Mermaids!, page 22
MacNair was privately of the opinion that his employer had obviously not known as many depraved sailors as he, MacNair, had, but he kept his own counsel, and never again deprecated Wilson's hobby. Ahab had chased whales; Mr. Wilson, mermaids. Mermaids, on the whole, were certainly preferable, being much safer. So was seafood. "A fare day's work for a fair day's pay," was MacNair's motto.
Wilson had long employed a clipping service in New York, unother in London, a third in Paris, and, after the war, a fourth in Tokyo, to supply him with mermaid data culled from the periodicals of the world. These clippings were arranged methodically in his leather-bound scrapbooks. Over a period of years, they had expanded into several volumes.
What made Jack Wilson unhappy was that he was always too late. No matter how quickly he got to an area where a mermaid had been sighted—and he had flown on several ocassions—the shy creature had always decamped by the time he arrived.
There seemed to be no help for it. The big international news services do not consider mermaid sightings to be real news. Unlike, for example, axe murders and sex circle exposes, they are relegated to the Silliness Files, and are usually a week or two old before they are ever printed. Even then, the reports are used only as fillers, and the details of fact are meager, since most of the space is given over to what Jack considered the dubious wit of the reporter or rewrite man.
Still, all in all, Jack was not a dull boy nor an unhappy one. If the chase had few hazards, yet it was not without spice. More than one worthwhile episode, culinary or amatory, had resulted.
We now come—and it is about time, considering his importance to the resolution of this story—to Professor Milton Rowe. Wilson and Rowe had never been more than nodding, can-I-just-take-a-look-at-your-notes, acquaintances in their undergraduate days at Miskatonic University. In lab and office, he was conscientious, hard-working, sober-sided, and just a little bit dull. He seemed shy, drank little, and was the despair of match-making faculty wives. He was also an ichthyologist.
Jack Wilson had been threading his way, one afternoon, through the old part of Antibes and found himself face to face with a smallish, pleasant sort of man with a receding chin, a large mouth, thick and heavy glasses, and American clothes.
It was the same Rowe that Wilson had known, a decade or so older, and yet very much not the same Rowe at all. Mildly interested in the difference, Jack invited him to join the group aboard the Lorelei. It was an invitation for the weekend, but it lasted six weeks. The difference became discernible within six minutes of his being introduced to Michi and Josette.
Like many plain-looking men before him, the professor had discovered that a man does not need the figure of a shot-put champion nor the features of a cinema star to attract and hold the attention of a desirable woman. Charm, wit, and understanding are much more important, and—now that he was far away from the reek of the laboratory, the chalky dryness of the classroom, and the mannered respectability of faculty social life—Professor Milton Rowe could display all three qualities without restraint.
Very few men could get as much out of a vacation as he could.
The Lorelei's passengers embarked for Cythera, and for six weeks they burned upon the waters of the tideless (but certainly not dolorous) midland sea. Michi, Josette. Jack, Milt, the sweet-salt air, the sea itself, a succession of small, little known, and quite charming harbors, fine cognac, golden days, and bright nights . . .
It was with the most agreeable astonishment that Miskatonic's Professor of Marine Biology realized that oceanic life-forms were not only fascinating to study they were good to eat, too!
All four of the passengers were lolling on the decks one afternoon, not fretting their skins with anything more than those bits of fabric called le minimum, and drinking something both cool and invigorating from a bottle in an ice bucket.
Professor Rowe, while idly proving to himself once again that the ball of his thumb fit nicely into Josette's comely navel, launched into an exposition of the pelagic peregrinations of the Chinook salmon, at the end of which Josette asked wonderingly: "but, how do you know all zese sings? How do you know where are ze fish—where zey go—so you can study zem?"
"Well, my pet, we have several ways. But we've got a new one now that can accurately predict almost exactly where a given school will be at a given time. Within certain variable limits, that is. We use one of the new electric computers."
Jack, who had been half dozing, suddenly sat up, very interested. "Predict where they're going to be? How can you, my old?"
His old waved a careless hand. "Well, I cannot give you the details mathematical. In general, it's something like this! We have information on fish migration going back for over a century in some cases. You know the sort of thing, Jack. Fishermen's log books, containing the amount of catch, the date, information on the weather, and things like that. Weather's very important in such matters. And plankton.
"Anyway, all this is converted into a sort of mathematical code and put on punched cards—date, time of day, barometric pressure, wind velocity and direction, temperature of the air mid water, kinds and number of fish sighted—" He took a deep breath. "—latitude and longitude, depth of water, direction of current, type of shoreline nearby, if any.
"Oh, and the brightness of the sun and moon, too. Light has an effect on the depths at which certain fish swim. And then there's the state of the tide, the salinity of the water, and so on and so on.
"We have thousands and thousands of cases, you see," Rowe continued enthusiastically. "We take all that data and put it through the computer, and the damned thing chews it all over and cross-correlates everything with everything else. Get it?
"So that when we want to find out just what fish will be at a given place at a given time, all we have to do is feed in the information on date, time, latitude, longitude, and so forth, and the computer mutters to itself and then goes chuff! and pops a card with a lot of holes punched in it. This card is run through a decoding machine, and out comes a list of the kind and number of fish to be found at that exact place and time under those circumstances.
"On the other hand, if we want to know where to find a particular kind of fish, the computer will tell us what conditions to look for in what places. You see?"
Jack frowned, concentrating. Josette's smile had by now begun to flag. Michi, a direct actionist, picked up a bottle of suntan oil and tendered it to Jack. He did not seem to see, nor be interested in this offer of the freedom of her gleaming body. He nodded bemusedly. The blue waves danced. He blinked. He glanced around as if suddenly remembering where he was. "Well!" he said. He smiled, and the spell was broken. Michi once again offered the flask of anointing, and this time he took it.
Although offered passage home on the Lorelei's transatlantic run, Milt declined. He didn't believe, he said, in pushing his luck. He returned on a populous Greek passenger ship, growing more and more sedate with each nautical mile, and by the time he had returned to the Miskatonic campus at Arkham he looked and acted the very model of a model ichthyologist.
Wilson made himself busy, once back in New York. He and Captain MacNair had already spent much time going through the scrapbooks and putting down, in tabular form, every bit of information available from the clippings. The next step was to get more data.
Selby Research Associates was prepared to have a stab at finding out anything for anybody who was prepared to pay for it. Selby himself, a lean, scholarly-looking, bearded man, shook Wilson's hand, waved him to a chair, and raised polite eyebrows in inquiry.
Wilson took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. "I want some weather reports," he said. "This is a list of ships. Find the exact latitude and longitude of each ship, the date and time given. And I want to know the weather at each time—wind direction, tide conditions, temperature, barometric pressure—everything."
Selby nodded rather absently, knowing that the first thing he intended to check was Wilson's credit rating. "Anything else, Mr. Wilson?"
"Yes. Here's a list of various locations along the coast of a score or more countries. I'll want the same weather information for the dates given, and, if possible, a contour map of the pertinent territory—shore line, and so on."
Selby stroked his beard briefly. He was not a man to resist when Opportunity came to his door with a battering ram. "Did we mention a retainer, Mr. Wilson?" was all his comment.
"How much?"
Selby, who had been thinking of a figure, doubled it, added fifty percent, and said it aloud. Wilson opened his checkbook, wrote. "Begin immediately," he said, handing it over. Selby, taking the check in his two hands as if it were a piece of T'ang chinaware, assured him they would.
Jack made several phone calls with an eye toward furthering the next step in his scheme, and found it more difficult than he'd supposed. In another ten years computers would be as numerous as leaves—fallen or otherwise—in Vallambrosa, but in 1950 they were not so easy to find. Most of the big ones were still in the experimental stage, and it was difficult to find one he could rent or hire.
He was soon convinced that in order to obtain the use of a computer complex enough to do the job he would have to see Rowe.
"Well, now, Jack, I'm not sure," said Milt. "What 'sea creature'?"
"Not quite in your line, Milt. A mammal, I think. Relative to the porpoise, perhaps. Or of the dugong or manatee." And he babbled on convincingly, including something about Stellar's Sea Cow (believed extinct since 1715). It was heresy, coarse and rank, and it hurt him. He hoped that the means would be justified by the end he had in mind.
Wilson outlined the data he had on mermaid sightings, without, of course, admitting that it was a mermaid he sought.
Professor Rowe listened intently, but, at the end, he answered with a slow shake of his head."I'm afraid not, Jack. I'd like to help you, believe me, but the work we're doing will have the computer tied up for the next two years. We couldn't possibly squeeze in a private project like this. After all, we're studying fish, not mammals. Now, if you want to give us your data, I can put it in with the rest. It will add to our total data bank. But we couldn't possibly give over time for a rare sea mammal like that."
"Oh," said Wilson, looking downhearted. "Well, that's that, then." After a moment, he brightened. "By the by, Milt, will you be coming to the lecture I'm giving at the Faculty Club?"
"I never miss a meeting of the Faculty Club," the professor said. "What sort of lecture are you giving?"
"Oh, on the sea. Just your sort of thing, really. I'm showing some eight millimeter movies."
"Movies?" Professor Rowe felt suddenly as though a stream of ice water were defying the laws of gravity and flowing up his back.
"Yes. You remember. The ones we took this summer."
"You—uh—edited them, of course?" the professor asked weakly.
Wilson looked innocently bland. "Why, no. Haven't had time."
The two men looked into each other's eyes for the space of a full minute.
Then Professor Rowe looked away and sighed. "If you can find time to edit those films. Jack, I believe I can find time in the computer schedule for your project. After all," he said musingly, the light of Pure Science gleaming suddenly in his eyes, "it isn't really out of line with the other work we're doing."
"I'm glad you see it that way," Wilson said. "But I don't see why you want to edit the films. They're just the ones we took off Capri with the underwater camera."
Professor Rowe looked at his friend's face and scanned it carefully, almost expectantly, as if examining the mouth for signs of unmelted butter.
The process took somewhat longer than Wilson had anticipated. The vast mass of data (from which he had carefully edited any mention of the word "mermaid") had to be reduced to mathematical form. Each one of the hundreds of data factors had to be assigned a numerical value expressed, not in the decimal notation of the Arabic system, but in the binary system used by digital computers.
Then, after the data bits had been translated into numbers, they had to be carefully encoded as holes in cards measuring 7 and 7/16 inches by 3 1/4 inches—hundreds and hundreds of them.
After the first three days, Jack Wilson stopped coming around to watch; the immediate fascination had worn off and faded away into monotony.
Finally Professor Rowe informed him that the calculations had been carried to completion.
The professor's desk was covered with a stack of large sheets of tracing paper, on each of which was drawn a long, wavy line which appeared to follow an irregular, elongated series of dots.
"We've graphed the whole thing, including interpolations and extrapolations," said Professor Rowe. "Naturally, in a multidimensional problem such as this, the graphs are necessarily two-dimensional abstracts, but all the information you'll need is there."
Before Jack could mention the fact that he was unable to make head or tail of the squiggly lines, the professor riffled through the pile and extracted a single sheet. As he spread it out on the top of the pile, he said: "Here's the most important one, as far as you're concerned. The line follows the migration pattern chronologically, according to weighted spatial coordinates."
Jack nodded silently.
"Your mammal," the professor went on, "follows this curve very nicely. Now, as to the extrapolation of the curve . . ."
He took another sheet of tracing paper from the stack, walked over to a large Mercator projection of the Earth's surface, and thumbtacked the tracing paper carefully over the map. For the first time, Jack Wilson found he could make sense out of the blue lines.
"They look like shipping routes on a navigational chart," he said.
"Don't they, though?" agreed the professor. "The Mediterranean, the Caribbean, both very well traveled up until a few decades ago. Then the pattern shifts more strongly to the South Pacific, via the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean. There, the pattern is strongly cyclic, as you can see.
"The animal obviously prefers warmer waters, coming northward, toward the equator, during the winter months of June, July, and August, and heading southward, toward Australia and Oceania during the summer months of December, January, and February."
The professor reached over to his desk and picked up a card, which he handed to Wilson. "Here's the latitude and longitude and dates for the next several months. As you'll see, your best bet is to search the Great Barrier Reef, just off the coast of Queensland."
Jack Wilson took the card and looked at it while visions of sea maidens danced in his head. Rowe, all unknowning, went on, "One of those little islands along there, and the adjacent waters, is where Beast X is most likely to appear."
Wilson looked up, sharply.
"Beast X?"
"That's what we call it down in the computer room," said Rowe. "After all, we had to call it something, and 'creature alleged to resemble members of the order Sirenia' is rather cumbersome, don't you think?"
And rather incorrect, too, Jack thought. "Beast X" indeed! This lovely creature of the sun-dappled waves and the blue-green depths! Oh, well, anticipation was about to become realization, and little things like this didn't matter at all.
"Milt," he said aloud, "I'm very much obliged to you. You may expect a picture postcard from Queensland . . . and, of course, you're expected to be with us on the Lorelei next summer."
The professor nodded abstractedly. He did, indeed, conjecture vision of Summer Past and Summer Yet to Come, void of dumpy, nosy faculty wives and adenoidally virtuous coeds alike; and, in this vision, the gray skies of Arkham were replaced by blue ones in which shone the bright, undying, unconquered Sun, in whose warmth he lay on yellow sands alongside young women with compact but yielding curves and electric fingers. But the vision, though pleasant, was a dim one; as a bear, snug in its stuffy cave of a winter, might dimly dream of fish leaping in streams and bushes heavy with ripe berries.
"I still don't see, sir," said Captain MacNair gloomily, "why you don't take the helicopter. Seems to me, if you'll pardon my saying so, sir, that it would be a good deal less dangerous."
"Possibly it would. Captain," said Wilson, "but I don't want to frighten off our quarry now that we're this close. Besides, Professor Rowe said that these figures are only approximate. She might not show up for two or three days, and I doubt we could hover that long in a 'copter. No, MacNair; we'll do it my way."
"Very well, sir." The Captain still looked gloomy. "We'll be as close as we can get within the hour, sir."
The plan, as Jack Wilson visualized it, was quite simple. The Great Barrier Reef area was not one where ships of any great draft could move with impunity, and the island which Jack Wilson sought was well within that area. Therefore, the Lorelei would stand down as close as possible, and, from there on in, Wilson would go it alone. He had bought a well-built outrigger sailboat for the purpose, and loaded it with provisions, a small outboard motor, and several five-gallon cans of gasoline. Wilson was taking no chances with unfriendly winds, since he had more than forty miles to go from the point where the Lorelei would be waiting. As an added precaution, he earned a small, waterproof, two-way radio. In case all did not go well, a call to the Lorelei would bring Captain MacNair in the helicopter which had been anchored to the deck of the ship.
At the rendezvous point, Captain MacNair dropped anchor, und the crew began to lower Wilson's outrigger over the side. The sea was relatively calm, and overhead the hot sun of late January poured down upon the sweating men.
"Now, remember," said Wilson finally, just before he went down the ladder to the outrigger that bobbed lazily on the blue waters, "I'll give you a call every six hours." He glanced at the scaled skin diver's wristwatch he was carrying. "If I don't call, get in that 'copter and come a-running. Got it?"
"Yes, sir; I do," said Captain MacNair.
"Good." Wilson clambered down the ladder, boarded the outrigger, and cast free. When the wind caught the sail, he aimed her for her destination, waved toward the Lorelei, then concentrated on his course.
Six hours later, he reported to Captain MacNair. "I'm within sight of the island group, Captain. I'll take a look around the smaller islands, but I think I'll beach the boat on the biggest one."
