Mad Mikhail took the photo, closely inspected it. “I do not know this boy,” he said at last, “but the Water Folk would. If he went out to sea, they would have seen him. They see everyone who goes out into the World Ocean. You have chocolate?”
Ronson had purchased a handful of Cadbury bars at the hotel shop. He pulled them out and showed them to Mikhail. The old man said nothing but simply gave him a questioning look. Ronson found his money clip, peeled off several high-denomination notes, held them up. Mikhail thought it over for a moment. “Very well,” he said at last, easing himself down from his stool. “Come with me.”
He emerged from the shack wielding a cricket bat, the sort an Englishman would carry to a sports field. Taking the money and the chocolate bars from Ronson, he led the detective down the dock, passing the boats tied up alongside. Captains and crew members lounging on their decks watched him with amusement; someone called to him in Russian and the others laughed, but Mad Mikhail only scowled and ignored them.
He and Ronson reached the end of the dock. A wooden light post rose above the water slurping against the dock’s edge. The former cosmonaut raised the cricket bat and, with both hands, slammed it against the post: two times, pause, then two more times, another pause, then two more times after that. Mikhail stopped, peered out over the water, and waited a minute. Then he hit the post six more times, two beats apiece.
“This is how you summon fro … the Water Folk?” Ronson wondered if he was wasting his time.
“Yes.” Mikhail turned his head back and forth, searching. “They hear vibrations, come to see why I call them. They do this for no one but me.”
He’d barely completed his third repetition when, one at a time, three dark blue mounds breached from the rain-spattered surface just a couple of meters from the dock. With a chill, Ronson found himself being studied by three pairs of slitted eyes the color of tarnished pewter. Those eyes were all he could see for a few moments, then Mikhail held up the chocolate bars and the creatures swam closer.
“Move back and give them room,” Mikhail said quietly. “Do not speak to them. They will not understand you.”
One by one, the Venusian natives emerged from the water, climbing up onto the dock until they stood before Ronson and Mikhail. Each stood about a meter and a half in height, the size of a boy, and were bipedal, but their resemblance to humans ended there. They looked like a weird hybrid of a frog, a salamander, and a dolphin: sloping, neckless heads, broad-mouthed and lipless, with protruding eyes; sleek hairless bodies, streamlined and mammalian, their slender arms and legs ending in webbed, four-fingered hands and broad, paddlelike feet; short dorsal fins running down their backs, away from blowholes that vibrated slightly with each breath and tapered off as reptilian tails that barely touched the wet planks of the dock.
Ronson couldn’t see any anatomical differences between males and females even though he knew that the natives had two genders. Each were naked, their light blue underbellies revealing no obvious genitalia; only subtle splotches and stripes upon their wine-colored skin distinguished one individual from another.
And they smelled. As they came out of the water, his nose picked up a fetid, organic odor that reminded him of an algae bloom in summer. The stench was offensive enough to make him step back, and not just because Mad Mikhail had asked him to do so. If they came any closer, he was afraid he’d lose his lunch.
Ronson had recently read a magazine article about how an Egyptian-American scientist, who’d perished during a dust storm on Mars, had discovered just before his death certain genetic evidence linking Homo sapiens to the native aborigines of the Red Planet. He wondered if much the same link might exist between the people of Earth and the Water Folk of Venus, and was both intrigued and disgusted by the thought he might be related, in some distant way, to these … frogheads.
Mikhail unwrapped the chocolate bars and offered them to the natives. As he did so, he addressed them in a low, warbling croak: “Wor-worg wokka kroh woka.” It sounded like nonsense to Ronson, but the Water Folk apparently understood him. The ones on the left and right bobbed their heads up and down and responded in kind—“Worgga kroh wohg”—and moved toward him in a waddling, forward-hunched gait that might have been clumsy if it hadn’t been so fast.
Only the native in the center remained where it was. It watched its companions with what seemed to be disdain as they each took a chocolate bar from Mikhail. When they opened their mouths, Ronson was startled to see that they contained rows of short, sharp teeth, with slightly longer incisors at the corners of the upper set. He was even more startled by the way they gobbled down the chocolate bars. Repulsively long tongues snatched the candy from their webbed hands; chocolate bars that even a hungry child might have taken a couple of minutes to eat were devoured in seconds. And yet the third froghead—Ronson couldn’t help but to think of it that way—refused the bar that Mikhail held out to it.
“Why doesn’t it take it?” Ronson whispered.
“I do not know,” Mikhail murmured; he was a bit surprised himself. “They have never done that before.” He raised his voice again. “Wagga kroh?”
“Kroh wogko!” The third froghead’s tail swung back and forth in what seemed to be an angry gesture, its dull silver eyes narrowing menacingly. “Kroh wogko wakkawog!”
“What did it say?”
Mikhail didn’t respond at once. He held out the bar for another moment or two, then slipped it in his pocket. The other two Water Folk made hissing noises that sounded like protests, but the third one stopped thrashing its tail and appeared to calm down a little. “The one in the middle is the leader,” Mikhail said softly. “She …”
“You can tell it’s a she?”
“Their leaders are always females. She refused the chocolate because … I think … she said it’s poisonous.” He shrugged. “I am not sure. I speak their language, yes, but some words of theirs I do not know well.”
“But this is the first time you’ve seen any of them refuse chocolate?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve been giving it to them for many years. They love kroh. Nothing else like it on Venus. This is how I have made friends with them, learned how to talk to them.” A thoughtful pause. “I do not know why one of them would refuse to take it. Very strange.”
“Well, that’s interesting, but I’ve got a job to do.” Ronson pulled out David Henry’s photo again. “Show this to them,” he said as he handed it to Mikhail, “and ask if they’ve seen him.”
The reaction was immediate. The moment Mikhail held up the photo, all three frogheads became agitated. Their tails swished back and forth, sometimes slapping the dock boards, as their heads bobbed up and down. They hissed, the leathery tips of their tongues slipping in and out of their mouths, and air whistled from their blowholes. Then the clan leader pointed to the photo and spoke in a rapid stream of angry-sounding croaks.
“Oh, yes … they recognize him, all right.” Mikhail was just as surprised as Ronson. “And I do not think they like him very much.”
“I kinda figured that. Ask if they know where he is.”
Mikhail addressed the frogheads again, and once more they responded with head bobs and tail slaps. Then the leader bent almost double, shifted slightly to the left, and raised her tail to point to the left. Mikhail listened as she spoke to him at length, then he turned to Ronson.
“She knows where he is … on a moss island that’s now some distance from here. She said she will lead us to him, but only if we will take him away.”
“That’s exactly what I want.” Then he darted a look at Mikhail. “You said ‘we’?”