Sea Wrack

by Edward Jesby

Introduction by Ted White

I started working for The Magazine in the early spring of 1963 as an Assistant Editor, although I didn’t get a mention on the masthead until the November 1963 issue (and what a great issue that was, with a beautiful wraparound cover by Hannes Bok, illustrating “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny), and my basic job was to read “the slush pile.” This is what unsolicited manuscripts from unknown authors was (and still is, I assume) called.

Avram Davidson, then the Editor, had hired me, but I saw him infrequently, because he was then living in Milford, Pennsylvania, and subsequently moved to Mexico. The man I saw weekly was Ed Ferman, then fresh out of college and newly the Managing Editor. Ed’s father, Joe, was The Magazine’s Publisher, and Ed held down the “editorial offices” on 53rd Street in Manhattan. And once a week I’d take the subway in from Brooklyn to pick up a fresh load of unread manuscripts, and turn in those I believed deserved consideration from Avram.

I put “editorial offices” in quotes, because the office was in fact a couple of side rooms off the lobby on the ground floor of an apartment building, and to get to it one walked through the building management offices. Unprepossessing, to say the least, but adequate to The Magazine’s needs.

Usually, unless Ed was busy, we’d chat for a half hour to an hour before I returned to Brooklyn. I was only a few years older than Ed, but I’d been a science fiction fan for more than a decade, and had been writing professionally for several years, first as a jazz critic and journalist and then, starting in 1962, as a science fiction writer. I knew the field far better than Ed, and he told me ten years later that our informal gossip had been invaluable to him, filling him in on what was generally going on at the time, bringing him up to speed.

I was with The Magazine for five years, leaving to become the editor of rival magazines, Amazing Stories and Fantastic, in 1968. In the course of those five years I was promoted to Associate Editor, and took on a variety of other duties—the occasional book review, several editorials, story and coming-next-month blurbs, and some copyediting—but my main task remained reading the slush pile.

A year or so in I decided to keep track of some statistics, and I established the fact that I was reading an average of 600 manuscripts a month, and rejecting all but a half-dozen of them. Of those that I passed on (originally to Avram and later to Ed, when he took over the position of Editor), at least one would be purchased. This resulted in each issue having at least one of “my” stories, a story I had found in the slush pile.

I was proud of that statistic. It held for most of those five years. I was known, during my ten-year reign at Amazing and Fantastic, for discovering and promoting new authors, but that “tradition” had actually started with The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, five years earlier.

Not every editor gave such attention to his slush pile. In fact, the fellow who’d held my position before me was fired for automatically rejecting every manuscript—dumping them into the return mail in the mailbox on 53rd Street directly in front of the office on his way out. And it’s easy to understand why he did that, because most of those stories were pretty awful. Some of them were handwritten. Some were childishly written. Some of them were just plain inappropriate for a science fiction or fantasy magazine, for any number of reasons. And it was obvious that the authors of a few of these stories were mentally disturbed.

Many of these stories were obviously unsuitable within their first paragraphs, and could be quickly dealt with. The real time-wasters for me were the adequately written stories which just didn’t work, but required a complete reading to establish that—some of them fairly long.

One person sent a brief story every day for a week. His last story, at the end of that week, had a note appended to it which said, “Since you haven’t bought any of my stories yet, I’m not going to send you any more.” It apparently hadn’t occurred to him that it took the postal service several days to deliver his stories, and that acceptances or rejections would take equally long to get back to him. I’d rejected them all, and wasn’t sorry to hear that I wouldn’t be seeing any more.

Another author sent me close to two dozen stories over a period of several months, all of which I rejected. I came to recognize his submissions from the envelopes they arrived in, and I’d sigh when I saw one. Bland, a bit glib, they almost worked, but eventually fell flat. They covered a broad spectrum of story-types, ranging from bar stories to the man who kills his wife by inventing a time machine (a classic story which crops up frequently in slush piles).

One day I saw that author’s name in one of Fred Pohl’s magazines—Galaxy or If or Worlds of Tomorrow—and I was a bit surprised. Then I got one from him that I liked. It was completely different from the stories which preceded it. It was “hard-science” fiction, cleanly told. It was “Becalmed on Mercury.” And the author’s name was Larry Niven. I never saw any of the stories I’d rejected published elsewhere; they’d been the “dues” Larry had paid, learning to become a salable writer and finding his real voice as an author.

Edward Jesby’s “Sea Wrack” was just another manila envelope in the week’s pile of envelopes until I opened it and read the story. It hit me between the eyes. Where had this guy come from? I passed it along with a note that this was one we had to buy, something I rarely did. And I wasn’t surprised to see it in a subsequent issue. I thought of Jesby as one of my discoveries, like Thomas Burnett Swann (whose first story Avram lost when he didn’t respond quickly enough; it was published in the British Science-Fantasy).

We didn’t hear any more from Jesby for several years (Gordon tells me his “Ogre!” was in the Sept. 1968 issue, just after I’d left The Magazine), but a few months after we’d published “Sea Wrack,” I had a call from Terry Carr, an old friend who was then an editor at Ace Books. “What can you tell me about Jesby and this story?” he wanted to know. I couldn’t tell him much, but he told me that he and Don Wollheim had selected it for their new World’s Best Science Fiction anthology, and I felt vindicated all over again.

For me that anthology selection validated my belief in the value of combing the slush pile for new and unknown authors. It wasn’t a thankless task—it was a necessary and valuable task. It was like panning for gold. Every so often you turn up a big shiny nugget.

* * * *

Sea Wrack by Edward Jesby

Greta Hijukawa-Rosen sat on the beach watching her escort maneuver a compression hover board above the waters of the Mediterranean. He stood on the small round platform, balancing it a few inches above the spilling tops of the wind-driven waves with small movements of his legs. The board operated on the power sent to it from the antennae above the chateau, but he operated on his own.

“Viterrible,” Greta thought, stretching to lift the underside of her small breasts to the full heat of the sun. She giggled, wondering what her sisters would think of her use of a commercial word, and then shrugged and looked at her own golden tan comparing it to her escort’s dark brown color. Abuwolowo was humus brown. “Deep as leaf mold,” she said, speaking aloud, and stood up to watch him lift the thin platform to its maximum altitude of six or seven meters. His figure rapidly diminished in size as he sent it wobbling in gull-like swoops out over the Mediterranean. Ultimately it was boring, she decided, there was no real danger. He had a caller fitted into his swim belt, and if he fell into the water, the board he rode on would save him, diving into the water and lifting him to safety. Now he was very far out, and all that was visible above the wave tops was the black bobbing ball of his head.

“I suppose I should have a feeling of loss.” There was contempt in her voice, and it came from her knowledge that all she knew of loss was what she had read about in a recent television seminar on great books, but she gasped, losing reality, when she saw the head in close to the beach.

Looking desperately for her binocular lorgnette, she asked, “Abuwolowo?” in a shout, but the head was white, and not merely the color of untanned skin, but a flat artificial white, like the marble statues in the garden of the summer home. Now, to her further horror, the rest of the apparition appeared out of the shallows. Above the blue sea, silhouetted against the paler sky, was a black figure with a dead white head. It staggered through the chopping waves with efforts to lift its legs free. When the creature succeeded in lifting its feet clear she was reassured. It was wearing swim fins, and she ran forward to help.

After she had gotten her hand onto the large soft arm she asked, “Are you all right?” The man nodded and kindly leaned a bit of his weight onto her. She was thankful, the figure stood a foot above her six foot three inch height, and its shoulders were broader than Abuwolowo’s Nigerian span.

Firmly enscounced on the sand, the man made a magician’s pass at his neck and lifted the covering away from his face. He shot a quick look at the sky with black eyes that filled huge sockets and said, “Bright.” He looked down at the sand, and after a few stertorous breaths spoke. “Thank you.” He paused, reaching into his armpit, and continued, “Basker hit me out there.”

Breathing more easily, he was easy to understand. The liquid mumbling of his first words had disappeared, and he looked directly at her. “Pretty,” he said, “pretty deserves an explanation. A basker drove me into the bottom. Something scared it from in the air and it dove.”

“Basker?” she asked, wanting to hear the strange soft cadences of the voice that issued from the round head with its huge eyes.

“Basker shark,” he said, “lying on the surface and it dove. I had no time to signal or to warn.” He fell forward, breathing easily, but she saw blood welling from a cut on his back as he slumped onto his knees. “Excuse,” he mouthed, when she gave a small touched cry. There was a long gash traversing his back from the left shoulder blade to his waist at his right side, and the rubbery material of his suit had rolled back and pulled the wound open. She tried to lift him, but his weight was too great, and all she succeeded in doing was to push him over into the sand. She straddled him and pulled at his long thick arm, trying to turn him over, but that too was impossible. Flat as he looked spread out on the sand, with long thin legs and a midsection that had no depth, he was still enormously heavy. She jumped away from him and looked out into the sea. Abuwolowo was coming in toward the shore and she frantically waved and shouted, throwing her long pigtail and the points of her body in spastic jerks until he rode his board up onto the beach. “There’s a man hurt here,” she said, turning her back to him until the sand blasting up from the vehicle’s air jets had subsided.

“Man?” Abuwolowo questioned, but he heaved at the collapsed figure. “He’s as heavy as a whale. It’s no use, I’ll go up to the house and get help.” He ran off in long loping strides that brought him to the elevator in the cliff with an instantaneous violation of distance that was dreamlike. She stayed to watch her charge, fascinated by the long breaths he took. Easy inhalations that moved down his length in a wave from his chest to midriff in a series that seemed to never stop. One breath starting before the other had finished.

She waited silently, forgoing her usual monkey chatter to herself, eschewing fashion in the presence of the impassive white straw-colored hair, whose only life showed in the delicate flutter of petal nostrils. Finally, after no time had passed for her, Abuwolowo returned with four of the servants, strong squat men from neighboring Aegean islands. Puffing, their legs bowed under the weight, they half carried, half dragged the wounded man to the elevator and folded him into it under Abuwolowo’s direction. Abuwolowo climbed over him, and braced between the walls, walked up the sides of the car until he was perched above the body. He held the up button down with a strong toe, the doors closed, and the elevator whirred invisibly away.

Greta had prepared for dinner, dressing and making her face up with unusual care, and was coming down the great ramp that swept into the entrance hall when she heard her brother-in-law talking to some of the guests. She stopped, amused, he was not really talking, but lecturing in a voice that his Kirghiz accent made even more didactic than he intended.

“Amazing,” he was saying, “the recuperative powers they have. After we had gotten him off the kitchen truck, and onto the largest reclining ottoman in the casual room, he sat right up. He smiled at me. He stretched.” Her brother-in-law paused, either overcome with amazement or staring down someone who appeared to be about to interrupt. “As I was saying,” he went on in measured periods, “He stretched.”

Greta could not resist her chance. She slipped down the ramp, and crossed to the speaker. “He stretched, and then what?”

Hauptman-Everetsky gave her the limited courtesy of his chill smile. “He stretched, and his water suit opened up and came off like a banana skin. He checked under his arm, the gill slit, you know, and climbed off the ottoman. He ignored me and turned around, and the cut was healed. There was only a thin line to show where it had been.”

Greta moved away, not waiting to hear the inevitable repetition and embellishments her brother-in-law would give to his reactions. She passed through the archway that led to the casual room, undisturbed by the slight malfunction of the pressure curtain that allowed a current of air to lift the hem of her long skirt.

The man from the sea was standing in front of the panoramic glass watching the slow turning of the sights from the islands’ perimeter. A passing flow of scenery that was magnified and diminished by the tastes programmed into the machine. Just at this moment it was dwelling on the lights of the skyscrapers of Salonika. He was engrossed, but her cousin Rolf was questioning him with his usual inquisitiveness. Dwarfed by the figure next to him, he blurted questions in his fluting high American tones.

The question she heard as she approached was, “And you came all that way?” Rolf’s voice did not hold disbelief, it held pleasure, a childish love for a reaccounting of adventure.

“Surely,” the huge man said, “I have said it. I came from outside Stavangafjiord. I was following an earth current. I hoped it might teach me something about the halibut’s breeding. But I felt that was foolish, and so I hunted down the coast until I came to here.” He turned back to the glass to catch the artistic dwindling of the city as the machine withdrew his view to a great height. “And,” he said, coming politely back to his interrogator, “And the dolphins told me, when they were racing off Normandy, that the waters here were warm, and” he paused, noticing Greta, “and the women beautiful, with yellow hair, and brown limbs.”

Greta nodded. “You’re very kind. But I do not have your name.”

“Gunnar Bjornstrom-Cousteau, of the dome Walshavn.” He bowed, and she noticed how curious he looked covered by evening clothes. The short open jacket that barely reached the stretch tights exposed the rectangular expanse of his chest, a smooth fall of flesh without muscle definition that made her remember the tallow layer of fat his wound had exposed. She shuddered, and he asked, “Does my face disturb you?” and for the first time she noticed that his skin was peeling, and there were angry red welts under his chin. “I was careless to take such a long trip without going under the lamps at home first. But then I did not intend to come into the air then. I am not used to the sunlight.”

“Into the air?” Rolf was off again, but Greta stopped him.

“Dinner must be ready.” She took the stranger’s arm. “Will you take me in?” With Rolf tagging along behind, shaking his head and bouncing every few steps to see if he could bring himself to the sea giant’s height, they entered the dining room.

The dining room was at the top of the chateau. It was open on all sides, and protected from the weather by polarized static fields that were all but invisible and brought the stars too plainly close.

“That fish.” Hauptman-Everetsky had passed from awe to condescension, as he answered someone’s question. “I could not throw him back like an undersized trout.” He gestured. “And it’s about time we had some amusement. We are beginning to bore one another.”

Greta felt her companion stiffen, and held onto his arm tighter. He bent his head to her, and said, “Do not fear, I will not fall. It is long since I have walked. I must become accustomed to being unsupported by the friendly weight of water.” She noticed that he stressed the word friendly, and remembered that one of the few things she had heard about the underwater people was that they had brought back dueling. In the infinite reaches of the sea the enforcement of organized law was difficult, encounters with the orca and the shark common, and the lessons they taught strong.

Yet her companion was smiling at Everetsky and his circle of friends, shaking hands with him firmly, and appraising the women. “At least I will not be bored,” he said, staring at her sister Margreta’s painted chest. Greta took his arm again, relieved, and glad she had chosen to wear her blue gown that completely covered all of her except her hands and face.

“Are we going to sit down now, Carl?” she said to Everetsky, and he led the way to the table, placing Gunnar at his right and her at his left.

The dinner went smoothly enough at first, the early conversation centered around the futility of investing money in the Moon mines, and the necessity of mollifying the government with sums small enough to be economic and yet larger than mere tokens. All of the men from the rich steppes and Russian mountain regions had recommendations: lobbyists to recommend, purveyors of formuli to complain about, and complaining tales of corruption. While Rolf was concluding a story that centered on a bribed official who refused to honor his obligations without further payments that would have nullified the capital payments he had agreed to save, he rediscovered Gunnar’s spherical face amid the contrasting ground of the tanned guests with their pointed chins.

“Nasty little fellow he was—dishonest as the day is long.” Rolf stopped. “But you, my seaman friend, you don’t understand any of this?”

“I,” Bjornstrom-Cousteau burbled laughter, “do not understand these problems, but we have our own with the government.” He seemed to like Rolf, but he spoke to his host. “They are difficult to explain.”

“I suppose so,” Abuwolowo spoke, “but tell us anyway.”

Gunnar shrugged, and the massive table trembled slightly as he shifted his knees. “They want us to farm more, and hunt less.”

“Why not?” Abuwolowo challenged, “In the past my people adjusted to the changing times. They learned to farm and to work in factories.”

“Yes.” He was quiet for a moment. “I suppose some day we must, but as Hagar the poet sang—”

“Poets.” Abuwolowo dismissed them. “We were talking of the government here.”

“Hagar said,” the sea guest went on, inevitable as the tides, pleasurably quoting a beloved line, “The sea change suffered by we; Cannot make the airmen think free.” He chanted on, squaring his shoulders to expose more of his pale flesh, “For we have chosen deep being, not the ease of their far seeing.” He stopped to stare out into the night with the depthless stare of his great dilated pupils.

Rolf, always jolly, rubbed his hands together, sniffing at the next course. “Ah, domestic venison,” he said, changing the subject, cutting Abuwolowo’s rejoinder short. “But our new guest doesn’t seem to be eating much, and mine host’s cook is excellent.”

“The food is cooked,” Gunnar said, as if it explained everything. It explained too much, and when he caught the expression on Hauptman-Everetsky’s face he stood up and excused himself. “I am still tired from healing my hurts. You will excuse me.” The last was a statement, not a question, and he left, moving with a tired lagging stride. His powerful body pushed down by the force of unrelieved gravity.

* * * *

Morning came, and the first thing Greta did was to look for Gunnar. She had left the dinner party soon after him and started for his room, but Abuwolowo had overtaken her, and she had gone with him. Now she searched the gardens, moving through the regions of climate. She found him in the subtropical section standing in front of a red rubber plant grown to treelike proportions. He was fingering a paddle-sized leaf, pressing his finger tips deep into it as he regarded it with slightly parted lips.

“Like meat,” he said. “Whale meat,” he said, smiling at the picture she made coming down the cedar chip path between the walls of greenery. “You look very pretty this morning.”

“And you looked like a child when you were touching that plant, with your mouth open as if you wanted to taste it.”

“It does look edible.” He gave the leaf a last squeeze that pressed liquid out onto his hands. He licked the juice and made a face, and she laughed happily to see the soft corrugations that wrinkled around his head. “Well, it is bitter,” he said defensively, and reaching out, lifted her off her feet and into the tree. “Bite it and see.”

Satisfied after she had clicked her teeth several times with mock gusto he set her down again, and she rubbed her sides. Seriously she looked up at him, appraising his bulk. “I was reading about you this morning,” she said, looking down with a strained intensity as if performing the unfamiliar task of following lines of print.

“So now I have become famous.”

“Oh, no,” she said, “In the encyclopedia. It says you are homo aquatic—”

“Homo aquaticus, one of the old words.” He touched her bare shoulder, “Yes, and one of the better.”

“That’s it,” she said, dwelling on the pronounciation, “Homo Aquaticus. And a long time ago a man named Cousteau said that you were to be.”

“Cousteau.”

“Yes,” she altered her pronounciation. “Cousteau. A relative?”

“He is dead, and my surname is the way you pronounced it the first time.”

“No matter,” she said, “I will show you the grounds now,” and took his arm. She started out chattering to him about the shrubbery, but she soon discovered that it was another subject she knew very little about. He was naturally silent, and her thoughts turned to the things she had found in the encyclopedia. It had said that the first colonies were set up in the Mediterranean. The warm water was perfect for man, and the sudden mistral-born storms were no trouble ten fathoms in the sea. The underwater colonies raised sea slugs, and clams, farmed algae and adapted fruits and hunted the smaller whales with hand weapons. She had read very quickly, scanning down the page in s-curves in her hurry to go and meet him, but womanlike, she did remember some things about human births under the sea. The children were born into the pressures they would live under, fitted with gill mechanisms that took oxygen from the water, and subjected to chemotherapies that prepared them for their lives.

“But why do you live in the cold seas in the north?” she asked. The question was an outgrowth of her thoughts, yet he seemed to know what she meant.

“Because so many of our people live here?” he went on without needing to have an answer. “My great-grandfather felt the bottoms were becoming too crowded, that the life would become too easy, and so, we left.” He swiveled his head to sniff at the sea, offering her a view of the seal folding of his neck. “And now we could not live here at all. We have changed our bodies, and we have learned to love the hunt.”

“But you come to the waters off this island.”

“I came only for a short hunt. I would have returned very soon.”

Further conversation was cut short by the interesting spectacle of wide-eyed gardeners dodging into the bushes to avoid their advance. The servants variously crossed themselves, or made the sign of the horns; some of them did both. They knew, if Greta did not, that there was a conflict between the sea peoples and the dwellers on the land. Servants listened to political conversations, but eighteen-year-old girls of good family were expert in oblivious attention. The gardeners had heard from the house staff how the world government in New Kiev, on the Baltic, was demanding more taxes in algae proteins from the independent sea states. Some of the servants’ relatives had served in the fleets of small boats equipped with grapple buckets that were sent in punitive expeditions against the algae beds and the sea slug pens. The duty was dangerous, the seamen darted to the surface in spurting pushes from shallows to rocks and overturned boats, they cut the grapple cables, and tied derisive messages to their severed ends. What the raiders did capture was diseased, or of thin stock that had gone to seed.

The servants did not hate the seamen, they feared them as they feared the storms, and rages of nature. They did not respect them as they did their masters: the seamen were unnatural feats of nature. Not to be dealt with except through the practice of the magics that had come back in the few short years of barbarism after the Two Months War.

Gunnar had some idea of what the men who had run away were thinking, but that part of the problem did not concern him. After all, his dome did not farm enough to be involved in the commercial disputes. He looked at Greta. She was still caught up in the uniqueness of the servants’ scuttling disappearance.

“It has been a long time since we went into the sea,” he said, touching her on the shoulder again, knowing that physical contacts reassured her, “and they do not remember us. We are strangers.” She leaned her weight against his side as soon as he had touched her, he noticed, and she made many movements with her hips and torso, but he attached no significance to her wriggling.

Greta became silent and swayed away from him. She had worked the individual muscles her governesses had trained her to use. Trained in long gymnasium sessions when she was young for the pleasurable obligations of adulthood, she accepted her expertness, and was piqued by his callous indifference. She almost believed that the sea women were more expert, but, on second thought, she disregarded that. Her instructors, and Abuwolowo, had assured her that she was perfectly trained in the amatory arts.

Hadji Abuwolowo Smyth watched them from a freestanding balcony that projected, fingerlike, out over the gardens. “The girl is infatuated with the Fish,” he thought. “It is nothing more than his difference.” Abuwolowo remembered the long hours of dancing that had trained him. The great factories that his parents managed, and Greta’s brother-in-law’s desire for new markets for his heavy machinery, and concluded that he had nothing to worry about. He went into the house to have a suppling rubdown to prepare him for the prelaunch wrestling.

Every day all the young men but Rolf wrestled for the amusement of the other guests. They fought in a combination of styles, jiu-jitsu coupled with the less dangerous holds of Greco-Roman wrestling. They were full of energy, had little to do, and they passed the time waiting for the day when they would assume the managerial offices their parents held in the automatic factories.

Gunnar and Greta emerged from the tree-lined walk as the matches were about to start. Gunnar blinked, and rocked his head as the forenoon heat bit into his sunburn. Halting, he made an effort; Gerta felt oil under her hand and saw his skin flex and knead. His pores opened and a smooth layer of clear oil covered his body. He took several more of his curiously peristaltic breaths, and with each one squeezed more protective fluid onto his skin.

“Now,” he said, as she let go of him, “We can go on, but first tell me what is happening here.”

“They are wrestling,” Greta said shortly, either still angry at his unresponsiveness, or caught up in the combat.

They watched Hadji Abuwolowo win the first fight easily. Throwing his opponent with a hip toss and pinning him with a leap. The Nigerian nodded to Greta with a victory grin on his face. “And you, Fish,” he said, “Do you wrestle?”

“Not with you,” Gunnar said politely, intending to imply that Smyth was too practiced a hand for his small skill.

“I am not a worthy opponent,” Abuwolowo chose to misunderstand him. “Or perhaps you are afraid?”

Gunnar felt Greta’s small hand in his back and walked forward onto the sanded turf looming more and more over Abuwolowo as he went. The Nigerian regretted his impetuousness for a split second, but compensated with a bound that was intended to carry him to the seaman’s head. The leap was successful, but his ear-grab hold was not. There was nothing to grip. Gunnar’s ears were tiny, and set deep into his skull. Their pavilions were vestigial, the auditory canals covered by membranes, and the skin oil slippery. Abuwolowo’s planned knee drive spun him over on his back, and he lay spraddled with his ludicrous failure driving his anger. Rolling backward he bounced up once and came down to jump flat through the air with his legs doubled. Just as he straightened to strike his adversary with the full force of his flight, and kicking legs, Gunnar dropped under the trajectory, folding with the flexibility of an eel. Abuwolowo skidded along the ground, and rolled over to rub sand into his hands. He looked up, and found himself looking at Gunnar’s back, certain that the man had not moved his feet. It was too much for him, but his urge to kill made him calculating. He stood up and ran, with short hunter’s steps, silently to Gunnar’s back, and unleashed an axe-like swing at the neck using the full strength of his wide shoulders. The edge of his hand struck and rebounded, but he was gratified to note that he had staggered Gunnar.

“You forget your title, Hadji,” Gunnar said in deeper tones than he had used before. Abuwolowo moved forward a shuffling half step and was thrown four or five feet backward by an open-handed slap he did not see start. When he recovered himself, Gunnar was standing stock still, waiting. It was too late to go back, and he charged hopelessly. He felt the long flexible arms, as thick at the wrist as the shoulder, reach out to pick him up, but he could do nothing about it, even though they appeared to be moving very slowly. For a minute Gunnar held him in a strangely compassionate embrace, but then threw him into the air straight up. He felt himself rise, and he floated for a long interval, but when he fell he could remember no more.

Hauptman-Everetsky leaped to his feet and ran forward, but Gunnar was there before him. He knelt by Abuwolowo’s side and twisted him in his hands.

“Guards,” Everetsky screamed, and fearlessly rushed toward the seaman.

“Stop,” Gunnar’s words were commanding, either out of their awesome depth, or because of the certainty of knowledge. “He will be all right. His back was hurt, but I have fixed it.” These last words were the ones that broke Everetsky’s code of hospitality. They were too much like a repair man speaking about a robot toy.

He stammered, peering out of slitted eyes that accentuated his Mongol blood, but Gunnar could only commend his control. His first thought was to stop the guards.

“Back, quiet now,” Everetsky’s diction was irregular, but his pitch was properly adjusted to the command tone of the mastiffs. The dogs, with the metallic crowns of their augmented skulls glittering, turned back and sat in their places under the chateau wall, once more becoming statues. Now that his first duty was accomplished, he could come back to the business of Gunnar.

“Sir,” he said, and now his voice was under control, “You have injured one of my guests. That would be permissible, but it is certain to happen again. There is enmity between you and him, and,” he paused, to collect himself, “I must be truthful, I do not like your kind myself. I ask you to leave. If you feel yourself insulted I offer you satisfaction.”

“You are a brave man,” Gunnar said, and with a sudden baring of his teeth. “Well fleshed too, so the spoils might be worth the fight, but your way is not ours. I cannot ask you to sport with me.” He showed Everetsky his teeth, opening his lips back to his neck, and dropping the hinges of his jaw. “I would have to ask you into the water so that we could play, and,” he asked with icy rhetoric humor that amused no one but him, “what chance would you take?”

“Thank you,” Everetsky said, not holding his contempt. “But I must nevertheless ask you when you will leave my house.”

“I ask your indulgence to wait until tonight when the tide is good.” Everetsky nodded, and the seaman turned and walked toward the beach path as if he remembered using it before.

Down on the beach Gunnar studied the water, watching for the signs of the incoming tide: sea-wrack would soon be tossed up onto the shore, pieces of the sea’s jetsam, thrown there to waste away on the cleansing shore. The dead seaweeds, fish and bubbles would soon push ahead of the growing combers to outline the demarcation between his domain and Everetsky’s. “Lubber,” he said, “you do not understand,” and stopped, putting his hand, palm down, flat on the sand. He felt the vibrations of approaching feet.

Two servants appeared carrying his water suit, signaling their trepidation with stiff backs and firm jaws. Behind them came two more servingmen, and a kitchen maid. The bearers put his suit down at his feet, at a distance they thought out of the radius of his arms. They backed off and squatted on their heels to wait for the others to come up, remaining, guardedly watching him, until the woman and her companions reached them.

“Greetings to you,” Gunnar said when the woman had come to a halt, spreading her legs to balance the weight of a waist thickened by years of carrying full water jars up steps cut from island rock.

“Greetings,” she said, in a Greek dialect as bastardized as the letters that appeared on ancient Scythian coins. She alone observed him with equanimity.

“Speak,” he said, viewing a full half circle of the beach and horizon, moving his eyes independently. He knew what was coming; three times now he had performed this rite.

She waddled up to him, pointing the forefinger of her left hand at his face. When it touched his closed mouth a rapturous look transformed her thickened features and the Attic awe encompassed her functioning. Obediently he opened his lips, and, with a sharp snap, clipped the end of her finger off. The nauseating taste of warm blood, and dirty fingernail, filled his mouth, but he swallowed quickly and spoke again.

“I have accepted. Speak.”

The woman could not resist looking back at her entourage with triumph, and Gunnar thought, “Poor fellows, now she is a full-fledged witch, ugly and to be obeyed in all things.” She would have the ultimate power over her fellows. Commands were to be her normal mode of speech. The mere pointing of her maimed hand, a gesture of pollarded horns, could call a man to her bed, or a maid to his; but, more important, it would fuse the serfs into a unit. They would be a group that would respond to the messages of Gunnar’s people when the time came. He knew that the inheritors and owners of the Earth understood their world very well from its blueprints; but they could not find the switches and valves and all the simple tools to work them.

“Did you speak your true thoughts when you promised to eat the master, Great Fish?”

Gunnar made the obligatory answer. “You have prayed to us.”

“Demon of Poseidon, my people would be saved.” She too was familiar with the ritual.

“I am no demon, but a servant,” he rose to his feet, and gave the toothy yawn that had impressed Everetsky. “Poseidon wants more servants who love the sea.”

“We will accept.”

Gunnar bit a piece of blubber from his forearm and spit it into the cup of her waiting hands. Immediately she kissed it ritually and squirreled it into the dirty fold of her blouse.

“When the appointed time is come I will return.” He watched them go, the woman leading, and the men with their heads inclined to the woman.

Gunnar was ashamed of himself, not for his threats to his host and their outcome. He had planned that series of happenings, and had, in fact, played this role many times before. His people could not hope to fight the land dwellers if a war was to be fought on the basis of numbers and equipment. The sea cities were very vulnerable, the simplest sort of guided torpedo could destroy the domes, and economic sanctions would quickly disrupt the lives of the ocean bed farmers and their cities. He was not ashamed of his tactics, but of the unmanly squeamishness which had overtaken him. To feel his stomach turn at the mere taste of human kind. It was true that the heavy starch diet of the airbreathers and the dark cooked meats they ate gave their flesh an unpleasant, alien taste, but it was not so different from the savor of enemies he had killed in the days-long hunting duels in his homeground.

He stopped his train of thought and studied the sea with heightened awareness. Wondering what disturbed him would do no good. He knew it would be better to relax, but the strange dislocation of his abilities was still with him. He breathed deeply, sucking great mouthfuls of air, and held them until his chest and diaphragm puffed out in a rotund bladder. Slowly he let the air escape through his nostrils, a silent flow of aspiration, until any observer would have noticed the change in his posture. Everything about his body was lax, his legs lay separately on the sand, and his head lolled, but the eyes were alive. They turned in their sockets independently scanning the surface of the sea. It was a look born in the middle twentieth century studies of frogs’ nervous systems. There were circuits spliced into the optical nerves that bypassed the brain and fed the sorted visual stimuli back to the eye muscles. Only the significant motions on the surface of the sea were allowed to reach the brain.

After a few seconds of this activity Gunnar’s legs twitched, his eyelids drooped, and the eyes themselves seemed to withdraw back into the skull. He brought his knees up, and hugged them, sitting in this childlike posture with a broad grin on his face.

“Hauptman-Everetsky was foolish,” he thought as he changed his position to stand, moving in a serpentine flow that ended in a run toward the surf. His last thoughts before he hit the water in a flat dive were of his hunger, and a mental note to come back to the beach to see if his calculations about Greta were correct. He hit near the bottom of a wave and let the undertow carry him toward the sudden deep just beyond the breakers. Turning in a free somersault he pushed for the boulder-filled bottom and found a current that carried him between the rocks. As he estimated his speed he slowed himself by pressing his heels into the sand, touching at chosen points much like a professional polo player guides his pony with touches of his spurs. When he saw the bathysphere that Everetsky had ordered sunk, he momentarily regretted not wearing his swim fins, but he did not dwell on the thought. It could hold no more than three men, he thought, and swam toward its hatch.

The three guards saw him as soon as he came into the bathysphere’s circle of light. They started out the open hatch. Gunnar caught the first man by the scruff of his neck as he came out, but they had expected to use the vanguard as a delay to allow others to come up on him. What they had not allowed for was the simplicity of Gunnar’s tactics. He held the man like a kitten and plucked the mouthpiece of his oxygen recirculator out of his face, pointed him toward the bottom, and, with a wide hand spread across his buttocks, pushed him under trampling feet. The second man tried to divert him with a shot from his speargun. Gunnar, feeling foolishly inept for his slowness, ducked and caught it just over his shoulder, and drove the blunt staff into the marksman’s solar plexus. He hauled this opponent out by a flopping arm, without time to watch his agonized contortions. The third member of Everetsky’s murder party refused to join the combat. Gunnar showed his grinning face at an illuminated port, and disappeared to the top of the sphere. He took the cable ring in his hands and, threshing his legs, swam the bathysphere over onto its side. With a little adjustment the hatch fitted neatly into the bottom and Gunnar surveyed his handiwork before he swam to the man curled up on the bottom with his legs doubled up over his stomach. No matter how he struggled, the man felt himself being drawn straight out. A round face, suspended inches from his mask gently studied his last reactions.

* * * *

The beach was deserted when Greta finally escaped from the chateau to look for the seaman. She kicked a puff of sand into the night breeze in exasperation and would have left, but she saw something break out of the water amid a froth of incoming waves. A second later she could see Gunnar’s figure wading ashore. He bent and reached under the water, and taking a handful of sand wiped it across his mouth. As he drew closer she could see the flicker of his tongue picking at the crevices in his teeth.

“Hello,” she said, not finding anything else to say for the moment, and wrapped her long cloak tighter around her.

“Hello,” he said, noticing her shivers. “Come, you are not used to the night air without screens to protect you.” He led the way to the shelter of the cliff, and continued. “What are you doing here?”

Greta did not know, except that she was attracted to him, and that he was the first man she could remember feeling anything but familiarity for, but she said, “Well, you beat Abuwolowo so easily.”

“In the jousts of love,” Gunnar said declaratively, having thought better of finishing his statement questioningly.

Greta gave him her best arch smile. “But I could talk my brother-in-law into letting you stay. He owes something to me.”

Gunnar would have told her about the affair he had just ended in the sea, but the strange repugnance overtook him again. “He would not really want me,” he said, but even he, not given to nuances of this sort, noticed the hesitant tone in his own voice.

“But his concern is always for the amusement of his guests,” Greta said, and giggled fetchingly at some private joke, “and they are getting bored. Very bored,” she said masterfully.

“And I would soon be boring too. Little Greta.” He rumpled her hair with a touch of rough power, and she stepped closer to him.

“You couldn’t bore me. Ever.” She turned her face up and Gunnar saw the plumb line of her throat. Thin, but adolescently rounded with a touching surplus of young fat. The strongest rules of his dialectic told him that he should destroy her as an incipient breeder.

“No,” he said, “I can do better.” He explained himself to the elders in the dome under the sea.

Greta was tired of waiting for an embrace that never came. She changed her posture, and spoke with irritation. “What was that?”

“Nothing.” Plausibly, he said, “I must go back to my family. I have been gone very long.”

“Your wife you mean.”

“I am too young to swim in the breeding tides.”

The metaphor’s meaning escaped Greta, but the surface of the statement could be turned into the small victory of a compliment.

“You will come back when you are ready?”

Gunnar found the source of his weakness. Somehow she had taught him to find the meaning behind simple words. He smiled.

“Of course. Where else would there be for me to go now?”

Greta had forgotten all her careful training: the sophistications that her governesses had taught her. She beamed, threw her arms around his waist, and leaned her head on his sternum. “Thank you,” she said, appreciating a compliment with coquetry.

“You are very welcome,” Gunnar said, and managed to keep his laughter out of his voice. “But you can do me a favor.” Before he spoke he studied the water. Now he must leave, he decided, and turned back to her. “It is very simple.” He said, “Remember to tell your brother-in-law this: war will be fought in places he has not yet thought of.”

“Yes?” Greta said, bewildered.

“No more.” Gunnar patted her head kindly, and sat down, smoothed his suit onto his body, and put his fins on his feet. When he had his mask in place he could no longer speak and he walked silently into the breakers to vanish. Later that same night he talked with the porpoises, chased a school of silvery fish out into the moonlight and then dove to flirt in swirls in a whirlpool current that spun him out in the direction of home.

Greta gave Hauptman-Everetsky her cryptic message; he took little notice of it, and she remembered less and less of Gunnar with the passing years. When she did recall, it was too late; the figures coming out of the surf, to be greeted by the servants, were not Gunnar, but triumphant victors. The island was without power, the servants in revolt, and nostalgia was not a shield.

The war had been fought; neither she nor her brother-in-law had known it. In the subterranean tunnels the ripped ends of power cables spluttered hopeless sparks, water poured from torn mains, and bells and voices, however loud, brought no servants back from their welcoming songs. The always obedient chattels only watched, with blank dark eyes, as the fish came to play their game with Greta.