Rather to our surprise, we did not have to wait long for the food that Curley Green had demanded. There was a great flurry in the offshore waters and then, plunging through the breakers, came a squadron of porpoises, pushing before them four disintegrating cartons. They burst before they got to the beach, spilling an assortment of cans. We waded out into the shallows to salvage them. There was corned beef, and canned sausages, and an assortment of tinned fruits.
“Carry them up to the camp,” ordered Green.
We carried them up to the camp. It was the common sense thing to do, anyhow.
“Take one can o’ beef and one o’ fruit each,” said the engineer. “Today’s a muckin’ holiday.” He turned to me, where I was standing beside Sally. “I want you, Petey boy. If you’re good, you can have the honour of dinin’ with me.”
“No thanks,” I said.
“You’d muckin’ well better.” (His hand, I thought, must be getting tired from carrying that gun, from giving it the occasional suggestive wave.) “Come on.”
“No thank you,” I said again.
His tone softened. “If we co-operate, we can get along quite nicely on this muckin’ island. But, first of all, you have ter know what it’s all muckin’ well about.”
“Do you know?”
“Yes. In fact, the muckin’ penny dropped as soon as we lost the poor old Sue. If you an’ Sally hadn’t been so muckin’ snooty during the trip I could’a told you plenty — things I’ve been hearin’, things I’ve seen for my muckin’ self. But I want to talk it over with yer, Petey, as long as you give your word that you’ll not try to jump me when I’m off my muckin’ guard.”
“All right,” I said, after a pause. Knowledge is power, and it was high time that I knew something about something. “All right — but I can’t answer for the others.”
“I’ll be keepin’ an eye on ‘em, don’t you worry. Now come with me.”
Carrying my cans, I followed him to the edge of the clearing, to where a peculiar little low hill — shaped like a woman’s breast it was — rose clear of the rocky ground. Agile as a monkey he climbed this. More slowly, I clambered after. I still wasn’t used to going barefoot. With a sigh of relief he put the pistol on a flat rock at his side, ready to be snatched up at a moment’s notice. He took the cans of food from the pockets of his filthy shorts, put them beside the gun. He produced a can opener, handed it to me. I opened his two cans and then my own. He didn’t look at me; he kept his eyes fixed on the others who, in the shade of the huts, were just sitting down to their meal.
He said, “I’ve never had much time for so-called muckin’ gentlemen, Petey boy, but you can, up to a muckin’ point, trust the bastards. I trust you.”
“Thank you,” I said, taking a mouthful of corned beef.
“Now, Petey boy,” he went on, “what d’yer make of it all?”
“These things are intelligent,” I said. “That’s obvious. They’re probably more intelligent than the usual run of their kind — although I have heard of dolphins in the so-called marine circuses along the Florida coast that could almost talk …”
“That big bastard called Noah can talk,” he said. “But I don’t know if any of his muckin’ cobbers can. But I’ll find out …” He shovelled meat into his mouth with his filthy fingers. “Not a bad hunk o’ pink nag, this … Well, Petey, have you any more muckin’ ideas to contribute?”
“No,” I admitted. “No …”
“No muckin’ ideas at all? An’ a muckin’ newspaper is daft enough to pay yer good money for it …” He slurped pineapple juice from the other can. “Now, as I said, I keep my muckin’ eyes an’ ears open. I was the one who could’a told yer about the vanishin’s, if you’d only asked. Don’t suppose you ever heard o’ Captain Willis, did yer? He’s dead now — the muckin’ D.T.’s finally got him, an’ about muckin’ time, too. Willie’s trouble was that nobody would believe what he muckin’ well told ‘em. Flyin’ saucers — he’d seen ‘em, ay, an’ the little green men. Sea serpents — he’d seen them too. So, when he told his story about the man on the raft, nobody would believe him. He was the only one that the man on the raft told his muckin’ story to, an’ the poor bastard died, in Willie’s arms an’ full o’ Willie’s rum, just as he finished it. Anyhow, Willie told me the story one night in Suva …” He chuckled reminiscently. “An’ what a muckin’ night it was!”
“Go on,” I said.
“A man must muckin’ eat,” he growled. He gulped some more pineapple juice. “Yair, this man on the bleedin’ raft. There was Willie proceedin’ on his more or less lawful occasions, an’ there was this driftin’ raft, a rickety, home-made affair, with the tattered remains o’ somebody’s muckin’ shirt flyin’ from the masthead. Willie hove to. There was a man on the raft. Three quarters dead he was. (It was probably Willie’s muckin’ rum that finished him off.) Anyhow, before he croaked he told his story. To Willie. To the one muckin’ man in the whole bleedin’ Pacific that no bastard’d ever believe. No bastard but me, that is. Somehow, that night in Suva, he convinced me.
“Now, this man. This man that Willie poisoned with his muckin’ rum …” Suddenly he snatched up the pistol. “Get back!” he yelled. “Get back! Keep your muckin’ distance!” I turned, saw that John and Bible Bill had been making a cautious approach to the hill. Curley Green fired, and I saw the dust puff up almost at the old man’s feet. (So the action of the pistol was not clogged with sand.) Slowly the fisherman and the fanatic retreated.
“Now, where was I before I was muckin’ well interrupted? Yair. The castaway. He was the only survivor of a Tongan fishing boat. He told Willie that the boat had been attacked by whales, by sperm whales, and that the big bastards had been driven in to the attack by a big school of muckin’ porpoises …”
“And I was feeling grateful to them for saving us!” I said bitterly.
“Anyhow, three men managed to get into a muckin’ dinghy. The porpoises shoved them miles over the muckin’ sea — same as they did to us — until they came to an island. An’ then the dinghy was broken up an’ the men swam ashore, an’ there was a white man there, quite muckin’ mad, who threatened them with a pistol an’ made ‘em work …”
“Work at what?” I asked.
Curley Green laughed. “This sounds muckin’ silly,” he said, “but it makes muckin’ sense, of a sort. Look at it this way. Look at the first muckin’ men. They hadn’t the weapons of the sabre-toothed tiger. They hadn’t the speed of the antelope. But they had their brains. An’ their hands. An’ fire. They made weapons, so they could fight the tiger, so they could shoot down a runnin’ deer. Get the muckin’ picture?”
“Yes,” I said slowly.
“Muckin’ simple, ain’t it?”
“Not so mucking simple,” I told him. “Of course, I can see now what’s behind it all. They have brains — but no hands, no means of making fire. They want human slaves. But what sort of weapons do they want? And how does Bible Bill come into it?”
“The weapons part is easy. I’m goin’ by what poor old Willie told me, an’ by the sketch stuck against the wall in the muckin’ shed down there. A sort of a harness, with a muckin’ great blade stickin’ out in front. I suppose that they have their enemies — giant squid, sharks, killer whales …
“But Bible Bill? I don’t know. But when he was a Sparks in the Union Company he was always preachin’ about the last muckin’ judgment an’ mixin’ it up somethin’ muckin’ awful with rockets an’ the atom bomb …
“You know,” he went on, after a pause, “after I heard Willie’s story I was rather hopin’ that whatever ship I happened to be in would be knocked off by the porpoises … As I said, I believed his story … It tied in so muckin’ well with other stories I’d heard …”
“But why did you want to fall into their hands?” I asked — and then, conscious of the absurdity of my words, amended it to “their power”.
“Because there’s precious little opportunity these muckin’ days for a good tradesman, an’ precious little inducement to become one. Here, workin’ for them, a good tradesman gets in on the muckin’ ground floor. An’ have yer never heard the expression ‘the power behind the muckin’ throne’?”
“Not quite in those words,” I said. “But I see what you mean …”
“An’ when we expand, Petey boy, we shall be needin’ you in the organisation. You’ve got yer Master’s ticket. We shall be needin’ a seaman an’ navigator — when we expand …”
“What do you mean?”
“Ain’t you got no muckin’ imagination? There’s no bleedin’ limit to this thing. Think of it — they can control a squadron o’ whales just as we control a squadron o’ tanks. Just imagine one o’ them big bastards sent to get himself mashed in the screws of a big ship, an’ then two or three more o’ them sent to charge her muckin’ sides while she’s crippled an’ drifting … Each of ‘em a hundred muckin’ tons, chargin’ at all of twelve muckin’ knots …”
I could imagine it, and I didn’t like it.
“Piracy?” I said. “Don’t be so bloody silly. It went out with Captain Kidd.”
“It could come back,” he said. “Especially at a time when the big powers have more to muckin’ well worry about than the loss of an occasional merchantman … Think of it,” he went on enthusiastically, “you an’ I could become the uncrowned kings o’ the Pacific. Or I’d be the muckin’ king, an’ you’d be my prime minister …”
“Not for me,” I said.
“Your funeral, Petey boy. Just think o’ that sayin’ — if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. Just think o’ that when I have yer workin’, sweatin’ an’ slavin’, with the others. But don’t worry — I said terday was a muckin’ holiday, an’ it is. Yer troubles start termorrer …”
“And is that all? “I asked.
“That’s all,” he said. He was playing with that gun again. “Just send Bible Bill up to me, will yer?”
So I left him there on his little hill, with his absurd dreams, and knew as I walked to rejoin the others that they were more frightening than absurd.