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

so sure,” Peter murmured. He plunged back towards the dead beast, and began to survey it cautiously, scraping away ooze by the shovelful from around its legs. Under its bloated belly he discovered a triangular rent, where a flap of the tough hide had been ripped on a sharp rock or stone. He went almost headfirst into the mud while struggling to see more clearly.
    At length he pushed himself away, grunting. “No, you are wrong. There’s nothing left of this thing but its hide and itsskeleton, and the hide is so impervious it makes a rhino’s look like papier-mâché. There’s just the hole in the belly where the water leaked in. Aside from that, it’s still sound, and the interior is full of water, not mud. If I’m any judge, we could lash a cable round it and drag it clear without trouble. As for it bursting on the way to the surface it won’t. At the speed the ’nef rises, the pressure can equalize quite happily through the hole in the belly.”
    “Peter, even if it’s possible I still don’t think we dare! Supposing—supposing this is a sort of graveyard for the things? Would we like it if someone came grubbing up corpses in one of our cemeteries?”
    “Don’t be anthropocentric!” Peter snapped. “What gives you the idea they’d bury their dead deliberately? In any case, this thing was under so much ooze before the avalanche it must have been here for centuries. This is our last dive before heading for home, remember. We could save a thousand unnecessary problems by taking it along to where we can study it properly.”
    “Oh, very well. I give in. I suppose there isn’t much they could do to us inside the ’nef. Go on, tie it up.”
    A few minutes later the ’nef was straining and tugging at the body, with two quarter-inch hawsers taut and singing like violin strings. Peter and Mary watched in puzzlement, asking themselves whether the little mud in which it was still embedded could possibly suck at the beast so powerfully. But it was not the fault of the mud. The corpse was shifting, very slowly, moving out over the ooze like a tractor over snow.
    “It’s not full of mud!” exclaimed Peter. “It couldn’t be.”
    Mary gave him a wry glance. “No. Haven’t you realized? That thing’s
heavy
, Peter. It weighs tons!”
    Peter’s hands closed convulsively on a bar before him. He had sudden idiotic visions of the dead weight of the body dragging them down into the ultimate depths, while he sawed frantically at the hawsers and tried to cut the ’nef free.
    Then the balance turned, as the raging power of the atomic beacon atomized the water in the buoyancy tanks past a critical point. The nightmarish corpse rose from its muddy grave and swung slowly to a point below them and out of their view. The ’nef continued steadily to rise.
    First: remnants of a lost civilization.
    Second: a man alive when he should have been dead.
    Third: the body of a creature that resembled, literally, nothing on earth or under the sea; with an articulated skeleton harder and denser than granite, and a flexible hide so tough it blunted their biggest wire-cutting shears before they managed to cut a sample of it.
    What kind of insane world had the bathynef brought man into?
    A kind of awe-struck hush seemed to have settled over the
Alexander Bache
. Since they had hauled the beast’s corpse alongside with the anchor winch and rigged an improvised crane to dump it on the afterdeck, the staff and crew both had been going about with faraway, mystified expressions, talking little, and then only about the things beneath the sea.
    Even the Chief, although he was fascinated by the strange animal Peter and Mary had found, was subdued. The reason was probably to be found in what he had said to the discoverers in the privacy of his office directly after their return.
    “I don’t know what to make of this,” he had muttered. “And nobody else will, either, for a hell of a long time. Was it creatures like this one that built the