Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (164 page)

‘What’s going on here, Klaus?’ Joe asked pathetically. ‘I smell trouble, but no one will admit anything.’

I toyed with my curry, trying to separate the bits that were safe from those that would take off the top of my head.

‘You can’t expect me to discuss a client’s affairs,’ I answered.

‘You were talkative enough,’ Joe reminded me, ‘when you were doing the survey for the Gibraltar Dam.’

‘Well, yes,’ I admitted. ‘And I appreciate the write-up you gave me. But this time there are trade secrets involved. I’m – ah – making some last-minute adjustments to improve the efficiency of the system.’

And that, of course, was the truth; for I was indeed hoping to raise the efficiency of the system from its present value of exactly zero.

‘Hmm,’ said Joe sarcastically. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Anyway,’ I said, trying to head him off, ‘what’s
your
latest crackbrained theory?’

For a highly competent science writer, Joe has an odd liking for the bizarre and the improbable. Perhaps it’s a form of escapism; I happen to know that he also writes science fiction, though this is a well-kept secret from his employers. He has a sneaking fondness for poltergeists and ESP and flying saucers, but lost continents are his real specialty.

‘I
am
working on a couple of ideas,’ he admitted. ‘They cropped up when I was doing the research on this story.’

‘Go on,’ I said, not daring to look up from the analysis of my curry.

‘The other day I came across a very old map – Ptolemy’s, if you’re interested – of Ceylon. It reminded me of another old map in my collection, and I turned it up. There was the same central mountain, the same arrangement of rivers flowing to the sea. But
this
was a map of Atlantis.’

‘Oh, no!’ I groaned. ‘Last time we met, you convinced me that Atlantis was the western Mediterranean basin.’

Joe gave his engaging grin.

‘I could be wrong, couldn’t I? Anyway, I’ve a much more striking piece of evidence. What’s the old national name for Ceylon – and the modern Sinhalese one, for that matter?’

I thought for a second, then exclaimed: ‘Good Lord! Why Lanka, of course. Lanka – Atlantis.’ I rolled the names off my tongue.

‘Precisely,’ said Joe. ‘But two clues, however striking, don’t make a full-fledged theory; and that’s as far as I’ve got at the moment.’

‘Too bad,’ I said, genuinely disappointed. ‘And your other project?’

‘This will really make you sit up,’ Joe answered smugly. He reached into the battered briefcase he always carried and pulled out a bundle of papers.

‘This happened only one hundred and eighty miles from here, and just over a century ago. The source of my information, you’ll note, is about the best there is.’

He handed me a photostat, and I saw that it was a page of the London
Times
for July 4, 1874. I started to read without much enthusiasm, for Joe was always producing bits of ancient newspapers, but my apathy did not last for long.

Briefly – I’d like to give the whole thing, but if you want more details your local library can dial you a facsimile in ten seconds – the clipping described how the one-hundred-and-fifty-ton schooner
Pearl
left Ceylon in early May 1874 and then fell becalmed in the Bay of Bengal. On May 10, just before nightfall, an enormous squid surfaced half a mile from the schooner, whose captain foolishly opened fire on it with his rifle.

The squid swam straight for the
Pearl
, grabbed the masts with its arms, and pulled the vessel over on her side. She sank within seconds, taking two of her crew with her. The others were rescued only by the lucky chance that the P. and O. steamer
Strathowen
was in sight and had witnessed the incident herself.

‘Well,’ said Joe, when I’d read through it for the second time, ‘what do you think?’

‘I don’t believe in sea monsters.’

‘The London
Times
,’ Joe answered, ‘is not prone to sensational journalism. And giant squids exist, though the biggest
we
know about are feeble, flabby beasts and don’t weigh more than a ton, even when they have arms forty feet long.’

‘So? An animal like that couldn’t capsize a hundred-and-fifty-ton schooner.’

‘True – but there’s a lot of evidence that the so-called
giant
squid is merely a large squid. There may be decapods in the sea that really are giants. Why, only a year after the
Pearl
incident, a sperm whale off the coast of Brazil was seen struggling inside gigantic coils which finally
dragged it down into the sea
. You’ll find the incident described in the
Illustrated London News
for November 20, 1875. And then, of course, there’s that chapter in
Moby Dick
….’

‘What chapter?’

‘Why, the one called “Squid”. We know that Melville was a very careful observer – but here he really lets himself go. He describes a calm day when a great white mass rose out of the sea “like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills”. And this happened here in the Indian Ocean, perhaps a thousand miles south of the
Pearl
incident. Weather conditions were identical, please note.

‘What the men of the
Pequod
saw floating on the water – I know this passage by heart, I’ve studied it so carefully – was a “vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas”.’

‘Just a minute,’ said Sergei, who had been listening to all this with rapt attention. ‘What’s a furlong?’

Joe looked slightly embarrassed.

‘Actually, it’s an eighth of a mile – six hundred and sixty feet.’ He raised his hand to stop our incredulous laughter. ‘Oh, I’m sure Melville didn’t mean that
literally
. But here was a man who met sperm whales every day, groping for a unit of length to describe something a lot bigger. So he automatically jumped from fathoms to furlongs. That’s my theory, anyway.’

I pushed away the remaining untouchable portions of my curry.

‘If you think you’ve scared me out of my job,’ I said, ‘you’ve failed miserably. But I promise you this – when I do meet a giant squid, I’ll snip off a tentacle and bring it back as a souvenir.’

Twenty-four hours later I was out there in the lobster, sinking slowly down toward the damaged grid. There was no way in which the operation could be kept secret, and Joe was an interested spectator from a nearby launch. That was the Russians’ problem, not mine; I had suggested to Shapiro that they take him into their confidence, but this, of course, was vetoed by Karpukhin’s suspicious Slavic mind. One could almost see him thinking: Just
why
should an American reporter turn up at this moment? And ignoring the obvious answer that Trincomalee was now big news.

There is nothing in the least exciting or glamorous about deep-water operations – if they’re done properly. Excitement means lack of foresight, and that means incompetence. The incompetent do not last long in my business, nor do those who crave excitement. I went about my job with all the pent-up emotion of a plumber dealing with a leaking faucet.

The grids had been designed for easy maintenance, since sooner or later they would have to be replaced. Luckily, none of the threads had been damaged, and the securing nuts came off easily when gripped with the power wrench. Then I switched control to the heavy-duty claws, and lifted out the damaged grid without the slightest difficulty.

It’s bad tactics to hurry an underwater operation. If you try to do too much at once, you are liable to make mistakes. And if things go smoothly and you finish in a day a job you said would take a week, the client feels he hasn’t had his money’s worth. Though I was sure I could replace the grid that same afternoon, I followed the damaged unit up to the surface and closed shop for the day.

The thermoelement was rushed off for an autopsy, and I spent the rest of the evening hiding from Joe. Trinco is a small town, but I managed to keep out of his way by visiting the local cinema, where I sat through several hours of an interminable Tamil movie in which three successive generations suffered identical domestic crises of mistaken identity, drunkenness, desertion, death, and insanity, all in Technicolor and with the sound track turned full up.

The next morning, despite a mild headache, I was at the site soon after dawn. (So was Joe, and so was Sergei, all set for a quiet day’s fishing.) I cheerfully waved to them as I climbed into the lobster, and the tender’s crane lowered me over the side. Over the other side, where Joe couldn’t see it, went the replacement grid. A few fathoms down I lifted it out of the hoist and carried it to the bottom of Trinco Deep, where, without any trouble, it was installed by the middle of the afternoon. Before I surfaced again, the lock nuts had been secured, the conductors spot-welded, and the engineers on shore had completed their continuity tests. By the time I was back on deck, the system was under load once more, everything was back to normal, and even Karpukhin was smiling – except when he stopped to ask himself the question that no one had yet been able to answer.

I still clung to the falling-boulder theory – for want of a better. And I hoped that the Russians would accept it, so that we could stop this silly cloak-and-dagger business with Joe.

No such luck, I realised, when both Shapiro and Karpukhin came to see me with very long faces.

‘Klaus,’ said Lev, ‘we want you to go down again.’

‘It’s your money,’ I replied. ‘But what do you want me to do?’

‘We’ve examined the damaged grid, and there’s a section of the thermoelement missing. Dimitri thinks that – someone – has deliberately broken it off and carried it away.’

‘Then they did a damn clumsy job,’ I answered. ‘I can promise you it wasn’t one of
my
men.’

It was risky to make such jokes around Karpukhin, and no one was at all amused. Not even me; for by this time I was beginning to think that he had something.

The sun was setting when I began my last dive into Trinco Deep, but the end of day has no meaning down there. I fell for two thousand feet with no lights, because I like to watch the luminous creatures of the sea, as they flash and flicker in the darkness, sometimes exploding like rockets just outside the observation window. In this open water, there was no danger of a collision; in any case, I had the panoramic sonar scan running, and that gave far better warning than my eyes.

At four hundred fathoms, I knew that something was wrong. The bottom was coming into view on the vertical sounder – but it was approaching much too slowly. My rate of descent was far too slow. I could increase it easily enough by flooding another buoyancy tank – but I hesitated to do so. In my business, anything out of the ordinary needs an explanation; three times I have saved my life by waiting until I had one.

The thermometer gave me the answer. The temperature outside was five degrees higher than it should have been, and I am sorry to say that it took me several seconds to realise why.

Only a few hundred feet below me, the repaired grid was now running at full power, pouring out megawatts of heat as it tried to equalise the temperature difference between Trinco Deep and the Solar Pond up there on land. It wouldn’t succeed, of course; but in the attempt it was generating electricity – and I was being swept upward in the geyser of warm water that was an incidental by-product.

When I finally reached the grid, it was quite difficult to keep the lobster in position against the upwelling current, and I began to sweat uncomfortably as the heat penetrated into the cabin. Being too hot on the sea bed was a novel experience; so also was the miragelike vision caused by the ascending water, which made my searchlights dance and tremble over the rock face I was exploring.

You must picture me, lights ablaze in that five-hundred-fathom darkness, moving slowly down the slope of the canyon, which at this spot was about as steep as the roof of a house. The missing element –
if
it was still around – could not have fallen very far before coming to rest. I would find it in ten minutes, or not at all.

After an hour’s searching, I had turned up several broken light bulbs (it’s astonishing how many get thrown overboard from ships – the sea beds of the world are covered with them), an empty beer bottle (same comment), and a brand-new boot. That was the last thing I found, for then I discovered that I was no longer alone.

I never switch off the sonar scan, and even when I’m not moving I always glance at the screen about once a minute to check the general situation. The situation now was that a large object – at least the size of the lobster – was approaching from the north. When I spotted it, the range was about five hundred feet and closing slowly. I switched off my lights, cut the jets I had been running at low power to hold me in the turbulent water, and drifted with the current.