Sea Serpents Read online

  Hands touched her shoulders and she started. Mark's voice intoned, "From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night . . ."

  "Good Lord deliver us," Sarah finished. How appropriate.

  He stood beside her, contemplating translucent sky and translucent water separated by the black horizontal slash of the opposite shore. "Sarah," he said, "surely you didn't mean to imply this morning that Don is only hunting sensation."

  "I'd like to see him turn down a guest spot on the Carson show."

  Mark snorted. "All right; we all want a shot at immortality. But give him some credit as a scientist."

  "And what he's doing is cool, dispassionate scientific research? Cheap rhetoric." She scuffed at the gravel. The water lapped questioningly at her toe. "It's like those people who say they've seen a UFO. They have an emotional stake in the answer. They want to believe there's more to existence than death and taxes."

  "So?" He stared at her, brows tight, as he would stare at some unidentifiable marine creature.

  "Irrefutable evidence? Tapes, pictures, whatever, it all comes in through the senses and is evaluated by that brain which causes emotions, too. The local superstitions are evidence. One of my drawings is as valid as a photograph."

  "But not in the same way. Superstitions, art—they can't be quantified."

  "Why should everything be quantified? Because your particular fear of the dark finds comfort in quantification?"

  A boat beat up the loch, sending shock waves through the twilight. After a long time Mark laid his arm across Sarah's shoulders and said quietly, "Julie's death was—pretty ghoulish, wasn't it? Respirators, plastic tubing, all the technological paraphernalia that only prolonged her agony and left us to wonder why."

  She stood stock still in the circle of his arm. She had thought him insensitive, but what he was, it seemed, was sensible. "Yes," she whispered, "if we didn't wonder why we'd be vegetables."

  A faint gleam diffused into the sky above the dark ridge of the distant shore. A thin pale gold circlet swelled up and out. The moon rose over Loch Ness and laid a shining path across the water.

  "Beautiful," said Sarah. She could step onto the light, follow the path up and across the dark water and into the sky. She could dance among the Pleiades, as light as one of her pencil-and-paper fairies, unencumbered by mortal flesh.

  Mark's face was burnished by the light. How handsome he was, how sturdy. She warmed in his glow.

  "Just think," he said, "how much equipment the Apollo astronauts had to leave up there. Perfectly good cameras."

  Sarah's image cracked, shattering into crystalline shards that cut deep. . . . No. They did not cut. She would not let them cut. They tickled instead, and she clung to his arm wreathed in helpless giggles.

  "Now what?" he asked warily.

  "You. You're so refreshingly honest, straightforward, unimaginative."

  "That's a compliment?"

  "Yes. Yes, actually it is."

  "Okay," Mark said, baffled but obliging.

  Sarah could see him plunging fearlessly into the dark, eager to see what lay on the other side. Foolish bravado, to court the silent shapes in the depths, to risk oblivion. Wasn't it?

  They turned toward their own tiny trailer, pausing just outside for one glance back at the gleaming celestial disc. "Luna," Sarah conjugated, "lunacy, lunar tides, lunar rover." Light, perhaps, an imperative beyond darkness

  Arm in arm they went inside and shut the door on the night.

  Sarah stood on the threshold of the Expedition hut. It was morning of a clear day. Brilliant sunshine dam ed on the waters of the loch before her, and the waters heaved, slowly, stretching toward the light.

  Beneath the surface sheen, in the darkness where the light could not penetrate, an earlier expedition had found ancient stone rings. Relics of an earlier time when the water level had been lower, Sarah told herself. Man's ancient impulse toward ritual, to propitiate the dark even as it swallowed him. To defy it.

  No one was in camp; Don and the rest of the Expedition staff had left early to haul the submersible up to Lochend. Mark had promised to follow later that afternoon. Right now he was working over the monitors in the hut, creating a minestrone of wire, capacitors, transformers, trying to line their 110-volt equipment to the 220-volt power source.

  Rather like us, Sarah thought. Two different voltages, the neurasthenic nut mated to the scientist, together forming something unique and vital.

  Mark was humming something under his breath that could have been anything from a Beatles tune to a Beethoven symphony. With a grimace Sarah tucked her sketchbook under her arm and strolled down to the beach. There was another anomalous wake pleating the water, probably an echo of the Expedition launch.

  One of the videotape camera leads was snagged on a rock, and she bent to retrieve and straighten it. The sinuous shape of the wire piqued her imagination. She sat down beside it and drew a pencil from her pocket. The wires became living appendages reaching into the water, reaching into another element, defining shapes in a shadowy world, human eyes and ears and voices, human senses cleaving the darkness. If truth is beauty, she thought, perhaps science was indeed art. What did scientists want, after all, but to believe in the quark or the quasar or the validity of the human observer who named them both?

  Mark stopped humming, encountering some problem that absorbed his entire attention. Sarah began humming, stilling a quaver of fear with melody. The twin wave of the wake crimped the surface of the loch.

  She remembered the peat-dark water closing over her head. She remembered the touch of something—not unearthly, because it was from Earth.

  Without darkness, light would be meaningless; without light, darkness would be impenetrable. Human perception was sketched in shades of gray. The quest for understanding, whether pursued by scientist or artist or tabloid myth-monger, was its own ritual of propitiation.

  She grinned; here I go again, purple prose and all. Julie used to call me a real vapor-head, and she was probably right.

  Sarah's pencil danced. An animal, long neck, flippers, strong rhomboidal tail sending it with swift, sure strokes through the darkness. An animal questing, warily, fearfully, toward the mystery of light.

  Several salmon leaped from the loch and fell back, spattering themselves across the water. The wake followed, the twin wave curling white and thick. Iridescent bubbles skimmed upwards, neither light nor dark, joining world to world.

  A long dark neck, eyes and nostrils like slits, thin protuberances like horns. A mouth gaping open, seizing a salmon. A thrashing in the water, spray cast upwards like tiny prisms into the sun.

  The fish disappeared. Sarah's pencil fell from nerveless hands. The illusions of the loch, the surface concealing the depths—she could not trust her senses. She had called it, surely, from the fevered depths of her need to believe.

  The creature flopped over, flippers beating the air, rounded belly facing the sky. Its thick tail beat the water, sending droplets high into the air. The droplets, cold ice flakes, fell on Sarah's face and she started.

  It was there. Not an object of fear, but of awe. An affirmation. She stepped backwards, one foot behind the other. Her sketchbook trembled in her hands. "Mark," she called hoarsely. "Mark, come down here, please."

  The creature lay still, back arching from the water, wavelets licking at its skin. Its head and neck curled from side to side, slowly, seeking food.

  "Mark!" Sarah croaked.

  Distracted, he called, "Huh? What?"

  "Forget the monitors. Get your camera, if your own eyes aren't good enough." And a moment later, softly, "Thank you, Julie."

  "What?" Mark called again, plunging down the embankment to her side. He hadn't brought a camera.

  "There," she said, with a grand wave at the loch, the wake, the fish, the basking creature. It seized another salmon, tilted its neck upwards, splashed about as if playing with its prey.

  Mark collapsed onto a rock, swearing slo
wly, reverently, under his breath.

  Sarah plucked another pencil from her pocket and began to sketch. Head, neck, back—even the fish leaping from the water.

  "No camera," Mark mourned. "Strobe's blown a fuse. No sonar, no hydrophone."

  "You can see it, can't you?" Sarah flipped to the next page in her book, beginning again. Magic flowed through her eyes, through her fingertips; the image leaped from the paper.

  "I see it," said Mark. "Whether it's really there is another matter."

  "Yes, Mr. Spock," she returned with a smile.

  The creature slipped beneath the waves and disappeared. The water smoothed itself and lay still. The sunsheen reflected from the surface of the loch like from a burnished shield.

  Sarah's fingers slowed and stopped. She was weak with effort. Her knees buckled and she sat beside Mark.

  "God!" he wailed. "No camera!" His eye fell upon her drawings and lightened. "Hey, those are good. Now if we can only get Don to believe it."

  "Do you believe it?" she asked quietly.

  "Yes. I saw something. And I'd sure like to see it again, even if it takes a lot of looking."

  "That's all that matters."

  "Is it? Is it really?" He laughed. "It's that easy, then?"

  "No, it's never easy," Sarah replied. "But the wanting to search; that's enough." They sat close together by the deep water. The darkness ebbed.

  Leviathan!

  by

  Larry Niven

  Larry Niven made his first sale to Worlds of If magazine in 1964, and soon established himself as one of the best new writers of "hard" science fiction since Heinlein. By the end of the seventies, Niven had won several Hugo and Nebula awards, published Ringworld, one of the most acclaimed technological novels of the decade, and had written several best-selling novels in collaboration with Jerry Pournelle. Niven's books include the novels Protector, World of Ptavvs, A Gift from Earth, Ringworld Engineers, and Smoke Ring, and the collections Tales of Known Space, Inconstant Moon, and Neutron Star. His most recent book is the novel The Barsoom Project, written in collaboration with Steven Barnes.

  Here Svetz—the hapless, harried, and overworked Time Retrieval Expert who has coped with one disastrous assignment after another in a number of Niven stories (collected in The Flight of the Horse,)—may finally have bitten off an assignment that's more than he can chew—one, in fact, that may chew him

  . . . and swallow him, too!

  Two men stood on one side of a thick glass wall.

  "You'll be airborne," Svetz's beefy red-faced boss was saying. "We made some improvements in the small extension cage while you were in the hospital. You can hover it, or fly it at up to fifty miles per hour, or let it fly itself; there's a constant-altitude setting. Your field of vision is total. We've made the shell of the extension cage completely transparent."

  On the other side of the thick glass, something was trying to kill them. It was forty feet long from nose to tail and was equipped with vestigial batlike wings Otherwise it was built something like a slender lizard. It screamed and scratched at the glass with murderous claws.

  The sign on the glass read:

  GILA MONSTER

  Retrieved from the year 1230 AnteAtomic, approximately,

  from the region of China, Earth. EXTINCT.

  "You'll be well out of his reach," said Ra Chen.

  "Yes, sir." Svetz stood with his arms folded about him, as if he had a chill. He was being sent after the biggest animal that had ever lived; and Svetz was afraid of animals.

  "For Science's sake! What are you worried about, Svetz? It's only a big fish!"

  "Yes, sir. You said that about the Gila monster. It's just an extinct lizard, you said."

  "We only had a drawing in a children's book to go by. How could we know it would be so big?"

  The Gila monster drew back from the glass. It inhaled hugely, took aim—yellow and orange flame spewed from its nostrils and played across the glass. Svetz squeaked and jumped for cover.

  "He can't get through," said Ra Chen.

  Svetz picked himself up. He was a slender, small-boned man with pale skin, light blue eyes, and very fine ash-blond hair. "How could we know it would breathe fire?" he mimicked. "That lizard almost cremated me. I spent four months in the hospital as it was. And what really burns me is, he looks less like the drawing every time I see him. Sometimes I wonder if I didn't get the wrong animal."

  "What's the difference, Svetz? The Secretary-General loved him. That's what counts."

  "Yes, sir. Speaking of the Secretary-General, what does he want with a sperm whale? He's got a horse, he's got a Gila monster—"

  "That's a little complicated." Ra Chen grimaced. "Palace politics! It's always complicated. Right now, Svetz, somewhere in the United Nations Palace, a hundred plots are in various stages of development. And every last one of them involves getting the attention of the Secretary-General, and holding it. Keeping his attention isn't easy."

  Svetz nodded. Everybody knew about the Secretary-General.

  The family that had ruled the United Nations for seven hundred years was somewhat inbred.

  The Secretary-General was twenty-eight years old. He was a happy person; he loved animals and flowers and pictures and people. Pictures of planets and multiple star systems made him clap his hands and coo with delight; and so the Institute for Space Research was mighty in the United Nations government. But he liked extinct animals too.

  "Someone managed to convince the Secretary-General that he wants the largest animal on Earth. The idea may have been to take us down a peg or two," said Ra Chen. "Someone may think we're getting too big a share of the budget.

  "By the time I got onto it, the Secretary-General wanted a brontosaur. We'd never have gotten him that. No extension cage will reach that far."

  "Was it your idea to get him a sperm whale, sir?"

  "Yah. It wasn't easy to persuade him. Sperm whales have been extinct for so long that we don't even have pictures. All I had to show him was a crystal sculpture from Archeology—dug out of the Steuben Glass Building—and a Bible and a dictionary. I managed to convince him that Leviathan and the sperm whale were one and the same."

  "That's not strictly true." Svetz had read a computer-produced condensation of the Bible. The condensation had ruined the plot, in Svetz's opinion. "Leviathan could be anything big and destructive, even a horde of locusts."

  "Thank Science you weren't there to help, Svetz! The issue was confused enough. Anyway, I promised the Secretary-General the largest animal that ever lived on Earth. All the literature says that that animal was a sperm whale. There were sperm whale herds all over the oceans as recently as the first century Ante Atomic. You shouldn't have any trouble finding one."

  "In twenty minutes?"

  Ra Chen looked startled. "What?"

  "If I try to keep the big extension cage in the past for more than twenty minutes, I'll never be able to bring it home. The—"

  "I know that."

  "—uncertainty factor in the energy constants—"

  "Svetz—"

  "—blow the Institute right off the map."

  "We thought of that, Svetz. You'll go back in the small extension cage. When you find a whale, you'll signal the big extension cage."

  "Signal it how?"

  "We've found a way to send a simple on-off pulse through time. Let's go back to the Institute and I'll show you."

  Malevolent golden eyes watched them through the glass as they walked away.

  The extension cage was the part of the time machine that did the moving. Within its transparent shell, Svetz seemed to ride a flying armchair equipped with an airplane passenger's lunch tray; except that the lunch tray was covered with lights and buttons and knobs and crawling green lines. He was somewhere off the east coast of North America, in or around the year 100 Ante Atomic or 1845 Anno Domini. The inertial calendar was not particularly accurate.

  Svetz skimmed low over water the color of lead, beneath a sky the color of s
late. But for the rise and fall of the sea, he might almost have been suspended in an enormous sphere painted half light, half dark. He let the extension cage fly itself twenty meters above the water, while he watched the needle on the NAI, the Nervous Activities Indicator.

  Hunting Leviathan.

  His stomach was uneasy. Svetz had thought he was adjusting to the peculiar gravitational side effects of time travel. But apparently not.

  At least he would not be here long.

  On this trip he was not looking for a mere forty-foot Gila monster. Now he hunted the largest animal that had ever lived. A most conspicuous beast. And now he had a life-seeking instrument, the NAI . . .

  The needle jerked hard over, and trembled.

  Was it a whale? But the needle was trembling in apparent indecision. A cluster of sources, then. Svetz looked in the direction indicated.

  A clipper ship, winged with white sail, long and slender and graceful as hell. Crowded, too, Svetz guessed. Many humans, closely packed, would affect the NAI in just that manner. A sperm whale—a single center of complex nervous activity—would attract the needle as violently, without making it jerk about like that.

  The ship would interfere with reception. Svetz turned east and away; but not without regret. The ship was beautiful.

  The uneasiness in Svetz's belly was getting worse, not better.

  Endless grey-green water, rising and falling beneath Svetz's flying armchair.

  Enlightenment came like something clicking in his head. Seasick. On automatic, the extension cage matched its motion to the surface over which it flew; and that surface was heaving in great dark swells.

  No wonder his stomach was uneasy! Svetz grinned and reached for the manual controls.

  The NAI needle suddenly jerked hard over. A bite! thought Svetz, and he looked off to the right. No sign of a ship. And submarines hadn't been invented yet. Had they? No, of course they hadn't.