"Anybody who happened to overhear the home twittering of Ebb"s clever feature-script writer could blackmail us for years," I told her.

It pa.s.sed her by.

"I"ve been thinking about what Mallarby said," she remarked, "and I don"t see why people couldn"t make up their minds to leave those things down there alone. I mean, if there is one part of the world that can be of no conceivable use to us, a part we can"t even reach, and it happens to suit them, then why not let them have it?"

"That"s reasonable-superficially, at any rate," I agreed, "but Mallarby"s point was, and I agree with that, that it"s a matter of instinct, not reason. The instinct of self-protection is opposed to the very idea of an alien intelligence-and not without pretty good cause. It"s difficult to imagine any kind of intelligence, except a sheer abstraction, that wouldn"t be concerned to modify its environment for its own betterment. But it is very unlikely that the ideas of betterment held by two different types would be identical-so unlikely that it suggests a hypothesis that, given two intelligent species with differing requirements on one planet, it is inevitable that, sooner or later, one will exterminate the other."

Phyllis thought it over.

"That has a pretty grim, Darwinian sound, Mike," she remarked.

" "Grim" isn"t an objective word, darling. It"s simply the way things usually work. If one species lived in salt water, and the other in fresh, you would, in the course of time, inevitably reach a situation where the interests of the races demanded that one should freshen the sea while the other was doing its d.a.m.nedest to salt the takes and rivers. It looks to me as if that is bound to apply unless the needs are identical-and if the needs are identical, then they are not a different species."

"You mean, you"re in favour of going on sending down atom bombs, and that kind of thing?" she said.

"Darling, if I happen to mention that, as a process, autumn follows summer, it does not follow that I am all for getting a ladder and pulling the leaves off the trees."

"I don"t see why you should want to."

"I don"t."

"You mean, you"re not in favour of sending down atom bombs? By the way you were talking before, I thought-"

"Look, let"s drop atom bombs for the moment no, d.a.m.n it, I mean, let"s leave them out of it. The thing is that once we had developed intelligence we weren"t satisfied with the world as we found it; so, are the things down there likely to be satisfied with it as they find it? Such evidence as we have suggests that they are not-they don"t like being bombed by us, for instance. Then the real point is, how long will it be before the efforts to change it for the convenience of both parties come into serious opposition?"

"Well, since you"ve asked me, I should say you have answered your own question: it happened when we prodded them with the first atom bomb. That"s what I"m complaining about."

"Scarcely a matter for complaint, darling, and anyway, it"s too late. We must have gone down then on their environment-improvement list with a high priority, even if we hadn"t before. There was a certain ominousness in the speed with which they took up the defensive-as if they might have expected something of the kind and prepared for it. What really remains to be seen is whether the natural obstacles that now separate us will defeat their abilities as they almost defeat ours and, if they do not, then how we can meet them when they come."

"Then, on the whole, you are in favour of dropping bombs?" suggested Phyllis.

"For goodness sake! Let"s get this thing straight. Darling, I and the Royal Navy are not in favour of dropping atom bombs: we think it poisons too much water, for problematical results. But I, and, I hope, the Royal Navy, too, are prepared to take up arms against this sea of troubles, as and when it may appear necessary and effective. In this I have no doubt that others will join us. The weapons to be chosen will be dictated largely by the time, place, and nature of the need."

Phyllis sat with her head propped on her left hand, her eyes unseeingly on the newspaper.

"You said, "inevitable". Do you really think that?" she asked, after a time.

"Yes. Even if only part of what Bocker thinks is right. We can"t both inherit the Earth."

"When, do you think?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "When you think of the difficulties that both lots must overcome to get at the other effectively, it looks as if it might be a long time coming to a head-a generation or two, perhaps, or a century or two. I don"t see how anybody could hope to get nearer than a wild guess."

Phyllis picked up a pencil, and watched her fingers abstractedly as they twiddled it. Presently she became quite still, staring rigidly at nothing. I knew the symptoms, and forbore to interrupt. After a time she said: "How would this be? Start with sounds of a tearing wind and an angry sea. Perhaps a lifeboat putting out, with the men"s words blown away as they speak. Then fade out all but the natural sounds of wind and sea. Then-how would you contrive the effect of sinking under the water? Keep the water-sounds, and diminish the wind? Then give the water-sounds a slower rhythm, diminishing, too, gradually. Voice counts: "-three fathoms-four fathoms-full fathom five and down-down-down " There"s only a slow, indefinite surge to suggest water movement now. As it gets fainter you begin to hear the chirruping fish, then the squawking ones, and the others until there"s fish pandemonium, which gradually diminishes to a final chirrup. Then I"m not sure whether it ought to be the voice telling the fathoms, or whether a mysterious silence would be more effective but next, deep grunts, some snarls, and galumphing noises. Voice intones about Leviathan and the monsters of the deep, and repeats "down-down-down" Occasional, indefinable sounds until absolute silence, out of which Voice says: "The deep-sea bottom! The uttermost part of the Earth! It is dark; it has always been dark; it will always be dark until the seas dry up and the and Earth spins on her endless way, with life a tale that has long been told and finished.

""But now, that is far away in the future, as far away in time as it will take the sun to scorch up the five miles of water above our heads; and it is dark.

" "It is cold, too, as cold as any glacier; and quiet... and still... It has been still for aeons...

""We have brought down light with us from the world far above, and we switch it on. We see a wide floor flanked by gigantic rocky cliffs. But it is not a solid floor. If we were to try to step on it we should sink through many feet of ooze before it became solid enough to support us.

""All the time, in the beam of our lights we can see motes endlessly descending and descending to make the great bed of ooze.

""It is an eerie place, an awful place, death"s own place; for the floor, the rock shelves, everything but the perpendicular faces of the cliffs, is drifted deep with the mortal remains of untold billion millions of minute creatures. "Nothing," you would say, "absolutely nothing could live here. This is beyond the reach of Life: the nethermost pit."

" "But-" and then some stuff about the improbable places you do find life, leading up to: "-is this, the most secret womb in the world, not barren, after all?" Er, well, words to that effect, anyway. And then, giving the Bocker line a complete miss: "Is a new form of life and not only of life, but of intelligent life about to emerge from these depths, from this slime, and struggle up through the miles of water to the sunlight, perhaps to challenge the supremacy of man himself? Millions of years ago our own ancestors crawled from the sea on to the land-" Then sprinkle in some bits which support the possibility. Then you can follow on with a piece about the inevitable animosity, and I can take the line that should the two forms of intelligence be complementary they may be able to solve all the riddles of the universe between them. What about something along those lines?"

I considered. "Well, to be frank, darling, I don"t quite see the overall form, and conclusion."

"I"m seeing it rather as one of those "Whither-?" things, only not highbrow. You know, ending on a question."

"As well it may. If I may say so, Voice doesn"t seem to have quite made up his mind whether he is a florid moralist, or a metaphorical guide. But I think I see the mood you"re after-the picture of a new kind of life emerging from the mysteries of a sort of super Celtic-twilight-that kind of thing?"

"Well, allowing for the fact that I shouldn"t express it at all like that-roughly, yes, I suppose."

"Well, Phyl, you"d have an awful handful there, because, honestly, I don"t think this thing can be made to lend itself to a romantic treatment. Why not wait until we get a few more facts to add to it, and then try again along more doc.u.mentary lines? They"re always your real hits, you know."

She thought it over. "You"re probably right, Mike. But I"d like to get in first with that angle, so I hope we don"t have to wait too long for the extra facts."

"I, on the other hand, would prefer that we should never have them at all. I should be a lot happier if I were to hear that the things down there had simply drowned themselves, but I"m prepared to be disappointed."

And I thought I was. n.o.body, however, was really prepared for the next day"s news.

PHASE TWO.

We made an early start that morning. The car, ready loaded, had stood out all night, and we were away a few minutes after five, with the intention of putting as much of southern England behind us as we could before the roads got busy. It was two hundred and sixty-eight point eight (when it wasn"t point seven or point nine) miles to the door of the cottage that Phyllis had bought with a small legacy from her Aunt Helen.

I had rather favoured the idea of a cottage a mere fifty miles or so away from London, but it was Phyllis"s aunt who was to be commemorated with what was now Phyllis"s money, so we became the proprietors of Rose Cottage, Penllyn, Nr Constantine, Cornwall, Telephone Number: Navasgan 333. It was a grey-stone, five-roomed cottage set on a south-easterly sloping. heathery hillside, with its almost eavesiess roof clamped down tight on it in the true Cornish manner. Straight before us we looked across the Helford River, and on towards the Lizard where, by night, we could see the flashing of the lighthouse. To the left was a view of the coast stretching raggedly away on the other side of Falmouth Bay, and if we walked a hundred yards ahead, and so out of the lee of the hillside which protected us from the south-westerly gales, we could look across Mount"s Bay, towards the Scilly Isles, and the open Atlantic beyond. Falmouth, 7 miles; Helston, 9; elevation 332 feet above sea-level; several, though not all, mod. con. When you did reach it you decided that it was worth travelling two hundred and sixty-eight point eight (or nine) miles, after all.

We used it in a migratory fashion. When we had enough commissions and ideas on hand to keep us going for a time we would withdraw there to drive our pens and bash our typewriters in pleasant, undistracting seclusion for a few weeks. Then we would return to London for a while, market our wares, cement relations, and angle for commissions until we felt the call to go down there again with another acc.u.mulated batch of work-or we might, perhaps, simply declare a holiday.

That morning, I made pretty good time. It was still only half past eight when I removed Phyllis"s head from my shoulder and woke her up to announce: "Yeovil, and breakfast, darling." I left her trying to pull herself together to order breakfast intelligibly while I went to get some newspapers. By the time I returned she was functioning better, and had already started on the cereal. I handed over her paper, and looked at mine. The main headline in both was given to a shipping disaster. That this should be so when the ship concerned was j.a.panese suggested that there was little news from elsewhere.

I glanced at the "story" below the picture of the ship. From a welter of human interest I unearthed the fact that the j.a.panese liner, Yatsushiro, bound from Nagasaki to Amboina, in the Moluccas, had sunk. Out of some seven hundred people on board, only five survivors had been found.

Now, in common with most of my fellow-countrymen, though independently of foundation, I have the feeling that in the Occident we construct, but in the Orient they contrapt. Thus the news of an oriental bridge collapsing, train leaving the rails, or, as in the present case, ship sinking, never impinges with quite the novelty its western counterpart would arouse, and the sense of concern is consequently less acute. I do not defend this phenomenon; I regard it as reprehensible. Nevertheless, it is so, and in consequence I turned the page with my sense of tragedy somewhat qualified by non-surprise. Before I could settle down to the leader, however, Phyllis interrupted with an exclamation. I looked across. Her paper carried no picture of the vessel; instead, it printed a small sketch-map of the area, and she was intently studying the spot marked "X".

"What is it?" I asked.

She put her finger on the map. "Speaking from memory, and always supposing that the cross was made by somebody with a conscience," she said, "doesn"t that put the scene of this sinking pretty near our old friend the Mindanao Trench?"

I looked at the map, trying to recall the configuration of the ocean floor around there.

"It can"t be far off," I agreed.

I turned back to my own paper, and read the account there more carefully. "Women," apparently, "screamed when-" "Women in night-attire ran from their cabins-," "Women, wide-eyed with terror, clutched their children-" "Women-" this and "Women-" that when "death struck silently at the sleeping liner.". When one had swept all this woman jargon and the London Office"s repertoire of phrases suitable for trouble at sea aside, the skeleton of a very bare Agency message was revealed-so bare that for a moment I wondered why two large newspapers had decided to splash it instead of giving it just a couple of inches. Then I perceived the real mystery angle which lay submerged among all the phoney dramatics-It was that the Yatsushiro had, without warning, and for no known reason, suddenly gone down like a stone.

I got hold of a copy of this Agency message later, and I found its starkness a great deal more alarming and dramatic than this business of dashing about in "night-attire". Nor had there been much time for that kind of thing, for, after giving particulars of the time, place, etc., the message concluded laconically: "Fair weather, no (no) collision, no (no) explosion, cause unknown. Foundered less one (one) minute alarm. Owners state quote impossible unquote."

So there can have been very few shrieks that night. No unfortunate j.a.panese women-and men-had time to wake, and then, perhaps, a little time to wonder, bemused with sleep, and then the water came to choke them: there were no shrieks, just a few bubbles as they sank down, down, down in their nineteen-thousand-ton steel coffin.

When I had read what there was I looked up. Phyllis was regarding me, chin on hands, across the breakfast table. Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then she said: "It says here: "-in one of the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean." Do you think this can be it, Mike-so soon?"

I hesitated. "It"s difficult to tell. So much of this stuff"s obviously synthetic... If it actually was only one minute... No, I suspend judgement, Phyl. We"ll see The Times tomorrow and find out what really happened-if anyone knows."

We drove on, making poorer time on the busier roads, stopped to lunch at the usual little hotel on Dartmoor, and finally arrived in the late afternoon-two hundred and sixty-eight point seven, this time. We were sleepy and hungry again, and though I did remember, when I telephoned London, to ask for cuttings on the sinking to be sent, the fate of the Yatsushiro on the other side of the world seemed as remote from the concerns of a small grey Cornish cottage as the loss of the t.i.tanic.

The Times noticed the affair the next day in a cautious manner which gave an impression of the staff pursing their lips and staying their hands rather than mislead their readers in any way. Not so, however, the reports in the first batch of cuttings which arrived on the afternoon of the following day. We put the stack between us, and drew from it. Facts were evidently still meagre, but there was plenty of comment. My first read: "Mystery still shrouds the fate of the ill-starred j.a.panese liner, Yatsushiro, which plunged to her doom bringing sudden death to all but five of her seven hundred pa.s.sengers, including women and children, on Monday night off the southern islands of the Philippine group. No mystery of the sea since the still unsolved riddle of the Marie Celeste has presented more baffling queries..."

The next one read: "It seems likely that the fate of the Yatsushiro may well take a place in the long list of unsolved mysteries of the sea. Nothing quite so unaccountable has occurred since the schooner, Marie Celeste, was discovered adrift with..."

And the next: "Statements made by the five j.a.panese sailors, the only survivors of the Yatsushiro disaster, serve only to deepen the mystery surrounding the ship"s fate. Why did she sink? How could she sink so swiftly? Answers to these questions may never be forthcoming, any more than they were to the questions posed by the mystery of the Marie Celeste which have eluded solution..."

And the next: "Even in these modern times of radio, etc., the sea can still produce mysteries to defeat us. The loss of the liner, Yatsushiro, presents puzzles as baffling as any in the annals of navigation, and to all appearance no more likely to be satisfactorily explained than were the problems aroused by the famous Marie Celeste, which, it will be recalled..."

I reached for another.

"It says here," Phyllis broke in, looking at the cutting in her hand, with a slight frown: ""The tragic loss of the Yatsushiro bids fair to rank high among the unsolved problems of the high seas. It is, in its way, only a little less baffling than the still unanswered questions posed by the famous Marie Celeste""

"Yes, darling," I agreed.

And the one before said: ""A mystery even deeper than that surrounding the celebrated Marie Celeste veils the fate of the vanished Yatsushiro..."" Wasn"t the whole point about the Marie Celeste that she didn"t sink?"

"Roughly-yes, darling."

"Well, then what is all this about her for?"

"It is what is known as an "angle", darling. It means in translation, that n.o.body has the ghost of an idea why the Yatsushiro sank. Consequently she has been cla.s.sified as a Mystery-of-the-Sea. This gives her a natural affinity with other Mysteries-of-the-Sea, and the Marie Celeste was the only specific Mystery-of-the-Sea that anyone could call to mind in the white heat of composition. In other words, they are completely stumped."

"It"s not worth looking through the rest, then?"

"Scarcely. But we"d better. I"d like to know if anybody is speculating-and if not, why not? We can"t be the only people who are putting two and two together. So just keep an eye out for guesses."

She nodded, and we went on working through the pile, learning more about the Marie Celeste than we did about the Yatsushiro. There was only one check. Phyllis gave a "Ha" of discovery.

"This one"s different," she said. "Listen! "The full story behind the sinking of the j.a.panese vessel. Yatsushiro, is not likely to be revealed. This luxury liner, lavishly decorated and furnished, was built in j.a.pan, with capital emanating largely from Wall Street, at a time when the gap between uncontrolled wage-levels and the rising cost of living for the j.a.panese worker-"

"Oh, I see."

"What do they work round to?" I asked.

She skimmed the rest. "I don"t think they do. There"s just a kind of all-through suggestion that it was too contaminated by capital to keep afloat."

"Well, that"s the only theory out of this lot," I said. "All got a strong dose of not-before-the-children this time. And not altogether surprising, seeing the h.e.l.l the advertisers raised over the last global panic they pulled. But they"re going to have to do better than this skulking behind the Marie Celeste; you can"t just proclaim a thing a Mystery-of-the-Sea and stop all theories for long. For one thing, the more intelligent weeklies haven"t such sensitive advertisers. Somehow I can"t see Tribune or the-"

Phyllis cut me off: "Mike, this isn"t a game, you know. After all, a big ship has gone down, and seven hundred poor people have been drowned. That is a terrible thing. I dreamt last night that I was shut up in one of those little cabins when the water came bursting in."

"Yesterday-" I began, and then stopped. I had been about to say that yesterday Phyllis had poured a kettle of boiling water down a crack in order to kill a lot more than seven hundred ants, but thought better of it. "Yesterday," I amended, "a lot of people were killed in road accidents, a lot will be today."

"I don"t see what that has to do with it," she said.

She was right. It was not a very good amendment-but neither had it been the right moment to postulate the existence of a menace that might think no more of us than we of ants.

"As a race," I said, "we have allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the idea that the proper way to die is in bed. at a ripe age. It is a delusion. The normal end for all creatures comes suddenly. The-"

But that wasn"t the right thing to say at that time, either. She withdrew, using those short, brisk, hard-on-the-heel steps.

I was sorry. I was worried, too, but it takes me differently.

I was evidently not alone in thinking that a solution would have to be provided. The next day, it was. Almost every newspaper explained it, and on Friday the weeklies elaborated it. It could be compressed into two words-metal-fatigue.

Certain new alloys recently developed in j.a.panese laboratories had, it seemed, been used, for the first time on any considerable scale, in the construction of the Yatsushiro. Metallurgical experts conceded it as not impossible that some, or one, of these alloys might, if the ship"s engines were to produce vibrations of a certain critical periodicity, become fatigued, and therefore brittle. A fracture of one member so affected would throw on others a sudden strain which, in their weakened state, they might be unable to take. Thus, the collapse of susceptible members might be rapidly successive and conducive to speedy disintegration of the whole. Or, one might put it that the whole ship was ready to fall apart at the drop of a hat.

This could not, at the moment, be positively established as the sole cause of the disaster since detailed examination of the structure was at present precluded by circ.u.mstances. Or, again, five or six miles of water.

It had been decided, however, that all work on the Yatsushiro"s sister-ship, now on the stocks, would be suspended pending the application of exhaustive tests regarding the crystalline structure of the alloys intended for use in her construction.

"Ah! The blinding light of science," I said after reading several closely similar versions in different papers. "A bit hard on that shipyard, and not, perhaps, very consoling to the relatives, but a pretty piece of work, all the same. So rea.s.suring for all the rest of us. Observe the nicer points: not just general metal-fatigue, nor even weld-fatigue, which might alarm people about welded ships in general; no, just the fatigue of an unspecified alloy or two used in one j.a.panese ship. No other ship is likely to suffer from this deciduous complaint: no need for the seafaring public to feel the least concern lest any other ship should get a touch of this ague and shake itself to bits. And the sea...? Nothing to do with it. The sea is as safe as ever it was."

"But it could be so, couldn"t it?" said Phyllis.

"That"s the beauty of it. It had to be something that could be if only just. And I think they"ll very likely get away with it. The general public will take it, and the technical men won"t stand to gain anything by contesting it in public, anyway."

"I"d like to believe it," said Phyllis. "I think I even might, if I hadn"t given myself to a cynic-and, of course, if the thing hadn"t happened to happen just where it did."

I pondered.

"I imagine," I said, "that marine insurance rates will be pegged at the moment, to preserve confidence-but we ought to keep an eye on the prices of shipping shares."

Phyllis got up and went to the window. From where she stood, at the side of it, she had a view of the blue water stretching to the horizon.

"Mike," she said, "I"m sorry about yesterday. The thing-this ship going down like that-suddenly got me. Until now this has been a sort of guessing game, a puzzle. Losing the bathyscope with poor Wiseman and Trant was bad, and so was losing the naval ships. But this-well, it suddenly seemed to put it into a different category-a big liner full of ordinary, harmless men, women, and children peacefully asleep, to be wiped out in a few seconds in the middle of the night! It"s somehow a different cla.s.s of thing altogether. Do you see what I mean? Naval people are always taking risks doing their jobs-but these people on a liner hadn"t anything to do with it. It made me feel that those things down there had been a working hypothesis that I had hardly believed in, and now, all at once, they had become horribly real. I don"t like it, Mike. I suddenly started to feel afraid. I don"t quite know why."

I went over and put an arm round her.

"I know what you mean," I said. "I think it is part of it-the thing is not to let it get us down."

She turned her head. " Part of what?" she asked, puzzled.

"Part of the process we are going through-the instinctive reaction. The idea of an alien intelligence here is intolerable to us, we must hate and fear it. We can"t help it even our own kind of intelligence when it goes a bit off the rails in drunks and crazies alarms us not very rationally."

"You mean I"d not be feeling quite the same way about it if I knew that it had been done by-well, the Chinese, or somebody?"