Гарднер Дозуа - Mermaids!

Let me tell you something which may perhaps surprise you but which scarcely surprises me at all. I had never seen Dr. Bertram's book, In Search of Mermaids , before I began to prepare this Adventure. I had never heard of the Director of the Marine Biological Station on the Red Sea, H.A.F. Gohar, whose "meditation" on the mermaid legend and the dugong I quoted a page or so before. The quotations from Dorothy L. Sayers' notes on Dante have been in my notebooks for years and I gave them no thought in connection with this Adventure: but just after finishing my extract from Gohar I pulled out the card on Sirens from my Virgil Magus file, and the first reference on it was to that passage from Sayers' note on Dante which I have just quoted. You see how well, how almost perfectly, it fits in. Although I had certainly heard of the phenomena of "feral children," it never had occurred to me that there might be a conceivable connection with the mermaid legend: until I "accidently picked up" the Sing-Zingg book. I would be surprised ... if this had not happened to me a thousand times.

I tell you, very sincerely, very simply, very humbly: these things are made by magic. The net which caught the siren mermaid does catch us all. It is Indra's net, a net of almost infinite dimensions, and where any two cords of it come together, there come together a line of time and a line of space, until every moment in time and every line in space are connected.

And each connection, it is said, shines and glitters, like a jewel.

Born in 1907, L. Sprague de Camp is a seminal figure in the development of modern fantasy and science fiction, one whose career as writer, critic, and anthologist spans almost fifty years. De Camp began writing for John W. Campbell's Astounding during the Campbellian "Golden Age" of the late thirties and the forties, but it was in Astounding's sister fantasy magazine, Unknown, that de Camp's talent really blossomed, and where he produced some of the best short fantasies ever written, including "The Wheels of If," "Divide and Rule," and "The Gnarly Man." De Camp's most famous book is probably The Complete Enchanter, an omnibus of the "Harold Shea" stories he wrote with Fletcher Pratt, although his Lest Darkness Fall is considered by many critics to be one of the three or four best "alternate worlds" novels ever written. De Camp's other novels include Rogue Queen, The Land of Unreason (with Fletcher Pratt) , The Glory That Was, The Search for Zei/The Hand of Zei, The Tower of Zanid, and The Hostage of Zir, as well as several fine historical novels. His short fiction has been collected in The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, The Reluctant Shaman, and The Purple Pterodactyls. As an anthologist, de Camp is largely responsible for the revitalization of the once-languishing sub-genre of "sword & sorcery" or "heroic fantasy," and, as writer and editor, also played a large part in launching the big Conan boom of the sixties and seventies. He has also written some of the major critical books about fantasy, notably Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers and the definitive Lovecraft: A Biography. His most recent books are the novels The Unbeheaded King and (with Catherine Crook de Camp) The Bones of Zora, and Dark Valley Destiny (with Catherine Crook de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin), a biography of Conan's creater, Robert E. Howard.

In the forties, de Camp was the mainstay of Unknown with wry, funny, and sprightly stories like the one that follows, in which sportsmen in search of a winning "edge" in an athletic competition resort not to steroids or amphetamines, but instead to something numinal and strange.

NOT MANY SPECTATORS TURN OUT FOR A MEET BETWEEN TWO minor women's swimming clubs, and this one was no exception. Louis Connaught, looking up at the balcony, thought casually that the single row of seats around it was about half-full, mostly with the usual bored-looking assortment of husbands and boy friends, and some of the Hotel Creston's guests who had wandered in for want of anything better to do. One of the bellboys was asking an evening-gowned female not to smoke, and she was showing irritation. Mr. Santalucia and the little Santalucias were there as usual to see mamma perform. They waved down at Connaught.

Connaught—a dark devilish-looking little man—glanced over to the other side of the pool. The girls were coming out of the shower rooms, and their shrill conversation was blurred by the acoustics of the pool room into a continuous buzz. The air was faintly steamy. The stout party in white duck pants was Laird, coach of the Knickerbockers and Connaught's arch rival. He saw Connaught and boomed: "Hi, Louie!" The words rattled from wall to wall with a sound like a stick being drawn swiftly along a picket fence. Wambach of the A. A.U. Committee, who was refereeing, came in with his overcoat still on and greeted Laird, but the booming reverberations drowned his words before they got over to Connaught.

Then somebody else came through the door; or rather, a knot of people crowded through it all at once, facing inward, some in bathing suits and some in street clothes. It was a few seconds before Coach Connaught saw what they were looking at. He blinked and looked more closely, standing with his mouth half-open.

But not for long. " Hey! " he yelled in a voice that made the pool room sound like the inside of a snare drum in use. "Protest! PROTEST! You can't do that! "

It had been the preceding evening when Herbert Laird opened his front door and shouted, "H'lo, Mark, come on in." The chill March wind was making a good deal of racket but not so much as all that. Laird was given to shouting on general principles. He was stocky and bald.

Mark Vining came in and deposited his brief case. He was younger than Laird—just thirty, in fact—with octagonal glasses and rather thin severe features, which made him look more serious than he was.

"Glad you could come, Mark," said Laird. "Listen, can you make our meet with the Crestons tomorrow night?"

Vining pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I guess so. Loomis decided not to appeal, so I don't have to work nights for a few days anyhow. Is something special up?"

Laird looked sly. "Maybe. Listen, you know that Mrs. Santalucia that Louis Connaught has been cleaning up with for the past couple of years? I think I've got that fixed. But I want you along to think up legal reasons why my scheme's okay."

"Why," said Vining cautiously, "what's you scheme?"

"Can't tell you now. I promised not to. But if Louie can win by entering a freak—a woman with webbed fingers—"

"Oh, look here, Herb, you know those webs don't really help her—"

"Yes, yes, I know all the arguments. You've already got more water resistance to your arms than you've got muscle to overcome it with, and so forth. But I know Mrs. Santalucia has webbed fingers, and I know she's the best damned woman swimmer in New York. And I don't like it. It's bad for my prestige as a coach." He turned and shouted into the gloom:

"Iantha!"

"Yes?"

"Come here, will you please? I want you to meet my friend Mr. Vining. Here, we need some light."

The light showed the living room as usual buried under disorderly piles of boxes of bathing suits and other swimming equipment, the sale of which furnished Herbert Laird with most of his income. It also showed a young woman coming in in a wheelchair.

One look gave Vining a feeling that, he knew, boded no good for him. He was unfortunate in being a pushover for any reasonably attractive girl and at the same time being cursed with an almost pathological shyness where women were concerned. The fact that both he and Laird were bachelors and took their swimming seriously were the main ties between them.