The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [55]
Don followed him at once, and they circled five hundred feet above the sea bed—far beyond visual range. On the sonar screen the rocky bottom was a sharply defined plane, but now at its center pulsed a tiny, brilliant star. The little beacon—less than six inches long and barely an inch wide—that had been anchored in Percy was already doing its job. It would continue to operate for more than a week before its batteries failed.
“We’ve tagged him!” cried Don gleefully. “Now he can’t hide.”
“As long as he doesn’t get rid of that dart,” said Franklin cautiously. “If he works it out, we’ll have to start looking for him all over again.”
“I aimed it,” pointed out Don severely. “Bet you ten to one it stays put.”
“If I’ve learned one thing in this game,” said Franklin, “it’s not to accept your bets.” He brought the drive up to maximum cruising power, and pointed the sub’s nose to the surface, still more than half a mile away. “Let’s not keep Doc Roberts waiting—the poor man will be crazy with impatience. Besides, I want to see those pictures myself. It’s the first time I’ve ever played a starring role with a giant squid.”
And this, he reminded himself, was only the curtain raiser. The main feature had still to begin.
CHAPTER XV
“HOW NICE IT is,” said Franklin, as he relaxed lazily in the contour-form chair on the porch, “to have a wife who’s not scared stiff of the job I’m doing.”
“There are times when I am,” admitted Indra. “I don’t like these deep-water operations. If anything goes wrong down there, you don’t have a chance.”
“You can drown just as easily in ten feet of water as ten thousand.”
“That’s silly, and you know it. Besides, no warden has ever been killed by drowning, as far as I’ve ever heard. The things that happen to them are never as nice and simple as that.”
“I’m sorry I started this conversation,” said Franklin ruefully, glancing around to see if Peter was safely out of earshot. “Anyway, you’re not worried about Operation Percy, are you?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m as anxious as everybody else to see you catch him—and I’m still more interested to see if Dr. Roberts can keep him alive.” She rose to her feet and walked over to the bookshelf recessed into the wall. Plowing through the usual pile of papers and magazines that had accumulated there, she finally unearthed the volume for which she was looking.
“Listen to this,” she continued, “and remember that it was written almost two hundred years ago.” She began to read in her best lecture-room voice, while Franklin listened at first with mild reluctance, and then with complete absorption.
“In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and slightly gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on reappearing once more, like a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod, the negro yelled out—‘There! there again! there she breaches! Right ahead! The White Whale! The White Whale!’
“The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars suspended, we were awaiting its appearance, lo! in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to catch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like