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2050’s productions would have seemed incomprehensibly highbrow to 1950. There had been some progress: the box-office was no longer lord of all it surveyed.
Among all the distractions and diversions of a planet which’~.
now seemed well on the way to becoming one vast playground, there were some who still found time to repeat an ancient and never-answered question:
“Where do we go from here?”
ii
Jail leaned against the elephant and rested his hands on the skin, rough as the bark of a tree. He looked at the great tusks and the curving trunk, caught by the skill of the taxidermist in the moment of challenge or salutation. What still weirder creatures, he wondered, from what unknown worlds would one day be looking at this exile from Earth?
“How many animals have you sent the Overlords?” he asked Rupert.
“At least fifty, though of course this is the biggest one. He’s magnificent, isn’t he? Most of the others have been quite small-butterflies, snakes, monkeys, and so on. Though I did get a hippo last year.”
Jan gave a wry smile.
“It’s a morbid thought, but I suppose they’ve got a fine stuffed group of Homo sapiens in their collection by this time. I wonder who was honoured?”
“You’re probably right,” said Rupert, rather indifferently. “It would be easy to arrange through the hospitals.”
“What would happen,” continued Jan thoughtfully, “if someone volunteered to go as a live specimen? Assuming that an eventual return was guaranteed, of course.”
Rupert laughed, though not unsympathetically.
“Is that an offer? Shall I put it to Rashaverak?”
For a moment Jan considered the idea more than half seriously. Then he shook his head.
“Er-no. I was only thinking out loud. They’d certainly turn me down. By the way, do you ever see Rashaverak these days?”
“He called me up about six weeks ago. He’d just foun4a book I’d been hunting. Rather nice of him.”
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Jan walked slowly round the stuffed monster, admiring the
skill that had frozen it forever at this instant of greatest vigour.
“Did you ever discover what he was looking for?” he asked.
“I mean, it seems so hard to reconcile the Overlords’ science with an interest in the occult.”
Rupert looked at Jan a little suspiciously, wondering if his brother-in-law was poking fun at his hobby.
“His explanation seemed adequate. As an anthropologist he was interested in every aspect of our culture. Remember, they have plenty of time. They can go into more detail than a human research worker ever could. Reading my entire library probably put only a slight strain on Rashy’s resources.”
That might be the answer, but Jan was not convinced.
Sometimes he had thought of confiding his secret to Rupert but his natural caution had held him back. When he met his
Overlord friend again, Rupert would probably give something away-the temptation would be far too great.
“Incidentally,” said Rupert, changing the subject abruptly, “if you think this is a big job, you should see the commission Sullivan’s got. He’s promised to deliver the two biggest creatures of all-a sperm whale and a giant squid. They’ll be shown locked in mortal combat. What a tableau that will make!”
For a moment Jan did not answer. The idea that had exploded in his mind was too outrageous, too fantastic to be taken seriously. Yet, because of its very daring, it might succeed.
“What’s the matter?” said Rupert anxiously. “The heat getting you down?”
Jan shook himself back to present reality.
“I’m all tight,” he said. “I was just wondering how the Overlords would collect a little packet like that.”
“oh,” said Rupert, “one of those cargo ships of theirs will come down, open a hatch, and hoist it in.”
“That,” said Jan, “is exactly what I thought.’
It might have been the cabin of a spaceship, but it was not. The walls were covered with meters and instruments: there were no windows-merely a large screen in front of the pilot. The vessel could carry six passengers, but at the moment Jan was the only one.
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He was watching the screen intently, absorbing each glimpse of this strange and unknown region as it passed before his eyes. Unknown-yes, as unknown as anything he might meet beyond the stars, ifhis mad plan succeeded. He was going into a realm of nightmare creatures, preying upon each other in a darkness undisturbed since the world began. It was a realm above which men had sailed for thousands of years: it lay no more than a kilometre below the keels of their ships-yet until the last hundred years they had known less about it than the visible face of the moon.
The pilot was dropping down from the ocean heights, towards the still unexplored vastness of the South Pacific Basin. He was following, Jan knew, the invisible grid of sound waves created by beacons along the ocean floor. They were still sailing as far above that floor as clouds above the surface of the Earth….
There was very little to see: the submarine’s scanners were searching the waters in vain. The disturbance created by their jets had probably scared away the smaller fish: if any creature came to investigate, it would be something so large that it did not know the meaning of fear.
The tiny cabin vibrated with power-the power which could hold at bay the immense weight of the waters above their heads, and could create this little bubble of light and air within which men could live. If that power failed, thought Jan, they would become prisoners in a metal tomb, buried deep in the silt of the ocean bed.
“Time to get a fix,” said the pilot. He threw a set of switches, and the submarine came to rest in a gentle surge of deceleraion as the jets ceased their thrust. The vessel wasinotioniess, ~oating in equilibrium as a balloon floats in the atmosphere.
It took only a moment to check their position on the sonar ~rid. When he had finished with his instrument readings, the pilot remarked: “Before we start the motors again, let’s see if we can hear anything.”
The loudspeaker flooded the quiet little room with a low, ~ontinuous murmur of sound. There was no outstanding ioise that Jan could distinguish from the rest. It was a steady Dackground, into which all individual sounds had been Diended. He was listening, Jan knew, to the myriad creatures )f the sea talking together. It was as if he stood in the centre )f a forest that teemed with life-except that there he would
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have recognized some of the individual voices. Here, not one thread in the tapestry of sound could be disentangled and identified. It was so alien, so remote from anything he had ever known, that it set Jan’s scalp crawling. And yet this was part of his own world-The shriek cut across the vibrating background like a flash
of lightning against a dark stormdoud. It faded swiftly away Into a banshee wail, an ululation that dwindled and died, yet was repeated a moment later from a more distant source. Then a chorus of screams broke out, a pandemonium that caused the pilot to reach swiftly for the volume control.
‘What in the name of God was that?” gasped Jan.
“Weird, isn’t it? It’s a school of whales, about ten kilometres away. I knew they were in the neighbourhood and thought you’d like to hear them.”
Jan shuddered.
“And I always thought the sea was silent! Why do they make such a din?”
“Talking to one another, I suppose. Sullivan could tell you
-they say he can even identifS’ some individual whales, though I find that hard to believe. Hello, we’ve got company!”
A fish with incredibly exaggerated jaws was visible in the viewing screen. It appeared to be quite large, but as Jan did now know the scale of the picture it was bard to judge. Hanging from a point just below its gills was a long tendril, ending In an unidentifiable, bell-shaped organ.
“We’re seeing it on infra-red,” said the pilot. “Let’s look at the normal picture.”
The fish vanished completely. Only the pendant remained,
slowing with its own phosphorescence. Then, just for an mstant, the shape of the creature ifickered into visibility as a line of lights flashed out along its body.
“It’s an angler: that’s the bait it uses to lure other fish. Fantastic, Isn’t it? What I don’t understand is-why doesn’t his bait attract fish big enough to eat him? But we can’t wait here all day. Watch him run when I switch on the jets.”
The cabin vibrated once again as the vessel eased itself forward. The great luminous fish suddenly flashed on all its lights in a frantic signal of alarm, and departed like a meteor Into the darkness of the abyss.
It was after another twenty minutes of slow descent that the Invisible fingers of the scanner beams caught the first
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glimpse of the ocean bed. Far beneath, a range of low hills was passing, their outlines curiously soft and rounded. What-~ ever irregularities they might once have possessed had long ago been obliterated by the ceaseless rain from the watery heights above. Even here in mid-Pacific, far from the great estuaries that slowly swept the continents out to sea, that rain never ceased. It came from the storm-scarred flanks of the Andes, J from the bodies of a billion living creatures, from the dust ofi meteors that had wandered through space for ages and had come at last to rest. Here in the eternal night, it was laying the foundations of the lands to be.