After a long time the _Pelorus_ got alongside and men quickly fastened the huge buoy to the ship. Then the down-wind sea changed its appearance. A reek of gasoline reached the _Esperance_. "Something happened," said Davis dourly. "They're dumping the gasoline--not even pumping it aboard. Let's get out of the stink." The _Esperance_ beat to windward. The _Pelorus_ began to lift something large and ungainly out of the water. The _Esperance_ went down-wind to take a look at it. The yacht went past no more than fifty yards away, just as the bathyscaphe left the water and swung clear. The bathyscaphe's conning-tower was gone. It had been torn away by brute force. The three-inch-thick steel globe.... Half of it was gone. The rest was crushed. The sphere, which had been designed to resist a crushing pressure of ten tons per square inch, had been ripped in half! It had been bitten through. Bitten! There was no comment by anybody on the _Esperance_. Half a mile from the oceanographic ship, Davis said in a peculiarly flat voice, "Cut away the dredge. We won't try to use it again." Someone slashed the inflated canvas bag. It collapsed. Somebody cut away a rope. The free dredge sank, slowly. It would never come up again. The _Esperance_ changed course. She headed north by west. There was still no conversation at all. The yacht seemed to tiptoe away from the scene of the bathyscaphe's destruction. A long time later, Deirdre said tentatively, "Have you been making guesses, Terry?" "Guesses, yes," he admitted. "Such as?" "Your father denied that the dredge was designed to stir up whatever gathered the fish together and then carried them down to the bottom of the sea. I was right there with him in the denial, but that's what we intended, just the same. We said we didn't believe there was anything there, so it couldn't do any harm to poke it. We poked, all right! Our dredge, and then the bathyscaphe...." "But what ..." "And a bolide fell right there a couple of nights ago," said Terry irrelevantly. "I wonder what the entity on the ocean-bottom thought of the bolide. Hm." He paused. "I wonder, too, what the bolide thought of what it found down there. Is that too crazy for a sane man to think, Deirdre?" She shook her head. "Why is my father working on this business?" she asked. "And why are the boys helping, and why do radar stations tell us what they find out, and why did the Philippine Government ask the _Pelorus_ to make a bathyscaphe dive at just that spot?" Terry blinked at her. "Too crazy for official notice, eh?" he said, "but too dangerous not to check up on! Is it absolutely certain that the bolides are bolides?" "No." "Thanks," said Terry. He pursed his lips as if to whistle. "I've been thinking of this thing as a puzzle. But it isn't. I'm very much afraid it's a threat!" He paused. "Y-y-es. I've just made a new guess. It adds everything together. I do hope it's wrong, Deirdre! I've got cold chills running up and down my spine!"