The Kraken Wakes

'A man of perception,' I said. 'For the last five or six years —'

'Shut up, Mike,' said my dear wife, briefly.

'Things,' Freddy went on, 'have in his opinion now reached a pass where he might as well spend some of his money while it still has value, and might even bring in some valuable information. At the same time, he doesn't see why he shouldn't get some benefit out of the information if it is forthcoming. So he proposes to fit out and send out an expedition to find out what it can — and of course the whole thing will be tied up with exclusive rights and so on. By the way, this is highly confidentiaclass="underline" we don't want the BBC to get on to it first.'

'Look, Freddy,' I said. 'For several years now everybody has been trying to get on to it, let alone the BBC. What the —?'

'Expedition where to?' asked Phyllis, practically.

'That,' said Freddy, 'was naturally our first question. But he doesn't know. The whole decision on a location is in Bocker's hands.'

'Bocker!' I exclaimed. 'Is he becoming un — untouchable, or something?'

'His stock has recovered quite a bit,' Freddy admitted: 'And, as this fellow, the sponsor, said: If you leave out all the outer-space nonsense, the rest of Bocker's pronouncements have had a pretty high score — higher than anyone else's, anyway. So he went to Bocker, and said: "Look here. These things that came up on Saphira and April Island; where do you think they are most likely to appear next — or, at any rate, soon?" Bocker wouldn't tell him, of course. But they walked; and the upshot was that the sponsor will subsidize an expedition led by Bocker to a region to be selected by Bocker. What is more, Bocker also selects the personnel. And part of the selection, the EEC's blessing and your approval, could be you two.'

'He was always my favourite ographer,' said Phyllis. 'When do we start?'

'Wait a minute,' I put in. 'Once upon a time an ocean voyage used to be recommended for the health. Recently, however, so far from being healthy —'

'Air,' said Freddy. 'Exclusively air. People have doubtless got a lot of persona] information about the things the other way, but we would prefer you to be in a position to bring it back.'

'Such thoughtfulness is greatly appreciated,' I assured him.

'Good. Well, go and talk it over with Bocker to-morrow, and then come round to my office and we'll go into contracts and all the rest of it.'

Phyllis wore an abstracted air at intervals during the evening. When we got home I said:

'If you'd rather not take this up —'

'Nonsense. Of course we're going,' she said. 'But do you think "subsidize" means we can get suitable clothes and things on expenses?'

'Even,' I said, surveying the scene, 'even a diet of lotuses can pall.'

'I like idleness — in the sun,' said Phyllis.

I reflected. 'I think it is more than that, more than just "like". I mean,' I suggested, 'twentieth-century woman appears to regard sunlight as a kind of cosmetic effulgence with a light aphrodisiac content — which makes it a funny thing that none of her female ancestors are recorded as seeing it the same way. Men, of course, just go on sweating in it from century to century.'

'Yes,' said Phyllis.

'You can't answer a whole observation like that with simply "yes",' I pointed out.

'I have reached a comfortable stage of enervation where I can say "yes" to practically anything. It is a well-known effect of the tropics, often underlined by Mr Maugham.'

'Darling, Mr Maugham depends very largely on the wrong people saying "yes", even outside the tropics. It is not so much a matter of temperature as his system of triangulation, in which he is second only to Euclid, another best-seller, by the way, makes one wonder whether a trinitarian approach to literature —'

'Mike, you're rambling — that's probably the heat, too. Let's just contemplate idly, shall we?'

So we resumed the occupation which had been the leading feature of the last few weeks.

From where we sat at an umbrellaed table in front of the mysteriously named Grand Hotel Britannia y la Justicia it was possible to direct this contemplation on tranquillity or activity. Tranquillity was on the right. Intensely blue water glittered for miles until it was ruled off by a hard, straight horizon line. The shore, running round like a bow, ended in a palm-tufted headland which trembled mirage-wise in the heat. A backcloth which must have looked just the same when it formed a part of the Spanish Main.

To the left was a display of life as conducted in the capital, and only town, of the island of Escondida.

The island's name derived, presumably, from erratic seamanship in the past which had caused ships to arrive mistakenly at one of the Caymans, but through all the vicissitudes of those parts it had managed to retain it, and much of its Spanishness, too. The houses looked Spanish, the temperament had a Spanish quality, in the language there was more Spanish than English, and, from where we were sitting at the corner of the open space known indifferently as the Plaza or the Square, the church at the far end with the bright market-stalls in front of it looked positively picture-book Spanish. The population, however, was somewhat less so, and ranged from sunburnt-white to coal-black. Only a bright-red British pillar-box prepared one for the surprise of learning that the place was called Smithtown — and even that took on romance when one learnt also that the Smith commemorated had been a pirate in a prosperous way.

Behind us, and therefore behind the hotel, one of the two mountains which make Escondida climbed steeply, emerging far above as a naked peak with a scarf of greenery about its shoulders. Between the mountain's foot and the sea stretched a tapering rocky shelf, with the town clustered on its wider end.

And there, also, had clustered for five weeks the Bocker Expedition.

Bocker had contrived a probability-system all his own. Eventually his eliminations had given him a list of ten islands as likely to be attacked, and the fact that four of them were in the Caribbean area settled our course.

That was about as far as he cared to go simply on paper, and it landed us all at Kingston, Jamaica. There we stayed a week in company with Ted Jarvey, the cameraman; Leslie Bray, the recordist; and Muriel Flynn, one of the technical assistants; while Bocker himself and his two male assistants flew about in an armed coastal-patrol aircraft put at his disposal by the authorities, and considered the rival attractions of Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, Cayman Brac, and Escondida. The reasoning which led to their final choice of Escondida was no doubt very nice, so that it seemed a pity that two days after the aircraft had finished ferrying us and our gear to Smithtown it should have been a large village on Grand Cayman which suffered the first visitation in those parts.

But if we were disappointed, we were also impressed. It was clear that Bocker really had been doing something more than a high-class eeny-meany-miny-mo, and had brought off a very near miss.

The plane took four of us over there as soon as we had the news. Unfortunately we learnt little. There were grooves on the beach, but they had been greatly trampled by the time we arrived. Out of two hundred and fifty villagers about a score had got away by fast running. The rest had simply vanished. The whole affair had taken place in darkness, so that no one had seen much. Each survivor felt an obligation to give any inquirer his money's worth, and the whole thing was almost folklore already.

Bocker announced that we should stay where we were. Nothing would be gained by dashing hither and thither; we should be just as likely to miss the occasion as to find it. Even more likely, for Escondida in addition to its other qualities had the virtue of being a one-town island so that when an attack did come (and he was sure that sooner or later it would) Smithtown must almost certainly be the objective.