The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [59]
Franklin gave a brief eyewitness description of the scene for the benefit of his patiently waiting colleagues a mile above. It was probably being broadcast, and he hoped that Indra and Peter were listening. Then he settled down to keep an eye on Percy as the long haul back to the surface began.
They could not move at more than two knots, lest the collar lose its none-too-secure grip on the great mass of jelly it was towing. In any event, the trip back to the surface had to take at least three hours, to give Percy a fair chance of adjusting to the pressure difference. Since an airbreathing—and therefore more vulnerable—animal like a sperm whale could endure almost the same pressure change in ten or twenty minutes, this caution was probably excessive. But Dr. Roberts was taking no chances with his unprecedented catch.
They had been climbing slowly for nearly an hour, and had reached the three-thousand-foot level, when Percy showed signs of life. The two long arms, terminating in their great sucker-covered palps, began to writhe purposefully; the monstrous eyes, into which Franklin had been staring half hypnotized from a distance of no more than five feet, began to light once more with intelligence. Quite unaware that he was speaking in a breathless whisper, he swiftly reported these symptoms to Dr. Roberts.
The doctor’s first reaction was a hearty sigh of relief: “Good!” he said. “I was afraid we might have killed him. Can you see if he’s breathing properly? Is the siphon contracting?”
Franklin dropped a few feet so that he could get a better view of the fleshy tube projecting from the squid’s mantle. It was opening and closing in an unsteady rhythm which seemed to be getting stronger and more regular at every beat.
“Splendid!” said Dr. Roberts. “He’s in fine shape. As soon as he starts to wriggle too hard, give him one of the small bombs. But leave it until the last possible moment.”
Franklin wondered how that moment was to be decided. Percy was now beginning to glow a beautiful blue; even with the searchlights switched off he was clearly visible. Blue, he remembered Dr. Roberts saying, was a sign of excitement in squids. In that case, it was high time he did something.
“Better let go that bomb. I think he’s getting lively,” he told Don.
“Right—here it is.”
A glass bubble floated across Franklin’s screen and swiftly vanished from sight.
“The damn thing never broke!” he cried. “Let go another one!”
“O.K.—here’s number two. I hope this works; I’ve only got five left.”
But once again the narcotic bomb failed. This time Franklin never saw the sphere; he only knew that instead of relaxing into slumber once more Percy was becoming more active second by second. The eight short tentacles—short, that is, compared with the almost hundred-foot reach of the pair carrying the grasping palps—were now beginning to twine briskly together. He recalled Melville’s phrase: “Like a nest of anacondas.” No; somehow that did not seem to fit. It was more like a miser—a submarine Shylock—twisting his fingers together as he gloated over his wealth. In any event, it was a disconcerting sight when those fingers were a foot in diameter and were operating only two yards away.…
“You’ll just have to keep on trying,” he told Don. “Unless we stop him soon, he’ll get away.”
An instant later he breathed a sigh of relief as he saw broken shards of glass drifting by. They would have been quite invisible, surrounded as they were by water, had they not been fluorescing brilliantly under the light of his ultraviolet searchlight. But for the moment he was too relieved to wonder why he had been able to see something as proverbially elusive as a piece of broken glass in water; he only knew that Percy had suddenly relaxed again and no longer appeared to be working himself into a rage.
“What happened?” said Dr. Roberts plaintively from above.
“These