The Watch Below (23 page)

This one had escaped the anti-missiles to land, owing to a fault in its
guidance system, in a large park in one of the larger coastal cities.
It thundered down to a perfect landing less than a quarter of a mile from
the water's edge, to stand like some tremendous metal lighthouse among the
smoldering trees and bushes. When the echoes of its touchdown had died away
and before the city could recover from its shocked silence there could be
heard a muffled, erratic pounding coming from the interior of the great ship.
The beings packing the refrigerated holds of the ship, warmed automatically
to full consciousness on the way down, had begun to panic. Quarters which
had been barely large enough to hold their frozen, unconscious bodies
were now jammed solid with the normally placid food animals biting and
tearing at themselves and each other in their efforts to escape.
But the mechanism that should have caused large sections of the hull to
fall open and allow the beings inside the freedom of the sea refused
to operate because of certain built-in safety devices. While the ship
was surrounded, not by water but by a completely unbreathable gas,
the opening mechanism refused to operate and the ship's hull remained
tightly and stubbornly closed.
For all of six minutes . . .
That was how long it took for the jets to arrive, screaming in from
tree-top height and hurling against the towering alien hull a veritable
rain of armor-piercing missiles, small HE bombs, and napalm. There were
certain tactical atomic weapons which could have been brought to bear,
but out of consideration for the city's inhabitants, lesser forms
of frightfulness were being tried first. The ship stood against the
onslaught for less than a minute before it burst open, toppled heavily,
and began to disintegrate. The napalm fires hissed furiously and died
in the torrents of water pouring from the stricken ship; and from
the subsiding masses of metal, great slick-bodied alien shapes fell
heaving and rolling and flapping into the steaming mud. And still the
jets maintained their attack, saturating the tiny landing area with a
rain of HE, tearing the ship and its contents into smaller and smaller
pieces. When they finally pulled out, remade their formations, and began
to circle warily, the section of the park where the enemy ship had landed
had been converted into a ghastly, steaming stew of mud, riven metal,
and shapeless pieces of raw meat.
It was a shock, somehow, to find that the blood of the enemy was red.
"Until the present moment," said the officer whose uniform showed dark
blue between the heavy incrustations of gold, "I had thought that this
was to be a space battle, with no place at all in it for the Navy.
It seems I was wrong."
"As soon as they saw the ship was filled with water they should have stopped
the attack!" said the gray-haired civilian who had just finished making
his report. Angrily, he went on, "The beings would have died anyway,
suffocated like landed fish. Now, as things are, you haven't left us
with a single whole specimen. We have only the vaguest idea of their
size or mass or limb arrangement, and the destruction of their ship
was so thorough that its power plant was wrecked along with everything
else, and now the level of radiation from the wreckage is so high that
we can't get near it! Potentially the greatest scientific find in all
history and we can't even -- "
"The implications of a water-dwelling species who have crossed interstellar
space are not lost on us, Doctor," a bespectacled officer broke in smoothly.
"In their culture the attainment of space travel would represent a much
greater technical achievement and would come at a much later stage of
civilization -- always assuming they are civilized -- and would represent
a double barrier to be surmounted, from sea to air or land surface,
then from land or sea surface to space. Moreover, their invasion fleet
would require a high degree of technical cooperation in the building,
and cooperation implies civilization, although its presence here is not
a civilized act -- at least, not according to our ideas of civilized
behavior -- "
"Well now," said the civilian expert, "we've done some odd things in
the name of civilization -- "
"This is no time for philosophy!" another officer broke in. "These people
live in the sea and they will fight in the sea. Their weapons are designed
for that medium, which is probably why they took no offensive or defensive
action on the way in. Our problem is that we cannot possibly interdict
every square mile of ocean surface. We were lucky this time to inflict
twenty per cent casualties. If we can't stop their landing, then this
will be predominantly a naval war. I agree with the admiral."
"We have a little experience with the noises produced by dolphins,"
the bespectacled officer resumed, "which is a form of language. Also, even
if we could surmount the second double barrier of air-water communications,
there must be basic differences in psychology. We may have nothing in
common with them at all."
"Except possibly the instinct for survival," the civilian expert put in.
"But it could be argued, Doctor, that survival in its fullest sense
requires cooperation rather than conflict. If we could communicate . . ."
"You are philosophizing again," said the admiral drily, "and at present
we should be dealing with the more practical aspects of this problem.
We can philosophize later, after we have drawn up some sort of plan to
deal with this invasion. Inasmuch as only few if any of you can think
in terms of naval strategy, I propose to outline the problem from my
own point of view."
He glanced quickly around the table, received nods, grunts of assent,
and stony silences, and then went on, "To begin with, we must assume that
their main force will reach our oceans with only minor losses. They will
then establish undersea bases and observation posts, and the opening
stages of the war will involve action between our surface craft and
submarines and the vessels and weapons of the enemy. Even though we
will be fighting in our own oceans, I'm afraid the enemy will be more at
home in them than we are, so to begin with our casualties will be heavy
and the enemy will seem to have things all his own way. This situation
will change, however, as we gain experience of their weapons, tactics,
physical and mental capabilities.
"Acquiring dead specimens and live prisoners is of immediate importance,"
he continued, looking steadily at the bespectacled officer. "If at all
possible we must communicate with them. We must know the enemy.
"With this knowledge," he resumed to the table in general, "we will be in
a position to hunt down the enemy and try to exterminate him completely.
I say 'try to' deliberately because I don't think it possible to kill
each and every one of them. But we must aim to keep them from becoming
established to the point where they can take the offensive against us by
launching missiles from the sea bed, and so on. Also, from the admittedly
cursory examination of enemy remains made by the doctor here I think it
safe to assume that these beings are not capable of surviving at great
depths, which means that they will tend to congregate near coastlines
and in other fairly shallow areas. This simplifies the job of detecting
and destroying their installations, but it will in no sense make the
job easy. This is going to be a long, hard, and undecisive war.
"Even with perfect communication between both sides," he went on grimly,
"I see no way of stopping, it. The situation has deteriorated beyond
the possibility of peaceful settlement since their leading contingent
has already been attacked and suffered heavy casualties. What I propose
is the mounting of a maximum effort operation against this relatively
weak force of the enemy before the main force of the enemy arrives,
in an attempt to devise and perfect tactics suited to a form of warfare
which will be utterly strange to us."
He paused briefly for comment, then went on, "If we assume this initial
landing to have been a test of our defenses and an attempt to gather
on-the-spot intelligence regarding us, we are going to encounter the
enemy close inshore -- at least, to begin with. It should be no problem
to detect a large mass of metal the size and shape of the enemy ships
with the detection gear already available to us; however, the Western
Approaches, the Med, and large areas of the Pacific are practically
carpeted with masses of metal the shape and size of the enemy ships --
the naval and merchant-shipping losses of World War Two. In a very short
time we can expect the enemy to put these relics to good use, as forward
observation posts in the shallows and for purposes of camouflage at
greater depths -- two masses of metal lying close together on the sea
bed being difficult to distinguish from one. Even the metal of a small
sunken vessel would serve to screen the weapons and smaller transport
vehicles of an enemy patrol, so our first step must be to depth-bomb each
and every sunken hulk around our coastlines, and to do so repeatedly at
the shortest possible intervals.
"The compression effects of a large explosion would undoubtedly kill
anyone sheltering in or near a wreck," he went on quickly, answering the
questions which several of them were about to ask, "but two weeks later,
or even hours later, it would still be there and available for use as
a shelter or screen for enemy metal. So every wreck or suspicious mass
of metal that it is possible to detect will be hit repeatedly with depth
bombs -- chemical explosives, of course, unless we suspect a concentration
of enemy in the area -- "
"Just a minute, sir," said the officer with the glasses, whose specialty
was communications. "The population is such that we depend on offshore
fishing to a large extent for food. If we contaminate the sea with
radioactives . . . As well as killing the fish there is the problem of
evaporation and later precipitation over land. You're going to make this
a very dirty war, sir."
"Yes," said the admiral, "a long, dirty war."
The fighter bomber hugged the tops of the waves all the way to the target
area, then climbed slightly, pivoted its jets, and slid to a stop two hundred
feet above a marker placed there by a fast detector boat. The boat had
dropped a magnet to which was attached a line and a quantity of marker
dye, and had then left in a hurry. It was said now that the Navy expected
torpedoes to come straight up at them, so their lookouts used glass-bottomed
buckets instead of binoculars. A heavy depth charge splashed into the sea
where it was stained yellow by the marker. A few minutes later the surface
turned white, bulged upward, and slowly subsided to leave a great, pale,
circular stain where once there had been a tiny yellow one.
"That's the second time this month we've hit that thing, whatever it is,"
said the navigator-bombardier. "It's not very exciting or dramatic, is it?
I keep expecting to see wreckage or bodies floating up."
"After 150 years," said the pilot, "any loose wood or bedding would be
too waterlogged to rise. The only bodies you could expect to see would
be concussed fish or aliens."
"But for argument's sake suppose we saw
human
bodies floating up. . . ."
"Don't be ridiculous! Much more of these morbid imaginings and I'll sic
the station psychologist onto you. Now, the next wreck on the list is
that tanker off Bertrand's Head. Give me a course, please."
The inhabited world of Gulf Trader had shrunk to the two cabins comprising
Richard's Rooms and the upper half of Number Twelve tank. It was a cold,
dank, dying world, shivering and starving and strangling in its own waste
products. The air was fresher near the roof of Number Ten, but nobody
wanted to take the risk of diving into the inky water of Twelve, groping
their way through the submerged door, and swimming up to the surface in
Ten just for the sake of breathing air which did not stink.
Instead they huddled together in their pile of damp and filthy hair,
trying to talk themselves into starting a Game but more often keeping
silent except for the chattering of their teeth. During daylight they
watched the scummed-over porthole waiting for something, anything,
to happen. Then one day, incredibly, it did.
"A sh-shadow!" chattered one of the girls. "It was moving slowly, up there!
Didn't you s-see it?"
"I saw something," said Wallis. "It might be a big fish. Or-r a boat
on the surface . . ."
There was a sudden, muted clang and a scraping sound, subtly different from
all the other metallic creakings and strainings which haunted the ship.
"A boat on the surface," said Wallis, in a voice which began as a whisper
and ended as a shout, "has dropped its anchor on us!"
Within seconds they were all banging furiously on the cabin deck. and
walls, in unison, with the first piece of metal or wood that came to
hand. Bang-bang-bang, they signaled hysterically, bang, bang, bang,
bang-bang-bang. They did not speak at all among themselves, because it
was ridiculous to expect rescue after all this time and talking about
the possibility would have made them realize just how ridiculous it
was. Instead they banged away while the minutes grew into hours and they
grew warmer than they could ever remember being from their exertions,
then cold again as they weakened. During the lengthening pauses for breath
they stared through the green scum on the other side of the porthole and
imagined moving shadows, or listened to the odd creakings and scrapings
and gurgling sounds coming from different parts of the ship, and tried to
convince themselves that they were not the same noises they always heard.
"It might have been part of the mast breaking away," said Wallis, during one
of the longer silences. "A piece of rusty metal falling onto the deck . . ."
They ignored him. Weakly, despairingly, they resumed hammering on the deck.
Then suddenly they stopped. Light was seeping into the cabin from the tank
below.
Wallis and one of the girls were first to the hatch and gained a place
on the ladder while the others knelt in the cabin above, staring down,
punching each other and laughing. Below him the water was lit by a lamp
of some kind which was being pushed through the submerged entrance.
A shape in some kind of diving suit was following it, and obviously
having difficulty squeezing through. It was impossible to see details
because the water was like so much cold, thick, stinking soup with the
wastes that had collected in it over the past few weeks. Wallis felt
suddenly anxious about their rescuer's feelings over this, and about
his people's appearance and what he should say. "Hello" or "Thank God"
or "You certainly took your time getting here, friend. . . ."