“Sure do appreciate that, Mr. Wong.” he said, getting the right tone into the words so that the man would classify him and file him away and forget him.

Two

He worked for two days on the report. The guard gave him a pad of paper and a short stubby little pen and Tseng told him to write it in English. Warren smiled at that. They thought any seaman had to speak a couple of languages, but he had never had any trouble getting around with one and a few words picked up from others. You learned more from watching people than from listening to all their talk anyway.

He had never been any good at writing and a lot of the things about the Skimmers he could not get down. He worked on the writing in his cell, listening all the time for the sound of new motors or big things moving. It was hard to tell anything about what the teams were doing. He was glad he could rest in the shadows of the cell and think, eating the food they brought him as quickly as he could while still getting the taste of it.

The same chinless guard he had from the first came once a day to take him down to the shore. Warren carried the waste bucket. The guard would not let him take the time to bury the waste and instead made him throw it into the surf. The guard stayed back in the sea-grape bushes while Warren went down to the lagoon. The man was probably under orders not to show himself on the beach, Warren guessed. On the windward side of the island there was a lot of dry grass and some gullies. Dried-up stream beds ran down into little half-moon beaches and Warren could see the teams had moored catboats and other small craft there. Some of the troops had pitched tents far back in the gullies but most of them were empty. The guard marched him back that way. On one of the sandy crescents Warren’s raft was beached, dragged up above the tide line but not weighted down or moored.

Coming back on the second day some sooty terns were hanging in the wind, calling with long low cries. Some were nested in the rocks up at the windward and others in the grass of the lee. The terns would fall off the wind and swoop down over the heads of the men gathering eggs out of the rocky nests. The birds cawed and dipped down through the wind but the men did not look up.

The next morning the chinless soldier came too soon after the breakfast tin and Warren had to straighten his sleeping pad in a hurry. The guard never came into the shadowy cell because of the smell from the bucket which Warren kept next to the door. The man had discovered that Warren knew no Chinese and so instead of giving orders he shoved Warren in whatever direction he wanted. This time they went north.

Tseng was surveying a work team at a point halfway up the ridge at the middle of the island. He nodded to Warren and signaled that the guard should remain nearby. “Your report?”

“Nearly done with it.”

“Good. I will translate it myself. Be sure it is legible.”

“I printed it out.”

“Just as do the Skimmers.”

“Yeah.”

“We duplicated your methods, you know, and dropped several messages into the lagoon.” He pointed to a spot north of the pass through the reef. From here on the ridge the moving shadows were plain against the sand. The soft green of the lagoon was like a ring and beyond it was the hard blue that went to the horizon. “No reply.”

“How’d you deliver them?”

“Three men, two armed for safety. After so many incidents they are afraid to go out unprotected.”

“They go in that?” Warren pointed to a skiff beached below them.

“Yes. I’m going to supplement their work with a set of acoustics. They should be—Yes, here we are.” A buzz came from the south and a motorboat came up the lagoon leaving a white wake. It cut in among the shoals and sandbars and a big reel on the back of it was spinning in the sun, throwing quick darts of yellow into Warren’s eyes.

“We will have a complete acoustic bed. A very promising method.”

“You make sense out of that?”

Tseng shaded his eyes against the glare and turned to smile at Warren. “Their high-frequency ‘songs’ are their basic method of communication. We already have much experience with the dolphins. We can converse freely with them. Only on simpleminded subjects, of course. Much of what we know about Swarmers’ and Skimmers’ movements comes from the dolphins.”

Warren said sharply, “Look, why fool with that stuff. Let me go out and I’ll ask them what you want.”

Tseng nodded. “Eventually I might. But you must understand that the Skimmers have reasons of their own for not telling you everything that is important.”

“Such as?”

“Here.” Tseng snapped his fingers at an aide standing nearby. The soldier brought over a document pouch. Tseng took out a set of photographs and handed them to Warren. The top one was a color shot of a woman’s stomach and breasts. There were small bumps on them, white mounds on the tan skin. One lump was in her swollen left nipple.

Warren went on to the next, and the next. The lumps got bigger and whiter. “They are quite painful,” Tseng said distantly. “Some kind of larva burrows into a sweat-sore and in a day this begins. The larva is biggest near the skin, armed with sharp yellow spines. The worm turns as it feeds. Spines grate against the nerves. The victim feels sudden, deep pain. Within another day the victim is hysterical and tries to claw the larva out. These are small larvae. There are reports of larger ones.”

In one photograph the open sores were bleeding and dripping a white pus. “Like a tick,” Warren said. “Burn it out. Use iodine. Or cover it with tape so it can’t get air.”

Tseng sighed. “Any such attack and the larva releases something, we are unsure what, into the victim’s bloodstream. It paralyzes the victim so he cannot treat himself further.”

“Well, if you—”

“The larva apparently does not breathe. It takes oxygen directly from the host. If anything dislodges the spines, once they are hooked in, the larva releases the paralyzer and something else, something that carries a kind of egg so that other larvae can grow elsewhere. All this in minutes.”

Warren shook his head. “Never heard of any tick or bug like that.”

“They come from the Swarmers. When they are ashore.”

Warren watched the motorboat methodically crisscrossing the lagoon, the reel spinning. He shook his head. “Something to do with their mating? Don’t know. Doesn’t make sense. The Skimmers—”

“They said nothing about it. Interesting, eh?”

“Maybe they don’t know.”

“It seems unlikely.”

“So you’re listening for what?”

“Contact between the Skimmers and the Swarmers. Some knowledge of how they interact.”

“Can’t you treat this bug, get rid of it?”

“Possibly. The European medical centers are at work now. But there are other diseases. They are spreading rapidly from contact points near Ning-po and Macao.”

“Maybe you can block them off.”

“The things are everywhere. They come ashore and the larvae are carried by the birds, by animals—somehow. That is why we burn our reserves of fuel to come this far.”

“To the islands?”

“Only in isolation do they make contact. The reported incidents are from the Pacific basin. That is why there are Japanese aircraft near here, Soviet, American—you are an American, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Oh? Somehow I thought—but never mind. The other powers are desperate. They do not know what is happening and they envy our lead in information. You will notice the installation to the south?”

Tseng gestured. Warren saw at the rocky tip of the island a fan of slender shapes knifing up at the sky. “Anti-air missiles. We would not want anyone else to exploit this opportunity.”

“Uh-huh.”

The motorboat droned, working its way up the eastern shore. Warren studied the island, noticing where the tents were pitched and where the men moved in work teams and where the scrub jungle cut off visibility.