and ten thousand years, he judged. Even by the standards of his race—to whom human beings were mere mayflies, hatched at morning, dead at sunset—that was a long time.
Still, no matter. The first essential was to gather his strength. Then to get servants and extend his dominion. He commanded the man to feed him, and by lashing him now and again drove him to select suitable articles of diet. There were molluscs on the shore of a lonely, rocky islet, whose succulent flesh gave him a little of the metals he needed. Their shells helped to provide silicon, and carbon he could absorb in plenty. It would need more than a single servant to provide him with all his requirements. Nonetheless, he had made a beginning. And he had time to spare.
Patiently, he looked for means of adding to his retinue. He found it, together with a superior means of transport. His strength grew. Sooner than he had hoped, he was in a position to conquer his first city. It was a floating city, a technological achievement he would have thought beyond these short-lived grubs of Earth, crude though it might be by his standards. But here he had enough to feed him, and he could turn his mind to the question of making men aware of their inferior status. Proper homage was the next thing to command.
Every now and again other human-filled vessels passed as he consolidated himself. He was not yet ready to trouble himself with them. He blinded them, and they turned aside.
“This I find significant,” the Chinese statistician said in his dulcet tenor voice. He put his thumb on the strange gap in the center of the North Atlantic chart he had prepared. “I do not know if it means anything important. Certainly it is to be investigated.”
He sat down abruptly, and a hum of conversation went up around the room. The room was the operations center of the aircraft carrier, the Cape Wrath, which had become the brain, behind the entire project. More than forty people were assembled. Some of them sat with simultaneous translation phones on their heads, and two interpreters were still completing their account of the Chinese’s remarks when Lampion spoke. He was the official UN representative. French by birth, international by adoption, he had become accepted as neutral president of the mixed bag of investigators.
“We are extremely busy,” he reminded the audience in his matter-of-fact manner. “The list of items we have on the agenda is conclusive, I think. Nonetheless, this is a major discovery; to find that for days past not one of our search units has reported a single sighting in that area. It looks as if it has been deliberately avoided. And yet we know that no less than four ships should have sent in news from there. Yes, Dr. Gordon?”
“You mentioned ships only,” Gordon said, leaning forward. “How about patrol planes?”
The Chinese signalled that he would reply, received Lampion’s nod, and said, “Air surveys are included, Dr. Gordon. They too show the curious hole in the network of reports.”
“In other words,” Gordon suggested, “the Queen Alexandra and the Gondwana are probably slap in the middle, and something is deliberately preventing the search parties that sight the missing vessels from informing us.”
There was a chorus of objections, belated from those present who did not speak English. Lampion stilled it with a wave of his hand.
“Let us not race ahead of our knowledge,” he said. “Let us merely send a further expedition to see.”
The thrumming of the engine shook the whole fabric of the helicopter. Peter had found it hard to get used to at first, and the pilot had sympathetically asked if he felt all right.
“It’s smoother underwater!” Peter had replied. “And it feels a hell of a sight safer there, too.”
“Same difference,” the pilot shrugged. “Down there if something goes wrong, the pressure mashes you flat. Up here, if something goes wrong, at least you have a parachute. Matter of taste, most likely.”
Peter nodded. He had inveigled his way aboard the ’copter between dives of the Russian ’nef—their own was still being refitted. The work of clearing the site of Atlantica was heartbreakingly slow, even with the German submarine bulldozer shifting mud by the scores of tons. And so far the TV camera, hunting on its robot drogue a thousand fathoms further down, had failed to reveal anything but mud, mud and more mud, dotted with the thinly scattered flora and fauna of the deeps.
“Right,” the pilot said, and flipped a switch. He took his hands off the controls and sat back in a relaxed fashion. Noticing Peter’s look of alarm, he grinned.
“George has taken over,” he said. “He’s quite a box of tricks; a whole lot more than just an automatic pilot. He’ll take us right into the middle of the blank area, circle us round, and bring us out again dead on course without my doing another hand’s turn. He was secret until they turned him loose for our benefit.”
“So we’re just passengers!”
Peter commented. “Like you said, it must be a matter of taste.”
They were flying at about a thousand feet, a reading of 130 showing on the air-speed indicator. There was almost nothing to be seen except sea. An occasional island showed the course of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. A few ships passed within their view, but it was dull today and visibility was poor. Foul weather would be hindering their work soon. Indeed, there was a small storm of rain a few miles to starboard, which they were skirting by courtesy of their robot pilot’s radar eyes.
He found the trip restful, and was half dozing, dreaming of the few short days of the honeymoon he had enjoyed with Mary, and making plans for picking up where they had left off, when the pilot leaned forward and pointed.
“There. See?”
“Why, it is the Alexandra!” Peter exclaimed. “Of all the crazy things! To think a ship that size could have been lost in the main Atlantic traffic lanes for so long …”
She was enormous; she was the biggest liner on the Atlantic run, a thousand and ninety feet long, a hundred and four thousand tons burden, nuclear engines, and a speed of at least forty-five knots average port-to-port.
The pilot snapped on the film cameras which would record what they saw, and touched a button on the casing of the automatic pilot. “Course correction,” he said briefly. “This is to let George know the ship ahead is the one we want. He’ll take us in and bring us back right away now.”
“Any sign of the Gondwana?” Peter was staring through binoculars. The distance was closing rapidly.
“Not a thing. Probably been sunk.” The pilot was casual.
“You seem to have some preconceived ideas,” Peter commented. “But what in hell is going on down there?”
They were close enough now to see movement on the liner’s great promenade deck. There were lines of people all round, in a sort of horseshoe formation. They moved rhythmically, like grass as the wind blows across it. They seemed to be shuffling back and forth. The distance closed further. They began to take on individual features. Some of them were crew in company uniform. Others were passengers in miscellaneous casual clothing. Now and then one or two would walk forward together to face something dark, canopied under an awning, in the middle of the horseshoe’s open end.
Suddenly, one of those called forward turned and tried to run. The lines broke. Men and women surged forward, seized him, dragged him to the rail and flung him bodily down to the leaden sea.
A shout so loud that it overcame the droning of the ’copter engine rang out, and they exclaimed together. Now they were circling in close enough to see faces through their binoculars; haggard, drawn faces, eyes ringed with dark circles indicative of sleeplessness. A group of stewards in soiled white jackets was beating on trays as though they were gongs.
“Have they all gone raving mad?” the pilot demanded.
“No …” said Peter, his stomach churning in revulsion. “Can’t you see what that is under the awning? It’s another of those creatures like the one we dragged up from Atlantica—only this one’s alive. …”
And at the moment he uttered the words, a blast of raw pain hit him, not in his body, but in his mind. In an instant he and the pilot both were slumped unconscious.
Uncaring, unknowing, George flew the ’copter on.
XII
“YOU’RE GOING to be all right,” a comforting male voice was saying. Peter blinked his eyes open and found himself looking at a square-jawed face under a peaked naval cap.
“What—” he said, struggling to sit up. The man in the naval cap helped him, putting an arm behind his shoulders to support him. Peter shook his head dizzily, and looked about him.
He was sitting on the deck of the aircraft carrier. The ’copter was being shunted away on a trolley towards the elevators, and a group of men and women were clustered, talking excitedly, around the pilot. The pilot must have recovered more quickly. He was standing, although he looked pale.
“Something blanked you out,” the man was saying to Peter. “But you’re perfectly all right physically. Just a bit of shock is your trouble.”
“Blanked me out? Oh yes, I remember. When we were flying over the Alexandra. We found her!” Peter seized the other’s arm. “We found her! And that’s not all!”
“Easy now,” the man said soothingly. “We know already. Your pilot told us before you woke up. We’re developing the pictures now. Your autopilot brought the ’copter back and we landed you under remote control. Now what you need, I’d say, is a drink and a chance to relax for a bit. Suppose you come down to the messroom. Can you walk all right, you think?”
Peter tested his limbs gingerly. He had the illusion that he ought to be unable to move. His memory was full of a pain so excruciating it seemed he must have broken every bone in his body. But the pain was only in memory, he could move freely, and after a moment, normally.
“We don’t know what happened to you,” his companion said, watching him. “Whatever it was, it’s a cinch to be the same as what kept the other search parties from reporting the liner. What puzzles me is why the hell we haven’t lost anybody. If your ’copter hadn’t been on auto, you’d most likely have gone down in the sea.”
Peter frowned. “Maybe we weren’t meant to see as much as we did,” he suggested. “I don’t know what was going on. It looked like some crazy sort of ceremony, though. Maybe the creature was distracted, didn’t notice us till we’d come in quite close. Then he hit us with all he’d got because he was surprised.” He shrugged. “I’m just guessing. Did anybody tell my wife I was all right?”
“I’ll check.” The other turned away to make inquiries of one of the group surrounding the pilot. Peter went on testing his movements experimentally, his mind dazed by the power of the blow that had been struck at it.
The gray overcast seemed to lower at the sea. A chill wind was creaming the waves into hesitant foam, and in spite of its phenomenally efficient stabilizers the aircraft carrier was moving a little in the water. Over the broad gray landing deck he could see across to the Russian mother ship. The ’nef was being readied for another dive, and there was much bustle and activity. Above, a giant floatplane was circling prior to touching down. A fast launch pulled away from the side of one of the little survey vessels and headed towards the Cape Wrath.
“Yes, they told your wife you were all right.” The words drew him back from his contemplation of the scene. “She’ll be coming aboard in a little while. They didn’t say what had happened. Figured it was better not to worry her.”
“Good,” said Peter with relief. “Now I’d like that drink you suggested.”
It was puzzling that the aircraft had not plunged into the sea when its crew was struck unconscious … Had it not been for his absorption in the ceremony he had commanded, he would have treated it as he had treated other aircraft and the many ships that had passed, by installing a hint of pain in the minds of the pilots or helmsmen every time they began to turn toward his floating city.
For the time being, he had to be gentle, subtle, although it irked him to treat these coarse and inferior beings with such finesse. Still, there was no doubt they had learned much since they had been freed from their old yoke. Until he had a complete picture of the present situation, he would not take risks.
No doubt that ingenious flying machine incorporated some automatic device to make it continue straight and level if the pilot’s attention wandered. He knew from his own experience that these dull minds could not be made to concentrate except by regular lashing; automatic machinery was the logical compensation for their human shortcomings. At the mercy of the wind, though, the machine would soon have toppled and drowned its passengers.
He dismissed the matter and decided on his next move. It was time now to extend his retinue further still. He was on the way to his full strength now, and there was the matter of supplies for the subjects that remained. Though he had had the intractable ones thrown overboard as an example to the rest, he had not wanted to cut the numbers significantly
. It was good to have many minds to control, it stimulated him.
They had exhausted the stores aboard, though, and they were hungry. If he had realized how few provisions there were aboard, he would have had the recalcitrants merely killed and used to supplement the meat supply, instead of giving them to the fish. Still, under his compulsion, they would serve to bring him to shore, and there he could pick and choose among millions. To shore … He sent for a man skilled in navigation as the humans counted skill, and demanded details of the coasts they could make for.
“Peter, you fool!” said Mary, throwing her arms round him. “Why on earth didn’t you tell me what you were going to do? You might have been killed!”
“All right, all right,” he said comfortingly. “I wasn’t, was I? I wouldn’t have gone up in that thing if I hadn’t been sure it was as safe as a bathynef, at least.”
“That’s not saying much, after what’s happened,” she tried to joke. But the words turned serious in her mouth.
“Dr. Trant! Mrs. Trant! Please …?” Lampion’s voice broke in on them, and they grew aware that everyone else in the operations room was impatiently waiting for them to take their places. They slipped into their chairs with a murmured apology, and Lampion coughed and looked round.
“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “you have all had a chance to study the pictures that have been brought back, I believe. I have some extra copies here, which I will pass around anyway.” He spread glossy enlargements on the table.
Peter had not needed to look at them. They showed precisely what he remembered; the crazy horseshoe of passengers and crew on the promenade deck of the liner; stewards beating trays, one unfortunate being seized and cast overboard … And, ghoulish in the center of it all, the indistinct but horrible shape of the creature that had come out of the sea.
“According to our latest information, the Queen Alexandra has begun to move. She has put about and is following a course which may or may not change, but which if extended will intersect the coast of the United States north of the Bahamas. Most probably, in northern Florida or Georgia. There can be little doubt that this is under the orders of the—sea creature.”