Involution Ocean

I looked around unobtrusively and was relieved to find Murphig nowhere in sight. I had been sure that he was standing around somewhere, watching.

Perhaps I would have to make a friend of Murphig. He was an open, inquiring mind, and despite his oddities he seemed firmly rooted in sanity. Suppose, for instance, that Desperandum suddenly became dangerous. Little help could be expected from the tradition-bound mates or oxlike crew. They would probably poison their mothers before they would soil their souls with mutiny. Calothrick was a zero, also. He was still resentful because I had not given him his own store of Flare, as I had learned just yesterday when he had come back to fill up all three of his packets. He was growing dirtier, too; his hair was lank and greasy, and the lightning-stripes were slowly peeling off the sides of his mask. He could not be trusted.

And it would take at least two of us to handle Desperan­dum; it would probably take two just to kill him, even with the harpoons. I even had my doubts about Dalusa as a confederate. She loved me, there was no doubt about that But in what way? How much did love mean to her, any­way? There was no way to tell, as she refused to talk about her cultural background. Dalusa obsessed me but I was not yet blind.

We killed two whales later that day and dropped six fer­tilized eggs overboard. I cooked whale steaks that night They were noxious.

Next morning there was a cloud on the southern hori­zon. This could only bode ill, as Nullaqua never had the decent, normal clouds of harmless vapor that grace the skies of other planets.

“What do you make of it, Mr. Flack?” I heard Desper­andum say to his first mate, handing the man a pair of binoculars.

“Flying fish, sir,” replied the laconic whaler.

“Good! Good!” said Desperandum gruffly. “Mr. Flack, have two men ready to help me with equipment. The rest of the crew will retire belowdecks.”

While two crewmen dragged monitoring devices from Desperandum’s cabin, the rest of us sought shelter below. Before I went in, I glanced quickly around for Dalusa. She was nowhere in sight. I later discovered that she had gone below before I did. I sat on the stool in the kitchen while the rest of the crew tramped down the stairs. Calothrick walked by and gave me a glazed, yellow-toothed grin.

I debated a short blast of Flare while the migration passed. The pro side was winning when Flack stuck his head through the hatch and said flatly, “Cookie wanted on deck.”

I went. On deck, Desperandum and the two crewmen were stringing nets between the masts. I noticed that six cubical boxes with swiveling wire-mesh radar dishes had been set several feet apart in front of the nets. Red and blue wiring trailed in tangles from the boxes to a sort of metal pillbox, fitted together out of five thin sheets of iron. It had a thick visorlike window, facing south toward the cloud. Al­ready the sails had been furled, to give the migratory horde leeway. In. the feeble winds of the equator, we could not possibly have outrun or dodged the fish.

Hie nets were ready. “Get below, men,” Desperandum told the crewmen. They hastened into the hold and slammed the hatch behind them. Already the fish swarm was assuming ominous proportions.

“Newhouse!” the captain shouted. I walked closer and saluted. “This way if you please,” Desperandum continued. He opened a low door in the side of the metal pillbox and we walked inside. Touching switches, Desperandum turned on a dim light in the ceiling and set an air filter humming.

They were rather cramped quarters, only seven feet by seven feet, and Desperandum’s vast bulk took up much of that. In addition, there was a metal counter that supported Desperandum’s binoculars and a large flat tally box with a small television screen. Two tiny white bUps crossed the screen, starting from the top and moving slowly and errati­cally.

Desperandum reached under the counter and handed me a notebook and a pen. “You can take of! your mask,” he said. “The filters should have cleaned the air by now.”

I took off my mask and dropped it under the counter. “You can write, I hope,” Desperandum said.

“Certainly, Captain,” I said.

“Good. You’re here to take notes. Copy down the num­bers I give you into that column I’ve listed as ‘individuals.’ Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, taking the notebook and lodging it in the crook of my left elbow.

“Two,” said Desperandum. “Well be just on the fringes of the horde for a few minutes, so you can take it easy. Stay alert though. You want to look before they arrive?”

Without waiting for an answer he handed me the binocu­lars. I stooped to get them at the level of the visor, which was set at Desperandum’s height. I focused the binoculars.

The cloud resolved itself into thousands of individual fish, foot-long creatures with thin, brightly colored wings. They dipped and pirouetted like the molecules of a gas.

“They look like butterflies,” I said.

“What are butterflies?”

“Earth fauna. Six-legged invertebrates with multicolored wings. They sometimes travel in swarms.”

“Are they aquatic?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, the analogy might be worth pursuing anyway,” Desperandum rumbled. “Eighty-seven.”

I wrote the number down. A complex pattern of clumped and scattered dots appeared on Desperandum’s television screen; he did a quick sketch of the pattern on graph paper in his notebook. “See how many we have in the nets,” he said.

I crouched to look out.

“Uh . . . Captain . . .

“What?”

“They’re slicing the nets to pieces out there. Their wings are as sharp as razors.”

Desperandum’s ruddy face turned pale. He looked out the window and grunted, as if he had been struck in the stomach. He looked down with an attitude of intense con­centration and touched two switches on his tally box.

“Three hundred and ninety-three,” he said.

There was a light metallic thud as a flying fish struck our pillbox. Desperandum flinched. There were more thuds.

The main body of the swarm was passing over the Lunglance. “One four nine four three,” Desperandum said, sketching frantically. The television screen was alive with swarming dots. “Aren’t we catching any of them?” Desper­andum demanded.

I looked out and flinched myself when a fish struck the window. “No, sir,” I said. “The nets are completely shred­ded now, they’re just lying on the deck. There’re a few fish on the deck by the mizzenmast, though. Wait a minute. They just flew off.”

“Five five six two seven,” Desperandum said. The air was growing dark. There were millions of them out there. “No matter,” said Desperandum, recovering his poise. “We’ve still got the radar to analyze their flying pattern. Their spawning grounds are in a bay just behind the Brokenfoot Islands. We can stop there and pick up a few speci­mens.”

“That’s a bit of a detour, Captain,” I said. It was an unwise remark.

“IH thank you to remember that I am the captain of this ship,” Desperandum said.

“I apologize, sir. I was out of line.”

It sounding like hail on the top of our pillbox; dozens of fish were colliding and rebounding. “Two oh five, eight eighty-three,” Desperandum said.

Then, suddenly, part of Desperandum’s television screen went dark, a long narrow vertical band on the left side of the screen. Desperandum frowned mightily and touched switches with his thick, blunt fingers. The band stayed dead.

“They must have sliced the wiring from one of my radar sets,” Desperandum said. “That means I’ll have to multiply the rest of the values by a sixth. Make a note of that. One eighty-five, nine forty-one.”

I glanced at the screen. White dots were pouring off the live portions of the screen into the dead area. None were re-emerging.

“What are they doing out there?” Desperandum asked himself. He peered through the visor; three fish, their thin crystalline wings splashed with yellow and crimson, collided with it at once. Desperandum flinched back.