Swamp Thing 1 Page 3

  “Not exactly,” he said. “Tell you what, if you’ll make a disturbance there in the middle, it’ll move toward one or the other of us.”

  Cable did as he suggested.

  Suddenly the man jumped and grabbed something under water. “Gotcha,” he said as he extracted a huge water rat with sleek black fur and angry red eyes. “Meet Alessandro,” he said. “He’s got a one-celled animal living in his fur that makes a terrific host.”

  Cable removed her hands from the water with deliberate slowness. “I’ll remember that next time I throw a party,” she quipped.

  “Not bad,” the man said with a chuckle. He patted the squirming wet animal on the head to calm it and walked back to the lab.

  The woman had a towel draped over one shoulder. She offered it to Cable, smiling apologetically. “You don’t have to be crazy to be around him—”

  “But it helps,” said Cable. “I can see that.” She extended a dry hand when she returned the towel. “I’m Alice Cable. New kid on the block. You guys part of Holland’s crew?”

  She laughed. “I’m Dr. Holland,” she said.

  Cable merely repeated, “You’re Dr. Holland.”

  “Not the Dr. Holland. That was Alec who carried Alessandro away. I’m Linda. He’s the brains in the family. I just cook up what he invents.”

  Alec Holland returned, drying his hands. “Don’t believe her. She’s got an IQ like a phone number.” He took Cable’s hand. “Hi,” he said again.

  “Hi,” she said. She could not take her eyes from his face. She could not have explained why—only that everything she saw there she liked.

  “I heard you say you have a sensor out,” he said. “Number three?”

  “Number three,” she said. “I don’t know how important it is, or what’s wrong with it, but the display says it’s malfunctioning.”

  “Want to take a look?”

  Cable felt a confusion that kept her from thinking at her usual level of efficiency. “Uh, I suppose I could ask Charlie to give me an escort.” She hoped she wasn’t smiling.

  “Maybe we could get your mother to come along, too,” said Alec with a grin. He laughed at her frown. “The only dangerous thing out there is the Government Eagle Scouts and their popguns.”

  Linda said, “He exaggerates.”

  Alec said, “You are the Alice Cable who unscrambled the Venus surface maps when nobody at JPL could manage it, aren’t you?”

  She nodded, amused.

  “The same Alice Cable who straightened out Dr. Haines’s biochemical data at Princeton?”

  “Amazing,” she said.

  “Then let’s go look at sensor number three. I’ll give you the Cook’s Tour. Ritter’s always after me to get some fresh air; he’ll be tickled pink.”

  “I don’t think Cook has swamp tours,” Cable said.

  “Then it’s a Holland tour.” He looked through the glass ceiling at the trace of sunlight that still rimmed the mossy old wall. “We have plenty of time to get there and back before dark.”

  The look on her face said: but why?

  He answered, “I want to show you my world.”

  4

  Ritter was nowhere in sight when Alec Holland hauled out the hidden blue coat and conscripted Bill Darkow to help carry it to the inlet.

  “Ritter said he wanted the boat to stay hidden,” Cable said, wondering what Alec’s reply would be: it would tell a lot about him, she suspected, and help her understand Ritter’s place here.

  “You can’t ride in a hidden boat,” Alec said simply. “He worries too much.”

  The boat sloshed into the water.

  “Keep an eye out for Sam,” Bill requested. “He must be out there somewhere.”

  “Will do,” said Alec as he pulled the starter of the outboard.

  As they chugged slowly down the widening inlet, Alec tossed Cable a bottle of insect repellent. “Put a little on your face and hands,” he suggested. “Mosquitos get desperate around sunset. Desperate and daring.”

  As the inlet widened, the cypress trees grew thicker and taller. Alec maneuvered slowly around the roots and trunks until the way ahead was open and sunlit. Then he fixed the rudder and leaned back in his seat. He opened his arms wide, as if to increase the area touched by the warm golden sunlight.

  “You look like a tree,” said Cable.

  “I think like a tree sometimes,” he said. “I know how they feel about sunlight and wind and rain and chills. See these cypresses? They’re the happiest trees in the world.”

  “The happiest,” she repeated, sort of understanding what he meant. “They tell you this?”

  “In a way. They make sounds, you know, and they move.” He noted her incredulous expression and became less fanciful. “Besides, how do you know when a person is happy? Certainly not when they tell you so. When they act like it.”

  “And the trees here act like it?”

  “Are you blind, woman? Look around you. Look at teeming, successful life. Happy life.”

  Unguided, the boat entered the water of the wide shallow lake. A small flock of flamingos touched down along a distant shore; their color was electric pink in the hot light of the setting sun. A white waterbird dived from a great height, scooped into the lake and rose, carrying away a fish. A cloud of dragonflies buzzed across the path of the quiet boat. Unlike Charlie, Bill, Ritter, and the others she had met, Alec belonged here, was accepted here.

  “Like the swamps?” he asked her.

  She hesitated. “Hate swamps,” she said finally. “Hate bugs. Hate things without legs.”

  He laughed. “You can’t tell me this isn’t beautiful.”

  “Well,” she said, grinning, “yes, it’s beautiful—at this very moment, at sunset, out in the open like this, with a guide I trust; but if I use a little imagination I could scare myself to death.”

  “Why’d you come?”

  “For one thing, somebody specifically requested that I be sent. For another—” She cut herself off and let her subconscious complete a thought. “Were you the one who requested me?”

  “Guilty,” he said. “They didn’t make you take the job, did they?”

  “No.” She did not feel like telling him more. Someday, perhaps, she would tell him how long his work, his career had fascinated her.

  Alec reached back and angled the motor so that they made a wide turn and headed back toward the peninsula. He aimed for a point some distance from the church, toward the tip of the finger of land.

  As the boat passed through a particularly shallow area, water plants scraped the bottom of the boat with a swishing sound.

  Cable looked over the side. Strands of dead weed caught on the bow and then slid away; they looked like snakes. “Ugh,” she said.

  “Neatness freak, huh?”

  She nodded. “You could eat off my kitchen floor.”

  He chuckled. “You could eat off this swamp. Maybe half the world could eat off this swamp, if only we knew how to manage the resources.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Everywhere I look I see mysteries. It’s a pyramid. For every one thing I learn, I find two new questions.”

  “Electronics is like that.” She laughed. “We could eat off the swamp, but it seems more likely that the swamp would like to eat us.”

  Alec shook his head, denying the dangers wordlessly.

  “What happened to the guy I’m replacing, for instance?” she asked.

  Alec sat up straight and said, a shade defensively, “Well, the guy stepped right on the gator’s head. The gator only did what came naturally. Who do you blame for that? It’s like wandering across the street in front of a bus, for God’s sake.”

  She smiled. “You do love it here, don’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  His eyes were too intense; she felt she had to look away. Then she realized that was only part of the problem: she knew two things the others did not want her to mention to Alec, two things that would hurt him.

  “What is i
t?” he probed, seeing something sad in her face.

  She looked at the red sun sandwiched between orange and amber clouds. “Have you talked to Charlie about the grant?” she asked.

  “Oh. I didn’t need to. If the committee had renewed our support, Charlie would have said that instead of hello. That won’t knock the props out from under me. I own part of the lab, and there’s money from other sources.”

  She smiled. “If that won’t do you in, maybe nothing else will, either. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Like what?”

  Like, Cable thought, you simply enjoy looking at me. “Oh, nothing,” she said.

  Alec slowed the engine further as he began to navigate the cypresses near the shore. The sun was almost down, and twilight had already reached the wooded land. Though they could not know it, Alec was threading his way along the exact route Sam Darkow had taken earlier in the afternoon.

  It became noticeably dimmer as the boat drifted under thick festoons of hanging moss. The side of the boat scraped by a cypress root.

  “Do we have a flashlight?” Cable asked.

  “There’s one in the tool kit under your seat. We shouldn’t need it, though.”

  “I’m taking it anyway.”

  Alec helped her to firm land and led her along a narrow path through dense foliage. He moved swiftly; she stayed several steps behind him.

  She paused once to look at her mud-caked feet. “I paid a fortune for these boots,” she muttered.

  He chuckled. “Better keep moving. There’s a fair amount of quicksand along here.”

  At that moment they heard distant voices.

  “Who’s that?” Cable asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Alec, his ear turned to the distance.

  A twig snapped from somewhere much closer.

  “Come on,” Alec urged.

  Cable pulled her sinking boot out of the mire with a huge sucking sound. “And I hate mud,” she said.

  “More than smog?” he asked wryly.

  “Probably.”

  “Keep your eyes open,” he said, as they hurried ahead, toward a brighter clearing in the trees.

  “What for?” she asked, wide-eyed, apprehensively.

  He bent low and scooped up a blossom that had been attached to a tree root. “One of these might jump out and get you.”

  As they came to a stop in the clearing he handed her the large wax-petaled flower.

  “It’s lovely,” she said. As she turned it over in her hands, she absently wiped mud off her shoe on a gnarled root that seemed designed for that purpose.

  “Look,” Alec instructed. He gestured toward mounds of flowers that were still visible and vibrant in the twilight. “There are over a hundred species of genus orchia here, growing like dandelions.”

  “Happy orchids, too,” she said with a chortle.

  “Yes. Happy orchids. There’s so much beauty in the swamps, if you open your eyes to it. You can’t see beyond the chaos, the mess.” He tapped her chest gently. “Look inside your own body, the most magnificent creation, and what do you see? Formica? Straight lines? Chrome and deodorant? Heck no, you see blood, bone, the pump and flow of a million messy miracles.” He took the orchid and stored it in his shirt pocket.

  “That’s true . . . but I’m more cerebral, I guess. I don’t live inside my body but inside my mind. No, that’s not fair, you do too. What I mean is that I think in right angles, circuits, the logic of electron flows; okay—chromium and Formica. And I like an ordered world around me.”

  He stepped closer to her and said softly, suggestively, “Look at the most creative thing a man and woman can do, and you’ll see things growing, unpredictable, magical . . . hot.”

  She pushed him away. “Save malarkey like that for your wife, Holland. Now, if you don’t mind, where’s that sensor?”

  He laughed. “Right over there.” He laughed again, as if the sensor were about to play some joke on her.

  They heard rustling in the underbrush again. This time they glimpsed a man running, stumbling away from them.

  “Who’s there?” Alec called out. “Sam?”

  The runner did not answer.

  There was a shout from somewhere deep in the swamp.

  “Who’s there?” Alec called again.

  Still there was no answer.

  Cable had reached the sensor and had lifted the hemispherical rain hood off of it. The array of instruments was clustered around a core which was attached to the pole that held the sensor about five feet from ground level. “Alec,” she said quietly. “Come look at this.”

  The wires connecting the modules had been cut. So had the lines to the telemetric transmitter.

  “Why would anybody want to do that?” Cable asked.

  Alec nodded. “I’m afraid I can imagine why someone might want to blind us and make us deaf. But who . . . when . . . and how did they get in and out unnoticed?”

  “I’m not sure they were unnoticed. We may have just noticed one of them. Why wouldn’t that guy answer?”

  “Do you have any way of determining when this was cut?” he asked.

  Cable nodded. “If your system is engineered the way I think it is, there’s a built-in clock. I can tell you to the split second when this went off the air.”

  “Was this the only one showing malfunction?”

  “I—I’m not sure. It’s the only malfunction the computer volunteered; I didn’t ask it if there were others.” Cable was still looking at the damaged sensor. “I can fix this; but not tonight. It’ll take a while.”

  Alec looked up to the dimming lavender in the sky. “We’d better get back,” he said.

  5

  When they returned to the inlet, Alec and Cable found lights burning in the several shacks and beaming from the front church windows. The brightest stars were visible in the purple sky.

  Alec slowed the boat, and Cable jumped out of it before it had completely stopped. She ran up the slope, to the bridge, toward the church—and stopped. Except for the lights burning, the camp seemed deserted. The stillness was eerie.

  “Charlie?” she called out.

  Alec secured the boat and ran to her side.

  Charlie emerged from the command shed, Cable’s cabin. “Cable,” he called out, “where the hell have you been?”

  “Charlie! Did anything suspicious happen while we were gone? Any strangers come into camp?”

  The door to the church opened and Ritter stalked out. “You’re damn right something suspicious happened,” he said angrily. “A stupid broad of a technician, first day on the job, takes the scientist we’re all supposed to be guarding on an unguarded romp in the bush! What kind of children’s games to you think we’re playing here, Cable?”

  Alec stepped forward. “Now, look, Ritter, she had nothing to do with—”

  “If I have my way,” said Ritter, “and by God I will, you’ll be on the next chopper back to Washington!”

  Other guards had heard the shouting and were appearing out of curiosity.

  “Calm down, Ritter,” said Charlie. “How could she have known?”

  Ritter wheeled on Holland. “Outside the lab, you’ve got no sense at all, Alec. How do we keep you away from women like this?”

  Holland laughed, unable to take Ritter’s tirade seriously. “I’ve never known a woman like this,” he said lightly. “Have you?”

  Cable said flatly, “There’s a cut sensor out there. Deliberately cut.”

  “Which sector?” Ritter asked, his storm passing.

  “Sector three,” said Cable.

  Ritter said, “Your predecessor was working on that one when he got chewed up by the gator.” He spelled out for her, as if talking to a child: “Needless to say, he didn’t have a chance to put it back together before we took him to the morgue.”

  Cable nodded, smiling sheepishly. “I see.” Something still worried her.

  What bothered Cable was the number of severed wires and the sloppy way they had been cut. Sens
or three did not look as if someone had been at work on repairing it. It looked as if it had been sabotaged. But she knew it was difficult to second-guess the methods of another engineer—especially one under attack by an alligator.

  Ritter seemed to want to say more to Cable, but he simply turned and walked away, toward the security headquarters shack.

  “Sorry, Cable,” Alec said.

  “I thought you said Ritter would be tickled pink if you went out for a little fresh air,” she said.

  Charlie said, “Give him an hour or two; he’ll cool down.” The white-haired administrator took out a cigarette and started to light it. “You didn’t see Sam Darkow out there, did you?”

  “We saw somebody,” Alec said, “but if it was Sam, he didn’t answer us. Is he still missing?”

  “I’m afraid we have to look at it that way now. He’s missing. Bill’s out looking for him in the other boat.” His face flickered in the yellow light from the match he cupped in his hands. “Probably nothing to worry about. Probably just dropped his walkie-talkie in the soup and will show up here any minute.”

  Cable studied Charlie Thaxton for an instant. Something in his voice said he was worried and he cared. It occurred to her that Charlie—bred to be a desk-bound Washington administrator—loved it here, felt attached to the importance of the work being done, wished he were more a part of it, more an adventurer.

  The match went out. Charlie slowly crushed it and dropped it to the ground.

  If she were right about Charlie, then he was more concerned about Arcane rumors than he had let on. She remembered his reluctance to tell Alec the rumor, or the truth about the withdrawn funds; and she added to her new picture of Charlie the fact that openness was not one of his cardinal virtues.

  Alec must have been having similar thoughts—he knew Charlie better, after all—for he stepped over to the white-haired man and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Not much more we can do about Sam tonight,” he said. “Bill will find him. Let’s go to the lab and drink a toast to persevering on our own, with less money.”

  Charlie brightened. “You know—”

  “You must be terrible at poker, Charlie. No wonder they don’t want you loose around Washington.”