The Atlantic Abomination by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page A

harmonics.”
    “Right. Let’s go straight to the head of the slip which buried Luke. It might have faulted at the outcrop of some wall-foundation, or at another ‘step’ like the one we’ve seen.”
    Ruagh and his kind had powers
.
    Once they had been able to look after themselves; to forage and feed themselves. They did not need to eat often, but when they did, they ate vastly. But because they had powers, they could compel others to labor for them, to feed them. It had been a long time since they had descended to shift for themselves. Even before they had come to Earth, it had been long
.
    And once on Earth—that fantastic, seemingly inexhaustible paradise—they had grown careless, even gluttonous. They had eaten for the pleasure of eating, and they had grown beyond the limit at which they could possibly have gathered for themselves the amount they consumed at a single meal
.
    Thus it was with Ruagh. Thus it was that, although heset out when his fellows abandoned him to try and find stragglers from the other’s city whom he could compel to find food for him, he weakened before he had gone halfway. Besides, it was centuries since he had had to carry his own weight more than a few yards
…
    His dying was unspectacular. He became still. The bacteria which cause earthly things to putrefy invaded his alien flesh and found it unwholesome. So, for a long time, he did not change visibly. That was why the men who still roamed that country, some of whom had been subjects of Ruagh’s kind and could voice a warning, gave him a wide berth
.
    Eventually, though, the symbiotic bacteria in his own body began to decay him. When at last the sea burst into that valley, the body was full of gases of decomposition, and floated on the stormily rising waters like an obscene rubber toy. He drifted so for a little while
.
    Then a gust hurled him against the broken shards of a tower in the city he had been laboring to reach. Gases whined out of a rent in his hide. Water-filled, he sank
.
    In the water, the bacteria which had reduced him to a hollow ceased their work, and their terrestrial cousins could not complete it. Slowly the ooze gave him burial
.
    There was something here, all right! Peter’s heart jumped. The mud had indeed slipped at the site of another wall. It looked curved, maybe the base of another round tower. And in the heap of mud that had not slipped and fallen, there was something embedded. Something large, a little shiny, quite smooth, slightly yielding to pressure. And enormous.
    It was so enormous that he had laid the whole thing bare from end to end and still not realized what it was, when a choking cry came to him from Mary. Automatically he spun in the water and plunged towards the ’nef.
    “No, Peter! I’m all right! But
look!
”
    He turned, looked, and was suddenly afraid.
    Thirty or more feet long, with legs, swollen belly, a headwhose dull and mud-crusted eyes seemed to fix them with a stare, it was an animal.
    But such an animal as only nightmares breed. …

VIII
    T HERE WAS a vast silence, as vast as the ocean around.
    At last Mary broke in, her voice shaking. “You know, I’d just figured out another explanation for Luke’s survival. I was going to suggest it could be an unexpected result of the Ostrovsky-Wong process. I was rehearsing the scorn I meant to pour on the Chief’s theories. And now—”
    “And now we find a life-form absolutely and utterly different from anything known before.” Peter put grimness into the words. “It’s so different I’m even prepared to accept it could be intelligent.”
    “I’m glad it’s dead,” Mary whispered.
    “So am I. … Think the ’nef will lift it?”
    She took a moment to understand him. “Are you out of your mind? You want to take that thing to the surface? We can’t dig it out of the mud by ourselves, for heaven’s sake! And even if we did, if it’s built for this kind of pressure it will just break to pieces on the way up.”
    “I’m not