Medusa's Children

CHAPTER TWO

Hal Tarrant was eating a light supper consisting mainly of dried fruit and cereals, while seated at his usual place by the window.

The large, north-facing window was the best feature of his house, with its jewel-bright views of the island’s green slopes and the ocean beyond. He kept a large table at it and liked to sit there for all meals and while attending to paperwork connected with the farm. Even when he was relaxing in the evenings he tended to sit at the table, rather than in an armchair, and cover it with his paraphernalia for relaxation—the books, the pipes and tobacco, the wine bottle and his single antique crystal glass.

As he chewed the unprocessed food, Tarrant’s gaze moved continuously over the geometrical patterns of the algae beds which began close to the shore and extended almost to the horizon. An occasional boat still moved in the waterways which separated the beds, but the day’s work was practically over and in the lingering red-gold light of the sunset the farm looked as peaceful as a private park.

It was a scene from which Tarrant normally derived comfort—the visible testimony that men could still work together—but on this evening his grey eyes were sombre and intent. Several times during the simple meal he picked up his binoculars and used them to identify farm boats as they drew in to the ragged line of jetties far below him. He was a tall man of thirty, with a spare, flat-chested build which would have made him look like a teenager had it not been for the adult identity, ratified by experience, which was impressed on his features. Each time he set the binoculars down his expression grew more thoughtful and the tension he was feeling became more apparent in the quick restless movements of his hands.

Finally, he pushed his plate away, went to a cupboard in the corner of the square room and took out a military-style rifle. The weapon was almost a hundred years old, but had been maintained in excellent condition. It was a good 23rd century copy of a late 20th century Armalite, and Tarrant had chosen it because it represented the highest point of one branch of technology. He had a fondness for good machines, whatever their purpose. From an upper shelf in the cupboard he took a box of cartridges he knew to be of practically the same quality as the rifle’s original ammunition, and filled the magazine. He pulled on a lightweight jacket, slung the rifle over his shoulder and went out into the warm, heavy air of the evening.

It was growing dark, and yellow glimmers of electric light marked the positions of dwellings among the shrubs and trees. Tarrant walked quickly down the deserted hill, his long strides covering the ground silently and without effort. When he reached the jetties on the island’s northern shore he was surprised to see there was still some activity on Will Somerville’s blue-painted boat, The Rose of York, which was moored three berths along from his own. He paused for a moment, wondering why Somerville was working so late.

“Will?” he shouted. “Is that you? What are you doing down there?”

There was a sound of movement and a clinking of glass below deck, then Somerville’s bearded face appeared in the hatchway. “I’m trying to save you some time and money,” he said gruffly, feigning annoyance at the interruption. He was a thick-set man of fifty who affected a piratical red bandana in place of a hat to protect his balding head from the sun. A white shirt cut very full in the sleeves added an extra touch of the Hollywood buccaneer to his appearance.

“You’re trying to save me money?” Tarrant was puzzled. “I don’t get…. Oh, you’re still working on this salinity thing.”

“Definitely. I took more samples today. It’s up to almost thirty parts per thousand, and that’s a gain of three points in the last couple of weeks.”

“That’s really interesting, Will.” Hearing the fervour in the old man’s voice, Tarrant began to wish he had not stopped.

Somerville emerged further into view and sat on the edge of the hatchway, his white shirt gleaming in the dusk. “You don’t get it, do you, Hal? You don’t see the importance of all this.”

“Well … there’s a hell of a lot of salt in the sea. I mean, we weren’t in danger of running low.”

“That’s typical!” Somerville threw up his hands in exasperation. “I’m not talking about table salt. I’m talking about the other salts, the nitrates and nitrites—the stuff that makes your crop grow.”

“Are they on the increase as well?”

“If they remain at the new level we’ll all be able to thin out our nutrient sprays by about ten percent. I tell you, Hal, the sea is changing.”

Tarrant nodded, unimpressed, and turned to move on. “Keep up the good work.”

“What do you care?” Somerville sounded genuinely bitter. “It’s just a job to you youngsters, isn’t it? It doesn’t really matter to you if … Is that a rifle you’ve got there?”

“Yes.” Tarrant was now certain he should not have stopped. “Are you going to shoot something?”

“No, I’m going to paddle the boat with it.” Tarrant turned to walk away, but Somerville scrambled up on to the jetty with surprising agility and caught his arm.

“Listen, Hal, are you still sticking to this story about somebody sabotaging your booms?”

“It isn’t a story,” Tarrant said patiently. “When I got out there this morning I found another link undone. God knows how much soup I lost.”

“An old bottle-nose must have got tangled up with it.”

“Three nights in a row? I’m not buying that one, Will. How many of the other farmers have had dolphin trouble even once?”

“I don’t know,” Somerville replied, “but there’s one thing I can tell you—they don’t like you talking about sabotage. Some of us have been here twenty years and more, and we’ve always worked together.”

“Yeah, it’s a nice little club here in the inner sectors, but I’m on the outside.” Tarrant kept his voice low and even. “I’ll farm my spread by myself, and if I find anybody messing around with my booms I’ll deal with them by myself. You can pass the word along.”

“I still don’t see any need for guns,” Somerville grumbled. “It doesn’t seem right.”

Tarrant gently detached the other man’s hand from his arm. “Will, I’m going to scare off a few dolphins. Okay?”

“I suppose you’re entitled to do that much.” Somerville looked undecided. “I’m sorry you’ve been having trouble—would you like me to ride out with you? Keep you company?”

“No, but thanks.” Tarrant smiled, feeling grateful for the offer. “This could be an all-night job.”

He walked along the uneven planks of the jetty to his own berth and climbed down into the waiting boat, which was much smaller than Somerville’s comfortable cruiser. It took him only a short time to fold the solar energy panels down into their night-time stowage positions and to check the state of his batteries. Satisfied that the boat was seaworthy, he cast off and selected low forward speed. Impelled by silent electric motors, the docile little vessel made its way north past the other farm boats, whose masts were black brush-strokes on the banded copper of the western sky. Tarrant stood in the kiosk-like control house and steered across the broad stretch of open water which separated the inner algae beds from the shore. Two beacons marked the entrance to the main northwards channel. As soon as the boat had passed between them into the ultra-calm water of the channel he advanced the speed-control lever and settled down for the hour-long journey to the outer sectors of the farm.

Tarrant was a comparative newcomer to the Cawley Island farm and, in consequence, had been allocated one of the rim sectors. Its principal disadvantage was that it required him to schedule two hours of his working day for travelling—and four hours if he had to make a mid-shift return to the island—but this was something he accepted without any complaint. He had previously spent six years in the armed forces of the kingdom of South Newzealand, and had been unlucky enough to be an interceptor pilot during the period when the ruler was refusing to accept the fact that he could no longer maintain an air force.

There had been little menace from outside, because the various would-be warlords of Melanesia—defeated by distance and dwindling technical resources—lapsed into prehistoric silence. The real threat to Tarrant’s life had lain in the aircraft he was obliged to fly. Most of them had been copies of copies of copies, dangerous offspring of flawed messenger chains, and only the purest good fortune had enabled him to survive several crashes.

Like most other young airmen, Tarrant had been convinced of his own immortality, but when the prestige-conscious king had instituted a space programme—based on century-old ion-riders—he had begun to have doubts. After several training excursions in a space craft, in which some of the flight instruments were marked in German and others in Spanish, he had decided to find safer employment. It was not permitted for expensively groomed pilot officers to resign from the Air Force, so he had booked ten days’ leave, bought a trustworthy boat and sailed off into the northeast. That had been three years earlier, but he still found a sense of peaceful luxury in slow-speed water travel.

By the time Tarrant was halfway out to the rim of the farm all traces of sunlight had fled from the western horizon and he was steering between strings of dim marker lights. The booms which constrained the algae beds were in the form of inflated double tubes. To facilitate maintenance and repair they were in thirty-metre sections, and at the top of each joint was a small glowball powered by a cell which used the sea as an electrolyte. The glowballs guided Tarrant’s way as he sailed northwards, but he knew he could have managed almost as well by the light of the stars. They shone brilliantly overhead, seemingly close at hand, turning the night sky into an incredible cityscape. Tarrant had no difficulty in seeing each of them as a sun in its own right, and he experienced a pang of regret that man had proved unequal to the challenges of interstellar flight.

Philosophical considerations faded from his mind as the boundary of his own sector came into view. He switched off all lights on the boat, trimmed it for quiet, slow running, and began a stealthy patrol of the booms. Gliding along in the green-scented darkness, with the stillness of the ocean all around, he almost immediately began to question the wisdom of what he was doing. During the day he had been certain he was right, but now his reasoning seemed at fault. Anybody who wanted to make trouble for him, and was prepared to sail out this far at night to do it, could have made much better use of his time by slashing a few booms. The unlinking of two sections was a comparatively minor annoyance, more on the level of an adolescent prank, and one simply did not find mischievous juveniles roaming the ocean in the darkness.

As Tarrant continued his slow progress to the north he recalled what Will Somerville had said about dolphins, and the idea that they were responsible began to seem increasingly reasonable. Dolphins were very intelligent, possessed of a strong sense of curiosity, and they were notorious for having a misplaced sense of fun. Tarrant had never heard of them interfering with farm equipment before, but it occurred to him that he ought to have spent that day wiring his boom connectors in such a way that they could be opened only with cutters. He gnawed his lower lip for a moment then decided that, as he had come out so far, he might as well make one circuit of the sector before heading back to the shore.

Now feeling slightly self-conscious, Tarrant increased the boat’s speed a little and began estimating how long it would take him to return home. He had told Beth he would not be calling on her that night, but—provided he did not arrive too late—her mother might allow him to have coffee with the family. The extra visit would help establish his credentials as a suitor and bring closer the time when Beth and he would be allowed unchaperoned meetings. He allowed his thoughts to dwell on the heady prospect of some day being alone with Beth, eventually in the secure privacy of a bedroom…. All at once, his furtive night patrol seemed totally ridiculous. He was close to the northern edge of his sector and, seeing the open water ahead, he stepped up the boat’s speed again and swung in a wide curve to the east. His hand was moving towards the switch of the navigation lights when he detected a curious movement a short distance along the northern boom.

The glowball on the fifth connector was bobbing up and down in a way that had nothing to do with the action of the waves. And as he focussed his gaze on the dim light he saw it being momentarily blotted out, as if a body had passed in front of it.

Tarrant immediately cut his motor and let the boat continue its gradual turn on momentum only. He picked up the rifle, turned his spotlight towards the clandestine activity, and waited for the boat’s residual energy to bring him close to the boom. During this silent approach he heard a harsh chirping, unlike any human or animal sound he knew, which came from the direction of the connector. He flexed his neck muscles, trying to dispel a growing sense of unease, and waited until the boat had described a semicircle and was nuzzling against the boom on the opposite side of the disturbance. When it was at rest, giving him a fairly reliable platform, he switched on the big light.

He got an instantaneous vision of three masses of brownish tentacles sprawled over the inflation tubes of the boom. In the centre of each mass a yellowish, plate-sized eye rolled frantically for a moment, then steadied in his direction.

Tarrant was unable to repress a tremulous sigh of fear. He was not a man of the sea, had no affinity with its inhabitants, and to him the creatures in the spotlight’s beam were embodiments of pure dread.

Long seconds dragged by before his mind recovered from the numbing impact and allowed him to make some assessment of what he saw. The creatures were large, far more massive than a man, and his first impression was that they had to be octopuses—then he noticed the rigid, conical bodies sloping down into the water. He knew this to be characteristic of the common squid, but he had never heard of them growing to such frightening size.

So great was Tarrant’s revulsion that he felt it had to be mutual, that the creatures were therefore bound either to attack or flee. Instead—after a sombre, speculative stare—they turned their eyes away from him and their tentacles writhed over the boom connectors, almost as if they were deliberately trying to slip the plastic pins. The combined weight of their bodies flattened the boom tubes and allowed the enriched algae soup to spill into the outer water. Apparently this activity had been going on for some time because the surface was stained green for as far as Tarrant could see. The water itself was strangely agitated, and a closer look showed him that the area was alive with fish attracted by the rich planktonic food which had been poured into it.

While Tarrant watched, two thick tentacles broke through the surface and sank out of sight again, and he knew there were other squid down below, feeding on the fish. The discovery increased his alarm, because it suggested that the monsters were intelligent. They appeared to be acting in concert—some of them spilling bait into the water, while others fed.

Tarrant swore silently and raised the rifle to his shoulder. The light was not good for shooting, but the range was only a few metres and he knew he was not going to miss.

He aimed at the nearest of the three creatures on the boom and squeezed the trigger. The rifle punched back into his shoulder and in the same instant the squid’s huge eye exploded. The creature gave a shrill cry, its tentacles straightened out, quivering, and the glistening brown body slipped down into the water. Both the remaining squid froze into immobility, draped across the boom, their eyes fixed on him with a kind of mournful expectancy. Tarrant, who had anticipated that they would vanish with his first shot, lined up on the nearest and fired again. It fountained black fluid, but remained in place, seemingly defying him to do his worst.

Appalled by this new evidence of the creatures’ alienness, he aimed more carefully at the eye which regarded him from the base of the clustered tentacles. He was tightening his finger on the trigger when there was a raucous, bird-like chirp from somewhere to his right and both squid dropped down into the water. Greenish whorls of algae marked the points where they had disappeared.

Tarrant swung the spotlight around, splashing light over the general area from which the sound had come, but there was nothing to be seen except for the patterns of ripples caused by the feeding fish. He remained still for a moment, then decided to go closer to the boom connector and see if he could find the body of the squid he thought he had fatally injured. People on shore were not going to believe his story unless he had evidence to back it up. He moved the speed control forward a little and the boat began to edge forward, but it felt strangely heavy. Concerned at the idea of being stranded in such circumstances, Tarrant switched on all his lights and inspected the various meters on the control panel. Everything in the power system appeared to be in perfect working order, and yet the boat was sluggish. The next step was to see if anything was fouling the propeller.

Switching off the power, he hung the rifle up by its strap and turned away from the controls to go aft. He had taken one pace when the deck tilted away beneath him and he fell to the side of the boat. A second later the craft rocked in the other direction and he had to catch a stanchion to avoid sliding towards the opposite bulwark. At once the deck rotated again, more violently, until the gunwale beside Tarrant was almost under water; then the swing was reversed. It was obvious to him that the boat was going to capsize unless he did something to prevent the wild oscillations, but as yet he had no clear idea of what was causing them.

Clinging tightly to the stanchion with one hand, he reached for the top of the gunwale with the other in an effort to regain his feet. His hand encountered a curving, leathery object which he took to be a lifebelt until he glanced towards it and saw the mottled grey-and-brown skin and rows of whitish suckers. He had grasped the end of a tentacle belonging to a squid which was clinging to the underside of the boat.

Tarrant let go at once, just as the deck dropped away again, and he fell against the single midship mast. He threw his arms around it and tried to line himself up for a dive into the cockpit where he had left the rifle. From the corners of his eyes he saw the movement of tentacles at several points along the gunwales. The squid was consolidating its hold.

The deck rotated sickeningly once more and, trying to judge the midpoint of the sweep, Tarrant threw himself forward. His shoulder collided painfully with a doorpost, but he tumbled into the cockpit and was able to wedge himself in the confined area. His first thought was for the rifle, and he was unutterably thankful to find it swinging from the hook on which he had placed it. He caught hold of the weapon and pointed it at the deck.

From the spread of its tentacles and the way it was able to affect the boat, he guessed the squid was even larger than those he had seen, but there was no time to try working out where best to place his shots. At the limit of its last gyration the deck was almost vertical and had Tarrant not been braced against the cockpit housing he would have gone overboard. He worked the rifle’s trigger and the high-velocity bullets snapped a series of almost invisible holes in the wood of the deck. They seemed totally inadequate compared with the bulk of the squid, but Tarrant was counting on the slugs deforming and exiting through the boat’s plastic bottom as spinning, ragged cutting implements.

Somewhere around his seventh or eight shot he felt a shudder go through the boat, the tips of the tentacles vanished from the gunwales, and the oscillations abruptly damped down. The spotlight was pointing towards the water and Tarrant caught one glimpse of a vast, conical body followed by an intent, rueful eye and a thrashing of tentacles as the squid torpedoed away in the direction of the open sea. Within a second there was nothing visible but slow-swirling algae.

Tarrant slumped back against the steering column, breathing heavily, then he noticed that the shallow bilge space had already filled and that water was welling up through the bullet holes in the deck. He gathered up some empty cartridge cases and jammed their narrow necks into the holes, effecting a temporary seal. When he switched on the motor the boat still felt sluggish, because of the water it had shipped, but he was confident it would get him back to the shore—provided that nothing extraordinary happened.

He brought the little craft round into the main radial channel, selected maximum forward speed, and tried to make himself relax as he rode south through the watchful darkness.