by Hugh B. Cave
Far in the distance a freighter with tall deck cranes or whatever those Eiffel Tower things were properly called—he, for Christ's sake, was only a fisherman—came into sight now and lumbered along westward, trailing a plume of dark smoke from its single funnel. It was the only craft of any kind in sight.
"George?" Alice was sending him a message.
"Yes?"
"Practice your breathing again. I'm telling Dannie to do it, too. We sometimes encounter ships or fishing boats out here and have to go down to avoid them."
"All right."
He found he could hold his breath longer each time he tried it. Not having a watch on his wrist, he could not time himself, but he estimated fifteen minutes, then twenty, then even longer. Finally he lost interest, knowing there was almost no limit.
"You're very good, George," Alice told him. "You'll have absolutely no trouble, I'm sure."
"Who taught me this?" he asked. "You?"
"You still don't fully understand, do you, George? I suppose the truth is, you're still subconsciously resisting me. But yes, to answer your question for at least the third time, I've been preparing your mind. That's what we have to do, don't you see? Work on the mind. The physical potential is already there; almost everyone has it. This is becoming a little tiresome, George. Explaining things to you, I mean. You're an unbeliever; that's your trouble. Dannie, now, has just been swimming along as though we were on a pleasure trip."
"We're not on a pleasure trip, are we?" George said.
"No, George, we're not."
"We're on our way to some kind of undersea hell."
"If you say so. Everything depends on one's point of view, you know."
George very nearly said, or thought, "You're a real bitch, Alice," but caught himself, aware he would gain nothing by antagonizing her. At the same time, the realization that he had even been able to entertain such a thought elated him, for it seemed to indicate he really did retain control of at least a portion of his mind. In case some part of the thought might have escaped him, he attempted a hasty cover-up by giving Alice something more to answer.
"Who recruited you, Alice? You say you recruited Dannie, and from what you've been telling me, I take it you were the one who lured Ginny Jourdan into this. But who recruited you?"
"Our leader, himself."
"Who's he?"
"You'll meet him soon."
"How did he hook you?"
"We met at Anse Douce one day when I was there alone, and he found me attractive, George. That's all, really. Some men have found me attractive, you know, even if you don't anymore. We continued to meet at the beach until I was trained, and then I made the journey with him. Unfortunately I didn't quite suit their original purpose, so I was instructed to recruit others. I chose Ginny first, then your girlfriend."
"Why those two?" George demanded.
"Ginny was such a special kind of girl, so bright and beautiful. Dannie I picked because—well, I guess because she was the one you turned to when you stopped thinking I was special."
"Have you—what's that word you used?—recruited any others?"
"Not yet, George. But I will."
"And how will you pick those?"
"I'll want them to be really strong and fit, so they can make the journey, of course. And attractive. And brainy. I have to be very careful who I select, George. You see, what we want is—"
Her voice in George's head suddenly changed timbre. "There's a fishing boat coming, George! I'm telling Dannie, too. Breathe deep now and follow me down!"
29
Dr. Louis Clermont had telephoned the Azagon at 5:45 that morning from the Beliard hospital in Cap Matelot, hoping—in vain, as it turned out—to speak to Paul Henninger. The call was prompted by something that had happened at the hospital a few minutes earlier.
Clermont had gone to the hospital the evening before, in a last desperate attempt to do something for Ginny Jourdan. Keeping her from dying had become an obsession with him. When his efforts exhausted him, St. Joseph's Abe Lincoln decided to spend the night at the hospital instead of driving his old Renault back to Dame Marie.
Then at three-something in the morning, waking from a fitful sleep in the Jourdan girl's room, he rose from his cot and went to her one more time.
And again, not even knowing why he did so, he leaned over her with a stethoscope.
The body he examined was no longer that of a healthy young teenager. Ginny Jourdan had long ago stopped eating, was now being fed intravenously, and had been in a coma for the past forty-some hours.
Nevertheless, Louis Clermont examined the girl with that instrument designed to detect sounds within the body, and this time he was absolutely certain he heard something. Dropping the stethoscope as though it had seared his fingers, he jabbed the same trembling hand out to seize the bedside telephone.
"Dr. Beliard!" he shouted when a voice at the hospital switchboard responded. "Get me Dr. Beliard! Hurry!" And thirty seconds later when Beliard's sleep-heavy voice came on, Clermont cried, "Ed! It's Louis! Come up here to Ginny's room, man! Fast!"
Beliard, a bachelor, used his hospital as his home. In less than two minutes he came striding barefoot into the room, still in his pajamas and with a dressing gown flapping about him. People who knew Louis Clermont usually did move fast when that normally quiet man yelled at them.
Clermont still stood by Ginny Jourdan's bed, the stethoscope dangling from one hand now as he peered down at his patient. "You're just too late," he said lifelessly over his shoulder. "Just half a minute too late." As he turned to motion his colleague forward, tears filled his eyes.
Beliard stepped to his side, and they gazed down at the girl's face together. For a St. Joseph face it was thin and almost colorless—pale gray at best—but it wore a strange expression now. One of satisfaction, was it? Of triumph? Something like that, Clermont thought. As though in the end, despite all that had happened to her, Ginny had come out on top and knew it.
But hell, it couldn't be anything like that, he angrily told himself. He was letting his imagination drain away his common sense. Anyway, this was no time for sentimentality. He had a decision to make.
He made it. Wheeling on the hospital medic, he glared at him in silence for a few seconds—a Great Dane glowering at a pit bull—then thrust the stethoscope at him. "Told you I heard something, God damn it," he growled. "Listen to it now!"
The pit bull looked startled. "Louis, she can't be. Even if it happened when she disappeared, there'd be no—"
"Listen to it, will you?"
Beliard put the tubes in his ears and leaned over the girl. "Jesus, Louis, there is. You're right." His voice was a whisper filled with awe. "Slow, though—it's slow." He bent his left arm and frowned at the sweep second hand of his wristwatch while listening. Then: "Sixteen. Is that what you got? Sixteen?"
Louis Clermont nodded. "I'm going after it, Ed. I want to know-what the hell it is!"
Beliard hesitated only briefly before nodding. "I'm with you, I think. Just let me—" For the next five minutes, during which time Clermont looked on in silence, the hospital head examined the girl on the bed with painstaking care, obviously to satisfy himself, as Louis Clermont had already done, that Ginny Jourdan's frail, wasted-away body harbored no life except that bewildering slow heartbeat in her womb. Then with a look of determination on his pit-bull face, he straightened and nodded.
Clermont said quietly, "Where, Ed? Here or downstairs?"
"I think downstairs. No need to make a production of it, though. I'll carry her."
The corridor was empty when Clermont opened the door. With his colleague carrying the dead girl as though she were a sleeping child being put to bed, they walked along it to the rear stairs and descended to the operating room.
When they took Ginny Jourdan back to her room a while later, Louis Clermont carried something, too. Its heart had stopped beating even slowly now. It was in an aqueous solution of formaldehyde in a large glass jar, with a surgeon's green robe w
rapped around the jar in case they encountered anyone along the way. Clermont's watch read 5:40.
"You going to tell her folks, Louis?" Beliard asked when the door was shut and the girl had been returned to her bed. Again the two men were studying the object in the preservative.
Clermont shook his head. "Not yet, anyway. Maybe never." Slowly he turned the jar to reveal all details of the thing it contained. "Ed, I can't believe this, even though I half suspected it. If one this size is so hideous, what kind of horror must a mature one be?"
The pit-bull face of the hospital man was one huge scowl. "The question, Louis, is—what is it? It can't be human. Gestation period's obviously far too short, for one thing. Yet"—Beliard had to pause to marshal his thoughts—"yet in spite of those gill-like openings it isn't altogether an aquatic creature either, is it? What is it, Louis? Part human, part sea creature? Aside from being, as you say, such a revolting little monster?"
"You tell me."
"Uh-uh. I'm in over my head here."
"Take a stab at it." Clermont stopped staring at the thing in the jar and turned to direct a pleading look at his colleague. "You've made a study of evolutionary biology, haven't you? What are we dealing with here?"
Beliard still gazed at the jar as he groped for an answer. "Well . . . from what you told me downstairs when we first saw this, we'd better begin by assuming its father is—is more closely related to, say, a dolphin than a human being. Quite a few anthropologists today are leaning to the belief that man lived in the sea at one stage of his development. I don't mean he came from the sea—we know he did that—but that he went back there for a time after evolving as a land animal."
Pausing, he shifted his gaze from the jar to Clermont's bearded face, as though anticipating an argument.
Clermont only nodded.
"Man did that during the Pliocene drought, these people think," the hospital doctor went on. "There's a span of around twelve million years there where he seems to have vanished from the face of the earth, leaving no trace. He must have gone somewhere, they say, and maybe that's the answer: He took to the sea to keep cool and find food. Then when the long drought ended and the rivers began to flow again, he swam up the rivers and climbed back out of the water into the forests while the others, the ancestors of our dolphins and whales and such, stayed behind."
"And?"
"Well, who's to say in view of what we've got in the jar here, that some of the humanoids, too, didn't stay behind? And are still out there in certain compatible parts of the planet's oceans?"
Louis Clermont let his breath out slowly and shook his head even more slowly and said, "You're assuming one hell of a lot, Ed."
"Don't we more or less have to? This thing is here, for Christ sake. Right here in this jar, man. We're not imagining it, so we have to explain it."
"I can't believe such a thing could mate with one of our kind."
"Evolution's a tricky thing. Staying in the sea may have made these things physically different from us—really hideous by our standards, if this one is typical—but obviously hasn't changed the genes all that much. We have proof of that right here." Lifting the container, Beliard again studied the creature in it. "Of course," he went on, scowling now, "we don't know if this little horror would have lived even if it had run the full course, do we?"
Clermont shook his head.
"How far along is it, you suppose, Louis? How big would it have become if Ginny had lived to give birth to it?"
"He didn't tell me that."
"Who didn't tell you?"
"Paul Henninger," Clermont said. "And I'd better call him right now and ask some questions." He reached for the phone beside the dead girl's bed.
But Dr. Steve Spence at the Azagon, after looking for Henninger, returned to the telephone to report him missing from his room.
Clermont put his phone down and again turned to the jar containing the fetus. "Ed, there's someone I ought to show this to," he said to Beliard. "I'll see you later."
"Louis, for God's sake be discreet! If anyone—"
"I know. All hell could break loose. Don't worry, I won't do anything too stupid." Having finished rewrapping the jar, this time in a pillowcase, Clermont paused at the door. "You want me for anything, I'll be at home. No office today." Walking out, he went down the back stairs to the hospital parking lot, where his car was.
At home in Dame Marie, Clermont put the jar on the floor in his front room and spent a frantic moment searching his billfold for the phone number given him by Paul Henninger's brother-in-law, Commander Norman Morris. Oh, Lord, he thought, don't tell me I left it at my office.
He hadn't, and when he found the number and put the call through, he eventually got an answer. His watch said five past six. Soon after he finished talking to the navy man, Steve Spence called him from the Azagon to say that Paul Henninger and Juan Mendoza had disappeared.
Commander Morris arrived at Clermont's house soon after nine, again wearing civilian clothes despite his navy title. This time his shirt was the brilliant orange of certain life jackets designed to be easily spotted at sea in an emergency. Opening the door to him, Clermont said briskly, "Thanks for coming. I've got something to show you."
He led his caller across the front room and lifted the hospital jar from the floor to a table so the commander could more comfortably examine it. The man did so, bending his knees to bring his eyes to the proper level. For thirty or forty seconds he studied the object in the jar without comment. Then Clermont, becoming impatient, nudged him and said, "Here, look at this," and thrust at him the watercolor Morris had left with him on his earlier visit to Dame Marie.
Evidently the commander's career in the navy had taught him to be long on thought and frugal with words. Before speaking, he took time to compare the painting very carefully with the object in the jar. Then at last he said with a shake of his head, "So Paul didn't dream them up. This one in the jar is a baby?"
"Unborn. I was going to ask you how big Paul said they got to be."
"Smaller than humans, he said, but not much. What are they, Doctor?"
"Dr. Beliard at the hospital believes they originated the same way we did. Then when a prolonged drought forced us all back into the sea, they chose to stay there when we crawled out."
"Paul thinks that, too. But it was only a guess on his part. He wasn't there long enough to learn much, he told me." Studying the creature in the jar again, Morris added with a shake of his head, "My God, they're ugly. How can anything part human be this ugly?"
"More important," Clermont said, "is that they have established a hold on certain people here. Patients and doctors at the Azagon. George Benson, the fishing fellow. The girl who died this morning with this thing inside her—and I shouldn't be telling you about her, so forget I said it." He walked to a chair and let his lank frame collapse onto it. "Quite likely there are others I don't know about. I called you because your brother-in-law obviously felt you might pitch in and help somehow."
"How? How can I help?"
"At this point, who knows? All I'm sure of now is that Paul isn't the weak link we all thought he was. Not you, perhaps, but the rest of us. Seems to me he fought them right down to the wire and when they finally got him to go there, wherever it is they are, and he saw what was going on, he still had guts enough to escape from them. Then he made up his mind not to quit his job at the Azagon but to stick around and fight. Isn't that why he called on you, when you come right down to it? To help him fight them?"
"It would seem so, Doctor."
"Well? I mean, do you have any idea how to go about it?"
Commander Morris refolded the watercolor Paul Henninger had painted for him, depicting an adult version of the miniature nightmare in the jar, and handed it back to Clermont. "Doctor," he said with care, "the more I say now, the more likely I am to find myself in hot water later. For the time being I'll just pass on this, if you don't mind. I would like to talk to Paul again, though, if it's possible. Where is he? At the Azagon?
"
"He left there very early this morning, they told me over the phone a while ago. I have to assume he hasn't returned or he would have called me."
"They don't know where he went?"
"They don't know where he went. Hold on, will you? Where are you off to in such a hurry?"
"Back to my plane," the navy man said crisply on his way to the door. "I've things to do and not much time, it seems. Maybe not time enough."
30
It was much like the dream, George Benson discovered. Of course it would be, because Alice was the one who had put the dream into his subconscious in the first place.
There was the deepening green of the tropical sea, like thick green glass. There were the fairy forests made up of growing things, some delicate and lacy, some writhing in tangled masses like the snake-hairs of Medusa. He had no idea how deep Alice was leading him, but he felt no discomfort. When he looked to see how Dannie was faring, she appeared to be having no trouble either.
How long had Alice been doing this, anyway? A long time, probably. Months. That "leader" she talked about . . . whoever he was, she had evidently met him soon after they came to Dame Marie from the States.
Ahead of him Alice turned, looked up at the brighter water through which they had descended, and lifted an arm to point. A shadow was passing over them, trailing an even longer appendage of bubbles. The fishing boat they were hiding from? It must be.
He watched it go by and saw Alice laughing, and for a moment even felt a touch of exultation himself. Only for a moment, though. Then he remembered some of the things she had been telling him during the long swim from Anse Douce, and began again the seemingly hopeless struggle to free his mind from her control.
There was still the all-important question: Did one small part of his mind really belong to him, or was Alice only letting him think so to amuse herself?