The Complete Short Stories

The dead hulk of the Prospero, daylight visible through its acid-etched plates, sat in the shallow water, the last of its chemical wastes leaking into the lagoon. But Johnson had forgotten the ship and the voyage that had brought him here, just as he had forgotten his past life and unhappy childhood under the screaming engines of Nassau airport. Lolling back in his canvas chair, on which was stencilled ‘Colonel Pottle, US Army Engineer Corps’, he felt like a plantation owner who had successfully subcontracted a corner of the original Eden. As he stood up to greet Christine he thought only of the future, of his pregnant bride and the son who would soon share the island with him.

‘Johnson! My God, what have you been doing?’ Christine ran the inflatable onto the beach and sat back, exhausted by the buffetting waves. ‘It’s a botanical mad-house!’

Johnson was so pleased to see her that he forgot his regret over their weekly separations. As she explained, she had her student classes to teach, her project notes and research samples to record and catalogue.

‘Dr Christine…! I waited all day!’ He stepped into the shallow water, a carmine surf filled with glowing animalcula, and pulled the inflatable onto the sand. He helped her from the craft, his eyes avoiding her curving abdomen under the smock.

‘Go on, you can stare—’ Christine pressed his hand to her stomach. ‘How do I look, Johnson?’

‘Too beautiful for me, and the island. We’ve all gone quiet.’

‘That is gallant — you’ve become a poet, Johnson.’

Johnson never thought of other women, and knew that none could be so beautiful as this lady biologist bearing his child. He spotted a plastic cooler among the scientific equipment.

‘Christine — you’ve brought me ice-cream..

‘Of course I have. But don’t eat it yet. We’ve a lot to do, Johnson.’

He unloaded the stores, leaving to the last the nylon nets and springmounted steel frames in the bottom of the boat. These bird-traps were the one cargo he hated to unload. Nesting in the highest branches above the island was a flock of extravagant aerial creatures, sometime swallows and finches whose jewelled plumage and tail-fans transformed them into gaudy peacocks. He had set the traps reluctantly at Christine’s insistence. He never objected to catching the phosphorescent fish with their enlarged fins and ruffs of external gills, which seemed to prepare them for life on the land, or the crabs and snails in their baroque armour. But the thought of Christine taking these rare and beautiful birds back to her laboratory made him uneasy — he guessed that they would soon end their days under the dissection knife.

‘Did you set the traps for me, Johnson?’

‘I set all of them and put in the bait.’

‘Good.’ Christine heaped the nets onto the sand. More and more she seemed to hurry these days, as if she feared that the experiment might end. ‘I can’t understand why we haven’t caught one of them.’

Johnson gave an eloquent shrug. In fact he had eaten the canned sardines, and released the one bird that had strayed into the trap below the parasol of a giant ycad. The nervous creature with its silken scarlet wings and kite-like tail feathers had been a dream of flight. ‘Nothing yet — they’re clever, those birds.’

‘Of course they are — they’re a new species.’ She sat in Colonel Pottle’s chair, photographing the table of fruit with her small camera. ‘Those grapes are huge — I wonder what sort of wine they’d make. Champagne of the gods, grand cru…’

Warily, Johnson eyed the purple and yellow globes. He had eaten the fish and crabs from the lagoon, when asked by Christine, with no ill effects, but he was certain that these fruits were intended for the birds. He knew that Christine was using him, like everything else on the island, as part of her experiment. Even the child she had conceived after their one brief act of love, over so quickly that he was scarcely sure it had ever occurred, was part of the experiment. Perhaps the child would be the first of a new breed of man and he, Johnson, errand runner for airport shoe-shine boys, would be the father of an advanced race that would one day repopulate the planet.

As if aware of his impressive physique, she said: ‘You look wonderfully well, Johnson. If this experiment ever needs to be justified..

‘I’m very strong now — I’ll be able to look after you and the boy.’

‘It might be a girl — or something in between.’ She spoke in a matterof-fact way that always surprised him. ‘Tell me, Johnson, what do you do while I’m away?’

‘I think about you, Dr Christine.’

‘And I certainly think about you. But do you sleep a lot?’

‘No. I’m busy with my thoughts. The time goes very quickly.’

Christine casually opened her note-pad. ‘You mean the hours go by without you noticing?’

‘Yes. After breakfast I fill the oil-lamp and suddenly it’s time for lunch. But it can go more slowly, too .1f f look at a falling leaf in a certain way it seems to stand still.’

‘Good. You’re learning to control time. Your mind is enlarging, Johnson.’