His hour was almost up. He was starving, and when he made the transition he didn’t come with money in his pockets, otherwise it would have been souvlaki time once he ditched Mistral. Mark was going to have a king-hell case of the munchies when he got back.
The locals gave him odd looks and plenty of sea room as he passed. Everybody knew foreigners were crazy, especially Americans, but the red-and-orange jogging outfit did tend to set him even further apart. But he was a lot less conspicuous arriving on his red Adidas than he would have been if he’d flown in.
Not that it mattered. The bad guys knew Mark and his friends were in Athens now. That meant the time had come not to be in Athens anymore.
As if cued by the thought, a voice called out behind him: “Flash! J. J. Flash!”
He turned. The man who called himself Randall Bullock was walking up the street toward Mark’s pension, wearing khaki pants and an Indiana Jones leather jacket.
“Jesus Christ! Can’t you assholes give me any peace?” He chased Bullock into an ouzo stand with a roaring jet of flame from his hand and took to the air.
He had to recover the extra powders. Mark had blown almost his entire roll to stockpile them, and J. J. was not about to leave them behind.
He streaked up toward the window of his flat. The key was in the pants of his Mark-form. Somehow he wasn’t worried about getting in.
And if the local heat had the flat staked out inside … he’d just show them what heat was all about.
Chapter Nine
Cool water caresses him like a lover, his sides, his belly, his back. He drives through it with a lover’s easy fervor, with rhythmic contractions of the muscles of back and stomach. There is pain in his side where his ribs were cracked when he was the small orange flying human, but in his exalted state he ignores it. He feels at once serene and charged with energy.
He tastes. He tastes his cousins, cleaving the water on all sides of him in a joyous, plunging roil. He tastes the Bulgarian freighter fifteen kilometers to the northeast, making for the Dardanelles and illegally dumping waste; and he tastes the sewage-and-chemical bloom of the land, near at hand on three sides. The taint is evil, more black and bitter than squid-spew. But it does not ruin the fullness of his pleasure, merely increases his disdain for what he is when he is not this.
And even that is small, distant, something his attention is easily drawn from. This form is quick in its emotions, anger and happiness alike. Infinitely changeable as the water all around.
He hears. He hears them around him, these Mediterranean dolphins, small yet fleet. He can barely keep up with them, and he can swim faster than a natural bottlenose. In his mind he has a marvelous image of them in many colors, a four-dimensional tapestry of where they are, where they have been, where they are going, each swimmer a different color, each one’s life line a sensuous curve extending to infinity.
He is out of place here, burly silver Pacific creature among lithe black-and-white Middle Sea shapes. But the others accept him, singing to him in their clicks and whistles with eagerness and love and even awe. For they know him, in that way of theirs that knows without much thought. He is at once one of them and one of the droll and sometimes dangerous land beings, a creature long foretold in their songs, belonging simultaneously to their darting, rushing depths and to the arid world above and beyond.
A school of small, furtive fishes darts past below, left, down, and away. Several of his escorts make as if to follow. But they come back to rejoin the chirping, leaping retinue, their wish to be near him overriding their desire to feed.
The Bulgarian freighter has a bent screw; he can hear. The Aegean is alive with craft today: freighters, sailboats, a hydrofoil mosquito-whining toward Lésvos. He knows where each one is, for many kilometers around — even a Soviet Yankee missile boat, a deep, slow drumming, one of the new-generation nuclear subs the glasnost’ Russians hope the rest of the world will forget about, that carries in its long, round snout the capacity to sow the earth with temporary suns, brief and bright and deadly.
Some part of him behind his consciousness notes the fact and files it away; his conscious mind has little energy for facts. The torrent of sensory impression rushing in upon him occupies his mind to the full.
Off to the north-northeast he senses land: sonar picture of a small mass, taste and scent of sand and soil and land-borne vegetation without the taint of recent human habitation. Something inside him makes him turn his rostrum, reluctantly, toward the island. Soon he will change, first to the being with the form of a landling but the skin and smell of a dolphin and then to the full human, comically pale, skinny, and hairy.
The others shift course, but their song changes, becomes wheedling, cajoling, and their bodies bump against his in a near-erotic way as they try to urge him to turn away. But the human he will become, too shortly, cannot swim, at least as he and his kindred understand it. When the transition inevitably arrives, he must be within wading distance of shore. Or the pale-haired man — and he, and the rest of the beings his own life line is intertwined with in a dance even dolphins cannot comprehend — will die.
The air above is growing dark with approaching evening; in the west, sea and sky collide in a sheet of copper flame. He can feel the weariness come upon him, and the ache in his side throbs deeper, more insistently. It still takes all his will to keep drawing nearer to the land. The open Aegean water is dark and intoxicant as wine, the songs of his kindred more seductive than the Sirens And a different part of him, swimming down where light never reaches, would even welcome the fumbling and frenzy and final darkness f it meant not having to return to the prison of a land-borne human body.
But he swims for the island, picking up velocity as he does so until even his speedy cousins can barely keep pace. His sense of time is not exact. If he misjudges, his kinfolk will try to help him even in his floundering human form. But they’re as likely to nudge him farther out to sea as in toward land; they are aware, and their minds are ever-filled with brilliant, flashing imagery richer than any human can ever conceive, but they aren’t really very bright.
Staring out the window at the traffic and construction in Constitution Square, the woman in the high-laced sandals and belted white tunic laced her fingers together and flexed. Muscles popped out all over her bare arms, and stood out like flying buttresses on her neck.
J. Robert Belew lit his pipe and puffed happily. The Greek national ace had curly black hair, flashing black eyes, olive skin whose natural gloss was augmented by a fine coating of olive oil. The broken nose added character to her face without detracting from its striking handsomeness.
Hera would be a thoroughgoing babe, thought the unabashed male-chauvinist part of him, if the rest of her didn’t look so much like Lou Ferrigno with breasts.
Standing by a wall-sized map of Athens, Mistral gave him a quick dirty look for lighting up. Her cheeks were smudged, there were dark scorch-marks on her white cape, and her trademark uniform was in dire need of dry cleaning. Raised since birth to be overwhelmingly conscious of her public appearance, she was visibly suffering from her disheveled state. More’s the pity, he thought. You look incredibly cute.