The Atlantic Abomination Read Free Page B

see into the murky water. There was nothing, exceptfor a lump of something solid but not very heavy tumbling through the edge of the light from the beacon. It moved, slowly, but it vanished forever towards the ooze of the Atlantic floor.
    “I think it’s stopped,” he said harshly, and then remembered to relapse into whispering. “Have we been moved far?”
    “Not very,” Mary managed to reply.
    “Could you relocate the spot we were at before?”
    “Oh God, I don’t know.” She made a gesture as though to brush hair out of her eyes. Her hand fetched up short against the hardness of her helmet. “I can try. You’re going out?”
    “Of course! If there’s the remotest chance he’s still in reach … He may only have been trapped in sludge. Maybe he’s still in the cave, unable to pick us up or get his signals through.” He was starting to operate the lock door.
    Mary stopped with her hand poised to open the reactor pipe. For a long moment she remained still. Then she turned away shaking her head. “It’s not worth the risk. There may be another fall coming.”
    “Not worth it? What do you mean? So long as there’s any hope—”
    Then a sudden light dawned on him. Mary must be about twenty-seven. He knew for sure Luke was thirty.
    “Mary, wasn’t Luke at Scripps Institute before he came to us at Atlantic?”
    Her answering “yes” was barely breathed.
    “Was it Luke who got you down here? Like you said?”
    Again, fainter, “Yes.”
    “All right. It may not be worth it for you, he may not be the godlike ideal you thought he was when you were fourteen, but he’s a human being and a damn fine oceanographer. I won’t give him up till I’ve seen for myself! Now get the ’nef moving!”
    He passed through the lock and seized the handholds on the hull, staring ahead towards the Ridge. The bathynef’s speed was at most two knots. He could barely feel the pressuredifference caused by their slow advance, but it was enough to make suspended mud deposit on his faceplate and force him to scrape it off every minute or two.
    Nonetheless, the brilliance of the beacon sheared through the muddy fog, and he was able to deduce that although the shock had been violent, the fall had been comparatively small. Only a few hundred tons of ooze would have taken part in the slithering redistribution of weight.
Only!
Peter shuddered. The Ostrovsky-Wong process enabled the human body to resist enormous pressures, but the weight of a hundred tons of mud was another question altogether.
    Almost without doubt, it was hopeless.
    “Right. Steady!” he commanded Mary. “I can see the wall ahead.” He surveyed the gradually widening area that the beacon illuminated. “It looks like we’re coming back at the same spot, okay. There’s a vague color difference between the mud ahead and the rest, like it was reflecting more light from an irregular surface.”
    “How close do you think we can go?” Mary’s voice showed restrained tension.
    “As close as your nerves will let you bring her,” Peter answered grimly. “Okay, hold it. I don’t see where another fall could come from. The ooze has slipped over a hundred square yards. I’ll cast off now and survey the surface without touching anything. If it seems to have settled I’ll go over with the sonar and see if I can get a reflection off Luke’s helmet or oxygen bottles.”
    There was practically no risk of further slipping, he decided after carefully circling the area of the disaster. Accordingly, he set the little sonar device which normally served for communication so that it would receive its own impulses, and began laboriously to quarter the surface of the shifted mud, back and forth, back and forth. …
    He was on the point of signalling to Mary that he must give up, when a last thought struck him. Maybe the ooze had slipped clear of the mouth of the cave where Luke hadbeen trapped, slipped all the way to a lower level. They could well be a little below the