Secrets of the Deep, Page 2

  “Balthasar’s excited about something,” said Robby. Having finished making his peanut-butter sandwich, he began to eat it.

  “Give him some aspirin,” muttered his father absently,taking the steak out of the thawer and testing it to see if it was ready yet. “Ah—just right. Now, on to the grill.”

  “I went out to see why, and I found some footprints,” said Robby, sticking to his guns. “You should have seen how big they were.”

  “What continually amazes me,” said his father, rubbing salt and pepper on the steak and putting it on the grill, “is the fact I can never seem to put on any weight.Not that I’d like to be fat—nobody in his right mind would.But you’d think at my age I’d have started to flesh out a bit.”

  “Three feet wide, anyway, and four feet long," persisted Robby.

  “No one,” said his father sternly, “no one could ever accuse me of not liking to eat. I could eat steak, for instance,until the cows come home. Of course, now and then I get busy and miss a meal. Maybe what I should do is set up a schedule for a well-rounded diet. Breakfast at seven, say,consisting of cantaloupe, corn flakes and milk, a couple of fried eggs and sausage—and possibly a small steak. For lunch.”

  “Dad, you aren’t listening!” cried Robby.

  “Certainly. I heard every word—you said you want to measure Balthasar’s footprint. What you’ll have to do is mix some plaster of Paris and make a cast of one flipper—and for lunch, let’s see, tomato soup, a healthful green salad, french fried potatoes and—oh well, a steak. Apple pie ”

  At that moment the bell that announced the arrival of a visitor rang suddenly through the station.

  “Oh, there he is,” said Robby’s father, coming back to the moment. “Go and let him in. Now let’s see—for dinner.”

  “Go and let who in?” asked Robby. But his father was now busy speculating out loud whether or not there was, after all, any good reason why he shouldn’t have steak for dinner as well, if he wanted it—or, failing that, a good roast. Robby gave up and hurried up the stairs to the surface platform. On the way, he found time to wonder who the visitor could be.The boat that brought supplies to them from the mainland was not due until the end of the week. And it could not be his mother home again, because his father had said, “Let himin.” It could be Lieutenant Vargas, in charge of the local Mexican coastguard patrol boat, a good friend of Robby’s,who might happen to be down this way investigating a report that Vandals were in the vicinity. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more Robby was sure that was who it must be.

  But when he burst out on to the surface platform, there was no patrol boat in sight. In fact, there was no visiting boat to be seen. And no aircraft. No one was in sight, anywhere.Robby stared. The bell could not have rung by itself. And then, behind him in the boathouse, he heard a strange, raspy man’s voice singing. The song was like no song Robby had ever heard before. It was only a few notes going up and down, but they made an odd little tune that seemed to have no beginning and no end. The tune gave Robby a shivery, sad feeling like the kind that comes over a person seeing the sun start to go down, a long way from home, and suddenly feeling how tired and hungry he is, and knowing how far he has to go to get back to where he belongs.

  This is what Robby heard:

  Mr. Lillibulero

  The first thing Robby did when he heard the singing was to stop in surprise. But then he walked over to the boathouse, opened its door, and stepped inside.

  At first, in the sudden gloom after the brilliant tropical sunshine outside, his eyes were so dazzled that he saw nothing at all. Then his vision slowly adjusted, and a very unusual-looking man was revealed before him.

  This man was hardly an inch or two taller than Robby, but he was fully grown. He was lean, wiry, and trim, dressed in slacks and a shirt of dark grey-green. He wore rubber-soled grey shoes, and from the thin grey belt threaded through the belt loops of his slacks hung a shark knife in a grey metal clip, and a flat, grey gun. Next to the gun was an olive-drab box about the size of a small transistor radio. Some plane had evidently dropped the little man on the station. Robby wished he had looked up at the sky as he had come out. The markings on the plane might have told him where the stranger had come from.

  The man’s hair was curly, brown, and tight, like a skullcap above his sharp-chinned face which was brown as well, and leathery, the way a fisherman’s or a farmer’s face becomes when it is exposed a lot to the sun. It was marked by a fine,curving line on each side of his mouth and a sharp, short line like an exclamation point between black eyebrows. And under those eyebrows there looked into Robby’s face two green eyes so burning and bright that Robby stopped short again at the sight of them. It was then that he noticed that the little man was packing something into a small, square, white case.His brown fingers flew so quickly that Robby was barely able to see that it was a one-man copter-parachute before the case was closed and sealed.

  “Where did you come from?” asked Robby, without thinking. “How did you get here?”

  The little man flashed his sharp green eyes at Robby.“Curious, are y’not?” he said, dryly. His voice was the strangest Robby had ever heard. It had an accent that at first sounded Scottish, but on second thought also sounded Irish,only there seemed to be the accents of other languages in it, too. It sounded, if you can imagine such a thing, like a raspy buzz-saw biting its way through a dry log. But even with all this oddness about it, the tone of the voice made it perfectly clear to Robby that he had asked the wrong sort of question. Robby felt his face grow hot.

  “It’s my station!” he said. “I’ve got a right to ask.”“Well, dinna hold y’r breath until y’get an answer, if y’dinna want to suffocate,” replied the little man, and walked out the door of the boathouse, quite as if he owned the station, to the entrance leading to the floor below. Robby stared, then ran after him, tumbling down the ladder just in time to see the man heading very quickly for the floors below.

  By the time he caught up, the man was setting his things down on the kitchen table. Robby’s father turned from the grill with a pleased expression on his face.

  “Lillibulero!” he cried.

  “Ah there, James,” said the little man in his rusty voice.He didn’t crack a smile.

  “Well, well, good to see you!” said Robby’s father, shaking hands happily. “Robby, I want you to meet Mr. Lillibulero. Lillibulero, this is my son.”

  “Aye, we met above,” said Mr. Lillibulero in a voice that said he was not impressed. “However,” he held out his hand, “I’m pleased to meet you—Robertson, is it not? Y’r father’s written about you.”

  “Everybody calls me Robby,” said Robby, shaking hands without any great joy.

  “Do they now?” ground out Mr. Lillibulero. “Here’s one that does not.”

  “Mr. Lillibulero likes to use full names, Robby,” said Robby’s father. He turned once more to the little man. “We were just going to have a snack—sort of a late lunch. If you’d

  like to join us for a bite of steak ”

  “I’m no slave to m’appetite, like some I could mention,”creaked Mr. Lillibulero. “However, since I’ve had the bad chance to disturb y’at mealtime, I will join y’in a sociable cup of tea.”

  “Tea—tea,” said Robby’s father, turning and digging energetically into the cupboard beside the grill. “We had some around here, I know—ah, there we are!” He brought out a sealed metal-foil package. And then, rummaging in the cup-board below, produced a teapot. “Now, let’s see,” he said, tearing open the metal-foil package, “I’ll boil some water ”

  “Dinna disturb y’self,” sniffed Mr. Lillibulero, taking the package out of his hands. “An ill-made cup of tea is worse than ditchwater. I’ll brew it m’self.”

  While this conversation was going on, Robby was staring at his father. Dr. Hoenig showed no signs of being even slightly annoyed at Mr. Lillibulero’s crankiness. It was almost as if he liked the way Mr. Lillibulero grumbled and snapped.

&nbs
p; During the meal Robby found nothing out about the strange visitor. His father and Mr. Lillibulero seemed to have known each other for a long time, although Robby could not remember his father mentioning the name. There were other men mentioned, too, whom Robby had never heard of.

  “And Morrison?” asked his father between bites of steak.

  “India,” replied Mr. Lillibulero.

  “You don’t say!” said Robby’s father. “I suppose the Char Ben Dhu. ”

  “That’s taken care of,” said Mr. Lillibulero, darkly.

  “Then what?”

  “Our fat friend. Y’know the one.”

  “Still.”

  “Aye.”

  By the time the meal was over, Robby was bursting with curiosity and resentment. The last few years he had become used to talking to his father man to man, and now the two of them, his father and this funny little man, were speaking as if he could not be trusted. Rebelliously, after the meal was over, he shoved the dishes into the disposal. Mr. Lillibulero marched out to look over the station, and Robby followed his father into his bedroom.

  “Now let’s see,” said his father, diving into his dresser, “shirts, shorts, socks, toothbrush, razor.”

  “What do you have to go away for?” said Robby, looking at the bed and feeling like kicking it hard.

  “When authority calls, I—hey!” said his father, straightening up and fixing Robby with a pair of sharp, discerning eyes. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” said Robby, glowering at the bed.

  “I know that kind of nothing,” said his father. He sat down. “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh—him,” said Robby. “That Mr. Lillibulero.”

  “What about him?”

  “What’s he here for, anyway?”

  “Oh,” said his father. “My fault. I should have explained before. He’s here to look after you and the station while I’m gone.”

  Robby stared.

  “I don’t need anyone to look after me!” he cried. “And I can look after the station. I know more about it than he does!”“You aren’t being very reasonable, old boy,” said his father mildly. “This station doesn’t belong to me, you know.It’s the government’s, and it’s worth half a million dollars—or more, if you try to figure how much it’d cost to replace the Martians downstairs. I don’t think the International Department of Fisheries would take very well to the idea of my leaving it in the hands of a twelve-year-old boy, even if said twelve-year-old happens to be the eminent Robertson Alan Hoenig.”

  Being wrong made Robby even more furious.

  “Well,” he burst out, “at least they might have sent somebody useful instead of a squeaky little sorehead like that!”

  “All right, now stop right there!” Robby heard a note of anger suddenly come into his father’s voice and saw that his eyes had gone hard and stem. “I never thought I’d hear a son of mine talking like a Vandal.”

  “I’m not talking like a Vandal,” muttered Robby.

  “Oh, aren’t you? Suppose,” said his father, “you tell me just what a Vandal is.”

  “They’re people who like making trouble,” said Robby, painfully.

  “But why do they like making trouble?” demanded Dr. Hoenig.

  “They just do,” said Robby.

  “There’s a lot more to it than that,” his father said, “as you’re now old enough to realize. Nobody does anything without a reason. If you get mad at somebody, you have a reason for getting mad, haven’t you?”

  “Well, sure,” Robby answered.

  “Of course you do,” said Dr. Hoenig. “And in just the same way, the Vandals have their reason for acting as they do. They’re men—and some women, too—who’ve refused to grow up in one particular way.”

  “You mean they’re little," said Robby. “But everybody always said—”

  “It’s inside that they’ve refused to grow up,” Dr. Hoenig said. “Most people learn somewhere along the line that they sometimes have to put other people’s feelings or wishes ahead of their own if the world is going to run smoothly. The Vandals never have, and they never do. They do nothing except what they want, all the time.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Robby.

  “You’ll see how bad it is when you run into some Vandals—if you ever do. People who act like that never have any friends. And that makes them unhappy—which is why they band together to smash and destroy things.”

  “There’s a lot more to it than that,” said Robby. “In school—”

  “I know,” said Dr. Hoenig. “In school they give you the history of it. They tell you how the Vandals grew out of the old criminal gangs and societies of the twentieth century. With better methods of catching criminals, ordinary crime was stopped, as war has been stopped nowadays. The real criminals are all caught and cured now before they can get started. But the merely unhappy people are still with us. They gang up, and hunt for something to hate to prove that, bad as they are, there is something that is worse. And when they find it, they band together and try to destroy it.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Robby, rebelliously, “I’m no Vandal.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” said Dr. Hoenig. “We’re all likely to act like Vandals on occasion, unless we watch ourselves. You may not like Mr. Lillibulero—that’s your privilege—but that doesn’t excuse you for telling lies about him.”

  “They weren’t lies. They ” Robby broke off, and bit his lip.

  “Of course they were,” said his father, calmly. “How do you know he’s a squeaky little sorehead? You don’t, of course. You just made that up because you’d like to think he is a squeaky little sorehead. Then you’d have an excuse for not liking him.”

  “Well, he’s certainly not very polite!” said Robby.

  “No,” said Dr. Hoenig slowly and thoughtfully, pursing his lips, “Mr. Lillibulero is not very polite. But as you grow up, you’ll learn that sometimes there are reasons for people being the way they are that go a long way towards excusing their faults.”

  “Such as?” said Robby. “Just tell me one thing!"

  “Well,” said his father, “for one thing, Mr. Lillibulero is an orphan. And for another, he is a top—perhaps the top—security agent for the International Bureau of Police, of which I’m sure you’ve heard.”

  “Him?” said Robby. He stared at his father. “Him?”

  “Exactly. Mr. Lillibulero,” said Dr. Hoenig. “So you see,the International Bureau of Police does not share your opinion that he is a squeaky little sorehead. Nor do Vandals, ordinarily, since his main job is breaking up their gangs. And as for his being not so polite, if you grew up in all sorts of odd comers of the world, if you worked and dedicated and prepared yourself for police work and thought it was more important to be honest than anything else, you too might be a little outspoken and inclined to say what you think.”

  Robby’s father turned back to his luggage. “Come on, now, give me a hand with this packing because I’ve got to get done and on my way. They need me right away over there.”

  “Over where?” asked Robby, reaching for a handful of shirts.

  “Just over there,” replied his father. “Hand me those shirts.”

  Just as they were snapping the locks on the suitcase, the arrival bell rang. Going upstairs together, they found Mr. Lillibulero already talking to a man in the uniform of the International Department of Fisheries—Fish Warden’s Division. A fast-looking, two-man flying disc was resting on the water beside the platform.

  Robby’s father shook hands with the uniformed pilot of the disc and climbed aboard. He leaned out to wave good-bye to Robby.

  “Don’t forget the temperature control on number seven!” he called. Then the bubble top of the flying disc popped shut over him. The disc skimmed the surface of the water and was off into the darkening sky of the east. It was getting late in the afternoon and the tropical sun was just about to go down.

  Robby watched the disc dwindle out of sight. With it
gone and the sun sinking, he felt lonelier than he had ever felt in his life. He remembered suddenly that he never told his father about the footprints. And now there was nobody else to tell.

  Except Mr. Lillibulero.

  “Huh! Him!” said Robby aloud, and hurried downstairs,looking for something to kick.

  The Vandals

  Mr. Lillibulero had already left the surface platform. When Robby entered the communications room on the floor below,he found the little man had brought his box up to the control panel for the station’s signalling system, and was busy connecting wires from the box to the panel.

  “What—” began Robby and then closed his mouth. He was not going to ask Mr. Lillibulero another question and bemade to feel foolish again.

  “ ’Tis a specially sensitive warning device,” replied Mr. Lillibulero without turning around, almost as if he had eyes in the back of his head and could also read minds. “We’ll want no troublemakers sneaking in on us without warning.”

  “Oh, nobody could,” said Robby. “Balthasar would let us know if anyone came up to the station.”

  “Och, aye?” said Mr. Lillibulero, turning and fixing Robby with one of his needle-sharp green glances. “And who might this Balthasar be, Robertson?”

  “My pet,” said Robby. “He’s a Risso’s dolphin. One of the Hoffer dolphins. I got him from my grandfather. Actually, he’s an experimental animal, but he was given to me, and he’s very bright.”

  “Bright? Ah, that’s interesting,” replied Mr. Lillibulero, dryly. “And his brightness provides as fine a warning system as underwater radar wi’ a twenty-mile sweep?”

  “Yes,” said Robby defiantly, knowing it was not true.

  “ ’Tis a meeracle of a beast,” sniffed Mr. Lillibulero, disbelievingly.

  “I don’t care!” shouted Robby, losing his temper which,perhaps, he had inherited from his father. “Balthasar is twice as good as any radar. I ought to know. I’ve had him since he was a baby, and you don’t like him just because he’s mine!”