I sat up. "But, darling, the Oceanographical Society has more or less threatened to excommunicate anybody who deals with us after that last script-it"s part of their anti-Bocker line."

"Well, Dr Matet happens to be a friend of the Captain"s. He"s seen his fireball-incidence maps, and he"s a half-convert. Anyway, we"re not convinced Bockerites, are we?"

"What we think we are isn"t necessarily what other people think we are. Still, if he"s willing-When can we see him?"

"I hope to see him in a few days" time, darling."

"Don"t you think I should-"

"No. But it"s sweet of you not to trust me still."

"But I-"

"No. And now it"s time we went to sleep," she said, firmly.

The beginning of Phyllis"s interview was, she reported, almost standard: "EBC?" said Doctor Matet, raising eyebrows like miniature doormats. "I thought Captain Winters said BBC."

He was a man with a large frame sparingly covered, which gave his head the appearance of properly belonging to a still larger frame. His tanned forehead was high, and well polished back to the crown. This dome was hedged about with wiry grey hair which stuck out in tufts over each ear. His bright eyes peered at one past a p.r.o.nouncedly Roman nose. His large, responsive mouth surmounted a slightly cleft chin. As if all this dominating apparatus were slightly too heavy for him, he stooped. He gave one, Phyllis said, a feeling of being over-hung.

She sighed inwardly, and started on the routine justification of the English Broadcasting Company"s existence, with the a.s.surances that sponsorship did not necessarily connote venality, venenosity, or even vapidity. He found this an interesting point of view. Phyllis recited examples of ill.u.s.trious EBC occasions and persons, and worked him round gradually until he had reached the position of considering us nice enough people striving manfully to overcome the disadvantages of being considered a slightly second cla.s.s oracle. Then, after making it quite clear that any material he might supply was strictly anonymous in origin, he opened up a bit.

The trouble from Phyllis"s point of view was that he did it on a pretty academic level, full of strange words and instances which she had to interpret as best she could. The gist of what he had to tell her, however, seemed to be this: A year ago there had begun to be reports of discolorations in certain ocean currents. The first observation of the kind had been made in the Kuro Siwo current in the North Pacific-an unusual muddiness flowing north-east, becoming less discernible as it gradually widened out along the West Wind Drift until it was no longer perceptible by the naked eye.

"Samples were taken and sent for examination, of course, and what do you think the discoloration turned out to be?" said Dr Matet.

Phyllis looked properly expectant. He told her: "Mainly radiolarian ooze, but with an appreciable percentage of diatomaceous ooze."

"How very remarkable!" Phyllis said, safely. "Now what on earth could produce a result like that?"

"Ah," said Dr Matet, "that is the question. A disturbance on a quite remarkable scale-even in samples taken on the other side of the ocean, off the coast of California, there was still quite a heavy impregnation of both these oozes."

"That"s astonishing, isn"t it?" said Phyllis. "The effects?"

"One cannot hope to foresee more than the most obvious effects. Some changes in fish migrations are already becoming noticeable, and a certain increase in sea vegetation along the course, as one would expect. Naturally, with the water diatomaceously richer-"

He went on for some time, with Phyllis trying not to look too much as if she were grasping straws behind him. At last he said: "This, obviously, is of immense interest and the greatest importance, but naturally the most interesting question to us is why it should happen at all, and is continuing to happen. What, in fact, can have occurred that could be responsible for sending this sediment from the greatest depths to the surface in such amazing quant.i.ties?"

Phyllis felt that it was time she made a contribution.

"Well, there was that atomic bomb off the Marianas. I should think that would have made quite a stir down below," she said.

Dr Matet regarded her severely. "That bomb was dropped after the phenomenon had been observed, and in any case it is highly doubtful whether the results of a disturbance there would have been concentrated into the Kuro Siwo."

"Oh," said Phyllis.

"It is, as you know, an actively volcanic area," Dr Matet launched off again, "so that one"s natural inclination would be to attribute the disturbance to the opening of some new vent, or vents, on the sea-bottom. The seismograph records, however, give no support to that view. No major seismic shock has been registered-"

Phyllis went on listening patiently while he demolished earthquakes as a possible cause.

"And yet," she remarked at the end of it, "something not only was, but still is, going on down there?"

"Something is," he agreed, looking at her. Then, with a sudden descent to the vernacular, he added: "But, to be honest with you, Lord knows what it is."

He went on. Phyllis learned that, since then, similarly unexplained somethings had been throwing up deep-sea sediments into the Monsoon Drifts, off Guatemala; and also across the other side of the isthmus into the Mosquito Current. A thickening of the waters in equatorial mid-Atlantic had been observed, and the most recent report was of ooze appearing in the West Australian Current. There were also several minor irregularities of the same kind. Phyllis did her best to list them for possible reference, but just before she left she managed to put in a question on the aspect which seemed to her most interesting and important.

"Tell me this, Dr Matet," she asked. "Do you think it is serious-I mean, is it a thing that worries you?"

He smiled at her. "It doesn"t keep me awake at night, if that"s what you mean. No, our worry about it, if you can call it that, is that we don"t like having to admit that we are utterly baffled in our own bailiwick. As for its effect-well, I should think that might be beneficial. There is a great deal of nutritious ooze lying wasted on the sea-bottom. The more of it that comes up, the more the plankton will thrive; and the more the plankton thrives, the more the fish will thrive; consequently the price of fish ought to go down, which will be very nice for those who like fish of which I am not one. No, what troubles me is that I feel I ought to be able to answer a simple "why?" on the matter after all, I am supposed to have been an expert for a number of years now..."

"Too much geography," said Phyllis, "and too much oceanography, and too much bathyography: too much of all the ographies, and lucky to escape ichthyology."

"Tell me, "I said.

She did, with notes. "And," she concluded, "I"d like to see even Mrs Hawkes scribe a script out of that lot."

"H"m," I said.

"There"s no h"m about it. Some kind of ographer might give a talk on it to highbrows and low listening figures, but even if he were intelligible, where"d it get anybody?"

"That," I remarked, "is the key question each time. But little by little the bits do acc.u.mulate. This is another bit. You didn"t really expect to come back with the stuff for a whole script, anyway. He didn"t suggest how this might link up with the rest of it?"

"No. I said it was sort of funny how everything seemed to be happening down in the most inaccessible parts of the ocean lately, and a few things like that, but he didn"t rise. Very cautious. I think he was rather wishing he had not agreed to see me, so he stuck to verifiable facts. Eminently non-wheedlable at first meeting, anyhow. He admitted he doesn"t know, but he is not going to make any guesses that might send his reputation the way Bocker"s has gone. What it amounts to is that he"d like it to be volcanic, but it can"t be because of the evidence, and it"s not likely that it is due to an explosion, or series of explosions, of any kind because it keeps on coming up in a more or less steady flow which suggests that the force at work is both immense and continuous. Now you have a shot at it."

"Look," I said. "Bocker must have got to know about this as soon as anyone did. He ought to have some views on it, and it might be worth trying to find out what they are. That select Press-Conference of his that we went to was almost an introduction."

"He went very coy after that," she said, doubtfully. "Not surprising, really. Still, we weren"t among the ones who panned him publicly-in fact, we were very objective."

"Toss you which of us rings him up," I offered.

"I"ll do it," she said.

"I suppose it"s being a victim of the charm myself that stops me being jealous of the supreme self-confidence it inspires," I said. "Okay. Go ahead."

So I leant back comfortably in my chair, and listened to her going through the opening ceremony of making it clear that she was the EBC, not the BBC.

I will say for Bocker that having proposed his mouthful of a theory and then sold it to himself, he had not ratted on the deal when he found it unpopular. At the same time he had no great desire to be involved in a further round of controversy when he would be pelted with cheap cracks and drowned in the noise from empty vessels. He made that quite clear when we met. He looked at us earnestly, his head a little on one side, a lock of his grey hair hanging slightly forward, his hands clasped together. He nodded thoughtfully, and then said: "You want a theory from me because nothing you can think of will explain this phenomenon. Very well, you shall have one. I don"t suppose you"ll accept it, but I do ask you if you use it at all to use it anonymously. When people come round to my view again, I shall be ready, but I prefer not to be thought of as keeping my name before the public by letting out sensational driblets-is that quite clear?,"

We nodded.

"What we are trying to do," Phyllis explained, "is to fit a lot of bits and pieces into a puzzle. If you can show us where one of them should go, we"re very grateful. If you would rather not have the credit for it, well, that is your own affair, and we"ll respect it."

"Exactly. Well, you already know my theory of the origin of the deep-water intelligences, so we"re not go into that now. We"ll deal with their present state, and I deduce that to be this: having settled into the environment best suited to them, these creatures" next thought would be to develop that environment in accordance with their ideas of what const.i.tutes a convenient, orderly, and, eventually, civilised condition. They are, you see, in the position of-well, no, they are actually pioneers, colonists. Once they have safely arrived they set about improving and exploiting their new territory. What we have been seeing are the results of their having started work on the job."

"By doing what?" I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. "How can we possibly tell? But judging by the way we have received them, one would imagine that their primary concern would be to provide themselves with some form of defence against us. For this they would presumably require metals. I suggest to you, therefore, that somewhere down in the Mindanao Deep, and also somewhere in the Deep in the south-east of the Cocos-Keeling Basin, you would, if you could go there, find mining operations now in progress."

I glimpsed the reason for his demand for anonymity.

"Er-but the working of metals in such conditions-?" I said.

"How can we guess what technology they may have developed? We ourselves have plenty of techniques for doing things which would at first thought appear impossible in an atmospheric pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch; there are also a number of unlikely things we can do under water."

"But, with a pressure of tons, and in continual darkness, and-" but Phyllis cut across me with that decisiveness which warns me to shut up and not argue.

"Dr Bocker," she said," you named two particular Deeps then, why was that?"

He turned from me to her.

"Because that seems to me the only reasonable explanation where those two are concerned. It may be, as Mr Holmes once remarked to your husband"s ill.u.s.trious namesake, "a capital mistake to theorise before one has data," but it is mental suicide to funk the data one has. I know of nothing, and can imagine nothing, that could produce the effect we have here except some exceedingly powerful machine for continuous ejection."

"But," I said, a little firmly, for I get rather tired of being dogged by the ghost of Mr Holmes, "if it is mining as you suggest, then why is the discoloration due to ooze, and not grit?"

"Well, firstly there would be a great deal of ooze to be shifted before one could get at the rock, immense deposits, most likely; and secondly, the density of the ooze is little more than that of the water, whereas the grit, being heavy, would begin to settle long before it got anywhere near the surface, however fine it might be."

Before I could pursue that, Phyllis cut me off again: "What about the other places, Doctor. Why mention just those two?"

"I don"t say that the others don"t also signify mining, but I suspect, from their locations, that they may have another purpose."

"Which is-?" prompted Phyllis, looking at him, all girlish expectation.

"Communications, I think. You see, for instance, close to, though far below, the area where discoloration begins to occur in the equatorial Atlantic lies the Romance Trench. It is a gorge through the submerged mountains of the Atlantic Ridge. Now, when one considers the fact that it forms the only deep link between the eastern and western Atlantic Basins, it seems more than just a coincidence that signs of activity should show up there. In fact, it strongly suggests to me that something down below is not satisfied with the natural state of that Trench. It is quite likely that it is blocked here and there by falls of rock. It may be that in some parts it is narrow and awkward; almost certainly, if there were a prospect of using it, it would be an advantage to clear it of ooze deposits down to a solid bottom. I don"t know, of course, but the fact that something is undoubtedly taking place in that strategic Trench leaves me with little doubt that whatever is down there is concerned to improve its methods of getting about in the depths-just as we have improved our ways of getting about on the surface."

There was a silence while we took in that one, and its implications. Phyllis rallied first.

"Er-and the other two main places the Caribbean one, and the one west of Guatemala?" she asked.

Dr Bocker offered us cigarettes, and lit one himself.

"Well, now," he remarked, leaning back in his chair, "doesn"t it strike you as probable that for a creature of the depths a tunnel connecting the Deeps on either side of the isthmus would offer advantages almost identical with those that we ourselves obtain from the existence of the Panama Ca.n.a.l?"

People may say what they like about Bocker, but they can never truthfully claim that the scope of his ideas is mean or niggling. What is more, n.o.body has ever actually proved him wrong. His chief trouble was that he usually provided such large, indigestible slabs that they stuck in all gullets-even mine, and I would cla.s.s myself as a fairly wide-bulleted type. That, however, was a subsequent reflection. At the climax of the interview I was chiefly occupied with trying to convince myself that he really meant what he had said, and finding nothing but my own resistance to suggest that he did not.

Before we left, he gave us one more thing to think about, too. He said: "Since you are following this along, you"ve probably heard of two atomic bombs that failed to go off?"

We told him we had.

"And have you heard that there was an unsponsored atomic explosion yesterday?"

"No. Was it one of them?" Phyllis asked.

"I should very much hope so-because I should hate to think it could be any other," he replied. "But the odd thing is that though one was lost off the Aleutians, and the other in the process of trying to give the Mindanao Deep another shake up, the explosion took place not so far off Guam-a good twelve hundred miles from Mindanao."

"I wish," said Phyllis, "that I had been kinder and tried to pay more attention to dear Miss Popple who used to try to teach me geography, poor thing. Every day the world gets fuller of places I never heard of."

"That"s perfectly in order," I told her. "Haven"t you noticed that the places mentioned in military communiques am scarcely ever to be found on the maps? The geographers never heard of them, either."

"Well, it says here that over sixty people were drowned when a tsunami struck Roast Beef Island. Where"s Roast Beef Island? And what"s a tsunami?"

"I don"t know where Roast Beef Island is, though I can offer you two Plum Pudding Islands. But tsunami is j.a.panese for an earthquake-wave."

She regarded me.

"You needn"t look so smug, dear. It"s only half marks. The thing is, would it be anything to do with us?"

"Us?"

"Well, with those things down there, I mean."

"Not unless it was a phoney tsunami."

"How euphonious! "Phoney tsunami"!-" She went on crooning; "Euphony-euphony-phoney-tsunami" to herself for a bit until she ended suddenly: "How would we know?"

"Look, I"m trying to think. Know what?"

"Whether it"s phoney or not, of course."

"Well, you could ring up your learned pal, Dr Matet. Oceanographers have meters and things to tell them what kind of wave"s what, and where it comes from."

"Do they really. How?"

"How would I know how? They just do. He"d be sure to have heard if there were anything funny about it"

"All right," she said, and went off.

Presently she came back.

"It"s okay," she reported, disappointedly." There was, I quote: "a minor seismic disturbance in the neighbourhood of St Ambrose Island, longitude something, lat.i.tude something else." Anyway, off Chile. And Roast Beef Island is another name for Esperanzia Island."

"Where"s Esperanzia Island?" I enquired.

"I don"t know," she said, happily.

She sat down and picked up the paper. "Everything seems to have gone very quiet lately," she said.

"I hadn"t noticed it. I might, if you would try to do some work, too," I replied.

A few minutes" silence ensued. Then she said: "Captain Winters rang up yesterday. Did you know there hasn"t been a single fireball reported for over two months?"

Evidently this was one of those mornings. I put my pen into its holder, and took out a cigarette.

"I didn"t, but it"s not very surprising; they"ve been rare for quite a time now. Had he any comments?"

"Oh, no. He just sort of mentioned it."

"I suppose the Bocker view would be that the first phase of colonisation has been completed: the pioneers have established themselves, and the settlement is now on its own to sink or swim."

"Predominantly, sink," said Phyllis.