The Man Who Lost the Sea (14 page)

“About then my knee gave another twinge and I looked dawn and saw it wasn’t just bumped, it was cut too and bleeding all down my leg, and only when I heard her laughing louder than I was cussing did I realize what I was saying. She swam round and round me, laughing, but you know? there’s a way of laughing
at
and a way of laughing
with
, and there was no bad feeling in what she was doing.”

“So I forgot my knee altogether and began to swim, and I think she liked that; she stopped laughing and began to sing, and it was …”

Smith was quiet for a time, and Jane Dow had nothing to say. It was as if she were listening for that singing, or to it.

“She can sing with anything that moves, if it’s alive, or even if it isn’t alive, if it’s big enough, like a storm wind or neaptide rollers. The way she sang, it was to my arms stroking the water and my hands cutting it, and me in it, and being scared and wondering, the way I was … and the water on me, and the blood from my knee, it was all what she was singing, and before I knew it it was all the other way round, and I was swimming to what she sang. I think I never swam in my life the way I did then, and may never again, I don’t know; because there’s a way of moving where every twitch and wiggle is exactly right, and does twice what it could do before; there isn’t a thing in you fighting anything else of yours …” His voice trailed off.

Jane Dow sighed.

He said, “She went for the rocks like a torpedo and just where she had to bash her brains out, she churned up a fountain of white-water and shot out of the top of it and up on the rocks—right
where she wanted to be and not breathing hard at all. She reached her hand into a crack without stretching and took out a big old comb and began running it through her hair, still humming that music and smiling at me like—well, just the way you said
he
did, waiting, not ready to run. I swam to the rocks and climbed up and sat down near her, the way she wanted.”

Jane Dow spoke after a time, shyly, but quite obviously from a conviction that in his silence Smith had spent quite enough time on these remembered rocks. “What … did she want, Mr. Smith?”

Smith laughed.

“Oh,” she said. “I do beg your pardon. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Oh please,” he said quickly, “it’s all right. What I was laughing about was that she should pick on me—me of all people in the world …” He stopped again, and shook his head invisibly. No, I’m not going to tell her about that, he decided. Whatever she thinks about me is bad enough. Sitting on a rock half the night with a mermaid, teaching her to cuss … He said, “They have a way of getting you to do what they want.”

It is possible, Smith found, even while surf whispers virtually underfoot, to detect the cessation of someone’s breathing; to be curious, wondering, alarmed, then relieved as it begins again, all without hearing it or seeing anything.
What’d I say?
he thought, perplexed; but he could not recall exactly, except to be sure he had begun to describe the scene with the mermaid on the rocks, and had then decided against it and said something or other else instead. Oh. Pleasing the mermaid. “When you come right down to it,” he said, “they’re not hard to please. Once you understand what they want.”

“Oh yes,” she said in a controlled tone. “I found that out.”

“You did?”

Enough silence for a nod from her.

He wondered what pleased a merman. He knew nothing about them—nothing. His mermaid liked to sing and to be listened to, to be watched, to comb her hair, and to be cussed at. “And whatever it is, it’s worth doing,” he added, “because when they’re happy, they’re happy up to the sky.”

“Whatever it is,” she said, disagreeably agreeing.

A strange corrosive thought drifted against his consciousness. He batted it away before he could identify it. It was strange, and corrosive, because of his knowledge of and feeling for, his mermaid. There is a popular conception of what joy with a mermaid might be, and he had shared it—if he had thought of mermaids at all—with the populace … up until the day he met one. You listen to mermaids, watch them, give them little presents, cuss at them, and perhaps learn certain dexterities unknown, or forgotten, to most of us, like breathing under water—or, to be more accurate, storing more oxygen than you thought you could, and finding still more (however little) extractable from small amounts of water admitted to your lungs and vaporized by practiced contractions of the diaphragm, whereby some of the dissolved oxygen could be coaxed out of the vapor. Or so Smith had theorized after practicing certain of the mermaid’s ritual exercises. And then there was fishing to be eating, and fishing to be fishing, and hypnotizing eels, and other innocent pleasures.

But innocent.

For your mermaid is as oviparous as a carp, though rather more mammalian than an echidna. Her eggs are tiny, by honored mammalian precedent, and in their season are placed in their glittering clusters (for each egg looks like a tiny pearl embedded in a miniature moonstone) in secret, guarded grottos, and cared for with much ritual. One of the rituals takes place after the eggs are well rafted and have plated themselves to the inner lip of their hidden nest; and this is the finding and courting of a merman to come and, in the only way he can, father the eggs.

This embryological sequence, unusual though it may be, is hardly unique in complexity in a world which contains such marvels as the pelagic phalange of the cephalopods and the simultaneity of disparate appetites exhibited by certain arachnids. Suffice it to say, regarding mermaids, that the legendary monosyllable of greeting used by the ribald Indian is answered herewith; and since design follows function in such matters, one has a guide to one’s conduct with the lovely creatures, and they, brother, with you, and with you, sister.

“So gentle,” Jane Dow was saying, “but then, so rough.”

“Oh?” said Smith. The corrosive thought nudged at him. He flung
it somewhere else, and it nudged him there, too.… It was at one time the custom in the Old South to quiet babies by smearing their hands liberally with molasses and giving them a chicken feather. Smith’s corrosive thought behaved like such a feather, and pass it about as he would he could not put it down.

The mer
man
now, he thought wildly … “I suppose,” said Jane Dow, “I really am in no position to criticize.”

Smith was too busy with his figurative feather to answer.

“The way I talked to you when I thought you were … when you came out here. Why, I never in my life …”

“That’s all right. You heard
me
, didn’t you?” Oh, he thought, suddenly disgusted with himself, it’s the same way with her and her friend as it is with me and mine. Smith, you have an evil mind. This is a nice girl, this Jane Dow.

It never occurred to him to wonder what was going through her mind. Not for a moment did he imagine that she might have less information on mermaids than he had, even while he yearned for more information on mermen.

“They
make
you do it,” she said. “You just have to. I admit it; I lie awake nights thinking up new nasty names to call him. It makes him so happy. And he loves to do it too. The … things he says. He calls me ‘alligator bait.’ He says I’m his squashy little bucket of roe. Isn’t that awful? He says I’m a milt-and-water type. What’s milt, Mr. Smith?”

“I can’t say,” hoarsely said Smith, who couldn’t, making a silent resolution not to look it up. He found himself getting very upset. She seemed like such a nice girl … He found himself getting angry. She unquestionably
had
been a nice girl.

Monster, he thought redly. “I wonder if it’s moonrise yet.”

Surprisingly she said, “Oh dear. Moonrise.”

Smith did not know why, but for the first time since he had come to the rock, he felt cold. He looked unhappily seaward. A ragged, wistful, handled phrase blew by his consciousness:
save her from herself
. It made him feel unaccountably noble.

She said faintly, “Are you … have you … I mean, if you don’t mind my asking, you don’t have to tell me …”

“What is it?” he asked gently, moving close to her. She was huddled unhappily on the edge of the shelf. She didn’t turn to him, but she didn’t move away.

“Married, or anything?” she whispered.

“Oh gosh no. Never. I suppose I had hopes once or twice, but no, oh gosh no.”

“Why not?”

“I never met a … well, they all … You remember what I said about a touch of strange?”

“Yes, yes …”

“Nobody had it … Then I got it, and … put it this way, I never met a girl I could tell about the mermaid.”

The remark stretched itself and lay down comfortably across their laps, warm and increasingly audible, while they sat and regarded it. When he was used to it, he bent his head and turned his face towards where he imagined hers must be, hoping for some glint of expression. He found his lips resting on hers. Not pressing, not cowering. He was still, at first from astonishment, and then in bliss. She sat up straight with her arms braced behind her and her eyes wide until his mouth slid away from hers. It was a very gentle thing.

Mermaids love to kiss. They think it excruciatingly funny. So Smith knew what it was like to kiss one. He was thinking about that while his lips lay still and sweetly on those of Jane Dow. He was thinking that the mermaid’s lips were not only cold, but dry and not completely flexible, like the carapace of the soft-shell crab. The mermaid’s tongue, suited to the eviction of whelk and the scything of kelp, could draw blood. (It never had, but it could.) And her breath smelt of fish.

He said, when he could, “What were you thinking?”

She answered, but he could not hear her.

“What?”

She murmured into his shoulder, “His teeth all point inwards.”

Aha, he thought.

“John,” she said suddenly, desperately, “There’s one thing you must know now and forever more. I know just how things were between you and
her
, but what you have to understand is that it
wasn’t the same with me. I want you to know the truth right from the very beginning, and now we don’t need to wonder about it or talk about it ever again.”

“Oh you’re fine,” John Smith choked. “So fine … Let’s go. Let’s get out of here before—before moonrise.”

Strange how she fell into the wrong and would never know it (for they never discussed it again), and forgave him and drew from that a mightiness; for had she not defeated the most lawless, the loveliest of rivals?

Strange how he fell into the wrong and forgave her, and drew from his forgiveness a lasting pride and a deep certainty of her eternal gratitude.

Strange how the moon had risen long before they left, yet the mermaid and the merman never came at all, feeling things as they strangely do.

And John swam in the dark sea slowly, solicitous, and Jane swam, and they separated on the dark beach and dressed, and met again at John’s car, and went to the lights where they saw each other at last; and when it was time, they fell well and truly in love, and surely that is the strangest touch of all.

The quiet third of the Twenty-First Century came to an end at ten o’clock on the morning of May 17, 2034, with the return to earth of a modified Fafnir space cruiser under the command of Capt. Avery Swope. Perhaps in an earlier or a later day, the visitation which began on the above date might have had less effect. But the earth was lulled and content with itself, and for good reason—international rivalries having reverted to the football fields and tennis courts, an intelligent balance of trade and redistribution of agriculture and industry having been achieved.

Captain Swope’s mission was to accomplish the twelfth off-earth touchdown, and the body on which he touched was Iapetus (sometimes Japetus), the remarkable eighth satellite of Saturn. All Saturn’s satellites are remarkable, each for a different reason. Iapetus’ claim to fame is his fluctuating brilliance; he always swings brightly around the eastern limb of the ringed planet, and dwindles dimly behind the western edge. Obviously the little moon is half bright and half dark, and keeps one face turned always to its parent; but why should a moon be half bright and half dark?

It was an intriguing mystery, and it had become the fashion to affect all sorts of decorations which mimicked the fluctuations of the inconstant moonlet: cufflinks and tunic clasps which dimmed and brightened, bread-wrappers and book-jackets in dichotomous motley. Copies were reproduced of the midcentury master Pederson’s magnificent oil painting of a space ship aground on one of Saturn’s moons, with four suited figures alighting, and it became a sort of colophon for news stories about Swope’s achievement and window displays of bi-colored gimcrackery—with everyone marveling at the Twentieth Century artist’s unerring prediction of a Fafnir’s contours, and no one noticing that the painting could not possibly
have been of Iapetus which has no blue sky nor weathered rocks, but must certainly have been the meticulous Pederson’s visualization of Titan. Still, everyone thought it was Iapetus, and since it gave no evidence as to why Iapetus changed its brightness, the public embraced the painting as the portrait of a mystery. They told each other that Swope would find out.

Captain Swope found out, but Captain Swope did not tell. Something happened to his Fafnir on Iapetus. His signals were faintly heard through the roar of an electrical disturbance on the parent world, and they were unreadable, and they were the last. Then, voiceless, he returned, took up his braking orbit, and at last came screaming down out of the black into and through the springtime blue. His acquisition of the tail-down attitude so very high—over fifty miles—proved that something was badly wrong. The extreme deliberation with which he came in over White Sands, and the constant yawing, like that of a baseball bat balanced on a fingertip, gave final proof that he was attempting a landing under manual control, something never before attempted with anything the size of a Fafnir. It was superbly done, and may never be equaled, that roaring drift down and down through the miles, over forty-six of them, and never a yaw that the sensitive hands could not compensate, until that last one.