Now a girl sitting surrounded by boys spoke up. “My name is Narda Long, Dr. Marston.”
Del Marston nodded.
“We don’t think that there has to be war with the Deep Ones.” Narda wore her medium-brown hair in curls. Her face would be pretty, Marston decided, in a few years when she shed her baby fat. It would help her figure, too. For now, she filled her pink blouse and plaid skirt a bit more amply than she might, but in this crowd anyone young and female would get all the attention she wanted.
The room was filled with a buzz. Apparently the New Deep Ones Society was divided between those who thought they could make league with the wet folk and those who considered the amphibians the implacable enemies of land-dwellers.
“If we’d just make friends with them, I’m sure they’d leave us alone. Or even help us. Who knows what treasures there are in the sea, on the sea bottom, and we probably have things here on land that would help them.”
“That’s right.” The boy sitting next to Narda Long agreed. “We have these battles and we go shooting torpedoes around and we set off depth charges, we’re probably ruining their cities. No wonder they’re mad at us.”
“What can you tell us about the Deep Ones, Dr. Marston?” The only other non-hostile girl in the room, a freckled redhead, asked.
Marston shook his head. “I think you invited the wrong person to your meeting. You need a folklorist or maybe a mystic. Somebody from the Classics Department might be good. I’m just a marine geologist. I study things like underwater volcanism and seismology, and their effect on shore structures and the way bodies of water behave. It’s all pretty dry stuff.”
Nobody got the joke.
The debate went on, the let’s-be-friends-with-the-frogs group versus the it’s-a-fight-to-the-finish group. Finally Del Marston looked at his watch and exchanged a signal with Aurelia Blenheim.
“I’m sorry but I have to teach an early class tomorrow,” she announced. “You know, we old folks can’t stay up as late as we used to, not if we’re going to go to work in the morning.”
* * *
“Thanks for getting us out of there,” Marston addressed Aurelia Blenheim. “Another five minutes and I was about ready to take a couple of those young blockheads and knock their skulls together.”
Aurelia Blenheim laughed. “They weren’t that bad, Delbert. They’re young, they can’t help that, and a certain amount of foolish passion goes with the territory.”
“I suppose so,” Marston grumbled. “And a couple of them even seemed moderately intelligent. The only one who seemed sensible was the young sailor—what was his name?”
“Ben Keeler. You weren’t just impressed by his hero-worshipping attitude, by any chance.”
“Not in the least. Sincere and merited admiration is never misplaced and is always appreciated.”
“What a lovely aphorism.” Aurelia Blenheim leaned forward and switched on the Cord’s radio. The Phaeton had cleared the Bay Bridge, the structural steel and giant cables of which would have interfered with reception. A late-night broadcaster was rhapsodising about the progress of General Clark’s forces in Italy and the successes of Admiral Nimitz’s fleet against the Japanese. The announcer must have been local because he went on to talk about Nimitz’s pre-war connection with the University of California in Berkeley.
When the news broadcast ended Marston switched to a station playing a Mozart clarinet piece. “You don’t really think those kids have something, do you?” he asked his companion.
“I try to keep an open mind.”
Marston asked, not for the first time, how his friend had first encountered the New Deep Ones. As usual she referred to a vague relationship between herself and Mrs. Hartley. “We went to school together a million years ago. I was in her wedding. Poor Walter, her husband, was on a sub that went down in the Pacific. She carries on and I try to keep her spirits up.”
“And you really do have a class in the morning,” Marston commented. He drove through Berkeley, dropped her at her home on Garber Street and returned to his home on Brookside Drive.
He refused further invitations to attend meetings of the New Deep Ones. His feet were bothering him and walking had become difficult and uncomfortable if not downright painful. And he was having problems with his jaw and teeth. He consulted his dentist and his medical doctor alternately. Each reported that he could find no source for Marston’s difficulties and referred him to the other.
Marston worked at his office on campus, solving problems brought to him from local naval installations. He reduced his social schedule until he was a near recluse, moving between his bachelor’s bungalow and his office on the university campus. He met requests for his company with increasing abrasive refusals until the day he realised he was excluded from faculty cocktail parties and all but the most compulsory of campus events.
The conversation he had in part overheard, in part contributed to, at the meeting of the New Deep Ones preyed on his mind. Several times he sought out Aurelia Blenheim, by now not only his longest-enduring acquaintance but virtually his only friend. Over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine he queried her about Selena Hartley, young Albert’s mother. At least Aurelia Blenheim had revealed her friend’s first name.
Her maiden name had been Curwen. She was a native San Franciscan, descended from the founder of Curwen Heights. She had married Walter at the height of the tumultuous Roaring Twenties and had struggled at his side through the years of the Depression to preserve their relationship and to keep the old house, built by the original Eben Curwen during the previous century, in the family.
Beyond that, Aurelia Blenheim had no information to share with Delbert Marston.
Naval Intelligence had ferreted out Japanese plans to send submarines against the West Coast of the United States. To Marston this made no sense. Earlier in the war, after the Japanese had decimated the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and had conquered the Philippines and Wake Island, it would have made sense. But the Japanese were being forced back by General MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign and General LeMay’s fire-bombing of the home islands.
An anti-submarine net had been strung across the Golden Gate in 1942, when a direct attack by Admiral Yamamoto’s forces seemed imminent. The attack had never come, but the Navy had been spooked by their intelligence and Marston was called on to help design a new and improved underwater defence line. Knowing the Navy, the war would be over before the new defences were built and the defences would be outdated before another war could make them useful, but Marston was not one to shirk his duty.
He spent his days touring the Bay and the Golden Gate in naval motor launches, alternating the excursions with long days at the desk calculator and the drawing board. His nights he spent in his living room, looking out over Brookside Drive, listening to music, and drinking scotch whiskey. It was almost impossible to find good single malt nowadays, far more difficult than it had been during the laughably ineffective Prohibition of Marston’s youth. He shuddered at the thought of having to switch to blended swill.
As walking became increasingly painful he spent more hours in the University pool. Even sitting in an easy chair or lying in bed he had to deal with discomfort, and the ongoing changes in his jaw and teeth made eating a nasty chore. He was losing his teeth one by one, and new ones were emerging in their place. He’d heard of people getting a third set of teeth, it was a rare but not-unknown phenomenon. His own new teeth were triangular in shape and razor-sharp. Only when he had slipped into the waters of the pool did the pain in his extremities ease, and even his mouth felt less discomfort.
Yet he was drawing unwelcome glances in the changing area at the pool. He altered his routine, suiting up at home and wearing baggy clothing over his trunks until he reached the locker room. There he would doff his outer costume and plunge into the water, staying beneath the surface as long as he could before rising for air. As time passed he found himself able to stay under for longer periods. He ascribed this to the practice of almost daily swims.