SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE

Fantasy &Science Fiction June 1961

(1961) *

Randall Garrett & Avram Davidson

On watch and at rest, Jack Wi ls on possessed special tastes in seafood and women; he also had the wherewithal , financially and temperamentally, to go to surprising lengths in search of satisfaction ...

If Jack Wilson’s curious voyage did not exactly reveal to him what song the sirens sang, it was satisfactory in other respects.

The specialist all too often finds that he has developed his taste to such a point that he is satisfied but rarely, and excited almost never. Since the recent trouble in Tibet, for example, it is impossible to get a really properly prepared yak roast. The smaller animal of the same name, from Sikkim and Nepal, is not only deficient in marbling, but is generally fibrous and watery. There are many long faces and rumbling bellies around the old Lhassa Club in Darjeeling nowadays.

Jack Wilson, however, is a sea food specialist, and for gourmets of this kidney there is a single ray of bright light shining through the foul fog of flaccid flounder fillets that are standard Friday fare throughout the country, a single escape route from curdled shrimp in greasy batter. Knowers and lovers of seafood will recognize at once that we refer to the ] & M Seafood Grotto, a place containing not a single ketchup bot tl e, and whose very slices of lemon are not the coarse, ordinary sort, but the rare and delicate Otaheite variety, from a little grove somewhere in Georgia.

Pardon us; no. We will not tell you where the J & M Grotto is, beyond the fact that it is only a few hundred feet from the shore of the Pacific, at the aft end of a wharf somewhere between Coronado and Nootka Sound—which is enough shoreline for anyone to search. It is doubtful whether any true seafood man will tell you where it is, either, unless you ar e known to him, not only as a friend, but as a fellow aficionado.

Nor do the proprietors of the Grotto advertise; they do not want customers who cannot appreciate their savory wares, and they do not lack for those who do.

And no man appreciates those wares more than Jack Wilson.

He is not one of your Guide to gourmets. Win e -mumblers and all their arcane habble-gabble he classifies with Turkish water-tasters, tea-tipplers, and other nuts and phonies. Beer he regards as most appropriate to wash the hair of women of a certain class. Women—of all classes—he loves. Also, seafood.

Now, the love of seafood, like the love of women, can lead a man into strange situations, and Jack Wilson, who combined these loves in a very literal way, managed to get himself into a situation which …

It would be easier to begin at the beginning.

Jack loves the food at the J & M Seafood Grotto as much as, if not more than, anyone else; but ten years ago, the Grotto did not exist, and Jack spent a good deal of his time traveling on faerie seas and delighting in the fruits thereof. The War—in which he had done his part—had been over only sligh tl y more than half a decade, and the world economy, insofar as pelagic goodies were concerned, had not yet returned to its prewar norm. Russian caviar, to be sure, had begun to trickle back into the world market, but, owing to the tragically unsettled conditions in Azerbaijan and the Trans-Kur, beluga fisheries in the western Caspian were a mere shadow of their former selves; and the good gray roe obtained from the capacious bellies of the sea-sturgeons which frequent the eastern reaches of that water lack, as all the world knows, a certain degree of delicacy.

There was some compensation in Jack Wilson’s knowing a small, weathered shed near New Smyrna where smoked mullet—fit for gods and Texas oilmen—was to be had.

Too, ever since the Kuomintang government had lost the Mandate of Heaven (except for Formosa, Matsu, and Quemoy), the small but suavely flavored shrimp—some say they are prawns, but no matter—found only at the spot where the Gulf of Po Hai disembogues into the Yellow Sea, were no longer to be had at any price. At least, not at any price Jack Wilson was prepared to pay.

Cost was of little consequence to him; he was of what are tritely described as “independent means,” which is to say he could spend much, much money without engaging in the tedious task of working for it.

So it was that, except for the thallasic victuals indigenous to the Communist-controlled areas of the world, Jack was not forced to rely on the vagaries of the export-import trade; whither went the wind and water, there went Wilson. Manga reva knew him, and the shoals of Capricorn. The great sea-turtle’s watery epithalamion enchanted him, and so did its green soup. In a tiny fishing village on the coast of Dalmatia, whose name contained seven letters, six of which were consonants, he discovered and delighted in a small, pink squid seethed in its own sepia. He found four wonderful ways of preparing the rare and tiny mauve crab of the Laccadive Islands, all of which required it to be sautéed in ghee. He learned that baccala —that dried codfish which, in shape, texture, and, for that matter, flavor, is not unlike an old wash board—when prepared with cibbolini, sea-urchin sauce, and olive oil of the first pressing, will take the mind of even a Sicilian signore tto off the subject of nubile servant girls, for a short time.

And he was infinitely appreciative of that exquisite forcemeat of pike, whitefish, and carp, lovingly poached in court bouillion, which the dispersed of Minsk and Pinsk have made known to continents and archipelagoes alike as gefilte fish.

Let it not be thought, though, that Jack Wilson’s entire field of endeavor to satisfy the inner man was circumscribed by his search for gustatorial novelties or staples in the seafood l ine. Seafood was his specialty. But he shared with all men those tastes in which all men worthy of the name delight. However, although Jack was well-versed in venery and found it enjoyable, invigorating and worthwhile, it presented little challenge. A man who possesses reasonable intelligence, an amiable disposition, excellent health, a pleasing countenance, and a six-figure bank balance seldom really needs to chase women.

That Our Jack had never married was due to nothing so juvenile as “not wanting to give up his freedom”; nor did he have any basic objection to the institution as such. He felt, with some mild degree of certitude, th at he would—some day—marry, and from this prospect he had no urge to shrink. But … somehow … whatever it was that he was looking for in a wife, he had yet to find a woman who seemed to have it.

He recalled the Mexican aphorism that “one must feed the body in order that the soul may live in it;” and, hence, food—and its preparation and consumption—always seemed to him to partake of a spiritual as well as a physical and social quality. An intelligent and appreciative interest in victualry made, in Wilson’s view, all the difference between dining and mere feeding. The more a woman showed a genuine interest in the food he chose for the two of them, the more genuine was his own interest in her; an extra dimension was supplied their friendship. Alas! for the ugly advance of ready-mixed, frozen, tinned, and pre-cooked rations: Jack Wilson had rarely met a woman who was his equal in the kitchen, and few who were not infinitely his inferior.

Wilson’s peregrinations were usually aboard his own vessels— for, as a lover of the dolphin-torn sea itself, he possessed a diesel-powere d yacht fully capable of braving a stormy Atlantic—and it can be realized that many a weekend, and sometimes many a week, was passed with pleasure and profit on the bosom of the deep. And the one thing he never disclosed to any one of the fine selection of prime cuties which he had squired over seven or eight seas was that he was looking for something more than perfection in a woman.

As a matter of plain fact, he was looking for a mermaid.

Wilson was quite certain that the mermaid legend was no legend at all, but simple truth. There had been too many sightings, too many reports from widely scattered spots over the earth’s seas, over too many centuries of human history, to doubt that such beings had once swum the seas of the planet. And, as far as Jack Wilson was concerned, they were still swimming them. (For that matter, he had an equally unshakable faith in the actual existence of the sea serpent—but, then, he had no desire to find a sea serpent.) It is not to be thought that Jack actually thought of marrying a mermaid; that would perhaps have been carrying things a bit too far, especially for a man of his fastidious tastes. He did not even particularly desire to make love to a mermaid, although the sheer physical mechanics of the process interested him in a semi-scientific sort of way. What Wilson was actually pursuing was a dream of beauty. A beatific vision.

The vision was compounded partly from the stuff that dreams are made of, but it included, as well, some of the more memorable features of some of the more memorable women whom Wilson had known intimately. And it happened that each of these hauntingly lovely items in his mind had likened in some way to the treasures of the sea itself, recasting poetry to do so: Full fathom five my true love glides …

His true-love had, to begin, long sun-blonde hair the color of the golden sands of Trincomalee (Merrilyn Madison, whose tresses remained in his mind long after th e grace-notes of her body had blended pleasan tl y with the symphony of a score of others.) His true-love had teeth like a perfec tl y matched set of the finest Bahrein pearls (The Contessa Delia Gama; he chose to forget that those teeth had a particularly nasty bite). His true-love’s eyes were as blue as the Bay of Naples on a summer’s day (Marya Amirovna, whose eyes, like the sea, shifted to gray when a storm was gathering). Her skin was as milky white as the waters which lave the beach at Saipan (Kirsten Jonsdotter, tall, majestic, and passionate). Her bosom was magnificen tl y bifurcate and tipped with coral (Amy, Duchess of Norchester; she of the cool manner and the hot blood). Her …

But enough.

Now, each of these women had been, in her own way, as nearly perfect as anything merely human can be. Yet each had failed to satisfy him for long, not because of the presence of any particular flaw, but by the absence of some indefinable quality. And so, in Wilson’s mind, over a period of years, his vision of the mermaiden had come to assimilate all the perfections of the women he had known, plus that definition-defying something.

He did not, on an intellectual level, consider that every mermaid would resemble his vision. He reasoned that such creatures must vary, one from the other, much as non-pinniped females do. But in his secret imagining—deep, deep, down, full fathom five—he knew that his mermaid would be the perfect one.

Alex MacNair, captain of the Lorelei, Jack Wilson’s yacht, neither believed nor disbelieved in mermaids. He was perfec tl y willing to believe—if he saw one— but, left to himself , would not have walked to the side to look. Mermaids, he felt, were, like lurlies and kelpies, out of his province. His task was to captain a seagoing vessel. The uses to which that vessel was put were the province of the owner, and Captain MacNair was quite happy with such a division of labor and responsibility. And as for any picturesque devotion to Old Scotland , he limited that to a deep fondness for Ballantine’s Twelve Year Old.

He had only once made the mistake of slighting his employer’s dream-hobby. It was in Port-au-Prince, early in Jack’s enthusiasm. “Captain MacNair! Look! A trawler off New Zealand sighted a mermaid, according to the paper!”

The captain had politely taken the proffered journal and read the item slowly, decoding the almost 18t h Century elaborateness of the French prose with deliberation while Jack fidgeted at his side.

“Ah!” MacNair said finally, looking up. “Interesting. Very interesting. I tell you what it probably was, Mr. Wilson. Very likely they spotted a dugong. Or a manatee. That’s what it was.” And he held out the paper as the patronizing smile slowly withered on his face.

“Captain,” said Jack, his tone the only chill thing that Haitaian noon, “have you ever seen a dugong?”

“I have, sir.”

“And your eyesight is good?”

“Twenty-twenty, Mr. Wilson.”

“Then tell me: Would you ever mistake a dugong for a mermaid? Does a dugong look like a beautiful woman to you?”

MacNair considered his recollection of the dugong. It was somewhat larger than a grown man, and much more visibly mammalian than—say—a porpoise or a whale. From the waist down, the ichthyoid tail, with its horizontal flukes, might have some likeness to the tail of a mermaid, but—from the waist up?

The flippers could never be mistaken for arms, certainly. And that bald, bulging head, with its swollen face and deep-seated eyes and its bristly, lumpy, divided upper lip certainly did not resemble anything human at all.

“Now that I think on it, Mr. Wilson,” MacNair conceded, “I do not believe that any sober person could mistake a dugong for a pretty woman.”

“Exactly! Not even the most depraved sailor would, or could, make such a mistake.”

MacNair was privately of the opinion that his employer had obviously not known as many depraved sailors as he, MacNair, had, but he kept his own counsel, and never again deprecated Wilson’s hobby. Ahab had chased whales; Mr. Wilson, mermaids. Mermaids, on the whole, were certainly preferable, being much safer. So was seafood. “A fare day’s work for a fair day’s pay,” was MacNair’s motto.

Wilson had long employed a clipping service in New York, ano th er in London, a third in Paris, and, after the war, a fourth in Tokyo, to supply him with mermaid data culled from the periodicals of the world. These clippings were arranged methodically in his leather-bound scrapbooks. Over a period of years, they had expanded into several volumes.

What made Jack Wilson unhappy was that he was always too late. No matter how quickly he got to an area where a mermaid had been sighted—and he had flown on several occasions—the shy creature had always decamped by the time he arrived.

There seemed to be no help for it. The big international news services do not consider mermaid sightings to be real news. Unlike, for example, axe murders and sex circle exposes, they are relegated to the Silliness Files, and are usually a week or two old before they are ever printed. Even then, the reports are used only as fillers, and the details of fact are meager, since most of the space is given over to what Jack considered the dubious wit of the reporter or rewrite man.

Still, all in all, Jack was not a dull boy nor an unhappy one. If the chase had few hazards, yet it was not without spice. More than one worthwhile episode, culinary or amatory, had resulted.

We now come—and it is about time, considering his importance to the resolution of this story—to Professor Milton Rowe. Wilson and Rowe had never been more than a nodding can ‘t-I -just-take-a-look-at-your-notes , acquaintances in their undergraduate days at Miskatonic University. In lab and office, he was conscientious, hard working, sober-sided, and just a little bit dull. He seemed shy, drank little, and was the despair of match-making faculty wives. He was also an ichthyologist.

Jack Wilson had been threading his way, one afternoon, through the old part of Antibes and found himself face to face with a smallish, pleasant sort of man with a receding chin, a large mouth, thick and heavy glasses, and American clothes.

It was the same Rowe that Wilson had known, a decade or so older, and yet very much not the same Rowe at all. Mildly interested in the difference, Jack invited him to join the group aboard the Lorelei. It was an invitation for the weekend, but it lasted six weeks. The difference became discernible within six minutes of his being introduced to Michi and Josette.

Like many plain-looking men before him, the professo r had discovered that a man does not need the figure of a shot-put champion nor th e features of a cinema star to attract and hold the attention of a desirable woman. Charm, wit, and understanding are much more important, and—now that he was far away from the reek of the laboratory, the chalky dryness of th e classroom, and the mannered respectability of faculty social life—Professor Milton Rowe could display all three qualities without restraint.

Very few men could get as much out of a vacation as he could.

The Lorelei’s passengers embarked for Cythera, and for six weeks they burned upon the waters of the tideless (but certainly not dolorous) midland sea. Michi, Josette, Jack, an t, the sweet-salt air, the sea itself, a succession of small, little known, and quite charming harbors, fine cognac, golden days, and bright nights It was with the most agreeable astonishment that Miskatonic’s Professor of Marine Biology realized that oceanic life-forms were not only fascinating to study they were good to eat, too!

All four of the passengers were lolling on the decks one afternoon, not fretting their skins with anything more than th ose bits of fabric called l e minimum, and drinking some th ing both cool and invigorating from a bottle in an ice bucket.

Professor Rowe, while idly proving to himself once again that the ball of his thumb fit nicely into Josette’s comely navel, launched into an exposition of the pelagic peregrinations of the Chinook salmon, at the end of which Josette asked wonderingly: “but, how do you know all zese sings? How do you know where are ze fish—where zey go—so you can study zem?”

“Well, my pet, we have several ways. But we’ve got a new one now that can accurately predict almost exactly where a given school will be at a given time. Within certain variable limits, that is. We use one of the new electric computers.”

Jack, who had been half dozing, suddenly sat up, very interested. “Predict where they’re going to be? How can you, my old?”

His old waved a careless hand. “Well, I cannot give you the details mathematical. I n general, it’s something like thi s. We have information on fish migration going back for over a century in some cases. You know the sort of thing, Jack. Fishermen’s log books, containing the amount of catch, the date, information on the weather, and things like that. Weather’s very important in such matters. And plankton.

“Anyway, all this is converted into a sort of mathematical code and put on punched cards—date, time of day, barometric pressure, wind velocity and direction, temperature of the air and water, kinds and number of fish sighted—” He took a breath. “—latitude and longitude, depth of water, direction of current, type of shore line nearby, if any.

“Oh, and the brightness of the sun and moon, too. Light has an effect on the depths at which certain fish swim. And then there’s the state of the tide, the salinity of the water, and so on and so on.

“We have thousands and thousands of cases, you see,” Rowe continued enthusiastically. We take all that data and put it through the computer, and the damned thing chews it all over and cross-correlates everything with everything else. Get it?

“So that when w e want to find out just what fish will be at a given place at a given time, all we have to do is feed in the information on date, time, latitude, longitude, and so forth, and the computer mutters to itself and then goes chuff ! and pops a card with a lot of holes punched in it. This card is run through a decoding machine, and out comes a list of th e kind and number of fish to be found at that exact place and time under those circumstances.

“On the other hand, if we want to know where to find a particular kind of fish, the computer will tell us what conditions to look for in what places. You see?”

Jack frowned, concentrating. Josette’s smile had by now begun to flag. Michi, a direct actionist, picked up a bottle of suntan oil and tendered it to Jack. He did not seem to see, nor be interested in this offer of the freedom of her gleaming body. He nodded bemusedly. The blue waves danced. He blinked. He glanced around as if suddenly remembering where he was. “Well!” he said. He smiled, and the spell was broken. Michi once again offered the flask of anointing, and this time he took it.

Although offered passage home on the Lorelei’s transa tl antic run, Milt declined. He didn’t believe, he said, in pushing his luck. He returned on a populous Greek passenger ship, growing more and more sedate with each nautical mile, and by the time he had returned to the Miskatonic campus at Arkham he looked and acted the very model of a model ichthyologist.

Wilson made himself busy, once back in New York, He and Captain MacNair had a l ready spent much time going through the scrapbooks and putting down, in tabular form, every bit of information available from the clippings. The next step was to get more data.

Selby Research Associates was prepared to have a stab a t finding out anything for anybody who was prepared to pay for it. Selby himself, a lean, scholarly-looking, bearded man, shook Wilson’s hand, waved him to a chair, and raised polite eyebrows in inquiry.

Wilson took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. “I want some wea th er reports,” he said. “This is a list of ships. Find the exact latitude and longitude of each ship, the date and time given. And I want to know the weather at each time—wind direction, tide conditions, temperature, barometric pressure—everything.”

Selby nodded rather absently, knowing that the first thing he intended to check was Wilson’s credit rating. “Anything else, Mr. Wilson?”

“Yes. Here’s a list of various locations along the coast of a score or more countries. I’ll want the same weather information for the dates given, and, if possible, a contour map of the pertinent territory—shore line, and so on.”

Selby stroked his beard briefly. He was not a man to resist when Opportunity came to his door with a battering ram. “Did we mention a retainer, Mr. Wilson?” was all his comment.

“How much?”

Selby, who had been thinking of a figure, doubled it, added fifty percent, and said it aloud. Wilson o pened his checkbook, wrote. “Begin immediately,” he said, handing it over. Selby, taking the check in his two hands as if it were a piece of T’ang chinaware, assured him they would.

Jack made several phone calls with an eye toward furthering the next step in his scheme, and found it more difficult than he’d supposed. In another ten years computers would be as numerous as leaves—fallen or otherwise—in Vallambrosa, but in 1950 they were not so easy to find. Most of the big ones were still in the experimental stage, and it was difficult to find one he could rent or hire.

He was soon convinced that in order to obtain the use of a computer complex enough to do the job he would have to see Rowe.

“Well, now, Jack, I’m not sure,” said Milt. “What ‘sea creature’?”

“Not quite in your l ine, Milt. A mammal, I think. Relative of the porpoise, perhaps. Or of th e dugong or manatee.” And he babbled on convincingly, including something about Stellar’s Sea Cow (believed extinct since 1715). It was heresy, coarse and rank, and it hurt him. He hoped that the means would be justified by th e end he had in mind.

Wilson ou tl ined the data he had on mermaid sightings, without, of course, admitting that it was a mermaid he sought.

Professor Rowe listened intently, but, at the end, he answered with a slow shake of his head. “I’m afraid not, Jack. I’d like to help you, believe me, but the work we’re doing will have the computer tied up for the next two years. We couldn’t possibly squeeze in a private project like this. After all, we’re studying fish, not mammals. Now, if you want to give us your data, I can put it in with the rest. It will add to our total data bank. But we couldn’t possibly give over time for a rare sea mammal like that.”

“Oh,” said Wilson, looking downhearted. “Well, that’s that, th en.” After a moment, he brightened. “By the by, Milt, wil l you be co m ing to the lecture I’m giving at the Faculty Club?”

“I never miss a meeting of the Faculty Club,” th e professor said. “What sort of lecture are you giving?”

“Oh, on the sea. Just your sort of thing, really. I’m showing some eight millimeter movies.”

“Movies?” Professor Rowe felt suddenly as though a stream of ice water were defying the laws of gravity and flowing up his back.

“Yes. You remember. The ones we took this summer.”

“You—uh—edited them, of course?” the professor asked weakly .

Wilson looked innocently bland. “Why, no. Haven’t had time .”

The two men looked into each other’s eyes for th e space of a full minute.

Then Professor Rowe looked away and sighed. “If you can find time to edit those films, Jack, I believe I can find time in the computer schedule for your project. After all,” he said musingly, the light of Pure Science gleaming suddenly in his eyes, “it isn’t really out of line with the other work we’re doing.”

‘Tm glad you see it that way,” Wilson said. “But I don’t see why you want to edit the films. They’re just the ones we took off Capri with the underwater camera.”

Professor Rowe looked at his friend’s face and scanned it carefully, almost expectantly, as if examining the mouth for signs of unm e lted butter.

The process took somewhat longer than Wilson had anticipated. The vast mass of data (from which he had carefully edited any mention of the word “mermaid”) had to be reduced to mathematical form. Each one of the hundreds of data factors had to be assigned a numerical value expressed, not in the decimal notation of the Arabic system, but in the binary system used by digital computers.

Then, after the data bits had been translated into numbers, they had to be carefully encoded as holes in cards measuring 7 and 7/16 inches by 3-1/4 inches—hundreds and hundreds of them.

After the first three days, Jack Wilson stopped coming around to watch; the immediate fascination had worn off and faded away into monotony.

Finally Professor Rowe informed him that the calculations had been carried to completion.

The professor’s desk was covered with a stack of large sheets of tracing paper, on each of which was drawn a long, wavy line which appeared to follow an irregular, elongated series of dots.

“We’ve graphed the whole thing, including interpolations and extrapolations,” said Professor Rowe. “Naturally, in a multidimensional problem such as this, the graphs are necessarily two-dimensional abstracts, but all the information you’ll need is there.”

Before Jack could mention the fact that he was unable to make head or tail of the squiggly lines, the professor riffled through the pile and extracted a single sheet. As he spread it out on the top of the pile, he said: “Here’s the most important one, as far as you’re concerned. The line follows the migration pattern chronologically, according to weighted spatial coordinates.”

Jack nodded silen tl y.

“Your mammal,” the professor went on, “follows this curve very nicely. Now, as to the extrapolation of the cu rve …”

He took another sheet of tracing paper from the stack, walked over to a large Mercator projection of the Earth’s surface, and thumbtacked the tracing paper carefully over the map. For the first time, Jack Wilson found he could make sense out of the blue lines.

“They l o ok like shipping routes on a navigational chart,” he said.

“Don’t they, though?” agreed the professor. “The Mediterranean, the Caribbean, both very well-traveled up until a few decades ago. Then the pattern shifts more strongly to the South Pacific, via the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean. There, the pattern is strongly cyclic, as you can see.

“The animal obviously prefers warmer waters, coming northward, toward the equator, during the winter months of June, July, and August, and heading southward, toward Australia and Oceania during the summer months of December, January, and February.”

The professor reached over to his desk and picked up a card, which he handed to Wilson. “Here’s the latitude and longitude and dates for the next several months. As you’d see, your best bet is to search the Great Barrier Reef, just off the coast of Queensland.”

Jack Wilson took the card and looked at it while visions of sea maidens danced in his head. Rowe, all unknowing, went on, “One of those little islands along there, and the adjacent waters, is where Beast X is most likely to appear.”

Wilson looked up, sharply. “Beast X?”

“That’s what we call it down in the computer room,” said Rowe. “After all, we had to call it something, and ‘creature alleged to resemble members of the order Sire n ia ‘ is rather cumbersome, don’t you think?”

And rather incorrect, too, Jack thought. “Beast X” indeed! This lovely creature of the sun-dappled waves and the blue-green depths! Oh, well, anticipation was about to become realization, and little things like this didn’t matter at all.

“Milt,” he said aloud, “I’m very much obliged to you. You may expect a picture post-card from Queensland … and, of course, y o u’re expected to be with us on the Lorelei next summer.”

The professor nodded abstractedly. He did, indeed, conjecture vision of Summer Past and Summer Yet To Come, void of dumpy, nosey faculty wives and adenoidally virtuous co-eds alike; and, in this vision, the grey skies of Arkham were replaced by blue ones in which shone the bright, undying, unconquered Sun, in whose warmth he lay on yellow sands alongside young women with compact but yielding curves and electric fingers. But the vision, though pleasant, was a dim one; as a bear, snug in its stuffy cave of a winter, might dimly dream of fish leaping in streams and bushes heavy with ripe berries.

“I still don’t see, sir,” said Captain MacNair gloomily, “why you don’t take the helicopter. Seems to me, if you’ll pardon my saying so, sir, that it would be a good deal less dangerous.”

“Possibly it would, Captain,” said Wilson, “but I don’t want to frighten off our quarry now that we’re this close. Besides, Professor Rowe said that these figures are only approximate. She might not show up for two or three days, and I doubt we could hover that long in a ‘copter. No, MacNair; we’ll do it my way.”

“Very well, sir.” The Captain still looked gloomy. “We’ll be as close as we can get within the hour, sir.”

The plan, as Jack Wilson visualized it, was quite simple. The Great Barrier Reef area was not one where ships of any great draft could move with impunity, and the island which Jack Wilson sought was well within that area. Therefore, the Lorelei would stand down as close as possible, and, from there on in. Wilson would go it alone. He had bought a well-built outrigger sailboat for the purpose, and loaded it with provisions, a small outboard motor, and several five-gallon cans of gasoline. Wilson was taking no chances with unfriendly winds, since he had more than forty miles to go from the point where the Lorelei would be waiting. As an added precaution, he carried a small, waterproof, two-way radio. In case all did not go well, a call to the Lorelei would bring Captain MacNair in the helicopter which had been anchored to the deck of the ship.

At the rendezvous point, Captain MacNair dropped anchor, and the crew began to lower Wilson’s outrigger over the side. The sea was relatively calm, and overhead the hot sun of late January poured down upon the sweating men.

“Now, remember,” said Wilson finally, just before he went down the ladder to the outrigger that bobbed lazily on the blue waters, “I’ll give you a call every six hours.” He glanced at the scaled skin-diver’s wristwatch he was carrying. “If I don’t call, get in that ‘copter and come a-running. Got it?”

“Yes, sir; I do,” said Captain MacNair.

“Good.” Wilson clambered down the ladder, boarded the out rigger, and cast free. When the wind caught the sail, he aimed her for her destination, waved toward the Lorelei, then concentrated on his course.

Six hours later, he reported to Captain MacNair. “I’m within sight of the island group, Captain. I’ll take a look around the smaller islands, but I think I’ll beach the boat on the biggest one.”

“Very well, sir; but you’d best hurry. Sunset in forty-five minutes.”

“Will do.”

Wilson felt pretty good, all things considered. He had arrived at high tide, just as he had planned, which meant that all but the highest islands of the Reef were underwater. He had already done some aerial reconnaissance earlier in the month, and found th at this particular group of tiny coral islands contained the only island that was both close to the predicted coordinates and large enough to have plants growing on it. It was also a Hell of a long way from any other island of any consequence. It must be—it had to be —the island where The Mermaid would come.

Already, in his own mind, she had ceased to be simply “A mermaid”; she had become The Mermaid—with capitals.

All these things buoyed him up. But one thing depressed him. His stomach.

Well, actually, it wasn’t his stomach; it was his palate that had been insulted. He had to admit that his stomach was not upset in the least; he felt no queasiness whatever. It had, after all, been more than twenty-four hours since he had eaten that horrible mess, just before the Lorelei had left the mainland of Australia.

It was supposed to have been baked shark’s fin, and no one else in the little restaurant in Yeetee-meeree had noticed anything particularly wrong with it, but to a connoisseur, it had given the impression that the shark had been dredged from the interior of a whale, along with a bumper crop of ambergris and decayed squid. Normally, Jack would have taken a single whiff and shipped the whole thing back to the kitchen by rocket express, but it had been specially selected by Donna Brennan, a lush beauty who had come all the way from Melbourne t o see him. He could hardly have refused.

But his insulted taste buds still felt indignant, and that now faint but still perceptible indignation was the only thing that took the fine edge off Wilson’s glow of adventure. In fact, as he sailed around the tiny islands in the vicinity of the larger one, the surge of excitement within him almost completely drowned out the memory of that despicable shark’s fin.

Maneuvering the boat required great care; even at high tide, there were places where the jagged surface of the Great Reef was only inches below the top of the water, capable of ripping the bottom out of the boat.

There wasn’t a sign of anyone or anything in the area, except for the brightly-colored fish that darted about in the clear waters. The sky, now colored a brassy orange from the reddened rays of the sun as it approached the horizon, was empty. Not a single bird floated overhead. The breeze was barely perceptible, and the only sound was the wash of the waves against the coral crags.

Wilson made his way to the largest island, beached the boat, and dragged it up on the sands. Then he looked around. The island would have delighted any cartoonist. It was somewhat larger, perhaps, than the cartoonist might have liked, since it measured about fifty yards long by thirty wide, and there was a little more vegetation on it than most cartoonists portray, but it certainly showed that tiny islands with a handful of palm trees on them did exist.

Wilson was working on the theory that a mermaid would not be frightened by a single, unarmed man. Historical evidence indicated that they avoided big concentrations of humanity, but that a lone individual didn’t bother them. At least, Jack Wil son hoped it would work that way.

By the time he had made a complete survey of the island, the last red rim of the sun had sunk beneath the horizon. There was no one there but himself. He gathered armfuls of dried driftwood, scooped out a pit in the gritty coral sand, and built himself a small fire.

His stomach was of two minds. It wanted to be filled, but the memory of that shark’s fin rejected the notion of eating just yet. Jack decided to wait until he was really hungry before he put any of the tinned beef or turtle soup into it. Meanwhile, he’d be satisfied with a cup of coffee. It was a remarkable thing, painfully r emarkable, how full the sea was of good things to eat and how empty the earth of people capable of cooking them.

Twenty minutes later, he was sipping a cup of hot, black, sweet coffee à la grecque and contentedly smoking a cigarette as he gazed into the dancing flicker of the small driftwood fire. It was the only light in a sea of blackness that surrounded him. The night was moonless, and in the clear sky only the stars rivaled the ruddy glow from the sandpit.

How long, he wondered, would it be before The Mermaid showed up? Niggling doubts about her ever showing up he dismissed as too absurd to countenance. Hadn’t she been sighted time after time? Weren’t her movements so regular as to … Just so. Exactly. She would be along. Wilson lay back on his sleeping bag and blew plumes of smoke toward the stars. Her hair would be long and sun-blonde, her teeth like perfectly matched Bahrein pearls, her eyes as blue as the Bay of Naples on a sunny day, her skin milky white, her breasts …

“Ahum!”

He jerked his head up and looked around. The noise had sounded for all the world like someone clearing his throat. Wilson found that looking at the fire had made him a bit night-blind for the moment. Until his vision cleared …

“Ah hum!” The noise came again, th is time with more persistence. He located its source as being somewhere to the right, near a coral outcropping. He suddenly wished he had brought a gun.

Very cautiously, he said: “Hello?”

” ‘Ullo , Cocky,” came a somewhat diffident voice. “Could you spare a gasper?” The voice was a sort of whiskey tenor, and by now Jack could make out a dimly-lit shape in the flickering fire. Someone was leaning across the low ridge of coral, arms folded, like a friendly bartender. Someone with a l ight mop of stringy hair. Someone with odd, very odd, skin coloration—great splotches of pink, black, and white, like a piebald pony.

Half -c aste abo., Wilson’s mind said. Semi-albinism. Must have seen my light and paddled over creeping around in the dark …

“Who is th at?” he asked, trying to peer further into the gloom.

“Me nyme’s Mavis.” The voice pronounced it My-vis. “Wot’s yours, Cocky?”

The voice didn’t fit in with his vision at all. Not one damn bit. Nor did anything else about the figure. But Jack Wilson’s mmd jumped straight to one sudden, dreadful conclusion, and his heart gave a truly horrifying leap. “You’re a—a mer maid?”

“Not ‘ardly. Old Mavis eyen’t been exactly wotcher might call a myde for, oh, ever so long. More wotcher might call a mer-lydy—if you tykes me meaning, Cocky.” There was a rather coarse giggle. “And now wot about that gasper?”

Wilson’s mind felt numb, barely capable of functioning. “Why, sure, Mavis,” he heard his voice saying, “but why don’t you come over by the fire? I’ve got some hot coffee, and …” He came to an abrupt halt as he realized how utterly ordinary his voice sounded.

Mavis needed no urging. “Now, that’s wot I calls a dinky-doo gent,” she said, gratified. “I ‘aven’t ‘ad a good, ‘ot cup o’ coffee since that narsty little yellerfeller scragged old Joe Kelly, wot used ter fish for trepang in the Torres Straight.” As she said this, she heaved herself over the ledge and propelled herself down the sand toward Wilson, fire, and coffee.

He threw on more wood, and he could see her clearly as she came.

There was no longer any doubt that she was of the sea. None. Her method of locomotion, necessitated by the muscular, horizontal-fluked ta il which took the place of her legs, was a sort of humping crawl similar to that of a seal. In the flaring firelight, details became clear. Unlike the portrayals of fanciful artists, Mavis did not have a sheath of iridescent scales on her tail; it was covered with thick, tough hide, like that of a dolphin, and was marked in many places by scars.

Her hair, one might say, was blonde, as a mass of unravelled but not unsnarled hempen rope, trailed in weedy seas for countless years, might be said to be blonde. Her teeth might be compared to pearls only if one were speaking of baroque pearls—long, irregular, and yellow. Her eyes, it is true, were blue—but not the blue of the Bay of Naples unless the Bay of Naples is sometimes faded and bloodshot. Her breasts were like a couple of half-emptied flour bags which had been misused by dirty hands. And she was, without any possibility of doubt, a mermaid.

Or, at any rate, a mer-lydy.

She stopped near the fire, flipped her tail exper tl y beneath her, and relaxed into a semi-reclining position. Wilson’s innate courtesy brought him partially out of his daze. He picked up the pack of cigarettes from his sleeping bag and offered her one. As she took it, he noticed that the th ick, warty fingers had a small web of leathery skin between the m, which didn’t quite reach the lower joint.

Jack fired up his lighter and proffered the flame. Mavis looked at the cigarette. “Coo-ee! A blink-in’ Sobrauie! You are a toff, you are.” She puffed it alight and smiled at him—the smile which one sees on the face of a more-than-middle-aged, unsuccessful, but ever-optimistic prostitute. It was not exactly a leer, but it was well on its way to becoming one.

Wilson snapped out the light and busied himself with the coffee pot. “Cream?” he asked bleakly.

” ‘F’you please,” Mavis said daintily—an effect somewhat marred by an enormous burp that seemed to have all three hundred pounds of her behind it. She looked embarrassed. “Eel,” she explained. “It will repeat, you know. Carn’t stop it. Many’s the time I says to me self, ‘Now, Mavis, no eel!’ But, then, wot’s life if you’ve always got to be a-dicting, eh? ‘A bit of wotcher fancy does yer good’ is my motto. Erp.”

Jack winced. “Sugar?” he asked, in a low, stricken voice.

“Four spoonsful. I do like my bit of sweet, and it’s seldom I gets it nowadyes, people bein’ the wye the y are. Why, the sea itself eyen’t syfe no more—all them perishin’ skin-divers! Bleedin’ lot of liberty-tykers is wot they are!” Resentfully, she fingered a newish scar on her tail. “I used to lo v e the Pacific afore all them ruddy bombs …”

Wilson handed her the coffee. Close up, the fish odor was even stronger. She took it with a resounding ‘“Ngky e w!” and, little finger stuck out, she slurped appreciatively. “Ah, that’s good! See, it’s all right; as long as you styes in the bleedin’ water, but if you comes out of an evening, that breeze gives you summat of a chill, it does. And ‘oo wants to be took sick ‘ere, miles from bloody woof-woof?” Another slurp. “Ahhhhhh.”

Wilson’s paralyzed mind was reacting almost automatically. “Glad you liked it. I don’t suppose you get much coffee.”

She gave a great, gusty, fish-laden sigh. “No, myte, I don’t, and that’s a fact. It eyen’t like it used ter be. ‘Ere I am, still in me prime , and there’s ‘ardly nuffink to look forward to.” Few females need much encouragement to talk; Mavis needed none. Her remarks were mos tl y of a plaintive nature, ranging from fresh-water swimming (“I styes clear o’ rivers nowadyes, Cock. Orl this pollution mucking up the plyce—some of the things yer sees floa t in abaht, why, it fair brings the blush to me cheeks!”) to the fun she used to have riding along in the bow wave of a sailing vessel (“Carn’t tyke chances like that no more; if some idjit don’t tyke a shot at you wiv a bleedin’ rifle, you still runs a risk of getdn’ yer arse snagged in the screw!”).

When she finally reached the Summing Up, she had disposed of four cups of coffee and half of the Sobranies.

“No, Cocky, I tell you,” she said reflectively, drawing in a mouthful of smoke with a wet, smacking sound, “mag all you wants to, but this mermyde gym e ‘as ‘ad it. Why, tyke Boro-Boro an’ all them other bleedin’ ‘eathen islands: Used ter come out in wackin’ big canoes, the buggers did, first full moon arfter the flippin’ solstices, all chantin’ an’ racketin’ an’ wyvin’ torches to welcome me. ‘Gryte Sea Muvver ‘Oo Fills Our Nets Wiv Fish’ and all that palaver, y’know—fling cocoanuts, yams, ‘ot taros, and ‘ole roasted pigs into the old briny—then back to the beach for fun and gymes and all them lewd nytive rytchuals. But now ?” She was torn between sarcasm and a sigh. “Not no more, myte. Flippin’ missioners ‘as turned their silly ‘eads ; got ‘em singin’ ‘ymns orl night long, cor stone the crows! Fit ter splitcher bloody ear-‘ol e s, the cows! No, I tell you the stryte dinkum oil. Cocky, this mermyde graft ‘as bleedin’ well ‘ad it, an’ I’m ‘arf ready to pack it in.”

Wilson felt much the same way. But how to go about it? Wh il e he was considering the problem, Mavis suddenly said: “But ‘ere. Cock! I been maggin’ sumfin’ orful, and you ‘aven’t ‘ad yer tucker yet!”

“I’m not very hungry,” he said weakly.

But he might as well not have spoken. “You just sit right there, Cock, and I’ll pop inter the wet and snaffle a couple o’ nice ones, an’ we’ll ‘ave a bit o’ scoff.” She propelled herself to the water’s edge and slid in with scarcely a ripple.

As she vanished, the cloud that had seemed to blanket Jack’s mind vanished, too. The shock of seeing (and hearing and smelling!) his dream shattered had numbed his brain.

Now the numbness had gone, to be replaced by pain.

He tried to bring back the dream, if only for a little while, but he found the task impossible. When he tried to conjure up the beatific vision, all that came was the warty, piebald face of Mavis. Perhaps no sane man could mistake a dugong for a beautiful woman, but it would be relatively easy to mistake Mavis for a dugong. He had been building his whole life around the quixotic pursuit of a dream, and now, God help him, he had found the reality. He hated himself for having had the dream, and he hated poor Mavis for having destroyed it.

Simply sitting there in the sand, staring blindly into the fire, now mostly embers and ashes, he hardly even noticed when Mavis returned, carrying two fish of unknown name but of reassuringly familiar construction. He paid only peripheral attention as she ex-per tl y cleaned and scaled them with a piece of shell. Not a word of her chatter penetrated as she stuffed the fish with one kind of seaweed and wrapped them in another, then plunged the dripping packages into the hot ashes of the fire, amid a hissing cloud of steam, and raked glowing embers over the pile.

He was still squatting stupidly as she humped herself over into the shadows and dug about in the sand. Uttering small cries of triumph, she disinterred two round objects and, making her way back to the fire, presented him with one.

” ‘Ave a bit of wa l lop,” she said invitingly.

“Eh?” He stared at the thing. “What’s this?”

Mavis chuckled richly. “Why, cor bless your ‘ead, you been practically sittin’ smack on top o’ one o’ me private caches o’ workin’ cocoanuts! I keeps a supply ready on all these narsty little bits of islands. Wot else would bring me ashore? ‘Ere—”

Expertly, then, she pulled out the plugs of twisted palm fronds which allowed the carbon dioxide to escape during fermentation, but prevented sand from sifting in. “Nah, then! ‘Ave a go!”

Wilson took the cocoanut, sniffed, and tasted. That part of his mind which had not been dulled by shock had to admit that the stuff wasn’t bad. He took a long swig; it went down smooth and warm.

“Ahhh!” said Mavis, licking her bristly upper lip; “that’s wot myde the deacon dance!”

Jack said nothing. There was a whole night to get through, and then the rest of his life after that, and he might as well start the ordeal as drunk as possible. He took another swig of the jungle juice. Mavis moved off, then she moved back.

“Got no bib,” she said gayly, “but ‘ere’s your tucker, Cocky.”

Wil son looked down at the palm frond she had spread on the sand in front of him. He didn’t move; he merely stared at the whole baked fish resting there. Then the soft sea breeze wafted a delicate scent to his educated nostrils, bringing a flow of saliva from beneath his tongue.

Almost as if it had volition of its own, his hand reached out and broke o ff a bit of the crisp skin and flak y flesh and popped it in to his mouth …

The J & M Seafood Grotto was opened to a select clientele only a few mon th s later. Jack Wilson, the junior partner, still makes excursions in the Lorelei to procure both rare and staple oceanic delicacies for the house’s table, but he rarely stays away long.

The few people who have seen his wife, the senior partner, say that she isn’t much to look at, and is confined to a wheelchair, her lower extremities covered, which is probably why she stays hidden in the kitchen most of the time. There are rumors that she and Jack often go for midnight swims in the nearby surf; and the re are other rumors of various sorts, not confirmed.

What needs no confirmation is the fact that Jack seems very fond of his wife, indeed—and that her seafood simply is out of this world.

The End