Chapter 1
1979....
Two miles off Petal Point, the Pacific Ocean was calm and sparkling under a high sun in a nearly cloudless sky. The old, white lighthouse perched on the bluff at Petal Point stood out starkly against the blue sky, and shimmered a bit in the warm, rising air.
A soft breeze caused the outboard to sway gently, slightly more than the big, steadily rocking Chris-Craft 100 yards away. A passenger on the fantail of the Chris-Craft lolled under a collapsible canvas awning which shielded her from the sun. The three in the outboard lacked such shade, but there were there for the sea, not for sun or shade. Their scuba tanks were propped against the gunwales as they rested between brief dives into the pleasant, cool, clear water.
Natasha Ross, a slender, 26-year-old fashion model, dressed like her companions in a black wetsuit, knelt in the bottom of the boat and reached out here and there to pick up bits of aluminum foil and paper refuse from their lunch. She stuffed it into a plastic bag and knotted the top, then jammed it under the seat. Leaning back against the gunwale, tilting her head up, and closing her eyes against the sun, she ran her hand through her long, damp blond hair and sighed a pleasant sigh as the sun baked her already well-tanned face.
Her fiancé, Jeff Slater, a 28-year-old architectural draftsman, lay back against the forward thwart, his lean legs resting on top of Natasha’s. She looked over at his handsome face and smiled, but his gray eyes were shut.
Lou Parsons, a burly plumbing contractor several years older than the two, sat on the stern thwart and smoothed over a little tear in his wetsuit with his hand. He burped and looked towards the bow. “Hey, Jeff, you done with your lunch?”
“Who wants to know?” Jeff didn’t open his eyes.
“You got a sandwich left there. You gonna eat it?”
Without opening his eyes, Jeff groped beside him to find the sandwich bag and languidly held it up toward Lou.
Lou stepped forward carefully in the bobbing boat and took the bag. “What kind is it?”
“Sea bass---what else?”
“Sea bass? Yuk! Next time bring salami.”
“I hate salami. You’ll eat anything.”
Natasha chuckled. She sighed again and stretched. “The sun’s so great out here. I’d love to take this suit off and get an all-over tan.”
“So, take it off,” Lou said, smiling as he unwrapped the sandwich.
“Don’t do it, Nat,” Jeff opened his eyes briefly. “His heart couldn’t take it. I’m gonna grab me ten more Zs.” He closed his eyes and folded his arms over his chest.
“You’d think he worked hard all week,” Natasha said.
“Draftsmen don’t work,” Lou said. “They sit on their asses and draw pretty lines all day. Plumbing contractors----that’s work!”
“Now you know why I’m a draftsman!” Jeff said, keeping his eyes shut.
“If it’s so easy,” Lou said, “why are you always zonked out?”
“Night work.”
“Night work!” Natasha scrambled over to Jeff on all fours. “I do all the night work, you lazy bastard!” She leaped on him and began tickling his ribs.
He wriggled and laughed, and tickled her in return. She screeched and writhed. Eventually, they both fell back, exhausted.
Lou took a bite of sandwich, grimaced, and spit it out over the side. He tossed the rest of the sandwich in the general direction of the garbage bag. “I can’t stand all this romantic nonsense between you guys any more’n I can stand sea bass. I’m going in.” He rose, gripped the gunwale with one hand, and reached for his air tank with the other.
“You go in belching like you are,” Jeff said, “and you’ll blow up like a balloon.”
“I’ll let you worry about that.” Lou buckled the straps on his tanks and blew into his regulator. “Least I’ll be in the water. This sun’ll make you nutty.” He flapped his flippers against the planks and leaned over the side. “Hey, what the hell is that?!"
“Hmmm--what?!”
“Jeff, whaddya make of this stuff in the water.”
Jeff and Natasha rolled to the side and hoisted themselves up to look into the water.
A weird, dark, purplish stain was spreading over the surface near them. The stain seemed to be rising from beneath, spreading an almost oily sheen closer and closer to the boat. Their wondering faces were reflected in it, in wavering distortions.
“It’s spooky,” Natasha said. “What could it be?”
“Weird,” Lou said, shaking his head.
“Must be Navy,” Jeff offered. “They’re probably trying out some new marking dyes. They’re always screwin’ up the water with something.”
“The Navy?” Lou said, unconvinced. “Well, where are they?”
The stain advanced to within reach, and Lou stuck his right hand into it. ”Ohshit!” He yanked his hand back and looked at it. The dark stain had burned a diagonal slash onto his skin. “What the fuck....?” He held his hand out toward Natasha and Jeff, and they looked closely at it.
“My God, it burns,” Jeff whimpered.
“Damn right it burns! Like I dipped it in acid, or something.”
“The water’s clear on the other side,” Natasha said urgently. “Try and rinse it off there.”
Lou leaned over the other side of the boat and dipped his hand into the water. “No dice.”
“Let’s get the hell outta here,” Jeff said, sliding to the stern and the motor “Secure the gear, Nat.”
Jeff turned his attention to the motor. Natasha straightened herself against the side as she lowered the air tanks to the decking.. Then she reached over the side to pull in the rope ladder.
Jeff pulled on the starter cord, but the motor failed to catch.
Suddenly, from the water where Natasha was drawing in the ladder, a pair of webbed hands emerged, stretched up above the gunwales, quickly grabbed Natasha’s arms, and yanked her over the side and down under the surface before she even had a chance to cry out.
“Jeff! Jeff!” Lou stumbled across the boat to where Natasha had disappeared and peered, dumbfounded, over the side. “What the hell’s happened to her?”
“Huh?” Jeff took another pull on the cord, then turned around. “Where’s Nat?”
“She’s gone! Something pulled her over!” Lou leaned down toward the water.
The dark, webbed hands shot out of the water again and grabbed Lou’s shoulders.
“Jeff! Help!” Lou was yanked over the side and pulled under, and his cries became gurgles.
“What the hell’s going on here!” Jeff lunged for the spot from which Lou had been taken. “What the.....”
Another pair of webbed hands took him by the hair and flipped him over the side, towing him quickly under the water and out of sight.
The outboard, now devoid of passengers, bobbed gently in the waves.
The woman sunbathing on the fantail of the Chris-Craft stared at the outboard for a few moments. The last garbled cries reached her ears. She stood up. “Bill!”
“What, hon?” Bill came aft from the cabin. “What was that yelling?”
“Bill, those divers over there,” she pointed a trembling finger, “something pulled them out of the boat. They were hollering for help!”
“Where are they?” He leaned over the stern and peered at the empty outboard.
“They’re gone!” She put her hand over her mouth. “Something took them! They’re not coming up!”
He spun around towards the cabin. “Get us over there. We better take a look. I’m callin’ the Coast Guard.”
He went inside to the radio. The woman moved to the controls and pushed the starter button, bringing the engine sputtering to life. She turned the boat and headed slowly for the outboard.
In moments, Bill returned and leaned over the side, gazing at the outboard.
“What’d they say, Bill?”
“Stand by, they’ll be right here.”
“Bill?” Her voice was hoarse and quivering. “What could it be?”
“I don’t know. I hope you’re sure about what you saw. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for getting the patrol out here, and then have those divers just surface with happy smirks.”
“I know what I saw, Bill! Something pulled them under!”
“Okay, okay. I’m not doubting you. Easy as you go now, let her idle. We’re about on top of it. You think I should get my scuba gear and go in?”
“You’re not going in there! Not after what I saw!”
“No, I’m not. Could be some kind of squid. Look at that weird slick. Like oil. Just on one side of their boat.”
“What is it?”
She left the controls and they both stared down at the purple stain.
“Damned if I know. Maybe I should take a sample.”
“Let’s just wait for the Coast Guard,” she pleaded.
He reached over and touched the surface of the stain and snapped his hand back in pain. “Yowp! Burns! Okay, we’ll wait.”
******
The old lighthouse at Petal Point had been dim and untended since 1959, having been replaced by a series of smaller, offshore, electronic beams that needed no light-keeper. But it’d been built sturdily enough atop the bluff, and was strong enough to withstand the gales that blew off the Pacific. Now, the tower stood just as it had for those many years, the prisms of the great oil-fed lamp reflecting the afternoon sun that beat down on the glass circumference.
The lighthouse rose from the enter of an old Victorian house, which had once been the keeper’s home. A widow’s walk surrounded the base of the tower where it rose from the roof.
For years the house, too, had been empty, as had the several outbuildings spread over the bluff, which had stored the fog horn, the kegs of oil, maintenance equipment, and even firewood for heating the house in an emergency.
But now the house and other buildings were bustling with activity. Though the light never shone from the tower, the lights burned late in the restored old house. Over the main door was a modest but dignified sign, painted in scrollwork like the name on the stern of an old whaling ship: OCEANIC RESEARCH DIRECTORATE. Beneath that, in smaller, simple Gothic script, was another sign reading: ALAN CALAVICCI, ADM. U.S.N. RET., DIRECTOR; JONATHAN ROBINSON, M.D., ASSOCIATE
The Directorate was less than 1 year old. It had been the dream of the two scientists whose names were on the sign. Or rather the two dreams, for each had arrived at it separately. A lucky accident had brought the two of them together just when newly heightened interest in oceanic research had prompted the government to invest in such a semi-private, imaginative, and comparatively small operation.
The two scientists had not known each other before the founding of the center, but they had known of each other’s work. And they both sought the same thing: a facility with a high standard of excellence, on a scale small enough to allow the greatest flexibility in their common pursuits. Their interest was in the creatures of the deep, large and small, and to them the charm of their operation was that they were free to take their time, to think, to analyze, to explore, to discover.
The Directorate, or O.R.D. as it was called, had quickly developed to just the size they wanted. They employed twenty people, mostly of them researchers. The outbuildings had been converted into spare holding tanks, labs, and storage space for the files and equipment that overflowed the offices. Near the main house stood two huge antennae.
The house retained a quaint nautical flavor. The main lab was huge, extending from one end of the house to the other. The walls of this room were adorned with prints of great old sailing ships---whalers, racing schooners, packet ships that used to ply the Pacific waters. And alongside them were hung maps, old and new, showing sea routes, weather patterns, and underwater environments. Scattered about on walls and tables and benches and desks, in what would would seem random manner to a visitor, were barometers, anemometers, scales, Bunsen burners, petri dishes, and dozens of aquarium tanks Labeled with handwritten cards, the aquariums held colorful, mobile exhibitions of both plants and animals in dazzling, flowing colors. They contained nudibranch, abalone, sea anemones, sea cucumbers, octopi, decorator crabs---all kinds of flora and fauna plucked from the ocean for examination, experimentation, and study.
Off the far end of this vast lab was the radio room, packed with round-the-world transmitters and receivers that could transmit and receive signals in all kinds of weather. In one corner of this jammed room stood a sophisticated computer bank, a solid and smug edifice which stored tons of intellectual data and made it available for fast recall by human beings whose own brains couldn’t retain even a fraction of this information.
Opposite the radio room was a spiral stairway leading to the upstairs bedrooms and baths.
The rear exit was on the sea side of the main lab, from it, a wooden stairway angled to and fro to the beach below. The front entrance was away from the sea. First one entered a hallway that led to several small offices, 2 of which belonged to the principals.
But Doctors and Calavicci and Robinson worked mostly in the huge lab, and used desks tucked there between aquariums. Dr. Calavicci’s desk was piled high with sloping mountains of papers and reports: Dr. Robinson’s was neat with most of its surface clear. The 2 desks reflected not only different personalities, but different backgrounds as well. Dr. Calavicci came from academia, the ivied labs o f several universities; Dr. Robinson came from the Navy, where he had achieved a high reputation as an associate in the Navy Undersea Center, 25 miles south along the coast.
But not all their work was done in the lab. Around the corner in the hallway was a set of sliding doors and an elevator which led to a tunnel to the sea, 200 feet below. In the tunnel was the dock where the kept their strange, four-sphered, deep-diving research submarine.
On this day of the disappearance of the three Scuba divers 2 miles offshore, the 2 scientists were engaged in monitoring separate bits of research.
Dr. Calavicci, in a white smock, closely watched an aquarium in which a queer, many-legged fish stalked. It was a sea robin, a small beast that both walks and swims. The fish slithered over to a button installed in the side of the tank, and pushed it with a bony fin. A bell tinkled lightly. Dr. Calavicci smiled, took from his pocket a small bit of dried food, and dropped it in. The sea robin swallowed it instantly.
“Did you see that, John?”
Dr. Robinson stepped over to the tank, carrying his clipboard. Though both in their mid-forties, in appearance they were as unalike as their desks. John Robinson, a muscular and slick-haired brunette with big brown eyes, wore a finely ironed white smock over a black turtleneck. Al Calavicci’s smock was rumpled, like his wild black hair. He was short, stocky, built like a wrestler. Robinson’s white shoes were clean; Calavicci’s black ones were horribly scuffed. They shared an intensely emotional nature, but while Robinson tended toward reserve and quiet thoughtfulness, Calavicci was ebullient, always upbeat, an outspoken, aggressive physicist.
Divorced, but holding no grudges or regrets, Al Calavicci never felt defeated by life’s problems, but welcomed then, invited them in, addressed them with keen interest. Solutions were poetry to him.
John Robinson, widowed and much sought-after by several on-and-off suitors, was, like his cohort, willing to face problems, but he tended to be less lighthearted about them. He saw the problems in more personal terms, and worried more. In style, he was the more disciplined of the two.
However, both were diligent, uncommonly so, and they shared an appreciation for discovery that drew them together in their work.
“Did you see that, John?” he repeated.
“I heard it, at least. He rang the bell and ate. Marvelous!”
“I knew he’d get the hang of it!”
“What do you do if he wants food at night?”
“You mean if he rings while I’m asleep? Hah! He doesn’t bother my beauty rest. I let him wait until morning. He’s been a nocturnal feeder for millions of years, but I’ve been training him to eat in daylight. That’s what this is all about.”
“Poor thing!”
“Far from it. He loves it.” Calavicci leaned over the tank and wrinkled his nose. “He’s healthier, and he’s even gained weight. Got more color in his cheeks, more spring in his step. It’s better for him. Evidently, evolution goofed on him a little.” He laughed lightly and turned to John. “Like it did on me.”
“On you? Oh, Harry.” He softened his voice, assuming he was alluding, as he occasionally did, to his unprofessional unkemptness. “Why do you say that?”
“Oh, you know. My parents and relatives brought me up to take over the family ranch in Wyoming.....”
Like truly dedicated scientists, they were shy about themselves outside of their work. Their conversation was generally about impersonal matters, and even though they had been working closely together for months, they knew little about each other’s personal lives.
“....It was dry, rugged, and gigantic country. Awesome and, to some, entirely absorbing territory. But for some reason, somewhere along the line I began to find more beauty in tiny things---artifacts at first, like arrowheads in the soil. Then on a visit to the shore, I discovered the beauty of sea shells, which attracted me not only by their designs, but by the fact that they once housed small, living things. Then I took up with those fine fellows of the swamplands, the newts and frogs. Somehow the combination of those interests got me into deep water, so to speak. I was lured more and more to swamps, then lakes, and then the sea. The sea is endless and huge. But to me it’s a reservoir of millions of small things. I guess I find bigger challenges in delicacy.
His words alone might have been ponderous, were it not for his light, almost giggly laugh.
“That’s evidently why you got to be so good at it,” John said, sincerely. “I mean, so good at all of it, everything from the sea, even those things a bit bigger.” They nodded to one another. “That’s why I brought Penny here when we left the Navy. I told her we had to have the best.”
“How kind of you to say, John.” Harry patted John on the shoulder. “But of course we both know that you brought your own excellence with you. And while we’re on the subject of mutual admiration, how’re you doing on the salinity?”
“Okay, here’s the scale.” For all their banter, they never veered far from their work. John had read the data from his clipboard. “With 4% salinity we get a pulse of 90. With 3%, 96. With 2%, 108. And so on. As the salinity rises, on this side, we also get a pulse rise, but faster.” He flipped over 2 pages and showed Calavicci a graph he’d drawn from these statistics.
“Got it,” Calavicci said, nodding. He turned to a small desktop computer and punched in the numbers as he scanned the graph. “Okay, that’s in. Now we know how much, or how little, salt affects his pulse. What’s next?”
“I want to correlate that to water temp.” John turned and walked over to a large tank the size of an extra-long bathtub. Calavicci followed him. “Penny?” John called softly.
Lying underwater on the bottom of the tank was the reclining figure of a young woman, asleep and breathing normally. The name John had given her was Penny Robinson. He had known her for more than two years, as long as any human being had known her. She had been discovered on a beach, washed up by a storm, unconscious and near death. John Robinson had revived her and taken her to the Naval Undersea Center where, through log weeks of testing, examination, and monitoring, he had discovered her to be a creature of both sea and land, having in her chest not lungs but gill-like structures.
No one, not even Penny Robinson herself, knew where she came from. John had attributed her ignorance to some form of amnesia. When all the data about her had been fed into a computer, the machine had answered with a question: LAST----CITIZEN---OF----ATLANTIS-----?
No one knew what the computer had in mind, referring to that mythological continent of a supremely advanced culture which had supposedly sunk into the Atlantic east of Gibraltar thousands of years ago. The printout triggered no recollection in Penny Robinson. Where she came from, where she belonged, thus who she was, were questions she could not answer, no matter how hard she tried.
What became known about her, over the time of John’s tests, was that she could live in the water like a fish, never needing to emerge. But she could also breathe the free air, for a dozen hours or so, before it was necessary to return to the water. In the water, she had enormous strength and agility, swam as fast as a porpoise, with an undulating motion, could dive to any depth, stay there for any length of time, and perform tasks that outdid the Navy’s most sophisticated deep-sea recovery machines.
On land she had strengths and abilities appropriate to a normal young lady six feet, one inch tall and weighing 182 pounds. But in a few hours dehydration would start, sapping her of strength and finally causing her breath to fade and her skin to blacken.
Except for the fact that her hands and feet were delicately webbed, and her almond-shaped eyes were an eerie, yet sensuous, shade of hazel, she looked quite like a normal human female. Her body was lithe and well-formed; her face had fine, sensuous features her hair was long, straight, and dark.
In the tank she was wearing the same unusual tight yellow one-piece bathing suit in which she was found on the beach. To the left of her swimsuit’s V-neck was an odd emblem for which she had no explanation---an image of a conch shell suspended over the tips of blue waves.
“Penny, can you hear me?” he asked a little louder.
She opened her eyes slowly, shook her head slightly to waken, and then nodded.
“We’re going to change the temperature of the water now,” he went on. “First, warmer.”
Penny nodded and stretched languorously.
Dr. Robinson turned to a set of nearby dials. Just then a voice came over the P.A. system, the voice of Roy Olson, the radio operator.
“Dr. Robinson, I just picked out something I think you oughta hear. I got it on tape. It’s pretty funky.”
“Coming Roy.” He looked at Penny in the tank. “I’ll be right back.”
He and Calavicci headed for the radio room.
Roy Olson was a lean and wiry 22-year-old with long dark hair whose prior job had been spinning records at a Los Angeles disco. But he was a supremely competent radio operator, and it was one of the finer satisfactions of O.R.D. that such a lad could be heard about through word-of-mouth and hired without having to prove his qualification before some higher authority. He sat amid a jumble of electronic equipment. To either side of him was a Smith-Corona electric typewriter and a hotplate, and in the little room beside him was a cot where he slept when he needed to, or often when he didn’t, just to be near the assemblage of expensive gear he took such pride in.
When John and Calavicci entered, he nodded without speaking and immediately hit the button that activate one of his tape recorders.
First came the voice of Bill, the man on the Chris-Craft. “Mayday! Mayday! George One Five Charlie to Coast Guard! Over!”
That message was quickly repeated. Then, contrasting with his frantic pitch, came the stubbornly calm and professional reply. “This is Coast Guard Seven-three. Go ahead, George One Five Charlie.”
“You guys better get out here fast! Three people in a small outboard were just yanked over the side by something my wife says was weird-looking and they haven’t surfaced yet. I mean it’s really wild! Over!”
“George One Five Charlie, what is your position?”
“We’re two miles offshore. I mean, two miles off the old Petal Point Light Bearing two-seven-seven. We’re the powerboat Willy Ide. We weren’t any more’n a hundred meters from the thing! Over.”
“Roger, George One Five Charlie, we read you. Stand by. We are en route, E.T.A. your position about 22 minutes. Do you copy?”
“Yes sir!” Hurry!”
“Roger. On our way. Over and out.”
“And there’s a stain in the water that burns!”
“Say again?”
“A stain! Some funny purple stuff in the water, burned my hand!”
“Roger. Don’t endanger yourself. We’ll pick up some samples. Coast Guard out.”
“Hurry! The stain’s disappearing fast!”
Roy clicked off the machine. “And that was the important part. It gets crazier. He keeps calling. In later transmissions the guy begins to convince himself it was a sea monster.” Roy looked up at them and smiled. It was not that he took such transmissions lightly, but it was his manner to smile when he delivered a communication he had been clever enough to record. It was a modest sign of satisfaction in doing his job well.
John swapped a hard glance with Calavicci. They nodded to Roy and went back to the lab.
John rapped lightly on the glass of Penny’s tank, and she sat up, pushing her head out of the water.
“Penny, do you know of any purple stain in the water that can burn you?”
Penny looked at him quizzically, and didn’t at first. Then he shook his head. “No.”
Calavicci looked at her thoughtfully. “Nothing, Penny? Nothing at all?”
Penny looked at him thoughtfully. “Many things in the sea can burn you. Even your own kerosene can irritate the skin. But what you say---no, I know of nothing like that.”
John pursed his lips. “Penny, how would you like to take a break?”
She smiled. “But I was taking a break, Father.”
“Roy?” John raised his voice and looked up at the intercom speaker. “Call the Coast Guard and tell them we’re coming.”
“They just called to ask for you!”
