"I shall find it sooner or later," said he, when first we debated the question, "because I know where to look."
His theory was a simple one, and made sense up to a point.
If you know how an animal is constructed, you can deduce a great deal as to how it lives, and especially as to what it lives on. When you know what it eats, and where that particular abounds, you have already a very good clue as to where to look for it.
Glenway had taken all the best authenticated reports, and he had had an outline drawn up from each of them. Almost all these reports, from whatever corner of the world they may come, describe more or less the same sort of creature, so he had no trouble in getting a composite picture made by an expert hand. This, of course, showed a reptile of the plesiosaur type, but very much larger than any of the fossil plesiosaurs, being only a few inches under eighty feet in length. But here there was a snag.
Glenway had every reason to know what each extra foot on the length of a yacht adds to its maintenance bills, and he knew that an eighty-foot plesiosaur is not a practical proposition. It was not hard to calculate what its weight would be, or the size of its bite, or how large a fish could pass down its narrow gullet. "It would spend more energy just picking up fish of that size one by one," said Glenway, "than it would gain by eating them. Also, schools of herrings, mackerel, haddock, and so forth are mostly found in coastal waters, and fishermen have been after them by day and by night ever since fishermen existed. An air-breathing creature has to show itself on the surface fairly often; if it followed fish of that sort it would be as familiar to us as the basking shark. And, finally, it would be extinct, because with those jaws it couldn't defend itself against killer whales, or threshers, if it hadn't been finished off by carcharodon, and the other big sharks of the Miocene."
"Glenway, if all this is correct, you've slain your own goddam Jabberwock."
"I was afraid I had," said he. "It depressed the Hell out of me. But one day it struck me that people who see something very surprising, and see it suddenly, briefly, in bad visibility and so forth, will naturally tend to exaggerate the most surprising aspect of whatever it is they see. Thus, an astonishing long, snaky neck will look longer and snakier than it actually is, a small head smaller, and so forth. So, I had a couple of young chaps from Uncle Fred's Institute of Industrial Psychology do a series of tests. They found a deviation running up to about twenty-five percent. Then I told them what I wanted it for, and asked them to modify this outline accordingly. We got this." He handed me a second sheet. "We can take it this is what was actually seen."
"Why, this damned thing is only six feet long!" said I, rather discontentedly. "It seems to me you're correcting eyewitness reports on pure speculation."
"No, I'm not," said he. "I double-checked it. I hired a reptile man and an icthyologist, and I asked them to work out what the nearest thing to sixty-foot plesiosaur would be like if it were to be a practical proposition in terms of food, energy, defense, and all that. They came up with two or three alternatives. The one that interested me was this." He pulled out a third outline. "If you put this on top of the psychologists' corrected version," said he, "you'll see they correspond in everything essential."
"All the same, if I'm going to believe in a large marine saurian, I'd rather have an eighty-footer."
"This one weighs more than an eighty-footer," said Glenway, "and he's probably ten times as powerful. Those jaws have a bite of over three feet. This fellow could swallow a big barracuda at a gulp. He might have to make two snaps at a porpoise. He'll follow schools of tuna, albacore, any sort of fish ranging from fifty to a hundred-and-fifty pounds. Not cod, of course."
"And why not cod?"
"Fishermen. He'd have been seen."
"Oh!"
"So, evidently, he doesn't follow cod."
"And, evidently, you can sweat a positive out of a couple of demolished negatives. Even so, it may make some sort of sense."
Glenway accepted this, which at least was better than he got from other people. He eagerly showed me innumerable charts he had drawn up, and had emended by his own observation. These showed the seasonal movements of deep-sea fish in the East Pacific, and, where these movements weren't known, he had what data there was on the smaller fish that the larger ones preyed on. He went on down through the food chains, and down to plankton drifts and current temperatures and so forth, and, with all these, modified by all sorts of other factors, he had marked out a great oval, with dates put in here and there, which tilted through those immense solitudes of ocean which stretch from the coast of Chile up to the Aleutians.
This was his beat, and two or three times I sailed it with him.
There were almost no islands, almost no shipping lanes. I used to take a regular spell in the crow's nest; two hours in the morning and two more in the late afternoon. You can't sit day after day looking for something without an admission, deep in your mind, of the possibility of seeing it. Anyway, I was extremely fond of Glenway, and it would have given me great pleasure to have been the one who sighted his saurian for him somewhere far out on the flat green or the rolling blue. The very wish lent a sinewy twist to every water-logged palm trunk that drifted across our bows, and every distant dolphin leap offered the arc of a black, wet, and leathery neck.
At the first sight of such things, my hand, more wishful even than my thoughts, would move towards the red button on the rail of the crow's nest. This, like another in the bow, and a third by the wheel, was connected with a loud buzzer in Glenway's cabin. However, the buzzer remained silent; the immense horizon, day after day, was empty.
Glenway was an excellent navigator. One morning, when I was aloft, he called up to ask if I could see anything ahead. I told him there was nothing, but I had no sooner raised my glasses again than I discerned a thickening, a long hump gathering itself in the infinitely faint pencil line that marked the juncture of sky and sea. "There's something. It's land! Land ahead!"
"That's Paumoy."
He had not bothered to mention that he was going to touch at Paumoy, the main island of an isolated group northeast of the Marquesas. I had heard of the place; there were eight or ten Americans there, and someone had said that, since the war, they almost never got their mail. Glenway's beat took him within fifty miles of the island, and he now told me he had agreed to touch there as he passed. Sensitive as he was to crude jokes about the sea serpent, he was still a New Englander, and he felt that people should have their mail.
The island, as we drew nearer, revealed itself as several miles of whaleback, covered with that hot froth of green which suggests coconut palms and boredom. I put down the light binoculars I was using and took up the telescope, which had a much greater range. I could see the harbor, the white bungalows spaced out around it, and I could even see the people quite clearly. Before long I saw a man catch sight of the yacht. He stared under his hand, and waved, and pointed; another man came out of a bungalow with a pair of glasses. I saw the two of them go off at a run to where a jeep was standing. The jeep crawled off around the harbor, stopped at another bungalow; someone got out, someone got in. The jeep moved on again, disappeared into a grove, came out on the other side, and went toiling up a little thread-like track until it went out of sight over the ridge.
By this time, other people on the shore level had turned out to look at us. They had plenty of time to do so, for the breeze fell off almost to nothing as we stood in towards the island. It was already late afternoon when the Zenobia, with every sail set, floated as softly as an enormous thistledown to her anchorage in the harbor of Paumoy.
"What a dreary-looking dump!" I said. "What do they do here? Copra?"
"That, and shell. One fellow dries a sort of sea slug and sells it to Chinese dealers all over the world. There was a Gauguin from San Francisco, but he didn't stay very long."
"You'd think they'd cut each other's throats out of sheer boredom."
"Well, they play poker every night of their lives, and I guess they've develo
ped a technique of not getting on each other's nerves."
"They must need it." There seemed to be nothing on the island but coconut palms, which I don't like, and the blistering bungalows, all of which might have been prefabricated by the same mail-order house. What I had taken from a greater distance to be banks of vari-colored flowers beside the bungalows were now recognizable as heaps of tin cans, some rusty, some with their labels still on. But I had no more time to look about me; we were on the quay, and being greeted by men in shorts and old-fashioned sun helmets, and the greeting was hearty.
"Now, listen to me," said Victor Brewer, "we've got two new guys here who've been in Java. We've had them working like dogs ever since we sighted you, fixing a rijsttafel. So you've got to stay to dinner. Or those guys are going to be hurt. Hell, you're not going to insult a couple of fellows who are slaving over a hot stove, fixing you a dinner!"
Glenway wanted nothing but to pick up the outgoing mailbag and be gone. On the other hand, he hated the idea of hurting anyone. He looked at me as if in the faint hope that I might step in and do it for him. It was at such moments, very rare with Glenway, that I felt Fitzgerald was right about the rich being different. This thought, and the thought of the rijsttafel, prevented me from obliging him. Instead, I pointed out there'd probably be no wind till nightfall, so we'd be losing hardly any time. Glenway at once surrendered, and we settled down to drinks and chat and to watch the sun go down.
Listening to the chat, I remembered Glenway's remark about the technique of not getting on each other's nerves. It seemed to me that this technique was being exercised, and especially for Glenway's benefit. At the end of almost every remark our host made, I felt myself dropping into the air pocket of a pulled punch; I experienced that disconcerting absence of impact which is the concomitant of velvet paws. It was clear they knew what Glenway was after, and they even referred to it, but with such collective tact that, if one of them seemed likely to dwell on it for more than a few seconds, he would be steamrollered out of the conversation, generally by Mr. Brewer. It was he who asked, very casually, when we had been sitting some time at dinner, if Glenway was sailing the same course as usual; if he was going to pass, give or take a hundred miles, the northern extremity of Japan.
Glenway having replied that he always followed the same course: "You know," said Vic Brewer, letting the words fall as casually as one lets fall the poker chips when the hands are high and the stakes are higher, "you know, you could do the Hell of a good turn to a guy. If you felt like it, that is."
"What sort of turn?" asked Glenway. "And which guy?"
"You don't know him," said the man on Brewer's left. "He's a fellow called Geisecker. He's Charlie's brother-in-law's brother-in-law, if you can work that one out."
"He dropped in here to say hello," said the next man. "He came on the copra boat and he didn't know the mailboat doesn't call anymore. So he's stuck."
"The point is, this poor guy is going to be in big trouble if he doesn't get to Tokyo in the next few weeks."
"When you get up in those latitudes you're certainly going to sight some boat or other bound for Japan.
"Any little tramp, or oiler, or fishing boat, or anything. He'll be tickled to death."
They spoke one after another all the way round the table, and remembering that Glenway had said they played poker every night of their lives, I was irresistibly reminded of the process of doubling up.
"We hate to see him go," said Brewer, collecting the whole matter into his hands with the genial authority of the dealer. "He's wonderful company, Bob Geisecker. But it's almost life or death for him, poor fellow! Look, he'll pay for his passage-any thing you like—if that's the obstacle."
"It ain't that," said Glenway. "But, I haven't seen him yet."
"He's over on the other side of the island," said Brewer. "He went off with Johnny Ray in the jeep less than half an hour before we sighted you."
"That's funny," said I, thinking of what I'd seen through the telescope.
"Damned funny," said Brewer, "if going off to give Johnny a hand makes him miss his chance of a passage." And, turning to Glenway, he added, "If you'd only seen old Bob, I know you'd have been glad to help him."
"I'll take him," said Glenway, "if he's back in time. But the wind's been failing us, and we're behind schedule, and . . ."
"Fair enough," said Brewer. "If he's back in time, you'll take him. If he isn't, that's his hard luck. More rice? More chicken? More shrimp? Boy, fill up that glass for Mr. Abbott."
The dinner went on and on, and not another word was said about Mr. Geisecker. At last, the heavy frondage above the table drew a deep breath and began to live and move. The wind was up, and Glenway said we could wait no longer. We all walked together down to the quay. Glenway and I were just stepping into the dinghy when someone pointed, and looking back, as people were rightly warned not to do in the old stories, we saw, like a moonrise, the glow of headlights in the sky. The jeep was coming up the far side of the ridge. "That's Bob," said Brewer. "But don't wait. We'll get him packed up in no time, and bring him out in the launch before you can up-anchor."
Sure enough, just as we were ready to move out, the launch came alongside with Mr. Bob Geisecker and his bags. The latter had pieces of pajamas hanging out at their sides like the tongues of panting dogs. Geisecker himself seemed a little breathless. His face, as he came up the steps into the light hanging above, had something strange about it. At first, I thought it was just the flustered and confused expression of a man who had to pack and get off in such a hurry; then, I thought it was the fact that, after weeks and months under an equatorial sun, this considerable face still peeled and glowed as if fresh from a weekend at Atlantic City. Finally, still unsatisfied, I thought of that massive, opulently curved, wide-mouthed instrument which is included in every brass band, and which, when it is not playing full blast, looks as if it ought to be, or at least is about to be. Mr. Geisecker greatly resembled this instrument, but he was very silent, and it was this that was strange.
There was a quick introduction, a brief welcome from Glenway, who was busy, an uncertain mumble of thanks from our guest, and a very hasty farewell from Brewer. Glenway had to give all his attention to taking the yacht out, and Geisecker stood neglected on deck, staring after the launch, his mouth open, looking something worse than lost. I took him down to his cabin, told him we breakfasted at seven, and asked him if there was anything he wanted before turning in. He seemed only vaguely aware that I was talking to him.
"Those guys," said he, speaking like a man in a state of shock, "I kept them in stitches. In stitches—all the time!"
"Good night," I said. "I'll see you in the morning."
Next morning Geisecker joined us at breakfast. He acknowledged our greeting soberly, sat down, and looked at his plate. Glenway apologized for having been so much occupied overnight and began to discuss where and when we might hope to encounter a boat headed for Tokyo or Yokohama. Geisecker lifted a face on which dawning enlightenment made me think of the rapid change from the blue-gray hush of the tropic night to the full glare and blare of tropic day; light, warmth, life, and laughter all came flooding in faster than one would think believable or even desirable.
"I knew it all the time!" said he exultantly. "Only I just didn't happen to think of it. I knew it was a gag. When those guys hustled me aboard this lugger I got the idea they were—you know—giving me the brush-off. They just about had me fooled. Now, I get it. Anything for a laugh! They swore to me last night you were heading for Lima, Peru."
"They told me very definitely," said Glenway, staring, "that it was of the greatest importance that you should get to Tokyo."
Geisecker slapped his plump and crimson thigh with startling effect. "Those guys," said he, "they'd ship a fellow to the moon on one of those goddam spaceships if they could get a laugh out of it. And that's what they've done to me! Tokyo's where I came from. Lima, Peru is where I was going to move on to. That's why they kept me all day over on the oth
er side of the island. So I couldn't hear which way you were going."
"We're short of time," said Glenway, "but I'll put about and take you back to Paumoy if you want me to."
"Not on your life," said Geisecker. "It's a good gag and I'll be goddamned if I spoil it. All I'm doing is just going around the world saying hello to people, and, to tell you the truth, there's a little kimono lady back in Tokyo I won't mind saying hello to once again." With that, he obliged us with a few bars from Madame Butterfly.
"Glenway," said I, "it's just on eight. I think I'll be getting up aloft."
"Aloft?" cried Geisecker. "That sounds like the real saltwater stuff. I've never been on one of these windjammers before. You've got to give me the dope on marline spikes, splicing the main brace, and all the rest of the crap. I tell you, boys, I'm going to learn to be a sailor. Now, what's all this about going up aloft?"
"I'm just going up to the crow's nest for a couple of hours."
"What for? Looking for something?" Even as he asked the question, he turned, first to me and then on Glenway, a face which now resembled a Thespian as well as a porcine ham, it so overacted the simple feat of putting two and two together. Fixing his eyes on Glenway, he slowly raised and extended an index finger of great substance. The lower joint of this finger was adorned with curving hairs, very strong and serviceable, and of a ruddy gold which glinted in the morning sun. The finger stopped about a foot short of Glenway's ribs, but its quality was so potent that it seemed to make itself felt there. In fact, I even felt it in my own.
"Abbott!" cried Geisecker triumphantly. "Now, that shows you how miffed I was last night when I thought those guys had given me the brush—it didn't ring any sort of bell. Glenway Morgan Abbott! Christ, I've heard about you, pal. These birds told me all sorts of yarns. You're the guy who got married to Thora Vyborg! You're the guy who goes around looking for the sea serpent!"
At this point he became aware of Glenway's regard, which was, for one naked moment at least, quite deadly. Geisecker drew back a little. "But, maybe," said he, "maybe they were pulling my leg. I ought to have seen it right away. A fellow with your education wouldn't fall for that cheesy old bit of hokum."
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