But for what capering reason, wondered Edward, does he settle on a cardboard carton? Why not a hubcap? Why not an immense shoe? And which — he began to wonder again, piling doubt upon doubt, suspicion upon suspicion — which was madder the lunatic, innocent of design, content to go about town in a cardboard carton, or the man, like himself, who has begun to develop peculiar suspicions, understands their peculiarity, and pursues them anyway? It was too much for him. He admitted it. There was no profit in worrying about madness. It was like fate and would search you out if it chose to. Sanity was a shell which might one day — for a lark, probably — crumble, leaving you picking straws from your hair, wearing candy cartons for hats.
Edward had fired Yamoto on the pretext that he had developed a passion for yardwork. Then he had immediately hired a new gardener, a Dutchman named Teeslink, who hacked the foliage in the front yard into ruin, satisfied with his pruning only when each bush had been reduced to a couple of ribby twigs. Edward lived in fear that Yamoto would show up to clip the Pembly lawn while Teeslink was underway on his own. Or even worse, that William would appear, phenomenally, from down the chimney or through an open manhole, and would recognize Teeslink, too, as a threat, in league with Hilario Frosticos. Damn all threats. Edward was tempted to wash his hands of the entire affair. But he knew he couldn’t.
Professor Latzarel arrived, slamming to such a stop at the curb that his Land Rover shuddered and lurched. He was in a state. There’d been a monumental discovery. The newspapers would be full of it. Mermen, it seemed, had been popping up like wildflowers, like sand fleas.
“Mermen!” cried Edward, forgetting all recent doubts. “How many of them?”
Latzarel calmed down. “Well, it’s not certain. Two at least.”
“Oh,” said Edward.
“But two might just as well be an army. And on opposite sides of the world. Listen to this; I got it from Lassen a half hour ago on the phone. A gilled man washed ashore on Madagascar. He lay on a beach on the west coast for a week before he was found. Sea birds had worked him over, but there wasn’t any doubt. He’s being shipped east to Los Angeles.”
Edward frowned.
“I know. That was my response entirely. Why Los Angeles? It had to have something to do with Oscar Pallcheck. So I set out across town on my way here, and look what I find in the Times.” Latzarel produced a newspaper and flopped it open. There in the bottom corner of the front page was an article captioned “Catalina Merman,” and a short, vaguely ridiculing article concerning yet another supposedly gilled human, far gone in decay, discovered by hikers on Catalina Island. “There’s the connection! I said to myself.” Latzarel tossed the newspaper onto the couch.
“You and I both know where that creature came from,” he continued. “Right out of the pool at Palos Verdes, that’s where. And he floated to Catalina on a current. Either that, or the seabed out there is peppered with tunnels. I half suppose that’s the case.”
The telephone rang. It was Ashbless. Yes, they’d seen the paper. Things were certainly afoot. He’d see them in a half hour. Edward hung up the phone, unaccountably and vaguely disturbed — suspicious of Ashbless for the same reason he’d fired Yamoto. It was William’s doing. Professor Latzarel, however, was enthusiastic. They’d need all the help they could muster, he said.
He pulled out a pocket calendar and began ticking off days. “How long until Jim goes back to school?”
“Almost a week,” said Edward. “The second of January.”
“Good. We’ll pack tonight. Call Squires; we’ll need his boat.”
“Where shall I tell him we’re going?” asked Edward.
“Catalina Island! I have the sneaking suspicion that we’re closing in on something here. That the pieces are falling into place. We’re closer to our goal than you suppose. Things are hotting up, and if you think Pinion isn’t going to be there to step in when we’re slack, you’re sadly mistaken. We’ve got to get the jump on him.”
When Jim wandered in that afternoon, he found the front porch heaped with camping gear and topographic maps, jackets and camera equipment, boxes of food and green steel canisters of drinking water. They spent the night aboard the Gerhardi, rolling on the swell. It was fearfully cold. Professor Latzarel and William Ashbless, hearty as a pair of geese, spent the better part of the evening on deck, talking and smoking in the wind, reminiscing about travels, about expeditions. A man hasn’t been cold, said Latzarel, until he’s been to the Pole. Jim swore he’d never go near the Pole. The deck of the Gerhardi was cold enough for him, and after half an hour there, attempting to maintain some semblance of spirit, he’d given up. It was impossible to imagine being colder. His fingers might as well have been wood, and the stocking cap did nothing to prevent the dull headache that seemed to be driven by the wind. So he spent most of the night in the cabin reading, knowing from experience that he wouldn’t get seasick unless he thought about it. At around midnight he decided to venture topside again.
A gray fog had misted in, thick and drizzly and dead still. Ashbless and Latzarel stood aft talking, but their voices were muted by the fog, and it sounded to Jim as if the voices wafted toward him from another realm, another dimension perhaps — as if he’d eaten one of Fu Manchu’s mushrooms and had receded into some murky closet of reality. He felt that he could push the fog out of his way with his hands, perhaps swim through it. Once his mind went to work, in fact, all sorts of possibilities filtered in, and he was possessed by the uncanny certainty that at any moment the bottle-eyed face of a vast airborne fish would materialize, mottled and dripping, searching for a door back into the sea.
Jim squinted, as if it had become suddenly dark, hoping that by squinting into the gloom he could somehow pierce it. There was, of course, nothing to be seen — nothing separated the Gerhardi from Catalina Island but the silent sea, slack and oily, pressed beneath the blanket of fog. It suddenly, occurred to him that the island might just as easily lie off the port side as off the starboard. He might be staring out toward nothing, toward the open sea. But it was all one. The night around him was a pale gray impenetrable wall.