The Lower Deep (35 page)

Dannie was just behind him, matching his forward progress with no visible struggle. Alice was a few yards in front. Otherwise the sea was empty and almost unbroken, just a boundless blue expanse of gentle heavings with only an occasional whitecap to mark a breaking wave crest. This, he reminded himself, was the north coast of St. Jo
seph, in the Caribbean. If they were indeed swimming west-northwestward, as the position of the sun seemed to indicate, they would pass between St. Joe's mainland and the old buccaneer isle of Ile du Vent in the direction of Hispaniola and Cuba. In Cuba the United States Navy had a base at Guantanamo, no?

Far in the distance a freighter with tall deck cranes or whatever those Eiffel Tower things were properly called—he, for Christ's sake, was only a fisherman—came into sight now and lumbered along westward, trailing a plume of dark smoke from its single funnel. It was the only craft of any kind in sight.

"George?" Alice was sending him a message.

"Yes?"

"Practice your breathing again. I'm telling Dannie to do it, too. We sometimes encounter ships or fishing boats out here and have to go down to avoid them."

"All right."

He found he could hold his breath longer each time he tried it. Not having a watch on his wrist, he could not time himself, but he estimated fifteen minutes, then twenty, then even longer. Finally he lost interest, knowing there was almost no limit.

"You're very good, George," Alice told him. "You'll have absolutely no trouble, I'm sure."

"Who taught me this?" he asked. "You?"

"You still don't fully understand, do you, George? I suppose the truth is, you're still subconsciously resisting me. But yes, to answer your question for at least the third time, I've been preparing your mind. That's what we have to do, don't you see? Work on the mind. The physical potential is already there; almost everyone has it. This
is becoming a little tiresome, George. Explaining
things to you, I mean. You're an unbeliever; that's your trouble. Dannie, now, has just been swim
ming along as though we were on a pleasure trip."

"We're not on a pleasure trip, are we?" George said.

"No, George, we're not."

"We're on our way to some kind of undersea hell."

"If you say so. Everything depends on one's point of view, you know."

George very nearly said, or thought, "You're a real bitch, Alice," but caught himself, aware he
would gain nothing by antagonizing her. At the
same time, the realization that he had even been able to entertain such a thought elated him, for it
seemed to indicate he really did retain control of at least a portion of his mind. In case some part of the thought might have escaped him, he attempted a hasty cover-up by giving Alice something more to answer.

"Who recruited you, Alice? You say you recruited Dannie, and from what you've been telling me, I take it you were the one who lured Ginny Jourdan into this. But who recruited you?"

"Our leader, himself."

"Who's he?"

"You'll meet him soon."

"How did he hook you?"

"We met at Anse Douce one day when I was there alone, and he found me attractive, George. That's all, really. Some men have found me attractive, you know, even if you don't anymore. We continued to meet at the beach until I was trained, and then I made the journey with him. Unfortunately I didn't quite suit their original purpose, so I was instructed to recruit others. I chose Ginny first, then your girlfriend."

"Why those two?" George demanded.

"Ginny was such a special kind of girl, so bright and beautiful. Dannie I picked because—well, I guess because she was the one you turned to when you stopped thinking I was special."

"Have you—what's that word you used?—recruited any others?"

"Not yet, George. But I will."

"And how will you pick those?"

"I'll want them to be really strong and fit, so they can make the journey, of course. And attractive. And brainy. I have to be very careful who I select, George. You see, what we want is—"

Her voice in George's head suddenly changed timbre. "There's a fishing boat coming, George! I'm telling Dannie, too. Breathe deep now and follow me down!"

D
r. Louis Clermont had telephoned the Azagon
at 5:45 that morning from the Beliard hospital in Cap Matelot, hoping—in vain, as it turned out—to speak to Paul Henninger. The call was prompted by something that had happened at the hospital a few minutes earlier.

Clermont had gone to the hospital the evening before, in a last desperate attempt to do something for Ginny Jourdan. Keeping her from dying had become an obsession with him. When his efforts exhausted him, St. Joseph's Abe Lincoln decided to spend the night at the hospital instead of driving his old Renault back to Dame Marie.

Then at three-something in the morning, waking from a fitful sleep in the Jourdan girl's room, he rose from his cot and went to her one more time.

And again, not even knowing why he did so, he leaned over her with a stethoscope.

The body he examined was no longer that of a healthy young teenager. Ginny Jourdan had long ago stopped eating, was now being fed intravenously, and had been in a coma for the past forty-some hours.

Nevertheless, Louis Clermont examined the girl with that instrument designed to detect sounds within the body, and this time he was absolutely certain he heard something. Dropping the stethoscope as though it had seared his fingers, he jabbed the same trembling hand out to seize the bedside telephone.

"Dr. Beliard!" he shouted when a voice at the hospital switchboard responded. "Get me Dr. Beliard! Hurry!" And thirty seconds later when Beliard's sleep-heavy voice came on, Clermont cried, "Ed! It's Louis! Come up here to Ginny's room, man! Fast!"

Beliard, a bachelor, used his hospital as his home. In less than two minutes he came striding barefoot into the room, still in his pajamas and with a dressing gown flapping about him. People who knew Louis Clermont usually did move fast when that normally quiet man yelled at them.

Clermont still stood by Ginny Jourdan's bed, the stethoscope dangling from one hand now as he peered down at his patient. "You're just too late," he said lifelessly over his shoulder. "Just half a minute too late." As he turned to motion his colleague forward, tears filled his eyes.

Beliard stepped to his side, and they gazed down at the girl's face together. For a St. Joseph face it was thin and almost colorless—pale gray at best—but it wore a strange expression now. One of satisfaction, was it? Of triumph? Something like that, Clermont thought. As though in the end, despite all that had happened to her, Ginny had come out on top and knew it.

But hell, it couldn't be anything like that, he angrily told himself. He was letting his imagination drain away his common sense. Anyway, this was no time for sentimentality. He had a decision to make.

He made it. Wheeling on the hospital medic, he glared at him in silence for a few seconds—a Great Dane glowering at a pit bull—then thrust the stethoscope at him. "Told you I heard something, God damn it," he growled. "Listen to it now!"

The pit bull looked startled. "Louis, she can't be. Even if it happened when she disappeared, there'd be no—"

"Listen to it, will you?"

Beliard put the tubes in his ears and leaned over the girl. "Jesus, Louis, there is. You're right." His voice was a whisper filled with awe. "Slow, though—it's slow." He bent his left arm and frowned at the sweep second hand of his wristwatch while listening. Then: "Sixteen. Is that what you got? Sixteen?"

Louis Clermont nodded. "I'm going after it, Ed. I want to know-what the hell it is!"

Beliard hesitated only briefly before nodding. "I'm with you, I think. Just let me—" For the next five minutes, during which time Clermont looked on in silence, the hospital head examined the girl on the bed with painstaking care, obviously to sat
isfy himself, as Louis Clermont had already done, that Ginny Jourdan's frail, wasted-away body harbored no life except that bewildering slow heartbeat in her womb. Then with a look of determination on his pit-bull face, he straightened and nodded.

Clermont said quietly, "Where, Ed? Here or downstairs?"

"I think downstairs. No need to make a production of it, though. I'll carry her."

The corridor was empty when Clermont opened the door. With his colleague carrying the dead girl as though she were a sleeping child being put to bed, they walked along it to the rear stairs and descended to the operating room.

When they took Ginny Jourdan back to her room a while later, Louis Clermont carried something, too. Its heart had stopped beating even slowly now. It was in an aqueous solution of formaldehyde in a large glass jar, with a surgeon's green robe wrapped around the jar in case they encountered anyone along the way. Clermont's watch read 5:40.

"You going to tell her folks, Louis?" Beliard asked when the door was shut and the girl had been returned to her bed. Again the two men were studying the object in the preservative.

Clermont shook his head. "Not yet, anyway. Maybe never." Slowly he turned the jar to reveal all details of the thing it contained. "Ed, I can't believe this, even though I half suspected it. If one this size is so hideous, what kind of horror must a mature one be?"

The pit-bull face of the hospital man was one huge scowl. "The question, Louis, is—what is it? It can't be human. Gestation period's obviously far too short, for one thing. Yet"—Beliard had to pause to marshal his thoughts—"yet in spite of those gill-like openings it isn't altogether an aquatic creature either, is it? What is it, Louis? Part human, part sea creature? Aside from being, as you say, such a revolting little monster?"

"You tell me."

"Uh-uh. I'm in over my head here."

"Take a stab at it." Clermont stopped staring at the thing in the jar and turned to direct a pleading look at his colleague. "You've made a study of evolutionary biology, haven't you? What are we
dealing with here?"

Beliard still gazed at the jar as he groped for an answer. "Well . . . from what you told me downstairs when we first saw this, we'd better begin by assuming its father is—is more closely related to, say, a dolphin than a human being. Quite a few anthropologists today are leaning to the belief that man lived in the sea at one stage of his development. I don't mean he came from the sea—we know he did that—but that he went back there for a time after evolving as a land animal."

Pausing, he shifted his gaze from the jar to Clermont's bearded face, as though anticipating an argument.

Clermont only nodded.

"Man did that during the Pliocene drought, these people think," the hospital doctor went on. "There's a span of around twelve million years there where he seems to have vanished from the face of the earth, leaving no trace. He must have
gone somewhere, they say, and maybe that's the answer: He took to the sea to keep cool and find food. Then when the long drought ended and the rivers began to flow again, he swam up the rivers and climbed back out of the water into the forests while the others, the ancestors of our dolphins and whales and such, stayed behind."

"And?"

"Well, who's to say in view of what we've got in the jar here, that some of the humanoids, too, didn't stay behind? And are still out there in certain compatible parts of the planet's oceans?"

Louis Clermont let his breath out slowly and shook his head even more slowly and said, "You're assuming one hell of a lot, Ed."

"Don't we more or less have to? This thing is here, for Christ sake. Right here in this jar, man. We're not imagining it, so we have to explain it."

"I can't believe such a thing could mate with one of our kind."

"Evolution's a tricky thing. Staying in the sea may have made these things physically different from us—really hideous by our standards, if this one is typical—but obviously hasn't changed the genes all that much. We have proof of that right here." Lifting the container, Beliard again studied the creature in it. "Of course," he went on, scowling now, "we don't know if this little horror would have lived even if it had run the full course, do we?"

Clermont shook his head.

"How far along is it, you suppose, Louis? How big would it have become if Ginny had lived to give birth to it?"

"He didn't tell me that."

"Who didn't tell you?"

"Paul Henninger," Clermont said. "And I'd better call him right now and ask some questions." He reached for the phone beside the dead girl's bed.

But Dr. Steve Spence at the Azagon, after looking for Henninger, returned to the telephone to report him missing from his room.