“What on earth did you say to it?” asked Napoleon.
“Her, not it. Her name is Sourpuss, and I told her to go get that coin before it hit bottom, and bring it back here. If she wasn’t in a particularly unplayful mood tonight, I
might have bought an eyeful of quarter plus salt water-usually when I give her quick instructions, she does things like spit in my eye.” He reached out and took back the quarter and pocketed it. -
“All that?” asked Napoleon. “It’s a very economical language. I suppose your finger-snapping told them which one you wanted.”
“Right. Each seal has a number, and I call more than one at a time with a little code of hand-claps. That’s the first thing we take on ourselves to teach a new animal, and the others help newcomers learn. They have a pecking order as strict as Naval rank, and sometimes I think they even help us learn the code. After you’ve worked with a team of them, and worked with the personnel who have been on SEALAB n, you pick it up. It’s far more subtle than a system of numbers and acoustic emergency signals, but you pick it up.”
“I imagine a two-way dictionary would be pretty hard to compile, though, Gus. Is there a Berlitz course in Seal?”
“Oh, for tonight, you won’t have to talk to them. I ve been working here as a trainer almost since I joined U.N.C.L.E.‘s underwater division, and you and I will go in with them. That sub will take us up to a position offshore from your pier, and my whiskered quartet will be right there with us. After we group, all six of us will tear into the ungodly right on their soft white underbelly.”
Napoleon looked out at the fishy smelling group with its eight black eyes staring straight at him. “That’s quite a job for two men and four seals.”
“After a man has been down below with a team of them and recovered the ruins of Dutch exploration ships and Yankee clippers from New York Harbor, he kind of gets the feeling that these fellows are unbeatable.” He leaned against a pillar, and flipped four fish from a canvas bucket out to the seals. All four fish were caught neatly, with much barking and smacking. “You know how delicately an archeologist picks up each thimbleful of sand when he’s near a find-imagine trying to resurrect ships that have been down on the dark river bottom since the time of Henry Hudson. They re in worse condition than the tomb of Cheops, I figure, and
for that kind of heavy, controlled work I’ll take the strong backs and sensitive noses of my team, any day.”
In the dressing room, Napoleon found a wetsuit laid out for him. “Just your size,” said Bransen. “Mr. Waverly sent your measurements over while you were sky-riding, and asked that you please not get your new suit wet.”
“Should I strip for this?” Napoleon looked over the black rubber suit and watched Bransen don his own gear right over his clothes.
“Not at all. When we can fit you as closely as this, you can put the suit on over full evening dress, swim miles, and step out with your white dinner jacket dry and uncreased. You get a lot better fit this way than we ever got overseas.” Strapping and zipping himself in, Napoleon looked at Gus. “Frogman?”
“Yup. Sixteen months Search and Destroy in the Bay of Haiphong. I just got rotated back here a year ago, and elected Reserve duty so I could sign up with U.N.C.L.E. Stateside Navy work just didn’t have the feel I wanted-in the Regulars, I’d probably be a full Commander by now, pushing a pencil instead of suiting up to invade Coney Island. With U.N.C.L.E.‘s underwater activities, training the Navy people during their programs here, and working with all kinds of the sea folk, I’ve had more than my fill of action.” For a moment they couldn’t talk, helping each other check out connections on their scuba apparatus and getting used to the bite of their mouthpieces.
“I do more than just salvage work,” said Bransen as he helped check Solo’s weapons compartments. “I was an observer with the unit that brought up the nuclear device off Spain-just in case our side missed, U.N.C.L.E. wanted to make sure no one else made a successful grab. We danced around with a team of sea-going Thrushes for days, while everybody wondered if we’d have to detonate it to keep them from getting it.”
Bransen was standing in front of Napoleon, adjusting his visor for maximum peripheral view. Napoleon looked through his face-plate and through Bransen’s, squarely into a pair of steel-blue eyes with the flat look that gets into a man who’s seen it all. U.N.C.L.E. was a hard enough taskmaster
on land, but the underwater squad seemed to work just as hard, under tons of pressure in an environment that would snuff out human life as quickly as outer space would. Given a knife-fight with Thrush underwater, Napoleon thought, he’d bounce right in for the old team.
They finished checking each other out, and carried their swim-fins out to the submarine’s berth. As they climbed aboard, Napoleon noted that the four seals had been fitted with harnesses stenciled “U.N.C.L.E.”
“That’s so the Navy can’t be implicated in case some of us are intercepted,” said Gus. “Those are four prisoners who won’t talk, and all Thrush or anyone else can learn is that they were working for us.”
They found snug nooks inside the sub, and Bransen made as good a round of introductions as possible, considering that six of the eight-man crew responded by welcoming Solo over the intercom system. Before he had been “shown around” the sub from his station, they were out the sea-lock into the bay, through the fence, and turning south, routed for Coney.
“Are your unbarbered quartet keeping up?” Solo asked.
“If they aren’t, I won’t let them back in the zoo to feed the people. We’ve made this kind of run before, and the sub is pacing them at their top cruising speed. They can actually outrun us for short distances, but everybody wants them to arrive relaxed where the action is. Each seal has to surface twice during the run, so our periscope is up, elevated to leave a wake they can track. When we move into a re-group formation off the pier, I expect to step out the conning tower amid a chorus of happy barks from my friends. Each one gets a fish-flavored candy at that point, and then we really move into high gear.”
The submarine came to a churning halt off Coney Island’s beach, tower above water, half a mile offshore in line with Porpoise’s pier. Solo and Bransen synchronized their watches with the crew, climbed up the ladder, and undogged the hatch to find themselves surrounded by the four eager seals. While the candy was going down long gullets and the animals were as close to purring as a seal can get, the two men fixed each other’s tanks and donned their flippers. Napoleon
waved goodbye to the stars, and they slid over the side.
Bransen made sure Napoleon had a good grip on the cow named Sourpuss and took a big male for himself. Holding the harness made enough work for both hands as the animals turned on top speed and headed for land. The other two seals remained on guard, fanned out from the submarine and alert for any land of action. The same sentry duty served when they watched poised near Navy divers, using their tremendous sensitivity to their own environment as an improvement over watch-dogs and radar scanners.
The pair of man-seal units went in parallel to the pier, not under it, as Bransen had no desire to swim right into a bed of knives. Just as they reached the approximate location of the trap door from the Space Maze, Sourpuss turned and arrowed over to her mate to nudge Bransen in the shoulder. He looked at her and slapped his chest twice in command, but she pushed her black nose into his shoulder again. He shrugged, and signaled a return to the surface.