In the cool of the morning he repaired the raft. The slow working of the tide had loosened the lashings and some of the boards were rotting. It would do for the lagoon, but as he worked he thought of the Swarmers crawling ashore at the last island. The big things had been slow and clumsy, and with Gijan’s pistol the men would have an advantage, but there were only two of them. They could never cover the whole island. If the Swarmers came the raft might be the only escape they had.
He brought the fishing gear aboard and cast off. Gijan saw him and came running down the hard white sand. Warren waved. Gijan was excited and jabbering and his eyes rolled back and forth from Warren to the break in the reef. He pulled out his pistol and waved it in the air. Warren ran up the worn canvas sail and swung the boom around so that the raft peeled away from the passage and made headway along the beach, around the island. When he looked back Gijan was aiming the pistol at him.
Warren frowned. He could not understand the man. After a moment when Gijan saw that he was running steady in the lagoon, the pistol came down. Warren saw the man put the thing back in his pocket and then set to work laying his lines. He kept enough wind in the sail to straighten the pull and move the bait so it would look as though it were swimming.
Maybe he should have drawn a sketch for Gijan. Warren thought about it a moment and then shrugged. An aft line jerked as something hit it, and Warren forgot Gijan and his pistol and played in the catch.
He took four big fish in the morning. One had the striped back and silvery belly of a bonito and the others he did not recognize. He and Gijan ate two and stripped and salted the others, and in the afternoon he went out again. Standing on the raft he could see the shadows of the big fish as they came into the lagoon. A Skimmer darted in the distance and he stayed away from it, afraid it would come for the trailing lines. After a while he remembered that they had never hit his lines in the ocean, so then he did not veer the raft when the Skimmer leaped high nearby, rolling over in that strange way. Gijan was standing on the glaring white beach, Warren noticed, watching. Another leap, splashing foam, and then a tube rattled on the boards of the raft.
SHIMA STONES CROSSING SAFE YOUTH
WORLD NEST UNSSPRACHEN SHIGANO YOU SPRACHEN YOUTH UM! HIRO SAFE NAGARE CIRCLE UNS SHIO WAIT
WAIT YOU
LUCK
Warren came ashore with it and Gijan reached for the slick sheet. The man moved suddenly and Warren stepped back, bracing himself. The two stood still for a moment, staring at each other. Gijan’s face compressed and intent. Then in a controlled way Gijan relaxed, making a careless gesture with his hands and helped moor the raft. Warren moved the tube and sheet from one hand to the other and finally, feeling awkward, handed them to Gijan. The man read the words slowly, lips pressed together. “Shima,” he said. “Shio. Nagare. Umi.” He shook his head and looked at Warren, his lips forming the words again silently.
They drew pictures in the sand. For SHIMA Gijan sketched the island and for UMI the sea around it. In the lagoon he drew wavy lines in the water and said several times, “Nagare.” Across the island he drew a line and then made swooping motions of bigness and said, “Hiro.”
Warren murmured, “Wide island? Hiro shima?” but aside from blinking Gijan gave no sign that he understood. Warren showed him a rock for STONE and drew the Earth for WORLD, but he was not sure if that was what the words on the sheet meant jammed in with the others. What did blackening in the w of WORLD mean?
The men spoke haltingly to each other over the booming on the reef. The clusters of words would not yield to a sensible plan and even if it had, Warren was not sure he could tell Gijan his part of it, the English smattering of words, or that Gijan could get across to him the foreign ones. He felt in Gijan a restless energy now, an impatience with the crabbed jumble of language. WAIT WAIT YOU and then LUCK. It seemed to Warren he had been waiting a long time now. Even though this message had more English and was clearer, there was no way for the Skimmers to know what language Warren understood, not unless he told them. Frowning over a diagram Gijan was drawing in the floury sand, he realized suddenly why he had made the bark mash last night.
It took hours to write a message on the back of the sheet. A bamboo quill stabbed the surface, but if you held it right it did not puncture. The sour black ink dripped and ran, but by pinning the sheet flat in the sun he got it to dry without a lot of blurring.
SPEAK ENGLISH. WILL YOUTH COME HERE? ARE WE SAFE FROM YOUTH ON ISLAND? SHIMA IS ISLAND IN ENGLISH. WHERE ARE YOU FROM? CAN WE HELP YOU? WE ARE FRIENDLY.
LUCK
Gijan could not understand any of it or at least he gave no sign. Warren took the raft out again at dusk as the wind backed into the north and ebbed into fitful breezes. The sail luffed and he had trouble bringing the raft out of the running lagoon currents and toward the spot where flickering shadows played across the white expanse of a sandbar. A Skimmer leaped and turned as he came near. He held the boom to catch the last gusts of sunset wind, and when the shadows were under the raft he threw the tube into the water. It bobbed and began to drift out toward the passage to the sea as Warren waited, watching the shadows, wondering if they had seen it, knowing he could not now catch the tube with the raft before it reached the reef, and then a quick flurry of motion below churned the pale sand and a form came up ripping the smooth water as it leaped. The Skimmer flexed in air and hung for an instant, rolling, before it fell with a smack and was gone in an upwash of bright foam. The tube was gone.
That night the mosquitoes came again and drove them into the rocky ground near the center of the island in the morning their hands were blood-streaked where they had slapped their faces and legs in the night and caught the fat mosquitoes partway through their eating.
In the morning Warren went out again and laid his lines as early as possible. Near the sandbar there were many fish. One of them hit a line, and when Warren pulled it in the thing had deep-set eyes, a small mouth like a parrots beak, slimy gills, and hard blue scales. He pressed at the flesh and a dent stayed in it for a while, the way it did if you squeezed the legs of a man with leprosy or dropsy. The thing smelled bad as it warmed on the planks so he threw it back, pretty sure it was poisonous. It floated and a Skimmer leaped near it and then took the thing and was gone. Warren could see more Skimmers moving below. They were feeding on the poison fish.
He caught two skipjack tuna and brought them ashore for Gijan to clean. The man was watching him steadily from the beach and Warren did not like it. The thing between him and the Skimmers was his, and he did not want any more of the stupid drawing and hand waving of trying to explain it to Gijan.
He went into the palm grove where the fire crackled and got the diving mask he had seen in Gijan’s box. It was made for a smaller head, but with the rubber strap drawn tight he could ride it up against the bridge of his nose and make it fit. As he came back down to the beach Gijan said something but Warren went on to the raft and cast off, bearing in the southerly wind out toward the sandbar. He grounded the raft on the bar to hold it steady.
He lay on the raft and peered down at the moving shapes. They were at least five fathoms down and they had finished off the poison fish. Seven Skimmers hovered over a dark patch, rippling their forefins where the bony ridges stuck out like thick fingers. Sunlight caught a glint from the thing they were working on and suddenly a gout of gray mist came up from it and broke into bubbles. It was steam.