by Rob Swigart
They should not have nitrogen narcosis at this depth, but perhaps it was time to start back to the surface. They would need a couple of short stops for decompression anyway. So he gave up on the octopus and began kicking toward the distant light.
The others followed reluctantly. When he looked back down at them, they collapsed again into hysterical fits. One held his hands up toward Chazz, holding the insides of his wrists together as if he were bound. He shook them above him and mimed trying to unstick two very sticky items, which always stuck to something else— his elbow, his side, his knee— until he was twisted into a helpless snarl. The other recorded everything on tape. Later they would have a good time at parties with this sequence: Dr. Charles Koenig snared by octopus.
As they rose, the creaking and roaring of the lava gradually faded.
At forty feet, Chazz paused to take his bearings. The others hung in the water nearby and watched the octopus. It was gradually relaxing, allowing a tentacle or two to fall away from Chazz’s arm, though it still kept a tight hold of him. He had acquired a new pet.
He looked up from his compass and gestured. The others nodded, and he started off.
The water was gradually growing darker as the sediment and small volcanic particles spread. Soon visibility was down to a few feet, and for a moment Chazz worried that he would have to go to the surface just to find the boat, but just then the line snagged his arm as he swam, and he stopped, clinging with one hand. He held the other one out, hoping the octopus would take this opportunity to leave him for a new home below, but the octopus held on tight.
Jack floated into view, holding the camera to his eye as he recorded Chazz and his pet. He held the camera away from his face, pulled out his regulator and made kissing motions with his lips. Then he laughed, huge bubbles expanding out of his mouth like cartoon speech balloons. Soon Sy floated into view dragging the bag full of samples. The three of them hung onto the rope, waiting out their decompression time. Chazz could almost hear the jokes they were thinking.
Soon Chazz checked his watch and nodded to the others, and they started up again. Just below the hull of their dive boat he stopped and tried once more to disengage the octopus, but it clung tighter and finally he gave up. He pushed his head out of the water, pulled his regulator out and shouted. “Hey! Get a bucket or something full of water. I’ve got a guest.”
His wife Patria stuck her head over the side. She nodded and vanished. Jack and Sy climbed onto the platform at the back and began shedding their equipment. Hands pulled the camera and sample net aboard. After a moment, a yellow plastic bucket appeared, attached to a rope, and Chazz took it under water and once more attempted to pull off his new friend, again without success. Finally he swam to the stern, hauled himself, the bucket, and the octopus out of the water.
In the air the octopus expressed its distress. Chazz plunged his arm into the bucket and heaved a sigh of relief as the octopus finally let go, one arm at a time. It curled into a small gray-brown sack on the bottom of the bucket, almost as if it were sulking.
“We should get back,” Patria said. “Orli will be missing us.”
Chazz nodded and handed her the bucket. Then he shrugged out of his buoyancy compensator and air tanks and handed them over the stern.
“He’s really cute,” Patria said, when Chazz sagged onto the bench beside her. She was peering into the bucket between her feet.
“What makes you think it’s a he?” Chazz leaned back and stretched his shoulders.
She smiled. “What’s it like down there?” She looked across him at the distant shore. Twin ribbons of crimson lava from this latest eruption of Kilauea still flowed sluggishly into the ocean. An enormous cloud of steam and vapor writhed like angry ghosts where the molten rock met the water. They could hear, even this far away, the roar of heated water, supported by the largo rhythm of the surf.
“Eerie,” Chazz said briefly. “The rock cools then cracks open, and more lava oozes out. It looks organic, alive. Very weird.” He leaned forward and peered into the bucket. “What shall we call him?”
Patria laughed. “See, there you go. It’s a he, just as I said.”
“All right, all right I’ve never had to sex an octopus before. What’s his name?”
“You’re the one asking all the questions, Socrates. You tell me.”
“All right. If I’m Socrates, then he’s my Plato.”
“Great. Plato the Octopus.”
Chazz rubbed his salty beard where it itched. “Well, let’s get started. As you said, Orli will be missing us.”
“Actually, she’s still asleep.” Patria looked slyly at her husband. “But I have an interview later with a kahuna over near Hookena. So maybe we’d better go wake her up so I can feed her.”
Chazz nodded and waved at Sy, who was lounging in the bow. Sy waved back and started hauling up the anchor, while Jack started the engine. Soon they were headed toward shore.
It was one of those perpetually flawless days when nothing could possibly go wrong. The air was warm, the breeze was refreshing, not too hot, too cool, too brisk or too slack. The water was smooth, the swells long and languorous. The peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea were free of clouds. Only the lava flow disturbed the almost surreal tranquility of the scene, and that was a distant hint of exotic color where it traced a thin red line down the blackened lava slopes. From time to time, it surrounded a living tree, which soundlessly exploded into smoke and steam, a small punctuation mark against the vivid backdrop.
They were still far enough away that the small village was invisible against the shore. Gradually, the white houses took form, small at first, but growing. Patria, leaning into the wind, her dark short hair sculpted against the fine bones of her skull, was smiling. Chazz, watching her, felt his heart lurch. She had resisted having a child, had not wanted to interrupt her career, and now they had Orli, still small as an otter and as hungry.
Chazz lowered his arm into the bucket. Plato reached a tentative tip toward it, curled around his finger and tugged gently. Chazz tugged back, and suddenly Plato let go. His tentacle rapped the side of the plastic bucket. “Did that hurt?” Chazz murmured.
“What happened to him?” Patria was leaning next to him, her head close to his.
“The rock shifted when the lava face split and he caught a tentacle. I almost didn’t make it.”
“Is he hurt?”
“I don’t know. I thought not, but he acts as if it’s tender. Perhaps it’s bruised, if octopuses get bruised.”
“He sure likes you. Look.”
Plato had reached out again and locked one tentacle around Chazz’s fingers. Another followed, softly tugging at him with his suckers. “You know, they’re supposed to be as smart as cats.”
“How smart is that?” She was laughing at him again.
“Pretty smart for somebody with no bones.”
“So. Bones are now a prerequisite for intelligence. New scientific theory, Doctor Koenig?”
“Bones do allow for most of the behavior we consider intelligent. Dancing, for example, a near-impossibility without bones. Or dipping snuff…”
“You could do that without bones.”
“All right, but bones are important, anyway, and I think it’s remarkable that Plato doesn’t have any and is still so brilliant.”
“You just think he’s brilliant because he likes you.”
“Okay, okay, enjoyable as all this jocular banter is, it’s time to get serious. What’s for lunch?”
“Hah. You’re taking us to the Sheraton.”
“Us?”
“Of course. Orli is joining us. She’s almost four months old now.”
“Oh. Of course— ready for sushi.”
They approached the beach, and Sy jumped overboard to fasten the bow line to the buoy The rest of them followed and lugged their equipment up the beach to Jack’s van: South Kona Divers was painted in international orange on the side.
“What do you want to do with this?” Jack asked
, holding up Plato’s bucket.
Chazz took the bucket. “I guess we’ll either have to find a place to let him go or a way to send him back to Kauai. He might be happy in one of the tanks at the Center. Let’s just take him with us for now.”
The beach was deserted now at the height of the day. The town, a few hundred feet to the north, was asleep. Even the traffic up on the highway seemed to have stopped moving. The four of them sat in the van, feet dangling out, and drank cold juice from the cooler. Around the bend to the south they could faintly catch the distant roar of the lava when the breeze was right. Otherwise only the insects, and a few crabs that scuttled on the sand, disturbed the silence.
“What’re you going to do with all this stuff?” Jack asked, tossing his empty can into the big plastic trash container in back, beside the rack of empty air tanks.
Chazz shrugged. “I wanted to see the volcano myself, up close, under water. That’s a primeval environment down there, where the lava meets the water. Life may have started near deep underwater vents a little like that. There’s the right combination of heat and organic chemicals. I got some water samples and some plant and animal life too. Mostly I’m interested in the little guys, the single-celled organisms who might show some genetic effects. It’s more a hobby than anything else, really.”
“Anything useful come of it?” Jack started to stand up, ready to go. Sy snorted a quick barking laugh at the question.
“Sy is laughing because he believes science, if it’s pure science, has no useful applications, at least not right away.” Chazz was smiling. “But frankly, we find some interesting effects in enzyme and protein production with the slight genetic changes we’re looking for here.”
“What kind of effects?” Jack swung open the driver’s door and climbed in. The others found their seats, and he started up the dusty dirt road to the highway. Looking back, Chazz could see the boat, rising and falling gently on the swells.
“You worry about your boat at all?” he asked.
“Naw. There’s a guy lives in the first house down there keeps an eye on it for me when I leave it there. What kind of effects?”
“Sometimes we find something useful.” They all laughed at that. The van turned north onto the highway.
“Yeah…?” Jack urged.
“And sometimes we find something harmful, a new toxin, a formerly harmless critter turned venomous, a poison. The changes are accidents, and the results unpredictable. That’s what I like about it.”
A siren started up and Jack pulled over. The sound died slowly behind them and Jack rolled down his window. They heard a door slam, and a heavyset sheriff’s deputy appeared at Jack’s window. His sunglasses reflected Jack’s distorted face back at Chazz and Patria.
“Jack Wellburn?” the deputy asked.
“That’s right.”
He nodded. “Good. One of your passengers named Koenig?”
“Two of them, actually.”
“Good.” He leaned a little into the window to get a better look at Chazz. “Dr. Koenig? I’m Locey. Deputy Sheriff. We got a telex from a Lieutenant Takamura, Kauai County PD. He’s asked us to put you on a state plane back to Kauai ASAP. Would you mind coming with me?”
Patria put her hand on his arm. “No! We have to get Orli.”
“Sorry, ma’am. There’s a panic on.”
“Don’t worry. Cobb wouldn’t do this if it weren’t important. You and Orli catch the next Aloha flight over. Sy, you know what to do about the specimens and so on. I’ll see you at the lab tomorrow.” He climbed out.
Patria said, “We’ll come over after my interview. Probably the five-thirty flight.”
“Okay,” Chazz said. He turned to the deputy. “Any idea what this is all about?”
“No, sir. Lieutenant Takamura just said it was urgent.”
Chazz smiled in at Patria and shrugged. She frowned, then relented “We’ll see you tonight. You still owe us lunch.”
Chazz nodded. “All right.” He turned to Locey. “Let’s go.”
THREE
DEATH SHIP
Cobb Takamura was angry. His lips had thinned into a dark horizontal line. His brows had knitted together into another thicker horizontal line. This produced fear in everyone who knew the ordinarily smooth skin of his forehead. Sergeant Handel especially did not like to see it.
“You what?” Lieutenant Takamura asked softly.
Sergeant Handel did not look at his superior. He looked at the tips of his shoes, which were scuffed. “It seemed like a good idea.”
“At the time?” Takamura allowed no inflection of sarcasm to enter his voice. Even irony was muted.
Handel put up a hand, warding off the corrosive effects of the lieutenant’s anger. “It’s regulation,” he protested. “We’re required to notify…”
Cobb turned away to look out his office window. The blinds were up. Waialeale was again shrouded in clouds. Yesterday had been such a perfect day. Until the call from Kimiko. Now his wife was in the hospital for “observation,” and he had a large problem just made larger by his assistant’s zeal for regulation. “Sergeant Handel,” he said without turning back. “You know how I feel about Commander Shafton…”
Handel was considering sitting down. There was a green metal-and-plastic chair against the wall he enjoyed sitting in. He could lean the chair back against the wall and prop his feet against the metal filing cabinet. But he did not sit down. Instead he said, “Yes, I…”
Cobb continued without pause. “I do not feel good about Commander Shafton. He has very small feet. This may seem like a trivial matter to you, but I feel strongly about men with small feet. It is my experience that they are not to be trusted. Commander Shafton is not to be trusted…”
“I know, Lieutenant, but I…” Handel found it judicious not to point out that Lieutenant Takamura wore a size eight and a half shoe.
“The commander was going on leave today. This very day, Sergeant. He would have left our island in a matter of hours, and he would have been relieved by Lieutenant Commander Whipple. Lieutenant Commander Whipple is a man of some sense, a reasonable man, even. Had your message taken just a few more hours to reach them, we would have been working with Lieutenant Commander Whipple, who does not have small feet. Do I make myself clear?”
“You’re upset.”
Cobb turned and glared at Sergeant Handel. “You are correct, Sergeant, I am upset. Perhaps I should not be upset. I should take everything in stride. I should live in the present, is that it? When you are hungry, eat, when you are tired, sleep, as the Zen masters say. Cut wood, cook food. What is done is done. The happy man is the calm man.’ All right. Now I am happy.”
Handel relaxed slightly “That was a quote, right? Charlie Chan?” If so, everything would be all right again. Handel sat down.
Cobb chose not to confirm his quotation. “Never do it again. Commander Shafton will be all over us about this ship. The Coast Guard has certain inalienable responsibilities for derelict ships unclaimed for salvage and so on. His tiny feet will patter on this very linoleum with excitement. He will push his chin over my shoulder as I try to work. He will claim the Kauai PD has no jurisdiction since the deaths might have occurred on the high seas. He will now postpone his leave, perhaps cancel it. He will strut. He will make asinine comments, issue stupid orders. There will be a terrible muddle. Now with Lieutenant Commander Whipple, everything would be fine. Whoever takes responsibility is okay in his book as long as it is not himself. Whipple, whose feet are large, enjoys surf fishing. He and I have passed many pleasant hours up at Hanalei casting our hooks into the sea, not caring what, if anything, might bite. Lieutenant Commander Whipple would let me get on with my job and would not interfere. For that I would give him a phone call from time to time and let him know how things were going so he could write his report back to headquarters or base or wherever he writes his reports to, and he would get a pat on the back for judicious and speedy action without doing much of anything. Which is the way I would
have preferred it.”
The telephone rang. Takamura gave Handel a sour look, reached for it, changed his mind and let it ring again, then gestured to Handel to pick it up.
“Lieutenant Takamura’s office, Sergeant Handel speaking… Oh, yes, sir. Certainly, sir. He’s right here.” Handel held out the receiver. Takamura’s frown returned. “Commander Shafton,” Handel said both loudly and unnecessarily. “He’d like to speak to you, Lieutenant.”
Takamura took the phone. “Commander,” he spoke with patently false cheer. “What a pleasant surprise… Yes, so you got the message. Why, of course, I had Sergeant Handel phone you immediately… Yes, yes, it is true the ship was discovered last night, but there was no need to disturb you last evening. Everyone aboard was dead, so aside from taking the bodies to the hospital and so on there really was nothing to do. The ship itself is anchored in Kalalono Bay.”
Apparently Commander Shafton said something unpleasant, because Cobb’s brow turned interstellar dark and interstellar cold. He said nothing for almost a minute, holding the receiver an inch or so from his ear. Then, very politely, he said, “Of course, Commander, I understand perfectly. Happy to cooperate. I’ll see you at three-thirty. Thank you. Good-bye.” He replaced the receiver so slowly it made no sound whatsoever.
Handel was surprised at the speed with which a broad smile replaced the grim look. “Moron,” Takamura said. “Perhaps there will not be as many ways we can cooperate with the Coast Guard as Commander Shafton may think. Perhaps he’ll still go on his leave. I heard he was going to Paris for a month. That would be fitting. It seems this whole case could fall under the jurisdiction of the Rescue Center in Oahu, and not the Nawiliwili Harbor Station, although there is no one to be rescued since they are all dead, and there is no known menace to traffic in American waters. It is possible that this particular problem will go away by itself. On the other hand, Commander Shafton has taken it upon himself to take charge. He’s put Ocean Mother under tow into Nawiliwili Harbor. They’ll tramp all over the ship and destroy evidence.”
