Free The Atlantic Abomination by John Brunner

chair, and ripped open the envelopes while Mary cleared the dishes. He left the Foundation ones till last.
    “Best wishes from Hartlund and the crew of the
Alexander Bache
,” he reported. “Mailed in Panama, when they were done there meeting the Russians and taking them out to the site. With regrets that they missed the ceremony.”
    “Anything from the Russians?” Mary called jokingly.
    “You’re not kidding, honey. Right here under Hartlund’s signature there’s a sort of scribble labeled ‘Captain, bathynef
Pavel Ostrovsky
.’”
    “That’s nice! What else?”
    “Invitation from a cousin of mine to see him in Florida, and a note from—” He broke off, and whistled under his breath. “You don’t say! Honey, here’s the analysis of the hide of that monster we brought up. It’s made of carbon, silicon,oxygen, and
boron
of all things, in the damnedest sort of arrangement. I wish I was a biochemist. And”—he turned the page—”they’ve done up the bones, too. They’ve got chromium in them, so help me, and cobalt and nickel and God knows what. But wait till you get to this bit! The chemists say these materials are basically different from the organic substances found in any high life-form anywhere on Earth. Their tentative conclusion is that they originated elsewhere …”
    A sudden chill seemed to blow through the trees. Mary came out with a dishtowel in her hands and sat down opposite him, her face sober. “Martians, huh?” she said. But her attempt to keep her tone light was a failure.
    Suddenly anxious to know what else was in the letters from the Foundation, Peter thrust the first one at her and attacked the second. Casual news and good wishes from Eloise Vander-plank. He threw it aside after the first glance and took up the last remaining envelope.
    The color drained from his face and he sat for a very long time staring at the paper, so long that Mary had to touch his arm twice before bringing him back to reality. He gave her the letter to read herself.
    Over Dr. Gordon’s signature, it said:
    You may have heard by now that the biologists assign a nonterrestrial origin to the creature you brought up from Atlantica (that’s the name we’ve bestowed on the city, by the way). It won’t be announced publicly yet; flying saucers on top of what we already have would be too much
.
    What you will not have heard is that we have found the bathynef. It was discovered accidentally during the search for the Gondwana, the Mapping Department sub we last saw at the site waiting for the ’nef to reappear
.
    I only have this at secondhand. I was in the Pacific on the way back from my visit to the Russian bathynef expedition, which is due at the site of operations in a few days. But it appears that the Gondwana went down to six or seven hundred feet after a suspicious sonar echo, losing contact with theBritish ship, and failed to come back
.
    Two days later and a hundred miles west, a Navy patrol plane spotted the abandoned bathynef, which looked as though someone had laid into its most delicate equipment with a sledge hammer. It will be weeks, perhaps months, before it is again fit for use. There has been no sign of the Gondwana for more than two weeks. This is being kept quiet for obvious reasons. There may be no connection, But
—
    And, of course, there was no sign of Luke Wallace
.
    I cannot, and do not want to, say anything more to you than this: Hartlund told me you wanted a trip in the Russian bathynef, and we are very short of people who have had the Ostrovsky-Wong treatment. The pattern emerging is an ugly one. Before we are finished, we shall need all the help we can get. I don’t know what has converted me to wild speculation instead of my old methodical scepticism, but something has
.
    I’m worried
.
    Mary folded the letter and handed it back. “That’s the nearest thing to panic I can imagine from the Chief,” she said.
    Peter nodded, his eyes on his bride’s face. “Well?”
    She