The Atlantic Abomination by John Brunner

that would suffice! He could not remember when last he had lashed a human mindthat had never before known such powers. Even infants in the womb had learned it before birth in the day when his kind ruled the planet. But this one was a stranger to the pain. He had no resistance.
    He overlaid the pain temporarily, implanted his commands, and began, satisfied, to work his way out of his refuge.
    The thickness of the layer of mud startled him when he compared it with the apparent rate of deposition. He had been in the refuge longer than he had ever anticipated. But it was not until the device had duly returned to bring him to the surface, and he had commanded the man to take it well away from the ship that had launched it overhead, that he was able to get a sight of the stars and know the real duration of his imprisonment.
    Not less than a hundred and ten thousand years, he judged. Even by the standards of his race—to whom human beings were mere mayflies, hatched at morning, dead at sunset—that was a long time.
    Still, no matter. The first essential was to gather his strength. Then to get servants and extend his dominion. He commanded the man to feed him, and by lashing him now and again drove him to select suitable articles of diet. There were molluscs on the shore of a lonely, rocky islet, whose succulent flesh gave him a little of the metals he needed. Their shells helped to provide silicon, and carbon he could absorb in plenty. It would need more than a single servant to provide him with all his requirements. Nonetheless, he had made a beginning. And he had time to spare.
    Patiently, he looked for means of adding to his retinue. He found it, together with a superior means of transport. His strength grew. Sooner than he had hoped, he was in a position to conquer his first city. It was a floating city, a technological achievement he would have thought beyond these short-lived grubs of Earth, crude though it might be by his standards. But here he had enough to feed him, and he could turn his mind to the question of making men aware of theirinferior status. Proper homage was the next thing to command.
    Every now and again other human-filled vessels passed as he consolidated himself. He was not yet ready to trouble himself with them. He blinded them, and they turned aside.
    “This I find significant,” the Chinese statistician said in his dulcet tenor voice. He put his thumb on the strange gap in the center of the North Atlantic chart he had prepared. “I do not know if it means anything important. Certainly it is to be investigated.”
    He sat down abruptly, and a hum of conversation went up around the room. The room was the operations center of the aircraft carrier, the
Cape Wrath
, which had become the brain, behind the entire project. More than forty people were assembled. Some of them sat with simultaneous translation phones on their heads, and two interpreters were still completing their account of the Chinese’s remarks when Lampion spoke. He was the official UN representative. French by birth, international by adoption, he had become accepted as neutral president of the mixed bag of investigators.
    “We are extremely busy,” he reminded the audience in his matter-of-fact manner. “The list of items we have on the agenda is conclusive, I think. Nonetheless, this is a major discovery; to find that for days past not one of our search units has reported a single sighting in that area. It looks as if it has been deliberately avoided. And yet we know that no less than four ships should have sent in news from there. Yes, Dr. Gordon?”
    “You mentioned ships only,” Gordon said, leaning forward. “How about patrol planes?”
    The Chinese signalled that he would reply, received Lampion’s nod, and said, “Air surveys are included, Dr. Gordon. They too show the curious hole in the network of reports.”
    “In other words,” Gordon suggested, “the
Queen Alexandra
and the
Gondwana
are probably slap in the middle,