Andre Norton - Sea Siege

by Sea Siege(lit)

  "They've been talking that way ever since I can re­member," Griff remarked somewhat absently, his atten­tion more on the water into which he was going. He kicked off his sneakers and adjusted swimming flippers.

  "Sometimes"—Chris's powerful oarswing shot them forward—"I think that maybe this world's gonna get powerful tired of mons. Spit us out like we ain't no 'count no ways. There's things on this world mon ain't never seen, no matter how big he talk with the mouth. Your father, he know many things, but he ain't never seen that there dupee afore, had he?"

  "No," Griff admitted as he adjusted his tank between his shoulders.

  "New things comin' outta the sea. Maybe new things comin' other places, too. Mon, he mess 'round, start things comin'. But what if they don't stop? Back there" —in the light of the lantern his chin pointed to the land behind them—"they ask voodoo for gris-gris. Me, I think better ask for good wits in mon's head—so he learn he maybe ain't top cap'n afore it be too late!"

  Some of that sunk into Griff's mind, past his preoc­cupations of the moment. But now he made ready to dive and slipped over into the weird world, the ex­istence of which he had suspected, but the reality of which completely bewitched him.

  He was familiar with the fairy tale seascapes that con­fronted the daytime diver—the rich color of live coral and sea fans, the butterfly tints of the small fish, the dusty patches of sunlight that filtered down through the waves to dazzle the diver and upset his judgment of distance.

  But this—this was very different. His finger moved on the torch button beneath its rubber coating. A beam of light cut through purple murk, struck coral into life, brought into its cone furious fish, their colors all al­tered so that Griff had to re-identify them. Then the light caught and centered on what he had come to find —that crevice in the rock wall with its telltale pile of shells beneath it.

  The octopi clan had long furnished a boogy man for the ocean. Since the days of the legendary Great Kraken —said to arise from the depths to wreath its arms about the mast of a ship and draw it down into darkness-there had been horror stories of the cephalopods and their cold-blooded enmity to his kind. Yet most of those tales were sheer fantasy. When man faced octopus, he was facing a creature that, had native conditions varied only the slightest degree, might have been this planet's ruler in man's place. They were the keenest witted creatures in the ocean for the same reason that man had been forced to develop a brain in order to survive on land. If they possessed thumbs and fingers instead of tentacles armed with suckers, the whole history of the world might be different Organic evolution had left them, as it had puny man, without adequate physical protection against the dangers of their world. What were man's teeth and nails against the talons and fangs of the creatures he faced—until he lengthened and strengthened his arm with a stick and a rock and learned to build fires in the night? And the cephalopods, mollusks that had lost their shells in the dim past, became streamlined in action, used a smoke screen of ink to mask their escapes, and lived in houses of their own contriving.

  That pile of shells outside the door was in itself re­markable, testifying to the fact that the owner of the dwelling was unlike other water creatures. They were not all empty shells—a goodly portion were still living, stored in anticipation of a hungry morrow.

  Griff had located this largest inhabitant of the reef some days earlier when he had been about to steady himself with one hand against a coral boulder, only to see two black eyes regarding him bleakly. Then the rock separated, and the larger portion had oozed away into the crevice, from which at last only the point of a single tentacle trailed as if to wave him good-bye.

  Now he picked up those eyes again. The octopus was enthroned on the same rocky vantage point, its stare in­to the flare of his torch unchanging. Would it change color? He watched for the livid white shade, which he knew meant that it was alarmed. But that alteration did not come. Instead Griff felt a queer sensation—as if hun­dreds of tiny wet and clammy hands pulled at the skin on his thigh. He looked down. A tiny edition of the large mollusk clung there, spread star-fashion, less than eight inches across.

  In that moment Griff lost his taste for night explora­tion. There was something about those unblinking eyes —that touch from which his flesh shrank. He tore at the infant on his leg. It slipped across his skin, but he could not pry any one of those arms loose from their sucker clutch. It was as if the small mollusk was deter­mined to go into the air with him!

  Then the large octopus moved. With the lightning speed usual to its kind, it swam away out of the light, leaving Griff staring at the rock where it had been only a second or two earlier. He had decided now about call­ing an end to this adventure. He wanted above all to lose the baby thing that clung so persistently to him. With a practiced flip he swam up toward the dark shad­ow of the boat and the waiting Chris.

  III

  BASE HUSH-HUSH

  griff sat cross-legged in the scrap of shade thrown by a single wind-warped palm tree, regarding intently the drama of his own private pool jungle. It was on the top of the cliff, a depression hollowed out by the beat of falling spray through the centuries, filled drop by drop by that same moisture, kept heated by the sun to blood temperature.

  Without any clue as to how they had made the journey up the cliff from the sea below, hundreds of small rain­bow-colored fish clashed their vivid blues and golds, their gleaming silver, their flamboyant purples and reds, their black and yellow stripes, as they wheeled and sped or hung suspended on quivering fins. Shrimp and prawn, which might have been ghosts of themselves, so trans­parent that one could see their lunch being digested inside their frankly revealed interiors, scuttled across the sandy bottom.

  Amid all these was the newcomer introduced by Griff in the early hours of the morning. A strangely streaked rock gave resting place to the baby octopus that had clung to him, refusing to be parted even when he had climbed into the boat. And true to its nature, the lurking cephalopod was now the same shade as that rock, only visible to Griff because he had seen it anchor itself on that point. In the light of day it was quiescent. But two tiny crab shells, emptied of their lawful contents, marked activity in the last hours before dawn. And if it allowed a rainbow fish to brush a tentacle with a careless fin, it was because that was its period for rest.

  Griff thought of what he had seen the night before— at least ten of the shell-heaped crevice doors along the reef—an octopi town. And Chris admitted that at the Other end of San Isadore there was an even larger colony of the creatures. The law of the sea, supply and de­mand of food—Griff frowned at his small specimen in the spray pool. Why so many of them about here now? Was hunting so rich hereabouts that the cephalopod population was going up? Were more of the young sur­viving than was usual? An octopus was a noted mother, protecting her eggs as they lay concealed in some care­fully selected crevice, sending the water moving in cur­rents over them by sweeps of her arms so that algae and other tiny plants and animals could not root on them, refusing to leave them even to hunt for food. But, with the prodigious wastefulness of sea life, for every one that hatched and reached adulthood, perhaps hundreds of others died. Conditions must be unusually favorable to bring such large colonies to settle about the island at this time.

  A shadow fell across the pool startling the fish, which fled in rainbow bands. Griff glanced up.

  "Dobrey Le Marr—"

  In the freshness of the morning it was hard to con­nect this thin tall man, possessing the air and features of highborn Spain, with the drumming of the night before, with Le Marr's acknowledged—could you term it?— profession?

  "The reef—how it be at night?" Le Marr asked abrupt­ly. As usual he spaced his words as if he spoke in a foreign tongue.

  "I didn't stay long." Griff wanted to explain that sen­sation he had had of menace, of being cut off from his own world, which had sent him out of the water and back into the boat last night, but somehow the words were missing.

  "You bring something from
the reef?"

  "Baby octopus—" Griff pointed to the new occupant of the pool.

  Le Marr leaned over, his odd yellowish eyes finding the small mollusk quickly.

  "It came to you, you did not hunt it?" There was a new note in his precise voice.

  "It clung to my leg—"

  "It came to you. Now it stay—an' watch—" Le Marr's head lifted, and he looked down out over the sea. "Oth­er things come soon. Life change—mons change too maybeso—"

  "You mean—the sea monster—?"

  Le Marr shook his head. "First come mon. Then—" He brought his slender hands together in a smacking slap, which sounded almost like a shot. "Then—all the trouble in the wide world!" His gaze flickered to Griff and became more human as the seer faded into the man. "We go inland—see things—"

  Griff was ready to agree. Since the incident of the night before, he fought shy of his father. And anyway both the elder Gunston and Hughes had been shut up in the laboratory almost since dawn. Also, Le Marr was none too generous with invitations to explore the waste­land that was the interior of San Isadore, and this might just be the time when he would reveal the site of the bat caves.

  "Thanks!" The American went in to gather up a can­teen, a pair of shoes suited to scrambling over coral rock, and a broad-brimmed hat to keep off the sun.

  He joined Le Marr, who had a donkey on a rope, on the faint path leading inland. No islander ever showed any interest in the passing of time, an hour more or less made little difference to their plans. But there was some­thing in Le Marr's attitude that suggested he was eager to be on his way.

  The heat increased, and Griff did not relish the thought of emerging from the shade to the open coun­try about the shallow salt lake, where the flamingos fished and water birds were thick. Their trail wound through the type of jungle peculiar to San Isadore, a matted growth of tangled thorn trees and stunted bush. Now and again Le Marr paused with an unerring sense to scrape loam and brown leaf mold out of hollows, allowing the murky liquid to gather so that the donkey could suck at it noisily, easing the tongue that lolled, foam-flecked, from his mouth.

  They came out at last on what Griff considered was one of the weirdest of all the island features—a hard floor of gray rock. The hoofs of the donkey, the tread of his own heavy shoes, even of Le Marr's hide sandals, caused low booming sounds. San Isadore was in reality a vast stone sponge, eaten into, channeled under, by the sea. This flooring was hollow, probably covering some vast cave or series of caves in which the sea washed. Loose slabs were piled here and there, and these, Griff knew from earlier experiments, gave off the sound of bells. To cross the strip was to tread from key to key on some giant piano.

  And always, the drift of salt, the soil that was 90 per cent shells and the remainders of sea life. Above them wheeled flamingos in formation. A wild clatter of sound heralded the retreat of some wild donkeys across the hol­low rock.

  Le Marr plodded on around the edge of one of the sea pools, deep, blue, leading down to unplumbed depths with some outlet to the ocean. Such wells rose and fell with the tides, and Griff saw anemones and scarlet sponges growing along its sides. Doubtless other marine life lurked in the underwater, but it was also a good place to meet a moray eel.

  The islander paused. This was one of the big wells, a good sixty feet in diameter. Le Marr stared into it with the same measuring intentness with which he had re­garded the surf pool on the cliff. After a long moment of silence he asked a question.

  "Could you dive down there? Like you do by the reef?"

  "I suppose so. But it might be dangerous—"

  "Some day—maybe you have to," was the reply. Le Marr went on, across a dried-up lake, where the bodies of tiny fish, desiccated because of the high salt contents, now made a silver carpet of scales. They did not pro­ceed to the flamingo lake but cut over to come out on San Isadore's nearest approach to a real headland.

  Beneath them was a knife-sharp valley, which might have been on another planet. Some hurricane of the past had scoured brain coral, massive chunks of it, free from the sea floor, the surf tossing it high enough against the outer cliff for it to be seized by the wind and brought over that obstruction to lie here, a weird monument to the horrors of wind and water unleashed.

  The mass of boulders and coral were embedded in sand, and that sand was patterned by the tracks of countless wild pigs. This appeared to be one of their favorite hiding places. But Le Marr was interested in neither the evidence of the forgotten storm nor the prospects of good hunting. Instead he pointed seaward, as if he sighted there something he had been waiting to see.

  And Griff was completely surprised when his gaze followed the line indicated by the other's brown finger. The Island Queen linked them with Santa Maria. There was also a Dutch freighter, which called at wide­ly spaced intervals. But this ship, coming to anchorage now beyond the ruffle of the reef, was neither island sloop nor small freighter.

  "Mons come—" Le Marr's voice held a hint of satis­faction as if some prophecy of his own was about to be fulfilled.

  "But who—why? And why not come to Carterstown? There's no landing point here."

  "These mons—they make their own landin' place. They think they can move the world. Maybeso—may­be no."

  Griff watched the amazing activity beyond the reef with a faint feeling that somewhere he had seen its like before. Surely that wasn't a boat they were slinging over the side of the ship— Yet when it hit the water, it did not sink, and the men aboard it, hardly distinguishable dots at this distance, flung off the slings and started the queer craft. It made straight for the reef, and then, turtle-like, it actually crawled through the pounding surf, up over the exposed coral ridge, and slid into the quieter waters of the lagoon, heading for the shore as if those who piloted it did, indeed, have no fears of their mastery over both water and land. And reading the in­signia painted on the crawler, Griff understood a little of their confidence. They had built and wrecked around the globe in their time and done it well. But what were Seabees—American Seabees—doing on San Isadore?

  Within three days the first foundations of the mysteri­ous buildings of Base Hush-Hush were being erected. The men from the north with their wealth of machines and supplies worked feverishly around the clock, in the daytime under the torrid sun, at night under flood­lights. But as far as the islanders were concerned, what they slaved to create remained a puzzle. The command­er had come armed with papers for the resident com­missioner, and guards patrolled the area the newcomers had selected, keeping all sight-seers away.

  Naturally, wild rumors circulated. Griff, lounging on the deck of the Island Queen, heard a collection of the choicest from Rob Fletcher. As usual the islander's long face mirrored a worried expression, and his hand fon­dled the small bag hanging on a cord against his bare chest.

  "They done bring the bomb—the big bomb. An' they's gonna bust it right here."

  Griff shook his head. "They're working too hard to build whatever it is to smash it with an atom bomb."

  Chris came along the deck and dropped down beside the other two. He lighted one of the coarse island cigarettes, and the blue smoke floated lazily on the air. Rob turned to him.

  "They's gonna bust the big bomb right here!"

  But Chris also disagreed with that. "No bomb, I think. Maybeso make place to hide sub—"

  Griff sat up. Now that made sense. A sub base! But why all the hurry? Those Seabees were putting to it as if they had a time limit imposed.

  He caught sight of the dinghy, with Angus Murdock aboard, headed for the Queen. And when the captain came over the rail, his good-humored face was very serious.

  "Chris, you been harkin' to the wireless?"

  Waite got up. "Bad news, Cap'n?"

  Murdock took off his peaked uniform cap and rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead.

  "They's another ship amissin'—the Rufus G.—down at Nassau. They got the government cutter out cruisin' 'round. She had the governor's aide 'boar
d her."

  "So?" Chris moved toward the radio cubby. "I done listened to all the talk 'bout the big no-war meetin'. Seems like every time they talk like that things gets worser. But they didn't say nothin' 'bout the Rufus G."

  "Just come on the wireless at the Government House ashore." Murdock waved an explanatory hand. "Do you think these here Navy mons are buildin' a place for subs?" he asked Griff. "They gonna send out subs to hunt down this thing what gits the mons on the ships?"

  "I don't know any more about that than you do, Cap'n," Griff was forced to admit.

  "They's sure in a hurry 'bout whatever they do," Mur­dock commented. "An' they's not lettin' any mon see what they do— They warned Mosely to git outta there when he went out for the conch."

  Rob roused at that. "How come they think they can say where a mon do fish? The best conch, they lie 'long there. They ain't own this here water!"