Free The Atlantic Abomination by John Brunner Page A

sighed heavily and pushed back her chair. “Well,” she echoed, “we’d better get packed.”
    They had been out of touch with events altogether for just over two weeks. On their return, they had spent a week answering questions; decided to get married; made the arrangements and taken off for the country. In that time, much had happened.
    The
Gondwana’s
disappearance had involved the Navy. The scientific data presented to them had involved the First Soviet Pacific Bathygraphic Expedition, which was the official name of the
Pavel Ostrovsky
and its mother ship. An appeal by Dr. Gordon had involved the oceanographic institutes of every nation that had an Atlantic seaboard and one that hadnot, to wit, Monaco, which has a royalty-sponsored tradition of deepsea exploration.
    And the extraterrestrial nature of the creature from Atlantica had involved the United Nations, whose banner flew proudly above the inaccessible rocky islet that had suddenly been promoted to the dignity of base for the new arrivals because a freak of nature had endowed it with fresh water.
    The aircraft bringing Peter and Mary was a Navy seaplane flying out a brand-new fifteen-ton underwater TV camera intended to carry the search far below the level a bathynef could attain. It dropped them out of sunlight and into sight of the scene of operations through an overcast at five thousand feet.
    Peter gasped, and caught at Mary’s arm.
“Look
at that!”
    There were more than thirty vessels riding here. Dominating them was the Russian bathynef’s mother ship, gleaming white like a cross between a luxury liner and a whaling ship—the latter, because of the hinged bows and miniature dry dock where the bathynef was carried. Her American cousin was still fitting out; they had decided to go ahead during the summer using the inefficient system of towing so as not to waste time.
    Larger, but less conspicuous because of her gray paint, was the aircraft carrier
Cape Wrath
. And there were others, from giant nuclear submarines and the Russian cruiser escorting the survey ship, to the tiny but ultramodern Monegasque floating biology laboratory.
    They put down, and as soon as the TV camera had been loaded aboard a lighter, Peter and Mary were whisked in a fast launch across to the Russian mother ship. Its facilities were about comparable with those of the
Alexander Bache
, Peter judged, but it was obvious why the HQ had been established here and not there. Here they had more room.
    Gordon greeted them delightedly, showered them with thanks and apologies, introduced them to Captain Vassiliev—the man who had added his signature to the greeting card fromPanama—and took them on a quick tour to familiarize them with the set-up.
    “The
Ostrovsky
went down just before you arrived,” he said. “Ostrovsky himself, and Wong, are both across on the island where we’ve set up our base, processing relief crews from Woods Hole, Darwin and the Chinese station at Tienling. But that’s not a quarter of it. People have come up with gadgets nobody knew existed except the owners. That British sub is back again. Right now, it’s a thousand feet down with an insane new German invention tied to its snout; an underwater crawler which they’re going to dump in the mud at the bottom of the submarine’s range and which they hope will be able to crawl down the side of the Ridge as far as the city. It’s got a bulldozer blade on it. If this works, we’ll be able to shift the ooze ten times as fast as we can now.”
    He bustled on. “Then there’s this TV camera you flew in with. It has four thousand fathoms of cable on it and if we can find a self-propelled drogue to stand the pressure we can get right down across the valley floor. There may be nothing to see but mud—or there may be anything.”
    Their amazement grew as they really began to take in the extent of the effort being invested here, until finally Mary could bear it no longer. “Chief!” she said. “I’m not going