Creatures of the Abyss by Murray Leinster

Author:Murray Leinster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pronoun

* * *

Six

FOURTEEN HOURS LATER THE Esperance made ready to sail from Thrawn Island. Her purpose was to carry the plastic objects to Manila, where they would be turned over to specialized laboratories to be studied. Five such objects had been found before: one in the Thrawn Island lagoon, while the satellite-tracking station was under construction, and four attached to exotic fish brought to market by the commercial fishing boat La Rubia. Now there were eight more, of four different kinds. To the laboratories would go Terry’s observation that one kind of these objects absorbed sound at audible frequencies and retransmitted it at much higher ones, but only under water. All this was very interesting and very puzzling.

But a serious disturbance had arisen at the tracking station.

Dr. Morton came to the Esperance before her departure. He had a problem. He’d predicted to the minute, and almost to the mile, the landing of the bolide of the night before. That was the first accurate prediction of the kind in history. But his forecast stood alone in its precision. Nobody else had even come near being right. Now he was being insistently queried by astronomers the world over. They wanted to know how he’d done it. In particular, they wanted to know how he’d figured that the bolide would lose just so many feet per second velocity, neither more nor less, in a three-quarter orbit around the world. Nobody else had such a figure in his equation for the landing spot. Dr. Morton had. His prediction had been exact. Where did he get that necessary but inexplicable figure?

He beckoned Davis and Terry to go below with him, in the Esperance’s after cabin. Terry hesitated.

“You may as well hear my troubles,” said Morton vexedly. “You’re largely responsible for them.”

Terry followed uneasily. He didn’t see how Dr. Morton could hold them responsible. He had guarded his own guesses about the Esperance’s discoveries against even the slightest expression. He couldn’t let himself believe in their correctness, but he was appalled at the inadequacy of all other explanations of past events.

“In sixteen months,” said Morton annoyedly, down below, “we’ve spotted six bolides coming in to land in the Luzon Deep. That’s out of all reason! Of course, it could be a mathematical series of wildly unlikely coincidences, such as probability says may happen sometimes. Up to last night that seemed to be a possible explanation.”

Davis nodded. His expression was odd.

“But now,” said Morton somehow indignantly, “that’s ruled out! It’s ruled out by last night’s bolide, and yesterday’s fishing experiment, and that business of the shining sea, plus those damned plastic gadgets and deep sea fish thriving in shallow water! There’s no reasonable explanation for such things, and they’re not mere coincidences!”

“I’m afraid,” admitted Davis, “that they’re not.”

“The obvious explanation,” said Morton doggedly, “I refuse to name or consider. But nevertheless the question is not whether a theory or an explanation is unlikely or not. The question is whether it’s true!”

Davis nodded. Terry had to agree. But

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.