Sea Siege Read online

  Murdock sent the dinghy toward the wallowing, weed-hampered boat of the two conch fishermen. He put out a strong brown arm and anchored them to its side, looking into the excited faces before him.

  "Where this dupee?"

  "On beach—Daid Sailormon's Point. The birds, they's peckin' it. That dupee's sure daid, sure is—"

  "Whale." Griff lost his keen interest of the moment be­fore. No birds would be pecking at a sub, even if the underseas vessel had grounded. But at his explanation both of the fishermen shook their heads vigorously.

  "Ain't no whale, nosuh," they chorused. "Ain't never seen this thing. It be dupee for sure—for sure—"

  Murdock, after a careful study of their expressions, settled back at his oars, and under his stroking the light craft swung into a course that would bring the dinghy and its passengers to Dead Sailorman's Point, where the outer reef ended and a jumbled mass of coral boulders stuck out into the raging surf of unchecked waves.

  "Surely it's a whale," Griff repeated, surprised at his companion's action.

  Murdock was frowning again. "Mosely—that mon, he be mostly no-'count. But he know daid whale. He say this ain't no whale, it ain't. An' I want to see this dupee for my ownself."

  There was certainly something grounded on the rocky point, something dead, a loadstone for all the winged scavengers on the island. During all his months on San Isadore, Griff had never seen such a large gathering of screaming birds. And, as the dinghy neared the place where they must land to advance on foot, avoiding the smashing surf rolling in from the open sea, he was aware of something else, the sickly stench of rotting flesh. Yes, whatever had beached here was very dead.

  He struggled after Murdock across the sharp ridges of broken coral, feeling the bite of the razor-edged stuff through his sneakers—though the captain's bare and cal­lused feet took the same path with apparent ease. They pulled up to the cliff top together and looked down in­to a small cove where something lay half buried in the sand.

  Not only birds had been drawn to the beast, but a multitude of crabs, so that the beach itself crawled with snapping life. But it was what was being torn by those busy beaks and claws that brought an exclamation out of Griff. In those few seconds his lifelong belief in the omniscience of science was rudely shaken—he was seeing legend clothed in sloughing flesh.

  Mosely's dupee—the vicious ghost of voodoo folklore—was a creature out of the fairy tales of Griff's own heritage. The fanged and grinning head, turned up by some freak so that the empty eyepits stared at the two men above, bore a photographic resemblance to the dragons of his childhood reading!

  II

  OCTOPI REEF

  half the population of Carterstown was assembled to beat the feasters off their malodorous banquet as Dr. Gunston and Hughes took photographs feverishly, measured, dug to free the carcass from the sand. They had something new right enough—or old enough if one wanted to recall the very ancient legends and later ac­counts of "sea serpents." An unclassified sea animal some twenty feet long, a snake's supple neck planted on a barrel body equipped with propelling flippers, a toothed alligator-like head. The stench of the rotting, rubbery flesh did not appear to bother the fascinated ichthyol­ogists, but Griff, at last, climbed to the headlands once more to gulp in cleaner air.

  "That thing"—Chris Waite dropped down beside him —"be a bottom thing."

  "Bottom thing?"

  Chris waved a big hand seaward. "Bottom—far down bottom out there. That thing come up from the bottom"

  "Why, do you suppose?"

  "Maybeso something chase he."

  Griff surveyed the length of the beached thing. Some­thing from which that monster had fled would indeed be formidable. Shark? But if so—an oversize in sharks.

  "Did you ever see anything like it before, Chris?"

  The islander shook his head. "Never no time. But some things in the big bottom—no mon ever see them! An' Defere, he see something swimmin' two-three weeks ago. Might be this here—"

  "Wonder what killed it?" Griff mused.

  Chris shrugged. "Birds, fish, crabs, they nibble, nib­ble 'til a mon can't tell that. But the doctor, he be pleased!"

  "I wonder how old that thing is—or was?" Another thought had struck Griff. Memories of fantastic stories spurred his imagination—the "lost world" where prehis­toric monsters still lived, waiting to be discovered. Did that lump of decaying matter down there come from such a place? Did it represent a species that had in-habited the swamps of an earlier continent? He had browsed enough in the laboratory library to know that odd discoveries had been made of survivals from the unreckoned past. There was the Latimeria, the mon­strous armored fish caught in the net of a trawler off the tip of South Africa back in 1938, a fish that rightly should have been dead a hundred and thirty million years like its carefully preserved fossils of the Devonian period.

  However, this time they had photographs, measure­ments, careful observations to back up their report— proofs the unfortunate ships' officers and earlier trav­elers could not offer in testimony when they had tried to explain what they had seen, and so suffered the ig­nominy of complete disbelief.

  Later that night the Americans learned another fact —one which was almost as great a shock as the original discovery had been. Hughes burst out of the laboratory, his tousled hair glued to his sweating forehead, his eyes wide with excitement. And the very impetus of his en­trance brought him a full audience at once.

  "That thing was "hot'!" he exploded.

  For a bemused second or two neither Griff nor his father understood. Then it was the younger Gunston who answered, "Radioactive!"

  "Certain?" Dr. Gunston asked with schooled detach­ment.

  "The counter says yes. It's about double that of the last batch of scum, too. I'd say that thing caught a good blast—maybe enough to kill it!"

  Griff followed the others back to the laboratory work­room, hovering near the dissection table, listening to the fatal clicking of the Geiger counter. But he knew bet­ter by now than to ask for an explanation. The creature had somewhere, somehow absorbed enough radiation to make its carcass "hot."

  "We must report in tonight—"

  Hughes shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Griff believed that he wanted to protest that decision.

  Then Dr. Gunston added, "I don't think it is neces­sary to go into too much detail as yet. Just say that we found a new marine life form, a large one, dead on the shore and that it registered exposure to radiation."

  "Yes, sir!" There was plain relief in that prompt reply. "I'll code it and send it short wave to Dr. Langley's of­fice at Key West-"

  Griff waited until Hughes had gone. "D'you suppose this thing"—he indicated the remains on the table— "came out of the depths—what Chris calls the big deeps?"

  Dr. Gunston looked tired. He ran both hands through his stiff brush of gray-brown hair. "Well, it certainly wasn't hatched, born, or spawned on that beach. And we haven't been able to get our claws on its like before. There'll be a regular consultation over it when the news gets out."

  "And 'hot' too—"

  His father stiffened. "That you'll keep quiet, Griff." He was no longer speaking equal to equal, but giving an order. And hearing that tone, Griff's old resentment awoke. Stubbornly he voiced another question.

  "So the plague scum is radioactive, too?"

  "Hughes had better keep his mouth shut!" Dr. Gunston exploded and then added, "That's another point to forget, Griff."

  The younger Gunston leaned back against the row of shelves with their jars of bottled specimens. "Is some­body experimenting with atomic stuff out in the At­lantic, Dad?"

  Dr. Gunston stood very still, his mouth thinned into a grim, straight line. His eyes were bleak. Griff had a second of something close to panic under that keen scrutiny.

  The doctor's hand shot out. His fingers closed with a pinching and compelling grasp on his son's upper arm, and he propelled the young man before him down the short corridor
to his office. There he released his captive and went to the desk. From his pocket he brought a cluster of keys fastened to his belt by a length of chain. Selecting one, he unlocked a drawer. He did not open any of the folders that lay within, merely shuf­fled through them, glancing at the notation on the front of each as if making sure that they were in some special order. Then he relocked the drawer and turned to his son.

  "So that was just a good guess, Griff?"

  Griff's Indian-brown face was impassive, but his hands locked together in a tight clasp behind his back. So, his father dared to think that—that he had been—spying!

  "It would seem so, sir." He was proud of his control.

  Dr. Gunston did not appear to notice any change in his son's attitude. "You've been around with Murdock, with these other islanders. You heard them say any­thing?"

  "Nothing about atomics—" But his father was not go­ing to let him off that easily.

  "Maybe nothing about atomic experiments—but you have heard something that made you think?"

  "Murdock believes the 'mystery sub' story about the trouble with the ships. Well, there're atomic subs, aren't there? And I don't think one of ours could have turned pirate. So if there is one patrolling, or observing about here, there's a reason for it—"

  Dr. Gunston sat down in the desk chair, fumbled with the pipe he picked up, and sucked at it unlighted. "Logical deduction, Griff. But such bright ideas are not to be peddled outside of here, understand?"

  "Yes, sir." Mentally Griff shrugged. Three warnings in three minutes or so—did his father think that he habitually ran off at the mouth?

  Hughes appeared in the doorway. "Report through and acknowledged."

  The doctor put his hands over his eyes and then pushed them upward through his hair. Under the garish light he suddenly looked very tired. "Good enough. Time we locked up for the night, Frank. That'll be all, Griff."

  So dismissed, the younger Gunston went on to the room that housed his cot and foot locker. But he did not make any move toward going to bed. Tiny brown lizards, which could have curled comfortably inside his class ring, flashed across the ceiling and walls in the glare of the unshielded light bulb dangling from an electric cord. And outside, the nightly chorus of hermit crabs, their claws clicking on the rocks, their stolen shell houses clanking as they scuttled, was an undernote to the high squealing bray of one of the wild donkeys come down to raid garden patches in the town.

  Griff pushed aside the netting and lay down on the cot, his fingers laced behind his head. The constant roar of the surf under the rising wind beat in his ears as a low boom. But he was trying to forget one thing, that his father had been willing to believe that he had rifled that desk drawer. Had everyone working for the govern­ment become so "security" conscious that now they sus­pected everyone else? Or—

  Five years was a long time, and even before Dr. Gun­ston had left the States on his first trip, they hadn't been together very much. Griff had lived with his Aunt

  Regina after his mother's death—until he went to school. His relationship, with his father had always been on a visitor basis. So maybe it was natural that Dad could believe him capable of a trick such as that. But— Reso­lutely Griff tried to think of something else.

  So the red plague scum was "hot"? That was an in­teresting fact. Atomic experimentation of some kind un­der the surface of the Atlantic? Near enough to the West Indies so that traces of such activity could be de­tected there? What kind of experimentation and who was doing it? Somehow Griff was sure that it was not his countrymen, nor their allies, unless the various "se­curity" precautions, which were growing more and more irksome, had taken to concealing one government proj­ect from another, leaving it that one finger could no longer learn what the other was dabbling in.

  And if that atomic research was not the concern of friends—then what? It was hard to lie in the dank heat of this island night, listening to the vociferous life out­side in the dark, a life that had nothing to do with the concerns of bipeds such as himself, and think of the cold, thin fear that had lain on the horizon of his world as long as he could remember.

  Griff got up. There was an adventure he had in mind —perhaps this was the night to try it. He stripped and pulled on swimming trunks. The rest of his equipment was in the second locker. He strapped on the watch protected against moisture, the wrist depth gauge, and buckled about his waist the weighted diving belt, fas­tening his knife in place. The aqualung, the mask, a rubber-encased flashlight—he gathered them all up and a few moments later was going down the cliff path. Chris would be willing to take him out to the reef. This was a plan they had discussed for some time.

  Here and there lamplight shone warmly yellow from unshuttered windows in the dying town. But there were few other signs of life. And then the steady beat of a drum, to be heard above the surf, told him why.

  Le Marr—Dobrey Le Marr—was drumming up the spirits. Nominally the islanders were Christian. There was a church they attended on Sunday, a vicar who came over from Santa Maria twice a month to hold services.

  But underneath that shell of the civilized world there had always lurked something else. And in late years— perhaps because of the world-wide unrest—it had bobbed once more to the surface. Dobrey Le Marr was no witch doctor of the jungle, but he claimed some of their ancient powers. His knowledge of herbs had con­founded Dr. Gunston, and his psychological understand­ing of his fellows, shrewdly used, had made him the most powerful man on the island, though he made no open display of his power. Luckily, Le Marr was a benevolent despot. And the Gunstons believed that he had a better education in the field of civilized learning than he now admitted. He was a racial mixture, as were all the islanders, but when he had been ten, he had gone off island, not to return until he was a man in his thirties. From then on he lived quietly among his fellows, say­ing little for five years or more, until he began to prac­tice medicine as the men of San Isadore knew it, with potions and spells. But he refused utterly to use his skill to kill. A gris-gris fashioned by Dobrey Le Marr was always for a man's protection, not his neighbor's damna­tion.

  He had held aloof from the Gunston laboratory when the Americans had arrived and started their work. But Dr. Gunston had deliberately sought him out. And when Le Marr discovered that the scientist from the north was willing to listen without impatience to his theories and explanations, he had fallen into the habit of coming in once in a while in the evening, sitting for long silent moments turning the American cigarettes they gave him in his long, artist's fingers, his thin hawk face—with the features of an Andalusian grandee—composed, until at last he told some fantastic tale that they could accept as true. Le Marr always used the idiomatic speech of the island, but he did it with the precision of one who speaks a foreign tongue, and Griff suspected that he could have spoken as an off-islander of education had he so de­sired.

  For a minute Griff hesitated on the path. He longed to watch Le Marr at his business—see a voodoo gather­ing. But he sensed that that was one place where he would not be welcome. And his presence there might undo all the friendliness of past relations. The Gunstons were interlopers here, and there were parts of island life that could never be open to them. Anyway he was sure he would not find Chris in that audience. Though Rob Fletcher was a devoted follower of Le Marr, Cap­tain Murdock and Waite held aloof from the calling drums and the dark belief born in an older and hotter jungle land.

  Griff's feet, clad in rubber-soled sneakers, made no sound on the road. He came to the three-room coral block house set in a garden patch and turned in.

  "Who's there?" A dark shadow detached itself from the doorway and moved out, to be outlined against the cream-white of the wall.

  "Griff Gunston. That you, Chris?"

  "This me. Ha—" The other had a cat's eyes in the gloom. "You gonna dive now?"

  "Can you take me out, Chris?"

  "Sure. But you mighty teched in the head, mon. The fishes, they eat your skin offen you some day, you do this
fool thing."

  "You ought to try it, Chris."

  The other chuckled. "Me, I ain't gone in the head yet, mon. I'll pull the crazy one out—afore the crabs eat him to little pieces—"

  Inside the reef the water was calm, not the blue-green of the day, but a purple-blue. And Griff, looking down into it, began to wonder about the wisdom of his plan. But he knew that the world below him, in which man could only be an intruder for short spaces of time, had two separate lives—that the activity that filled it by night was not the activity that it knew by day. And he had long wanted to observe the difference for him­self.

  As they rowed out along the reef, Chris was full of news.

  "The wireless, it go war, war all evenin'," he remarked. "Big talks here, there. They talk bomb, bomb all the time. Say, 'You do what I say, mon, or I blow you up.' Think that they do that, Griff-blow us up?"