Robert Silverberg - A Tip on a Turtle

Thompkins said, all flippancy gone from his voice now, “You think he’s going to do something to himself out there?”

“No. Not him. That’s one thing I’m sure of.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

“A guy like that, all keyed up all the time and never letting on a thing to anybody—” Thompkins looked at her closely. “You know him better than I do. You don’t have any idea what he might be up to?”

“Maybe he just wants to see the reef. I don’t know. But he seemed so peculiar when he left—so rigid, so focused —”

“Come on,” Thompkins said. “Let’s get one of those boats and go out there ourselves.”

“But he said he wanted to go alone.”

“Screw what he said. He don’t own the reef. We can go for an expedition too, if we want to.”

It took a few minutes to arrange things. “You want a guided tour, sah?” the boy down at the dock asked, but Thompkins said no, and helped Denise into the boat as easily as though she were made of feathers. The boy shook his head. “Nobody want a guide tonight. You be careful out there, stay dis side the reef, you hear me, sah?”

Thompkins switched on the lights and took the oars. With quick, powerful strokes he moved away from the dock. Denise looked down. There was nothing visible below but the bright white sand of the shallows, a few long-spined black sea urchins, some starfish. As they approached the reef, a hundred yards or so off shore, the density of marine life increased: schools of brilliant fishes whirled and dived, a somber armada of squids came squirting past.

There was no sign of Holt. “We ought to be able to see his lights,” Denise said. “Where can he have gone?”

Thompkins had the boat butting up against the flat side of the reef now. He stood up carefully and stared into the night.

“The crazy son of a bitch,” he muttered. “He’s gone outside the reef! Look, there he is.”

He pointed. Denise, half rising, saw nothing at first; and then there was the reflected glow of the other boat’s lights, on the far side of the massive stony clutter and intricacy that was the reef. Holt had found one of the passageways through and was coasting along the reef’s outer face, where the deep-water hunters came up at night, the marlins and swordfish and sharks.

“What the hell does he think he’s doing?” Thompkins asked. “Don’t he know it’s dangerous out there?”

“I don’t think that worries him,” said Denise.

“So you do think he’s going to do something to himself.”

“Just the opposite. He knows that he’ll be all right out there, or he wouldn’t be there. He wouldn’t have gone if he saw any real risk in it.”

“Unless risk is what he’s looking for.”

“He doesn’t live in a world of risk,” she said. “He’s got a kind of sixth sense. He always knows what’s going to happen next.”

“Huh?”

Words came pouring out of her. “He sees the future,” she said fiercely, not caring how wild it sounded. “It’s like an open book to him. How do you think he does that trick with the turtles?”

“Huh?” Thompkins said again. “The future?” He peered at her, shaking his head slowly.

Then he swung sharply around as if in response to some unexpected sound from the sea. He shaded his forehead with his hand, the way he might have done if he were peering into bright sunlight. After a moment he pointed into the darkness beyond the reef and said in a slow awed tone, “What the fuck! Excuse me. But Jesus, will you look at that?”

She stared past him, toward the suddenly foaming sea.

Something was happening on the reef’s outer face. Denise saw it unfolding as if in slow motion. The ocean swelling angrily, rising, climbing high. The single great wave barrelling in as though it had traveled all the way from Alaska for this one purpose. The boat tilting up on end, the man flying upward and outward, soaring gracefully into the air, traveling along a smooth curve like an expert diver and plummeting down into the black depths just beside the reef’s outer face. And then the last curling upswing of the wave, the heavy crash as it struck the coral wall.

In here, sheltered by the reef, they felt only a mild swaying, and then everything was still again.

Thompkins clapped his hand over his mouth. His eyes were bulging. “Jesus,” he said after a moment. “Jesus! How the fuck am I going to get out there?” He turned toward Denise. “Can you row this thing back to shore by yourself?”

“I suppose so.”

“Good. Take it in and tell the boat boy what happened. I’m going after your friend.”

He stripped with astonishing speed, the dinner jacket, the sharply creased pants, the shirt and tie, the black patent leather shoes. Denise saw him for a moment outlined against the stars, the fleshy burly body hidden only by absurd bikini pants in flamboyant scarlet silk. Then he was over the side, swimming with all his strength, heading for one of the openings in the reef that gave access to the outer face.

She was waiting among the crowd on the shore when Thompkins brought the body in, carrying it like a broken doll. He had been much too late, of course. One quick glance told her that Holt must have been tossed against the reef again and again, smashed, cut to ribbons by the sharp coral, partly devoured, even, by the creatures of the night. Thompkins laid him down on the beach. One of the hotel boys put a beach blanket over him; another gave Thompkins a robe. He was scratched and bloody himself, shivering, grim-faced, breathing in windy gusts. Denise went to him. The others backed away, stepping back fifteen or twenty feet, leaving them alone, strangely exposed, beside the blanketed body.

“Looks like you were wrong,” Thompkins said. “About that sixth sense of his. Or else it wasn’t working so good tonight.”

“No,” she said. For the past five minutes she had been struggling to put together the pattern of what had happened, and it seemed to her now that it was beginning to come clear. “It was working fine. He knew that this would happen.”

“What?”

“He knew. Like I said before, he knew everything ahead of time. Everything. Even this. But he went along with it anyway.”

“But if he knew everything, then why—why—” Thompkins shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

Denise shuddered in the warm night breeze. “No, you don’t. You can’t. Neither can I.”

“Miss Carpentah?” a high, strained voice called. “Mistah Thompkins?”

It was the night manager, Mr. Eubanks of the dazzling grin, belatedly making his way down from the hotel. He wasn’t grinning now. He looked stricken, panicky, strangely pasty-faced. He came to a halt next to them, knelt, picked up one corner of the beach blanket, stared at the body beneath it as though it were some bizarre monster that had washed ashore. A guest had died on his watch, and it was going to cost him, he was sure of that, and his fear showed in his eyes.

Thompkins, paying no attention to the Jamaican, said angrily to Denise, “If he knew what was going to happen, if he could see the fucking future, why in the name of Christ didn’t he simply not take the boat out, then? Or if he did, why fool around outside the reef where it’s so dangerous? For that matter why didn’t he just stay the hell away from Jamaica in the first place?”

“That’s what I mean when I tell you that we can’t understand,” she said. “He didn’t think the way we do. He wasn’t like us. Not at all. Not in the slightest.”

“Mistah Tompkins—Miss Carpentah—if you would do me de courtesy of speaking with me for a time—of letting me have de details of dis awful tragedy—”

Thompkins brushed Eubanks away as if he were a gnat.