“Ah, Phil,” Uncle Edward cried when the door swung open.
“Let me introduce you to Mr. Spekowsky and Dr. Lassen.”
Spekowsky shook his hand with the air of a man suspicious of deviltry while Mays juggled his cardboard box between his free hand and his knee. Dr. Lassen scribbled notes into a little red spiral binder, oblivious to the proffered introduction.
“We’ve been discussing Professor Latzarel’s discoveries at the South Pole,” said Edward. “Perhaps you can acquaint Mr. Spekowsky here with the strange nature of the tropical fish that the two of you brought back.”
Mays said he was happy to. He had with him, in fact, not only photographs of the specimen in question, but an actual pickled fish, revolving slowly in a tiny formaldehyde sea held in a sealed glass jar. ‘The preserved fish, about two inches long, was a gray and pale shadow of the fish in the photograph, Latzarel’s Rio Jari tetra.
“So you’re telling me,” Spekowsky asked after Mays had carried on for a bit, “that specimens of this fish were caught both in the alleged South Pole pool and at the mouth of this South American river?”
‘That’s correct. A coincidence which is, on the face of it, impossible.”
“And this coincidence is supposed to convince me that the Earth is hollow. That wooly mammoths and Neanderthals and such are poking around beneath us at this moment?”
Giles Peach was transfixed, his eyes big as plates.
“We didn’t mention Neanderthal men,” said Professor Latzarel in the interest of scientific accuracy. “But, yes, we do consider this fairly substantial evidence.”
Spekowsky guffawed, but was quite obviously caught up in the game. “Sounds like evidence of continental drift.” He looked once again at the photograph of the fish. It had a splayed tail of iridescent pink that deepened to lavender and pale blue, then back to pink again round its gills. If its fins were clipped off it might quite easily be mistaken for an Easter egg by a far-sighted person.
“Look,” said William Ashbless, suddenly flaring up and running a huge hand through his white hair, “we’re wasting our time here. What do we care for the press? By God, we’ve seen things at the Pole that this — this — journalist can’t imagine. Are we asking the likes of him to authenticate our discoveries with an ill-written article on the last page of the Times? Far be it from me to applaud John Pinion, but by God, Pinion is a man of action. He’ll be there before us, gentlemen, mark me. All of this talk is getting us nothing but headaches!”
Spekowsky, feeling himself slandered, straightened his tie, threw his coat over his shoulder and marched out, laughing dramatically. Edward St. Ives, waving the skeleton hand from the tidepool, carried on vainly about recent discoveries and about their anticipated excursion in the diving bell, but Spekowsky had had enough. The door slammed, the room fell silent, and Jim waited for Professor Latzarel to explode, as he surely would, at William Ashbless.
“Sometimes,” Latzarel said, breaking the short silence, “I wonder whose side you’re on.”
“Russ!” cried Ashbless. “We need this Spekowsky like we need a leaky boat.”
“He was just coming round. We’d have had him. And now, of course, not only is he not for us, he’s against us. I can imagine the article he will write.”
“Speaking of articles,” said Dr. Lassen suddenly, coming up, as it were, out of his reverie. “I have this recent clipping from the Massachusetts Tribune that might interest you.” And he produced a square of cardboard with an L-shaped clipping glued to it. “Giant Squid Found on Massachusetts Shore!” shouted the caption. The article, some two hundred fifty words long, described the monster thus: “The giant squid, not unlike the one battled by Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s classic, was forty-four feet long and had to be carried from the beach on a flatcar.” The creature had been dissected by scientists at Woods Hole, and in its stomach, along with the ancient, rotted figurehead from a long-ruined sailing ship, and a pair of brass pliers encased in verdigris and closed around a tooth, was the half-digested neck and torso of a human being. At least they thought it was a human being. They couldn’t be sure; digestive fluids had ruined it, and there was one strange, unaccountable confusion: the thing in the squid’s stomach appeared to have been gilled — amphibious. The article didn’t call it a merman, but the implication was obvious. The squid and its inhabitant were bound for Boston for further study.
Jim heard his uncle read the story through a growing mist, as if he were falling asleep with his eyes open. Giles Peach sat next to him, not apparently listening, but staring, his mouth half open, out the dark window at the branch of a low bush that thrashed against the glass in the wind. It seemed to Jim suddenly that for the past moments he’d been drifting, or perhaps sinking, into a watery sleep. And off in the periphery of his vision, where he could just see them, as if they were creeping up out of a dream, were waving tendrils of kelp floating lazily in the sunlit depths of a submarine grotto. The light was diminishing and the room falling into shadow. His uncle’s voice, droning on about the enormous squid and its merman, slipped I through obscurity toward silence, as if Jim were on the edge of I sleep, sailing across the threshold of dreams. Giles Peach sat still and silent, the line of gills along his neck undulating softly I and rhythmically. A seaweed curtain closed around Jim, a I green and lacy wonder of kelp snails and starfish and dark dens in rock reefs from which shone the luminous eyes of waiting fish.
He awoke with a sudden shout to find Giles Peach on his way out the door, Dr. Lassen pulling on an unlikely, floor-length overcoat, his father asleep in his chair, and Uncle Edward poking through a cigar box full of iridescent beetles with Squires and Phillip Mays. He could hear Ashbless and Professor Latzarel talking furiously in the kitchen. Jim lay in bed that night with the lingering suspicion that something peculiar had occurred, that he hadn’t merely drifted into a dream. But he fell asleep almost at once, and when he awoke in the morning it was to the earthbound smells of coffee and bacon and to the sound of a lawnmower. His father and uncle were in the kitchen.
“Peculiar business, wasn’t it, them finding the squid?” William asked, shoveling a forkful of eggs into his mouth.
“Absolutely,” Edward responded.
“What do you make of the amphibian? He’s damned intriguing if you ask me. Worth pursuing. I’ll write Woods Hole today. Use Dr. Lassen’s name. He won’t mind. Damn that lawnmower!”
The roar of the mower drew up toward the kitchen window, grinding and growling louder until, smiling and nodding at the surprised William, an Oriental man in a snap-brim hat and loose white trousers sailed past, edging away around a rose bush.
“Who the devil is that?” William asked quietly, as if the man might overhear him. “The gardener. Yamoto. He’s been at it for six months now.
Absolutely dependable. Shows up like clockwork, rain or shine.”
William watched him disappear from the kitchen window, then hurried into the living room to see where he’d gone — what route he’d taken through the grass. He returned lost in thought. “I don’t like it,” he said.
Edward tried to change the subject. “I had the strangest feeling last night. Just for a moment. I believe it was when I was reading that business about the squid. It felt as if a wet tentacle slid across my cheek, or a strand of seaweed. It even smelled like it, just for an instant. I was just barely aware of it, you know, like when there’s a fly buzzing for minutes before you notice it. Then the droning sort of filters in and you look around. Try to spot him. But he stops, lands somewhere. There’s no more buzzing, no fly, and you can’t swear, finally, that there ever had been. Do you follow me?”