And then — we worked.
Hard, unremitting labour, from sunup to sundown, was the order of the next few days. Curley Green knew, now, just what he could do with the available materials and was determined to waste no time. He drove us hard, but he drove himself harder. He was artisan, foreman and warder. He could never afford to relax his vigilance for a second; he knew, as well as we did, that the tools that we were using — even the sail needles with which the women were sewing the canvas harnesses — could be weapons, as dangerous at close quarters as the automatic pistol.
For myself, I wasn’t so much concerned with the chances of jumping Green as with the difficulty of warning Noah of the plot against him. On the occasions that I could get down to the beach he was not there. I worked it out that the other porpoise, the one whom Curley had addressed as Moby Dick, was his second in command — and Moby Dick, these days, was always in charge of the food bringing parties and of the continual patrol around the island.
But the way that things were going — or had gone — was sickening.
Mind you, I did not place much credence in the late Bible Bill’s ideas, his give-the-ants-a-chance philosophy. I did not believe that Man, for all his nuclear know-how, was about to wipe himself off the face of the Earth. We were living through dangerous times — but that was nothing new in the history of homo sapiens. And I did believe that it might be possible for ourselves, as a race, to live in symbiosis with the intelligent porpoises and had thought that they, for all their apparent ruthlessness, might exhibit more decency than we, as a people, have ever done.
But now, already, they were tracing out the old, familiar pattern — palace revolutions, military coups and all the rest of it. Noah, as I understood it, wanted to use his armies and weapons only against the real enemies of his people, the killer whales, the giant squids and the like — but Moby Dick, if he gained control, would embark with Curley Green on a career of piracy.
And as far as we humans were concerned, Moby Dick and Curley Green had the whip hand. The porpoise controlled our food supply, the man held the only firearm. John and myself did manage to do a little exploring on the occasions that we collected more fuel for the charcoal burning, but the island had little to offer. There were a few straggly bananas — enough to make an occasional supplement to our diet, but no more. There were the land crabs — but apart from them there seemed to be no land animals. There were the birds — and I supposed that we could, if pressed, devise some means of trapping them. But John and Mary were almost as much the products of an urban civilisation as Sally and myself. With purloined knives and boat axes we might be able to hack our way through the bush — but to what? Curley Green would be a fool (and he was no fool) if he gave chase; all that he would have to do would be to sit tight on the food supplies, gun in hand, until starvation drove us back, our tails between our legs.
The only being who could possibly help us was Noah. Surely he would be grateful when we told him of the plot against him. Surely it would be possible to make some sort of treaty with him. (One night Sally and I worked out in detail such a treaty — the porpoises, in exchange for weapons, would maintain a continuous and efficient shark patrol off the Australian beaches …) But Noah was not available. He was away on some business of his own — the organisation of yet other tribes of mutants, perhaps, or the search for more wrecks with their supplies of useful material, or something too wildly alien for us to envisage … But this last, we decided, was fantasy. The machinations of Moby Dick had shown us that the cetaceans were all too human.
So we worked, and worked, driven by the hateful Green. Strip after strip was hacked and battered off the plating of the submarine, strip after strip was beaten by the engineer into a slim, rapier-like blade. The smoke from the charcoal burning hung heavily over the encampment, mingling with the dirty steam from the tempering of the swords. And each day, at about noon, Green would go down to the beach to talk with his porpoise confederate, taking one of the women with him as hostage but making sure that she kept her distance, out of earshot, during the conversation. Sally reported, after one such session, that by straining her ears she had been able to hear Moby Dick ask, “… be ready when he returns?” and Green reply, “Yes.”
There was one good result, but only one, of all the tiring activity. Curley Green slept well, secure behind his padlocked and barricaded door, so that I was able to visit Sally, as soon as I heard his snoring start, without fear of discovery. I was able to get down to the beach, too. I tried it once — by myself, luckily.
The night was dark, the last of the moon not yet risen, a thin overcast veiling the stars. A wavering line of green luminescence marked the edge of the sea, and phosphorescent streaks offshore indicated that the patrol was on duty. I stood with the water just lapping my feet and whistled softly.
“Dash dot, dash dash dash, dot dash, dot dot dot dot.”
“Noah.”
Something large broke surface in a spatter of cold fire.
“Man, what do you want?”
The voice held the peculiar rasp that I had identified with Moby Dick.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You will find it here,” came the reply.
A humorist, I thought. Put you in a tank on the stage of the Tivoli, and you’ll pack ‘em in the aisles …
“Man, this no place for you.”
I didn’t bother to reply, just climbed back up the path, back to my hut.
The next day, after his conference with Moby Dick, Curley Green tackled me.
“What the hell were you doin’ down on the beach last night, Petey boy?”
“I felt like a swim. I couldn’t sleep.”
“You weren’t thinkin’ of muckin’ well escapin’, were yer?”
“Of course I was,” I said. “I should be able to swim from here to Apia easily enough.”
“A muckin’ humorist,” he snarled. “Put you on the stage of the muckin’ Tiv, an’ you’ll pack ‘em in the aisles. But just keep off the beach in future, see? An’ get crackin’ on makin’ some more muckin’ charcoal.”
And then, on noon of the day that Noah was supposed to be returning, there were twelve of the swords ready. All of us could not help but admire the skill and the thought that had gone into their manufacture. Each one was six feet in length, and each one, instead of a hilt, had a gently curved plate on top of which it was mounted, like an extended spine. And this part of the blade had rings worked into it, as did the edges of the curved plate. It was obvious that the straps of the harness were to pass through these rings, and that the plate was designed to fit smoothly on top of the wearer’s head. As for the fastenings of the harness — that case of heavy dog collars had been useful. Each leather strap had been cut in two, and the halves had been sewn to the canvas straps, so that each harness could be buckled on securely.
So the porpoises, I thought, were even more dependent upon us than I had at first thought. Human beings had made the weapons, and human beings would have to buckle them on to the wearers. Risky, I thought, for the porpoises …
But it had been risky, too, for the armoured knights of old, who had been utterly dependent upon their dressers and upon the serfs who had to hoist them up on to the backs of their horses with a crane — but it had been the longbowmen who had put paid to their account, not the menials, many of whom must have hated their guts.
And we were menials.