Гарднер Дозуа - Mermaids!

Still, all in all, Jack was not a dull boy nor an unhappy one. If the chase had few hazards, yet it was not without spice. More than one worthwhile episode, culinary or amatory, had resulted.

We now come—and it is about time, considering his importance to the resolution of this story—to Professor Milton Rowe. Wilson and Rowe had never been more than nodding, can-I-just-take-a-look-at-your-notes, acquaintances in their undergraduate days at Miskatonic University. In lab and office, he was conscientious, hard-working, sober-sided, and just a little bit dull. He seemed shy, drank little, and was the despair of match-making faculty wives. He was also an ichthyologist.

Jack Wilson had been threading his way, one afternoon, through the old part of Antibes and found himself face to face with a smallish, pleasant sort of man with a receding chin, a large mouth, thick and heavy glasses, and American clothes.

It was the same Rowe that Wilson had known, a decade or so older, and yet very much not the same Rowe at all. Mildly interested in the difference, Jack invited him to join the group aboard the Lorelei . It was an invitation for the weekend, but it lasted six weeks. The difference became discernible within six minutes of his being introduced to Michi and Josette.

Like many plain-looking men before him, the professor had discovered that a man does not need the figure of a shot-put champion nor the features of a cinema star to attract and hold the attention of a desirable woman. Charm, wit, and under- standing are much more important, and—now that he was far away from the reek of the laboratory, the chalky dryness of the classroom, and the mannered respectability of faculty social life—Professor Milton Rowe could display all three qualities without restraint.

Very few men could get as much out of a vacation as he could.

The Lorelei 's passengers embarked for Cythera, and for six weeks they burned upon the waters of the tideless (but certainly not dolorous) midland sea. Michi, Josette, Jack, Milt, the sweet-salt air, the sea itself, a succession of small, little known, and quite charming harbors, fine cognac, golden days, and bright nights...

It was with the most agreeable astonishment that Miskatonic's Professor of Marine Biology realized that oceanic life-forms were not only fascinating to study they were good to eat, too!

All four of the passengers were lolling on the decks one afternoon, not fretting their skins with anything more than those bits of fabric called le minimum , and drinking something both cool and invigorating from a bottle in an ice bucket.

Professor Rowe, while idly proving to himself once again that the ball of his thumb fit nicely into Josette's comely navel, launched into an exposition of the pelagic peregrinations of the Chinook salmon, at the end of which Josette asked wonderingly: "but, how do you know all zese sings? How do you know where are ze fish—where zey go—so you can study zem?"

"Well, my pet, we have several ways. But we've got a new one now that can accurately predict almost exactly where a given school will be at a given time. Within certain variable limits, that is. We use one of the new electric computers."

Jack, who had been half dozing, suddenly sat up, very interested. "Predict where they're going to be? How can you, my old?"

His old waved a careless hand. "Well, I cannot give you the details mathematical. In general, it's something like this! We have information on fish migration going back for over a century in some cases. You know the sort of thing, Jack. Fishermen's log books, containing the amount of catch, the date, information on the weather, and things like that. Weather's very important in such matters. And plankton.

"Anyway, all this is converted into a sort of mathematical code and put on punched cards—date, time of day, barometric pressure, wind velocity and direction, temperature of the air and water, kinds and number of fish sighted—" He took a deep breath. "—latitude and longitude, depth of water, direction of current, type of shoreline nearby, if any.

"Oh, and the brightness of the sun and moon, too. Light has an effect on the depths at which certain fish swim. And then there's the state of the tide, the salinity of the water, and so on and so on.

"We have thousands and thousands of cases, you see," Rowe continued enthusiastically. "We take all that data and put it through the computer, and the damned thing chews it all over and cross-correlates everything with everything else. Get it?

"So that when we want to find out just what fish will be at a given place at a given time, all we have to do is feed in the information on date, time, latitude, longitude, and so forth, and the computer mutters to itself and then goes chuff! and pops a card with a lot of holes punched in it. This card is run through a decoding machine, and out comes a list of the kind and number of fish to be found at that exact place and time under those circumstances.

"On the other hand, if we want to know where to find a particular kind of fish, the computer will tell us what conditions to look for in what places. You see?"

Jack frowned, concentrating. Josette's smile had by now begun to flag. Michi, a direct actionist, picked up a bottle of suntan oil and tendered it to Jack. He did not seem to see, nor be interested in this offer of the freedom of her gleaming body. He nodded bemusedly. The blue waves danced. He blinked. He glanced around as if suddenly remembering where he was. "Well!" he said. He smiled, and the spell was broken. Michi once again offered the flask of anointing, and this time he took it.

Although offered passage home on the Lorelei 's transatlantic run, Milt declined. He didn't believe, he said, in pushing his luck. He returned on a populous Greek passenger ship, growing more and more sedate with each nautical mile, and by the time he had returned to the Miskatonic campus at Arkham he looked and acted the very model of a model ichthyologist.

Wilson made himself busy, once back in New York. He and Captain MacNair had already spent much time going through the scrapbooks and putting down, in tabular form, every bit of information available from the clippings. The next step was to get more data.

Selby Research Associates was prepared to have a stab at finding out anything for anybody who was prepared to pay for it. Selby himself, a lean, scholarly-looking, bearded man, shook Wilson's hand, waved him to a chair, and raised polite eyebrows in inquiry.

Wilson took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. "I want some weather reports," he said. "This is a list of ships. Find the exact latitude and longitude of each ship, the date and time given. And I want to know the weather at each time—wind direction, tide conditions, temperature, barometric pressure—everything."

Selby nodded rather absently, knowing that the first thing he intended to check was Wilson's credit rating. "Anything else, Mr. Wilson?"

"Yes. Here's a list of various locations along the coast of a score or more countries. I'll want the same weather information for the dates given, and, if possible, a contour map of the pertinent territory—shore line, and so on."

Selby stroked his beard briefly. He was not a man to resist when Opportunity came to his door with a battering ram. "Did we mention a retainer, Mr. Wilson?" was all his comment.

"How much?"

Selby, who had been thinking of a figure, doubled it, added fifty percent, and said it aloud. Wilson opened his checkbook, wrote. "Begin immediately," he said, handing it over. Selby, taking the check in his two hands as if it were a piece of T'ang china ware, assured him they would.

Jack made several phone calls with an eye toward furthering the next step in his scheme, and found it more difficult than he'd supposed. In another ten years computers would be as numerous as leaves—fallen or otherwise--in Vallambrosa, but in 1950 they were not so easy to find. Most of the big ones were still in the experimental stage, and it was difficult to find one he could rent or hire.