A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist

by Ron Miller

  “Ooh!” cried one of the mermaids, “I feel tingly all over!”

  “Odd, isn’t it?” answered a companion, “Like when I caught that dreadful electric eel once, remember?”

  That certainly sounded more than a little familiar to Bronwyn, but it was still a memory that remained tantalizingly and frustratingly aloof.

  Once more the air crackled and this time Bronwyn could actually hear it buzzing, like a taut wire in a breeze. The atmosphere had become saturated with an electric fluid: she could feel the hairs on her nape and on her arms become stiffly erect, as though she had just touched the poles of a battery. She was certain that if one of the mermaids were to touch her just then, she’d receive a violent shock.

  The breeze ceased entirely and a great silence prevailed in the calm that followed. The ocean heaved in lazy, oily billows.

  The island that had until this moment been little more than a scarcely-noticed shadow on the horizon, capped with a towering billow of cloud, like whipped cream piled atop a sundae, drew Bronwyn’s attention. From the center of its darksome silhouette there suddenly lanced a thread of violet light that skewered the cloud like a needle passing through a skein of yarn. It looked like the dazzling thread of white-hot metal inside the globe of an electric light. The cloud flickered and pulsated with an internal commotion, like fireflies behind ground glass. From its highest billow, the princess could still see the almost invisibly fine thread as it vanished into the indigo zenith. And there in the zenith, too, was the tragic little moon, the thread of light aimed toward it like the trail of a rocket. As if it were the rocket’s target.

  And as though that strange beam of light had hit her directly between the eyes, filling her head with sparkling, throbbing illumination, she was inspired and turned to the mermaids and asked, “What is that island over there?”

  But as she spoke, the cloud was torn in two like a curtain and the mysterious electricity burst from it as though from a shattered galvanic cell. Fearful claps of thunder followed dazzling flashes of lightning, of an intensity Bronwyn had never experienced. The bolts crisscrossed one another and the echoing thunder pealed like a machine gun fired in a bank vault. The mass of vapor became incandescent and a shower of hailstones fell onto the islet, each detonating with a burst of light. The waves that suddenly fell upon the rocks reared up like firebreathing monsters, their crests surmounted by combs of flame.

  The lightning became whimsical and took the form of fiery globes that burst like bombshells over Bronwyn’s head. The incessant lightning became an almost constant emission of light, flickering like sunlight through a rapidly rotating propeller.

  Waterspouts shot up in sinuous columns, like enraged cobras, falling back to disintegrate in explosions of foam, each individual droplet fizzing and sparkling like a firework. Spikes and needles of violet and green light covered the rocks, making them look like incandescent porcupines huddling against the storm.

  Brownyn did not receive an answer to her query concerning the identity of the distant island since, at the first whipcrack of thunder, the mermaids had in practiced unison dived from the islet into the safety of the serene and saline depths. But the island, Bronwyn realized, didn’t need a name since she knew what to call it: Tudela’s Island.

  The princess eradicated the distance between the mermaid’s islet and the mysterious island like a furious torpedo; not wavering half a degree from the course, her powerful flukes propelling her like the blades of a turbine. When she saw the shadowy flanks of the island’s foundations loom darkly ahead of her, she surfaced to reconnoiter. In front of and above her were wild ramparts of broken basalt heaped into fantastic and ragged shapes. like buttresses supporting the island itself, vast arches of black stone connected sea and cliffs. Through their openings, the frustrated waves lashed and frothed. At the jagged edge of the cliffs, high above her head, Bronwyn could see a dozen wan-looking trees, resembling twisted bits of wire more than anything alive. The cliffs looked stark and lifeless until she caught a glimpse of something moving among the great piles of broken rock at their base. Though it looked like little more than a scrap of windblown cloth, it was a human figure. She dived back beneath the grey, beating surf and with a few powerful strokes reemerged near where she had seen the human. As her head rose above the surge, she was at first almost deafened by the thundering roll of the breakers as they beat themselves uselessly against the adamant basalt. Somewhere amidst the sound she seemed to hear her own name, bronbronbronwynbronwynwynwyn. Was she so close to land that the sea itself was pleading for her return? She cleared her face of the strands of kelpy hair that clung to it and as her vision cleared she saw that her name was not mysteriously being called by the waves, but, more prosaically, by the tall, lanky figure that clung precariously to the slippery boulders just above her head.

  “Bronwyn!” it called again.

  “Professor Wittenoom!” cried Bronwyn, “Whatever are you doing there?”

  “Clinging for dear life. But better I should ask, I think: whatever are you doing there?”

  “Treading water.”

  “It’s very good to see you! Do you know, I thought that you were dead? Drowned?”

  “I thought so myself, at first. And it’s good to see you, too, Professor.”

  “An odd time and place to go skinny-dipping, if I might say so.”

  “I can’t help it, I’m a mermaid.”

  “Literally or figuratively?”

  “Literally. Some god or another turned me into one, to save me from drowning.”

  “Decent of him or her. But I wouldn’t have thought it possible, anatomically speaking. Icthyology, however, is not my field, let alone comparative anatomy, so I can’t speak with any sort of expertise, you understand.”

  “Of course. Here, look at this,” she offered, doing a neat somersault that finished with a showy flick of her tail.

  “Remarkable.”

  “How did you get onto the island? I take it that’s where your parachute took you?”

  “You are correct, but after what I’ve found here, it almost seems inevitable that I land here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The secret of the moon, it’s here on this island.”

  “I knew it!” cried Bronwyn. “It’s Tudela’s island, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so. I looked on a map and it’s called Skupshtina.”

  ”No! No! That’s not what I mean. Tudela’s here, isn’t he? On this island? Dr. Tudela?”

  “Oh! Yes, of course he is. How could you possibly have known that?”

  “Uncanny, isn’t it?”

  “Look here, Princess, it’s getting awfully cold and wet. Why don’t you come and join me someplace dry and warm? Then we can catch up with what’s been going on?”

  “I can’t!”

  “But . . . Oh. I see. Sorry. That was silly of me. But, tell me, what are you going to do about, ah, your condition? You can’t remain demipiscine forever, can you?”

  “I don’t know, I hadn’t much thought about it.”

  “What are those things on your neck?”

  “Oh. Those are my gills. I only need them when I’m swimming underwater.”

  “Well . . . look here, Princess, there’s an awful lot about which I think you ought to know, about what’s been occuring on this island, but I don’t know what you’re going to be able to do about it . . . ”

  “I can see what you mean. If you must know, I didn’t ask to be this way, though the thought was certainly well-intentioned: I would certainly have drowned otherwise. But I don’t know that I enjoy it all that much. If you must know, the conversation’s less than compelling. I’m not sure what, exactly, I can do about it, however.”

  “You must do something. I need your help to stop Tudela’s madness. I’m the only one here besides him and his associates. He only allows me my freedom because he considers me harmless and the island escape-proof. Although electrical phenomena are outside my field, I understand enough to kno
w what he’s doing and have some idea of how his devices operate. Running the Academy for so many years has taught me a smattering of just about every discipline, you see. He thinks that you’re dead, by the way, especially since I seemed convinced of your demise, in spite of my hopes. With your presence on the island unknown to him, I think that we could put paid to his evil schemes.”

  “I take it that it’s Tudela who’s responsible for what’s happening to the little moon?”

  “He’s managed to harness some remarkably potent forces.”

  “I think that I’ve experienced some of them. But why?”

  “I’ll have to explain that to you when we meet again. I don’t want to be out of the Doctor’s sight too long. Are you going to be around long?”

  “No, this surf’s too difficult to swim in. Besides, I think that I need to find out how to get my legs back if I’m to be of any use to you.”

  “Could you hurry? I think that there’s probably only another week before the moon plummets into the earth!”

  “Where?”

  “Here!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  REUNIONS

  “You don’t want to be a merperson any longer?” asked the Triton in astonishment. Bronwyn felt terrible: he looked so hurt.

  “I’m really very grateful for what you’ve done for me,” she said. “I mean, you saved my life and all. I can’t forget that, of course. But there are some important things that I must do and I cannot do them as a mermaid. In fact, I have to admit to you that I’m not really certain that I have it in me to be a mermaid.”

  The Triton let out a long stream of bubbles in lieu of a sigh. “Don’t worry. It often comes to this, once or twice a century or so. It’s been a pleasure having you among us, but I certainly wouldn’t consider forcing our hospitality on you. You were welcome to come and you are equally welcome to go.”

  “Thank you very much, that’s very decent of you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he replied as he turned to go.

  “Ah, er, sir! Ah, when might I expect to, ah, change back?”

  “You have,” he said, over his retreating shoulder and with those words Bronwyn discovered that breathing water was no longer the soothing pleasure it had heretofore been. Holy Musrum! she thought, in sudden panic, I’m thirty feet down!

  Before she knew what had happened, she was thrashing on the surface, coughing, spitting and retching, her lungs on fire in spite of the water they had contained. She also realized belatedly that half of the thrashing was being accomplished by a pair of legs. As soon as she had managed to gulp down a few more quarts of oxygen her panic receded, even though all of her old distrust and disliking of being immersed in seawater returned. She had forgotten just how much she dis-liked the ocean. She brushed her hair, dark copper once again, from her eyes and glared bleakly at the horizon which, from her fish’s eye vantage, was only a few thousand feet distant and heaved like a blanket having lint shaken from it. There was a regular, heavy pounding that she assumed was the sound of her own heart. This is fine, she thought ruefully, I’m a hundred miles from land. She turned clumsily and saw, with considerable relief, that the land that she had labled Tudela’s Island was not more than a few hundred yards distant and that the pounding she had heard was the surf breaking against its cliffs. Its ragged black rocks looked not much less bleak than the remote and empty horizon. She gazed with some foreboding at crags that yawned at her like jagged, shattered teeth until she spied a tiny crescent of greyish sand between two basalt monoliths. She knew that she would be fortunate indeed to choose the proper wave from among those that were thundering against the shore, otherwise she would be smashed against the rocks like a pea against a molar. Bronwyn’s repugnance of drowning, however, easily overrode her fear of pulverization and she began paddling toward the forbidding coast, which, however forbidding it might appear was more attractive than open, bottomless sea. As a huge swell lifted her on its glassy crest, she aimed her body as best she could for the diminuitive target. As the bottom shelved, the swell began to experience drag and its crest overtook its trough, quickly turning into a mountainous, foaming breaker that rushed at the beach with much of the sound and inexorable fury of an express locomotive. It threw the princess toward the shore like a lancer heaving his weapon. For the briefest moment, Bronwyn saw the waterline sucked back from the beach, exposing yards of dark, wet sand, then there was a deafening explosion of water and foam, something slammed into her chest like a demolition ball swinging into a one-story stucco bungalow and she was bounced from one hard object to another like a bearing ball in a pachinko machine. Then she realized that she was breathing air for the second time that day and lying on firm, dry sand.

  She scrambled further from the crashing breakers into a sheltering cleft between two huge rocks, before thinking to examine herself for completeness. Surprisingly, there seemed to be nothing broken, only enough bruises to make her look like an abused banana and bloody abrasions over her chest and thighs where she had hit the beach like a piece of wood on a belt sander. The beach, she discovered, was not sandy, but rather covered with a coarse, sintery material that resembled crumbled black glass. Still, even though her body had been scraped and bruised and bloodied, it was surprisingly pleasant to see it familiarly whole again, and she flexed her long legs luxuriously, enjoying as for the first time their hinged prolongations. Her feet looked perfect for the first time in her life and she wiggled her toes as she reintroduced herself to each individually.

  There was an abundance of shellfish, she discovered, clinging to the glassy, black rocks, well above the level of the surging water, a fact that reminded her that the tide must be at the ebb and that the little beach must often be inundated. She pried several of the mussels from their homes using a blade-like sliver of obsidian and then used the same tool to pry open the shells so that she could consume the hapless bivalves they contained.

  She now had to face two difficulties, in order of precedence: how to get up the wild-looking cliffs and onto the island proper, and once there how to find Professor Wittenoom. There would of course be a third problem, shelter, food and water, should the second problem remain unsolved for very long. The solution to the first problem, of course, was only a matter of exertion and a little caution and, in fact, required only an hour or two to accomplish. The climb was only made more difficult than it might have been due to the combination of her nudity and the sharpness of the broken lava, but on the other hand was easier because she discovered numerous natural, sand-paved paths winding upward through the cliffs.

  Whatever good humor she might have regained evaporated like a drop of ether on a hot stovetop when she discovered the nature of the island.

  Skupshtina Island, to give the proper name to what she had been terming Tudela’s Island, rested very nearly in the geographical center of the Great Sea and was something like six or seven thousand miles from significant land in any direction (a particularly dismal fact was that if one were to head due north or south the next land one would encounter, after traveling across some twenty-four thousand utterly empty miles, would be the opposite shore of Skupshtina Island). It squats toad-like astride the equator, so its perpetual summer is tempered neither by spring nor autumn. Bronwyn had seen nothing comparable to its bleak landscape since she had last seen the great cinderfields that surrounded the factories of the Transmoltus. Even the blasted and sterile landscape of the moon had not had the depressing countenance of Skupshtina Island; the satellite’s desolation was part and parcel with its character, the island was a lifeless anomaly in the midst of life. The island looked as though Musrum had used it to grind out a cigar as large as an ocean liner, as though the island were a kind of titanic ashtray.

  Skupshtina Island is, as the princess eventually discovered, a desolate, whithered, used-up thing. It is emphatically uninhabitable. Only the outcasts of the animal kingdom find solace among its clinkers: spiders, lizards and snakes. Even the habitually unparticular seabirds shun the barren ashfield
s and the island’s cliffs are uninhabited by their nests. At night the sultry air is not disturbed by howl, chirp, bark, grunt, whine, or yowl, neither warble, tweet, honk, chirrup, peep nor chitter. A prolonged hiss is the only sound of life.

  Skupshtina’s coast is bound by cliffs that are like the piles of slag found outside an ironworks; they reminded Bronwyn of the ruined ironworks themselves, whose abandoned and collapsing skeletons she had seen in the Transmoltus, like the complex carcasses of useless and discarded antedeluvian monsters. The sea beats incessantly and futilely at these vitreous and unyielding ramparts, so that a pall of grey, salty mist perpetually hangs over them, making them black and treacherous with a peculiarly slimy moss, and the lugubrious rumble of the waves is hollow and unconsolable.

  The island’s soil is a sterile combination of black sand and a gritty lava ash not un-like ground glass and the only representatives of the vegetable kingdom were, as far as Bronwyn could see, a virtually unbroken tangle of wiry, grey-green trees, -like a military barricade of razor-barbed concertina wire, that grew nearly to the brink of the cliffs. Where these bristling shrubs were not growing there were stunted and belligerent cacti. Beyond the trees, near where she imagined the center of the island to be, a low, black cone rose, from the truncated crest of which billowed thick rolls of white vapor, as though it were the industrious factory upon whose waste heap the princess now found herself, like a lone seagull on a landfill. The landscape was as unprepossessing as steel wool, but, at least for a short time, she appreciated the warmth of the sun after the spray-chilled, shady path she had been climbing.

  At the top of the path she found a wide brook that meandered from the woods to pour with froth and a kind of despairing gurgle into the tangles and grottoes of the moist cliffs, throwing itself over the brink in a kind of suicidal rush, and she drank from it thirstily. The water was warm and slightly sulfurous, but refreshing nevertheless. She decided, in lieu of any better idea, to follow the rivulet into the interior.