The Spy Who Spoke Porpoise

by Philip Wylie

  Grove knew that if this Betty was Esther, this hiding place had been clever. Solentor’s people might look for her, doubtless had looked and perhaps were still looking; but the public cafeteria wouldn’t be a likely spot for their search. Move away a block or so; change your name and looks slightly: Grove’s own formula for disappearing. If the bus girl was the onetime American agent and the twice-brainwashed captive of the Soviets, her presence might mean loyalty to America or that she was again, on the other side and alert on behalf of that side. And she might not be either.

  He could not decide how to resolve this enigma—or fantasy. Black hair would be simple. Her Hawaiian locutions could be easy for the linguist his naked, short-term guest had claimed she was. And he found her resemblance to Racquelle, which had put him off for such a long time, wasn’t facial except for a few trifles; it was owing to the fact that this Betty Sato, or whoever, moved as that long-ago girl had, smiled with the same warmth and the same special glow of eye—attracted him, then, in a way once very familiar. He discovered that with a slight sense of embarrassment because he had not expected ever again to feel toward any woman quite as he’d felt toward the French girl. He did, though, and at twice this girl’s age, nearly! He couldn’t help wondering if that wasn’t a sign of male menopause though he kept obstinately trying to guess what the bus girl in the loose muumuu would look like if the wide hips, the extending derrière and the vast breasts were not substance but padding, and, imagined as removed.

  One afternoon when he returned to the park after a final, hard and luckless crawl on the steeps in the power-line region he saw that Betty was preparing to go off duty. She finished some sweeping and now mopped up a spot on the asphalt floor. Then she took broom and the mop to their closet and he managed, by leaning awkwardly, to see her do something he still had not quite expected. She carefully wiped the long handles of the implements with a towel.

  The dishes and trays she touched all day were, of course, put straight into washing machines.

  Grove said nothing to her then. But he left for his home thoughtfully. If Solentor’s people knew their lost lady was here, why would that clever lass be careful not to leave her fingerprints anywhere? On the other hand, did she suspect that the CIA, or somebody of that sort, might make a print survey of park employees, or even of herself in particular? Why?

  It might be important to know. And it was interesting to be fairly sure, at last, that Esther Wilson was here and occupied by some cautious endeavor aside from that of staying hidden and unrecognized by him and maybe others.

  The next day Betty was off duty he tried to find out from the counter girls what they knew about her. Not much that satisfied Grove, it proved. Betty had lived in Hana Maui, they said, till lately when she came to Oahu and got the cleanup job. She boarded with a big family in the Hawaiian Homelands, people who were known to several of the counter girls and who were sure of Betty’s long-time residence in Hana. They said she “knew everybody”—it wasn’t a large village, after all. If that background was false, as Grove believed, it was well founded owing, perhaps, to the ingenuity and aid of Mr. Cy Ah Soo.

  He told Jerry that night what he had learned and what he suspected. Jerry elicited from his second cousin, a few days later, the fact that Betty was, indeed, Esther. She had been “hidden” in the village of Hana for several weeks, at first. It was she who had suggested this different way of concealment. Cy hadn’t told Jerry about it because the girl had begged him not to. And also because Cy had thought the whole affair was pretty clever, a bit of one-upmanship on his part in relation to Jerry Gong. Since Cy had no idea of the background of the lady he’d first unchained in Grove’s house and provided with clothes, helped disguise for her appearance in Hana and later aided in her present imposture, he thought of it as a great joke.

  “He’ll keep it quiet,” Jerry told Grove that night, “so no sweat, there. But what are you going to do?”

  “That’s a peach of a question! If we pick her up and she explains what’s behind this bright idea, we may have to start all over, hiding her. We can’t deal her in. Though I’d bet half of my dough against a single buck she’s not working for them any more. But I’ve made mistakes before now. Suppose we just leave her as is for a while? I’ll try, try a little, to get her to come clean. It’s a mess! Suppose she now feels loyal to CIA, for instance?”

  “Wouldn’t she have sent them word?”

  “Guess not. Nothing about her in the regular Eaper bulletins. There would be, if she’d made contact. Told ’em about me—us.”

  “I could get a—friend—to keep tabs—?”

  “Let her sit, Jerry. We don’t want any more aides. Can’t have them: presidential order, remember?”

  “My friend wouldn’t need to know anything but just keep an eye on this Betty Sato.”

  “Not now. Anybody doing that could tip off somebody else doing the same. Right?”

  Jerry agreed.

  Some days later Grove came from his garage and found Genevra Oopani sitting on a shaded bench in the back yard—all two hundred and ten pounds of Jenny, all the serenity, the repose, the face that recalled a youthful beauty and still had a different loveliness. She was not aware of his arrival—or of the stunning portrait study made by the quiet traces of her character—her fondness, generosity and faint sadness, her wisdom, her—Grove had called it Polynesianness—a dignity, the innocent sexuality, the poise and her unspoken nature worship. (Did she still believe the story about Haleakala and the sun?) He never could know.

  She was relaxing on a redwood bench, leaving scant room for another occupant and looking, with dark, shining eyes, toward the mountains. It made Grove look.

  Maybe she knew by then that he was there. Maybe not.

  What she was watching, Grove watched.

  Over the tops of the near mountains, precipitous and vertically trenched, white, gray and ominously purplish clouds piled up. The trades kept adding to those already blocked by the sharp-topped, hidden crests. They came at regular intervals, marine cumulus, white as angel wings, spaced evenly, and almost of a size. Flat on the bottom but of varied shape, and when they were pushed into their predecessors they turned gray or mauve. As the compression increased the mass darkened. At a certain point their essence, moisture, congealed owing to the chill of altitude, very different from the warmth that rose out of the sun-steamed Pacific, whence they had origin.

  At that height, the clouds rained.

  From below, the rain appeared as glittering sheets, as dark shafts, as amorphous curtains that hid the jungle and bare stone. Through the panoply, light streamed in every degree of intensity from hot white to a dusky shimmer, light shaped by iris-opening of cloud and mountain into geometrical forms because the light did not bend; slow, hushed blocks of it slanted against the background. Grove looked and he thought, as often, of the praise heaped on Rome’s golden light, or the Aegean’s—and he knew that nobody had seen what light could be, who’d not watched the Hawaiian pali on such a day.

  And he saw what fascinated Jenny.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said softly.

  She wasn’t startled; she turned a little and smiled. “The rainbow? I am listening to it.”

  What an ideal he thought. Listening: to a rainbow.

  Genevra said things like that. Perhaps they were things said by her ancestors, when they stared in awe at their new paradise, chiefs and princes, huge men in feather cloaks, handsome and impressive in a way lost to man now. Perhaps, when they looked at rainbows in the Hawaiian light they also listened—as the clouds came and thickened, darkened, spilled diagonal torrents into the light shafts that made, then as on this day, trapezoids of rain and curtains which then became waterfalls, silver torrents that fell for a thousand or two thousand feet from every murk-hidden notch in the summit line.

  He tried it; he “listened” to the rainbow that arced above.

  Its violet would be a deep and low tone, double basses and oboes; red, the brasses; yellow, the violins,
high and wild and explicit, with violas and second fiddles harmonizing with orange woodwinds.

  It stirred a memory. When he’d been a child, near to sleep, he’d sometimes heard massive, symphonic music, self-composed, marvelous, never repeating and very distant, long before he’d listened to a real symphony orchestra; when the only music he knew was that of the circus band, of calliopes, or of popular phonograph records.

  He remembered that other, accepted marvel and wondered, now, what had produced it. Auditory imagination, perhaps—or some earlier, unremembered and chance hearing of symphony records which he had later recomposed in tempo with the rush of capillarial blood, giving an interpretation of his own, from its forgotten source.

  Looking now at the rainbow, a resplendent arch with a hazy companion, and “listening” to both, Grove recalled those bedtime rhapsodies.

  And a phrase came to mind: music of the spheres.

  Suppose there was such a thing—a cosmic sonata, that only the innocent, or children, could hear nowadays? But music that Polynesians might always have heard, since, according to missionary and other haole views, they were more or less children?

  He realized goose flesh had pocked him and that Jenny had turned, seen that and smiled.

  For a moment, as he glanced back at the prismatic arc, the tiny pimpling stood out and he could hear the childhood rhapsody, with its massive orchestration. Then the sound ebbed, his flesh became smooth and he laughed a little at himself, but not quite with deprecation.

  For Grove knew that man, in his modern, civilized state, scientific man, technological man, was merely at the edge of knowing. Science, however little scientists accepted the fact, was a beginning art. The most elaborate concept of the nature of reality—the farthest reach of telescopes, the minutest seeing of electron magnifiers, and the deepest insight so far gained—was elementary, tentative and crude. A hundred years from now an expectably vast extension of knowledge would also be regarded near to final, just as it was this day. But another next century would see all that prior knowing as meager and see its own, once again, as nearly whole.

  He chuckled softly.

  And the big woman answered that same way: “Haoles almost never know how little they know.” She turned that into a great compliment. “But some, Mr. Grove, do guess.”

  They watched the rainbow a little longer. But he didn’t hear it again.

  Finally they went in. Lunch, Jenny said, was nearly ready. And she reminded him as she served it that, at three-thirty, his trampoline class would arrive: the multihued kids from the neighborhood, aged eleven to sixteen, who were becoming expert under his instruction. Fifteen boys and, by their special permission (with a little pressure from Grove), two girls, who didn’t know they were being taught acrobatics by one of the world’s former but greatest clown tumblers—a teacher who, at the lesson’s end, gave exhibitions which he wound up with at least one new display, some combination of flip, flips or twists—tucked or layout—that no other “uncle” or “gramp,” Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Portuguese or Yankee, the popeyed kids ever heard of could perform.

  That afternoon as he watched Raymond Tatti and Joseph Wataln (who was East Indian) complete perfect tucked back-double-somersaults he thought that he would soon need a taller and bigger gym room, one equipped for flying trapezes, providing parents assented.

  The kids would go for it.

  But it was a bit risky. So far, nobody had been seriously hurt: sprains, strained muscles, a ligament pulled, but nothing worse. With trapezes, though, the danger increased even at low levels over mats.

  Meantime, he held his breath while Timothy Chung, the recent scaredy-cat of the group did a layout back gainer safely, though he missed the padded steel rim by a margin technically adequate but, Grove felt, too small for kids. Whom you shouldn’t tell that, he decided—unless they came out a bit farther.

  Even with a trampoline frame padded, you can break your neck by a relatively minor miscalculation.

  “How was that?” the boy demanded.

  Grove looked at his gleaming, oriental eyes and great child grin. “Terrific! Try another. You drifted a trifle.”

  Tim tried—and came down dead center. Grove relaxed.

  When his trampoline class had left Grove took a leisurely shower, dressed and strolled out on his lanai. The sun was near to setting—early on this coast where the mountains behind the Kalan were high and near. There would be sunshine in Honolulu for at least an hour more.

  Grove gazed over the water through the special wall of glass on the sea side. He did that a good deal now, as if looking at the ocean could somehow lead to an idea of what might have happened out there, or was happening, probably beyond the reach of eyes or even of radar. The contours of Rabbit Island, to his right, were deep-dug by shadows, the white rock ledges emphasized by the last sunlight. The bay sparkled as usual and a small craft with a red sail tacked near shore toward Kailua. Earlier in the spring the Navy had put on an occasional show of bombing practice, using smoke bombs to show the accuracy of the circling airmen, or its lack. But there hadn’t been any such sight for quite a while.

  As Grove looked at nothing in particular, he saw a sudden and distant glint, offshore and slightly to his right. He took up binoculars, the kind used on ships’ bridges, and tried to find the source. The flash came again but what caused it wasn’t discernible. Anything floating and shiny, or merely wet, might return such a glint. But as he thought that he remembered he had seen it on two or three other occasions—just such a flicker in what seemed the same place, not far from Rabbit Island. And not, he thought, much beyond the long, irregular rim of white where the oceanic swells were smashed so the inside water was never exposed to the huge waves common on other stretches of coast and highly prized by surfers.

  The distant sparkle could come from flotsam that had anchored itself beyond the outer barrier. It could be, and probably was, from a buoy marking a fish trap or a trap for crawfish that went by the name of lobster, here. But as Grove gave the matter uncertain thought while keeping the glasses focused, he realized that the previous sightings of a similar flash or two had occurred at about this time—when the sun fell behind the sculpture on the mountain summit: Nature’s ancient anticipation, he had decided, and perhaps her present mocking of what often passed as art, these days.

  This detail had at least one significance. If some floating object were fixed at the point he had noted, it cast back the sun’s light only for a few moments and owing to a certain angle of the sun. He hadn’t paid attention to the precise time before: every ocean is likely to bear objects that reflect a slant of sun as they rise and tilt on the waves—and any such that is anchored, or fast for whatever cause, may well be seen only for a brief time when the sun is right.

  Nevertheless, this trifling discovery would need checking out. The need, Grove reflected grimly, was owing to the lack of any other leads, a lack which made his position almost intolerable. If, as he feared, the operation in progress (or completed!) could destroy America, or be used to threaten such destruction, just four Americans knew what he did about the situation and two more, who had been alerted to some degree by the President. It wasn’t enough—not enough by thousands. Perhaps there would never be enough people in time enough.

  However—he put down the heavy binoculars—this mere glint was out at sea and that was where the cable could have run—hooked to another, perhaps, in the maze of seaweed, gorgonians, coral, anemones and rocks on the bottom and so camouflaged as to be impossible to see there. The problem was, how to search the area where the glint had been seen without becoming conspicuous.

  Maybe Jerry could help—Jerry’s family and friends, rather. They had done several things for Grove now, and not asked why, or accepted compensation. They were proud of Jerry as uncle, cousin, whatever he was to them, and inasmuch as he had been a detective, if he wanted, now, say a woman hidden or an island combed they were delighted to oblige.

  It would be awhile before Jerry came to work: Grove im
patiently waited.

  “How could it be done?” Grove had explained.

  Jerry’s answer was drowned out by a metal bellow from beyond the institute grounds, toward Waimanalo. He gestured with his head and walked his bike toward the park with Grove following. The din pursued them. Not until they’d entered the Reef Tank and ascended its spiral ramp for some distance was conversation at normal level possible.

  “How come, working at night?” Grove then asked.

  “Got to get the new foundations and walls up by the fifteenth,” the watchman answered. “Contractor set up lights and pays overtime to make it.”

  That referred to an activity in the third area belonging to the organization controlling the park and the institute. It also owned and operated the Makai Range where the bulldozers, earth-moving machines and triphammers were now making the din in the darkness. The Makai, or Seaward Range, had a space age look. From it, a pier extended into the Pacific for six hundred feet. At its far end and at anchor nearby were three oceangoing ships designed for engineering and research operations. Beyond the ships and beneath the water at depths of two hundred, four hundred and six hundred feet three “habitats,” steel and aluminum and glass structures, would soon rest, places where men would live for months at a time under pressures equal to the depths. Their future locations were already marked by lighted buoys.

  Across the highway upon the pier an edifice was rising, one seemingly normal from the outside but, within, soon to be crammed with computers, delicate electronic instruments, chemical-analytical apparatus, spider webs of cables with varicolored insulation, pumps, mazes of plastic and metal tubes, teletypes and other automated devices of which some were highly classified—a scientific beehive so novel that most people now employed in its building could not imagine its functions.