The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [68]
Five thousand feet lower down, that zest returned with all its old vigor. They both saw the echo simultaneously, and for a moment were shouting at cross purposes until they remembered their signals discipline. When silence had been restored, Franklin gave his orders.
“Cut your motor to quarter speed,” he said. “We know the beast’s very sensitive and we don’t want to scare it until the last minute.”
“Can’t we flood the bow tanks and glide down?”
“Take too long—he’s still three thousand feet below. And cut your sonar to minimum power; I don’t want him picking up our pulses.”
The animal was moving in a curiously erratic path at a constant depth, sometimes making little darts to right or left as if in search of food. It was following the slopes of an unusually steep submarine mountain, which rose abruptly some four thousand feet from the sea bed. Not for the first time, Franklin thought what a pity it was that the world’s most stupendous scenery was all sunk beyond sight in the ocean depths. Nothing on the land could compare with the hundred-mile-wide canyons of the North Atlantic, or the monstrous potholes that gave the Pacific the deepest soundings on earth.
They sank slowly below the summit of the submerged mountain—a mountain whose topmost peak was three miles below sea level. Only a little way beneath them now that mysteriously elongated echo seemed to be undulating through the water with a sinuous motion which reminded Franklin irresistibly of a snake. It would, he thought, be ironic if the Great Sea Serpent turned out to be exactly that. But that was impossible, for there were no water-breathing snakes.
Neither man spoke during the slow and cautious approach to their goal. They both realized that this was one of the great moments of their lives, and wished to savor it to the full. Until now, Don had been mildly skeptical, believing that whatever they found would be no more than some already-known species of animal. But as the echo on the screen expanded, so its strangeness grew. This was something wholly new.
The mountain was now looming above them; they were skirting the foot of a cliff more than two thousand feet high, and their quarry was less than half a mile ahead. Franklin felt his hand itching to throw on the ultraviolet searchlights which in an instant might solve the oldest mystery of the sea, and bring him enduring fame. How important to him was that? he asked himself, as the seconds ticked slowly by. That it was important, he did not attempt to hide from himself. In all his career, he might never have another opportunity like this.…
Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the sub trembled as if struck by a hammer. At the same moment Don cried out: “My God—what was that?”
“Some damn fool is letting off explosives,” Franklin replied, rage and frustration completely banishing fear. “Wasn’t everyone notified of our dive?”
“That’s no explosion. I’ve felt it before—it’s an earthquake.”
No other word could so swiftly have conjured up once more all that terror of the ultimate depths which Franklin had felt brushing briefly against his mind during their descent. At once the immeasurable weight of the waters crushed down upon them like a physical burden; his sturdy craft seemed the frailest of cockleshells, already doomed by forces which all man’s science could no longer hold at bay.
He knew that earthquakes were common in the deep Pacific, where the weights of rock and water were forever poised in precarious equilibrium. Once or twice on patrols he had felt distant shocks—but this time, he felt certain, he was near the epicenter.
“Make full speed for the surface,” he ordered. “That may be just the beginning.”
“But we only need another five minutes,” Don protested. “Let’s chance it, Walt.”
Franklin was sorely tempted. That single shock might be the only one; the strain on the tortured