From the Ocean from teh Stars (20 page)

erts interjected anxiously: "Don't give him too much! And keep him moving so that he'll still breathe!"

Don was too busy to answer. Having carried out his role as decoy,
Franklin could do nothing but watch as his partner maneuvered dexter
ously around the the great mollusk. The anesthetic bomb had paralyzed it completely; it was slowly sinking, its tentacles stretched limply up
ward. Pieces of fish, some of them over a foot across, were floating away
from the cruel beak as the monster disgorged its last meal.

"Can you get underneath?" Don asked hurriedly. "He's sinking too
fast for me."

Franklin threw on the drive and went around in a tight curve. There
was a soft thump, as of a snowdrift falling from a roof, and he knew that
five or ten tons of gelatinous body were now draped over the sub.

"Fine—hold him there—I'm getting into position."

Franklin was now blind, but the occasional clanks and whirs coming
from the water outside told him what was happening. Presently Don said triumphantly: "All set! We're ready to go."

The weight lifted from the sub, and Franklin could see again. Percy
had been neatly gaffed. A band of thick, elastic webbing had been fastened around his body at the narrowest part, just behind the flukes. From
this harness a cable extended to Don's sub, invisible in the haze a hun
dred feet away. Percy was being towed through the water in his normal direction of motion—backward. Had he been conscious and actively resisting, he could have escaped easily enough, but in his present state the
collar he was wearing enabled Don to handle him without difficulty. The
fun would begin when he started to revive. . . .

Franklin gave a brief eyewitness description of the scene for the ben
efit of his patiently waiting colleagues a mile above. It was probably
being broadcast, and he hoped that Indra and Peter were listening. Then
he settled down to keep an eye on Percy as the long haul back to the
surface began.

They could not move at more than two knots, lest the collar lose its
none-too-secure grip on the great mass of jelly it was towing. In any
event, the trip back to the surface had to take at least three hours, to give Percy a fair chance of adjusting to the pressure difference. Since an air-breathing—and therefore more vulnerable—animal like a sperm whale could endure almost the same pressure change in ten or twenty minutes,
this caution was probably excessive. But Dr. Roberts was taking no
chances with his unprecedented catch.

They had been climbing slowly for nearly an hour, and had reached the three-thousand-foot level, when Percy showed signs of life. The two

long arms, terminating in their great sucker-covered palps, began to
writhe purposefully; the monstrous eyes, into which Franklin had been
staring half hypnotized from a distance of no more than five feet, began
to light once more with intelligence. Quite unaware that he was speaking in a breathless whisper, he swiftly reported these symptoms to Dr. Rob
erts.

The doctor's first reaction was a hearty sigh of relief: "Good!" he
said. "I was afraid we might have killed him. Can you see if he's breath
ing properly? Is the siphon contracting?"

Franklin dropped a few feet so that he could get a better view of the
fleshy tube projecting from the squid's mantle. It was opening and closing
in an unsteady rhythm which seemed to be getting stronger and more
regular at every beat.

"Splendid!" said Dr. Roberts. "He's in fine shape. As soon as he
starts to wriggle too hard, give him one of the small bombs. But leave it
until the last possible moment."

Franklin wondered how that moment was to be decided. Percy was
now beginning to glow a beautiful blue; even with the searchlights
switched off he was clearly visible. Blue, he remembered Dr. Roberts
saying, was a sign of excitement in squids. In that case, it was high time
he did something.

"Better let go that bomb. I think he's getting lively," he told Don.

"Right—here it is."

A glass bubble floated across Franklin's screen and swiftly vanished
from sight.

"The damn thing never broke!" he cried. "Let go another one!"

"O.K.—here's number two. I hope this works; I've only got five left."

But once again the narcotic bomb failed. This time Franklin never
saw the sphere; he only knew that instead of relaxing into slumber once
more Percy was becoming more active second by second. The eight short
tentacles—short, that is, compared with the almost hundred-foot reach of
the pair carrying the grasping palps—were now beginning to twine briskly
together. He recalled Melville's phrase: "Like a nest of anacondas." No;
somehow that did not seem to fit. It was more like a miser—a submarine
Shylock—twisting his fingers together as he gloated over his wealth. In any event, it was a disconcerting sight when those fingers were a foot in
diameter and were operating only two yards away. . . .

"You'll just have to keep on trying," he told Don. "Unless we stop
him soon, he'll get away."

An instant later he breathed a sigh of relief as he saw broken shards
of glass drifting by. They would have been quite invisible, surrounded as

they were by water, had they not been fluorescing brilliantly under the
light of his ultraviolet searchlight. But for the moment he was too relieved
to wonder why he had been able to see something as proverbially elusive
as a piece of broken glass in water; he only knew that Percy had suddenly relaxed again and no longer appeared to be working himself into
a rage.

"What happened?" said Dr. Roberts plaintively from above.

"These confounded knockout drops of yours. Two of them didn't
work. That leaves me with just four—and at the present rate of failure
I'll be lucky if even one goes off."

"I don't understand it. The mechanism worked perfectly every time
we tested it in the lab."

"Did you test it at a hundred atmospheres pressure?"

"Er—no. It didn't seem necessary."

Don's "Huh!" seemed to say all that was needful about biologists
who tried to dabble with engineering, and there was silence on all chan
nels for the next few minutes of slow ascent. Then Dr. Roberts, sounding
a little diffident, came back to the subject.

"Since we can't rely on the bombs," he said, "you'd better come up
more quickly. He'll revive again in about thirty minutes."

"Right—I'll double speed. I only hope this collar doesn't slip off."

The next twenty minutes were perfectly uneventful; then everything
started to happen at once.

"He's coming around again," said Franklin. "I think the higher speed
has waked him up."

"I was afraid of that," Dr. Roberts answered. "Hold on as long as
you can, and then let go a bomb. We can only pray that
one
of them will
work."

A new voice suddenly cut into the circuit.

"Captain here. Lookout has just spotted some sperm whales about
two miles away. They seem to be heading toward us; I suggest you have
a look at them—we've got no horizontal search sonar on this ship."

Franklin switched quickly over to the long-range scanner and picked
up the echoes at once.

"Nothing to worry about," he said. "If they come too close, we can
scare them away." He glanced back at the TV screen and saw that Percy
was now getting very restive.

"Let go your bomb," he told Don, "and keep your fingers crossed."

"I'm not betting on
this,"
Don answered. "Anything happen?"

"No; another dud. Try again."

"That leaves three. Here goes."

"Sorry—I can see that one. It isn't cracked."

"Two left. Now there's only one."

"That's a dud too. What had we better do, Doc? Risk the last one?
I'm afraid Percy will slip off in a minute."

"There's nothing else we can do," replied Dr. Roberts, his voice now
clearly showing the strain. "Go ahead, Don."

Almost at once Franklin gave a cry of satisfaction.

"We've made it!" he shouted. "He's knocked cold again! How long
do you think it will keep him under this time?"

"We can't rely on more than twenty minutes, so plan your ascent accordingly. We're right above you—and remember what I said about tak
ing at least ten minutes over that last two hundred feet. I don't want any
pressure damage after all the trouble we've been to."

"Just a minute," put in Don. "I've been looking at those whales. They've put on speed and they're coming straight toward us. I
think
they've detected Percy—or the beacon we put in him."

"So what?" said Franklin. "We can frighten them with—oh."

"Yes—I thought you'd forgotten that. These aren't patrol subs, Walt.
No sirens on them. And you can't scare sperm whales just by revving
your engines."

That was true enough, though it would not have been fifty years ago,
when the great beasts had been hunted almost to extinction. But a dozen
generations had lived and died since then; now they recognized the subs
as harmless, and certainly no obstacle to the meal they were anticipating. There was a real danger that the helpless Percy might be eaten before he
could be safely caged.

"I think we'll make it," said Franklin, as he anxiously calculated the
speed of the approaching whales. This was a hazard that no one could
have anticipated; it was typical of the way in which underwater opera
tions developed unexpected snags and complications.

"I'm going straight up to the two-hundred-foot level," Don told him. "We'll wait there just as long as it's safe, and then run for the ship. What
do you think of that, Doc?"

"It's the only thing to do. But remember that those whales can make
fifteen knots if they have to."

"Yes, but they can't keep it up for long, even if they see their dinner
slipping away. Here we go."

The subs increased their rate of ascent, while the water brightened
around them and the enormous pressure slowly relaxed. At last they
were back in the narrow zone where an unprotected man could safely
dive. The mother ship was less than a hundred yards away, but this final

stage in the climb back to the surface was the most critical of all. In this
last two hundred feet, the pressure would drop swiftly from eight atmos
pheres to only one—as great a change in ratio as had occurred in the
previous quarter of a mile. There were no enclosed air spaces in Percy
which might cause him to explode if the ascent was too swift, but no one
could be certain what other internal damage might occur.

"Whales only half a mile away," reported Franklin. "Who said they
couldn't keep up that speed? They'll be here in two minutes."

"You'll have to hold them off somehow," said Dr. Roberts, a note of
desperation in his voice.

"Any suggestions?" asked Franklin, a little sarcastically.

"Suppose you pretend to attack; that might make them break off."

This, Franklin told himself, was not his idea of fun. But there seemed
no alternative; with a last glance at Percy, who was now beginning to stir
again, he started off at half-speed to meet the advancing whales.

There were three echoes dead ahead of him—not very large ones,
but he did not let that encourage him. Even if those were the relatively diminutive females, each one was as big as ten elephants and they were coming toward him at a combined speed of forty miles an hour. He was making all the noise he could, but so far it seemed to be having no effect.

Then he heard Don shouting: "Percy's waking up fast! I can feel him
starting to move."

"Come straight in," ordered Dr. Roberts. "We've got the doors open."

"And get ready to close the back door as soon as I've slipped the
cable. I'm going straight through—I don't want to share your swimming
pool with Percy when he finds what's happened to him."

Franklin heard all this chattering with only half an ear. Those three approaching echoes were ominously close. Were they going to call his
bluff? Sperm whales were among the most pugnacious animals in the
sea, as different from their vegetarian cousins as wild buffaloes from a
herd of prize Guernseys. It was a sperm whale that had rammed and sunk
the
Essex
and thus inspired the closing chapter of
Moby Dick;
he had
no desire to figure in a submarine sequel.

Yet he held stubbornly to his course, though now the racing echoes
were less than fifteen seconds away. Then he saw that they were begin
ning to separate; even if they were not scared, the whales had become
confused. Probably the noise of his motors had made them lose contact
with their target. He cut his speed to zero, and the three whales began to
circle him inquisitively, at a range of about a hundred feet. Sometimes
he caught a shadowy glimpse of them on the TV screen. As he had