“He wants you,” I said to Bible Bill.
“That blasphemer?” exploded the old man. “That impious ingrate?”
“Who else?”
“I refuse to run to his beck and call. I refuse …”
There was a bellow from the hill top. “Shake the lead outa yer muckin’ pants, yer psalm-singin’ old bastard! I want yer!”
Slowly Bible Bill got to his feet, raised himself to his full, gangling height. He lifted his knotted fists, shook them in the direction of the engineer. He screamed, “Who are you, Green, that you should speak to me in this manner?”
“The man with the muckin’ gun, that’s who!” came the shouted reply. “Want me ter warm yer muckin’ feet up for yer?”
“He’s a good shot,” I said helpfully, deciding to get the others and myself out of the line of fire, grasping Sally’s shoulder and pulling her to her feet. “You’d better do as the man says.”
I was beginning to be afraid that he, like so many fanatics, would be excellent martyr material. Perhaps he was — but martyrs are apt to demand a large and appreciative audience. This audience wasn’t large and, as I learned later, he had already discovered that it was far from appreciative. To my relief he dropped his fists and, with slumped shoulders, began to walk slowly towards the hill.
Sally shook her shoulder free from my grip.
“Well,” she demanded, “what were you two nattering about on Mount Olympus?”
“And what were you low, common people talking about down here?” I countered. I sat down in the shade, realised that I was still holding my can of pineapple, saw that there was some juice left in the bottom of it. I drained it, started to throw the tin from me and then refrained. It might possibly be shaped and hammered into a dagger of sorts.
“What did you learn?” she insisted.
“That the porpoises are intelligent — but we already knew that. That they were responsible for the attack on Sue Darling. That they want human slaves, to make weapons for them.”
“And was that all?”
“No. Friend Curley has dreams of grandeur. He already sees himself as a pirate king, with squadrons of sperm whales and porpoises ranging the Pacific at his command. Furthermore, he kindly offered to let me come in on the ground floor …”
“And what did you say?” she asked sharply.
I looked at her in some surprise. “I refused, of course.”
She looked at me with an expression that puzzled me. “When will you grow up, Peter?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Just this. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. As far as the sea outside this island is concerned, the porpoises are the bosses. As far as this island is concerned, Curley Green is the boss. Play along. Keep in good with the bosses — and you stand a chance of supplanting them. And if you don’t think that you can bring that off, you are, at least, making life fairly easy for yourself. For all we know, we shall be on this speck of dirt for the rest of our lives.” She added softly, “And if I have children, I want them to get a square deal …”
The fisherman said, “Men are not meant to be the servants of animals.”
“Prejudice,” said Sally airily.
“I’m inclined to agree with John,” I said thoughtfully. “Our loyalties are to our own species, to homo more-or-less sapiens. I know that he’s a bit of a bastard, but he’s the only family we have. The porpoises may be more deserving, but they’re alien. Alien. They’re as alien as the natives of Mars or Venus, or of the planets of Alpha Centauri …”
“Christ!” she swore. “What delightfully woolly thinking, for this day and age! As far as I’m concerned, our main motivation should be survival — survival until a ship comes to take us off the island or, at the very worst, just survival. There are times when it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion, and this is one of them.”
“That’s all a matter of opinion,” I said. “But, as a professional seaman, I can’t play along with piracy.”
“The piracy,” she said, “seems to be Curley’s idea. The porpoises aren’t pirates …”
“No?” I asked sarcastically. “I suppose that what they did to Sue Darling, and the other ships, was just a love pat.”
“It was a slaving raid rather than piracy,” she said.
“To those at the receiving end the results are just the same,” I told her. “And then to be compelled to make weapons for use against one’s own kind …”
“And that’s where you’re wrong,” she flared. “Those weapons — when they’re made — will not be for use against human beings. Bible Bill told us …”
“He is mad,” said the Samoan.
“Mad or not, he made a crazy sort of sense. He was trying to convert us, I suppose, and was rather too enthusiastic. But his story hangs together …” She said suddenly, “I wish I had a cigarette … I find it hard to talk without one …”
“Some brands are put out in watertight tins,” I said. “We may be able to get that organised later …”
“Yes. As long as we play along with them …” After a pause she went on, “I wish I had a cigarette. And I wish I had reams and reams of paper, and a typewriter, so I could set all of this down. Bible Bill’s story, for a start.
“He was a wireless operator, as you may have gathered from your friend Curley. He got religion, and the Company in whose ships he was serving made a martyr of him. At least, that’s his version of it. He was fired. He had some money tucked away and he bought himself a decrepit ketch and decided to sail single handed round the Pacific, preaching his own version of the Gospels. After all, Captain Slocum sailed round the world single handed …”
“Slocum,” I said drily, “was an outstanding seaman and navigator. But go on …”
“As I said, it was his own version of the Gospel that he was preaching. Straight from Revelations, with improvements. The End of the World at hand, with the fire from Heaven of the nuclear fission variety and delivered by ICBM. Pray for the night is coming, and so on and so forth.
“Anyhow, there was a storm.
“He was wrecked, and cast up on the beach of this island. And then it all started. Then he began to see himself as a sort of latter day Elijah or Elisha, or whoever it was that the ravens brought tucker to in the wilderness. The porpoises, seeing him on the beach, brought food to him. Fish.”
“Decent of them,” I said.
“Shut up. Anyhow, it was then that he realised that they were intelligent. And it was then that he decided to try to establish communications with them. He doesn’t look the patient type, but he must be. He started off by teaching them Morse. Logical enough, when you realize that their normal method of speech is by snorts and whistles. And then he got ambitious when he found that a few of them were capable of forming sounds almost in the human manner.
“And then the penny dropped. The world was about to be destroyed by fire — but not all life would be destroyed. The sea people would survive. The sea people, therefore, were God’s new elect — and he, Bible Bill, was their servant. It was then, remembering the Deluge, that he called the leader of the sea people Noah.
“But, even as we do, they have their enemies. The killer whales, for example. You must know something about them, how they attack anything, more for the joy of slaughter than for food. They always were intelligent, but they, too, may have mutated. In any case the sea people are frightened of them, and want weapons …”
She rose to her feet, graceful in her sari-like garment, led me into the shed. It was workshop as well as storeroom. There was a crude bench. There was one of those portable forges with a crank-driven fan for draught. There were a couple of bolts of canvas.
Tacked to the uprights of one of the walls was a crude sketch. At first glance it looked like a swordfish — and then, as I looked more closely, I saw that it was supposed to represent a porpoise. There were straps around the body, a sort of harness, and projecting from this harness, like the horn of the fabled unicorn, was a blade.
“It could work, I suppose,” I said dubiously.
“It could,” she said. “But Bible Bill just hasn’t a clue as to how to start making it. With all his faults, Curley Green is a craftsman.”
“And he makes no secret of it,” I told her.
“Well, there you are, Peter. You and John can study it in your spare time while Mary and I go for a bath. There’s a fresh water stream near here. You can have it when we’ve finished.”
“Thank you.” I fingered my bristly chin. “I could do with a shave, too …”
“Then you’re unlucky.”
We went outside. I looked towards the hill. Green was still sitting a-top the eminence, with the old man standing a few feet below him. I couldn’t hear what was being said, although an argument seemed to be in progress. A plague on both your houses, I thought sourly.
Sally and Mary wandered off into the trees. I sat down beside John.
“Well,” I asked, “what do you make of it?”
“We are Christians,” he said slowly. “We are Christians. We do not believe in the old gods, the old devils. We have always laughed at the stories about the devil fish. But now …”
“Yes?”
He flung out an arm towards the sea. “They are not natural. They are devils.”
“And you will not work for them?”
“That,” he said, “is another matter. Mary must eat. I must eat.”