The Atlantic Abomination by John Brunner Read Free Book Online

Not that even the deeps were barren. They were just quite thinly populated, and one of the few disadvantages of the beacon was that the marked local rise in warmth it communicated to the water seemed to make fish steer away from it. Or maybe the magnetic bottle produced ultrasonics they could sense, thus frightening them. They were still arguing the point.
    “Homing in,” said Mary suddenly. “Gotchal” she added—Peter presumed—to the city-site beyond the port. He acknowledged her words and went to the lock to supervise the fine manoeuvring of the last few hundred feet.
    This time they moored the ’nef so that if it were necessary they could both leave the cabin for a short while. But they were under strict orders not to take risks when doing so. The first task was to find a suitable site for the sonar beacon they would activate when they left.
    Peter went out first, and began by surveying the same area Dick and Eloise had covered. They seemed to have done most of what was possible. Short of some gadget like a supervacuum cleaner, there was no means of laying bare the walls around the plaza further than had been done already.
    His mind busy with atomic-powered suction devices, he returned to the ’nef and collected sample bags, boxes and nets. Meantime, Mary was “photographing” by sonar-scanning the exact nature of the ground about them.
    The first six-hour shift passed in careful, patient consolidation of what had been done previously. The next would be spent differently, Peter decided.
    “Let’s face it,” he said, “we’ve done what we can here. The rest is for later. I propose we cast off and move down the mountainside, to see if we can locate a similar site to this, one where we might set off a slipping in the accumulated ooze and let gravity shift it for us. It won’t be funny if the really interesting stuff turns out to be in the valley at the bottom, but by the time we get there a few more tons on top of the natural load won’t bother us.”
    Mary agreed without argument, and with Peter clinging to the hull they descended by stages of a hundred feet at a time. Each time, taking it in turns, they swam away from the ’nef and surveyed the mountainside, but each time the sonar told them that ooze lay thick over the rock, and over any more remains that might be in the area.
    They had descended nearly a thousand feet when they drew blank for the last time in this direction. They were moving and breathing comfortably and freely; Mary made a note of the indicated depth in confirmation of the success of the Ostrovsky-Wong treatment.
    “No show,” Peter shrugged. “Okay. We’ll try going sideways.”
    They went back to the original site, and began to move out from it horizontally instead of vertically. At their arbitrary limit of a thousand foot range, they found something new; the broken-off stump of a round tower, around which ooze was piled. But the vast hollow shaft of the tower was clogged full with mud, and nothing else in the area was detectable.
    Nonetheless, they passed more than three hours in mapping its shape with sonar, as far as they could, in measuring it and in chipping off odd pieces for study and analysis. It was very hard, but it did not seem to be stone. Peter wondered what cataclysm had snapped it off. Perhaps half a mountain had fallen on it. It was hard to see what else, short of a heavy bomb, could have managed the job.
    They retraced their steps and worked once more in the opposite direction. Here and there objects registered on the sonar, but most of them they disregarded, being too near the surface of the mud, and therefore having been embedded quite recently.
    “Well, that leaves
up
,” said Peter when they had reached the end, once more, of a thousand-foot sweep. “Do we set the beacon going to save coming down again, or not yet?”
    “Not yet. I prefer to be able to talk. Besides, at this short range it would quite probably foul our own probes with