Man From Atlantis Page 4

  The admiral took in the presentation without emotion. He stared intensely at the slides without commenting or even nodding. His aide, Lt. Ainsley, kept his eyes on the admiral, looking for reactions. Ainsley was fidgety, fearful that the admiral, because of his silence, might be growing impatient. He glanced at Elizabeth, who stood in her white lab coat with her arms folded.

  Ainsley wished she would hurry up with the presentation, so that the admiral wouldn’t suddenly turn grumpy and somehow blame him for the snail’s pace of her report.

  But the admiral, at this stage, showed nothing, and Elizabeth continued in her cool, professional, thorough manner.

  “... The evidence shows a humanoid being only marginally equipped for life on land...”

  The trouble, Ainsley guessed, was that none of this really made sense, it couldn’t really be true. He feared that the admiral would suddenly erupt in irritation at ali this science fiction.

  Slides now focused on Mark’s various physical features.

  “... Testing indicates that his eyes are light-sensitive, but without expected adaptive changes while on land. We are preparing dichroic glasses for him. He sees best at greater depths, apparently. On land he tires comparatively easily, though, as I said, he does not sweat, his skin does not flush. But internai signs show rapid loss of energy while engaged in work on land. In addition, we find that within twelve hours out of the water, actual physical deterioration begins.”

  A slide showed a close-up of Mark’s hands.

  “... Here we have the first stage of dehydration, the first signs of which are the prominent discoloration of the extremities...”

  A series of slides showed the hands evolving from beige to tan to brown to chocolate and then to black.

  “... The latter stages of this change occur quite rapidly. We are unable to detect any signs of pain connected directly with this discoloration, although he does seem to suffer with attendant physical changes through this time...”

  Slides showed him being assisted back into the pool.

  “... Within sixteen to twenty hours, if not returned to a water environment, our projections are that the subject will suffer extensive skin cracking, pulmonary insufficiency, cardiac arrest, and death. We didn’t actually keep him out of water that long, of course. But our monitoring of the early stages made these deductions quite reasonable. Even though the early stages of deterioration themselves must have been accompanied with some discomfort, the subject was remarkably cooperative, as if he wanted us to understand what could happen to him, his limitations, on land. However...”

  “Doctor.” Lt. Ainsley had been pacing quietly behind the admiral, and now was unable to restrain himself. “Perhaps we can finish off the technical side of the presentation. The admiral...”

  “The admiral’s doing just fine, Ainsley,” Admiral Pierce said, swiveling around to him and smiling. He turned back toward the screen. “Go on, Doctor. And take your time. All this is fascinating, even if it is hard to absorb and accept.”

  “But sir,” Ainsley stammered, “I—I was only thinking that...”

  “If you can’t sit still through this, Ainsley, you are welcome to take a walk.”

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  “Proceed, Doctor.”

  Elizabeth took a deep breath. “However, in the water a different picture emerges.”

  Shots showed Mark frolicking in the round pool, undulating gracefully, turning cartwheels in the water, diving straight down, rising straight up to break the surface, popping out to his waist, then arching over smoothly to dive again.

  “... He appears to be perfectly adapted to aquatic life, displaying great strength and agility. He is as at home in the water as a fish, though with much greater strength, and, of course, with his brain and arms and legs, much greater flexibility and ability to perform ali manner of underwater tasks. Better than any other truly aquatic mammal we know of—if we classify him as an aquatic mammal, which I am not yet prepared to do.”

  She gave the admiral a long look. “Because he’s too much like a human man for me at this time to commit him to any other category, if you understand me.”

  The admira! nodded.

  “Still, his capabilities underwater far surpass anything a human can do.”

  A slide showed Mark just emerged from the water, his smooth, hairless torso glistening with drops, his metallic green eyes with their typical piercing stare. A close-up showed his muscular chest.

  “... The chest cavity has gill-like membranes in place of normal lung tissue—”

  “May I interrupt, Doctor?”

  “Certainly, Admirai.”

  “Are you saying simply that he has gills rather than lungs?”

  She stared at the screen thoughtfully. “Well, I wouldn’t want to be quoted that way, Admirai. Without taking a biopsy or having the opportunity for, um—”

  “An autopsy?”

  “Yes. That is not to imply, of course, that I wish we could have an autopsy. I mean...”

  “Of course, I understand. Nobody is wishing him dead, I assure you.”

  “What I mear to say is, without sampling tissues and so forth, I would rather just say he has gill-like membranes through which he seems to absorb oxygen from the water.”

  “Simply put, Doctor, he breathes like a fish. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You needn’t be coy about your findings, not with me.”

  “I know, sir, but it’s just that I keep imagining some of this stuff as it would appear in newspaper headlines.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s all safe here.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Continue.”

  She nodded and stepped to the screen and traced her finger around the image of Mark’s chest. “His skin appears humanoid, but with certain dolphin characteristics.”

  Lt. Ainsley was ever more nervous over the sciencefiction aspects of this presentation, and cast a sharp, incredulous look at her. The admiral’s expression did not change.

  “... Except for his scalp, his body is completely hairless.”

  “No keratin layer in his skin?”

  “None.”

  “Looks to me like he’s wearing a wig,” Ainsley muttered.

  Elizabeth blinked slowly, controlling her desire to tell the young lieutenant to butt out. She turned to face him, and spoke evenly. “I can see just what you mean, Lieutenant. His hair lies very neatly on his head, and with the absence of hair elsewhere, one might wonder why he has it on his head. I wonder too. But he does. The sample we examined showed it to be entirely humanoid. Real hair. Like yours and mine. There are a lot of things for which I have no explanation. If you’ll be patient with me, all I am trying to do at this point is show you what we’ve found so far. I hope we’ll have answers to everything in time.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Sorry I interrupted.” He hung his head.

  “Don’t be. I want to hear your questions, and answer them if I can.”

  “Proceed, Doctor.”

  “Right. Now, you’ve noticed that the hands and feet are webbed, which of course facilitates his movement underwater. We think the eyes may be catlike in deeper water. We suspect he may be able to see at ocean depths in almost total darkness. As with his other abilities, his vision is much more restricted on land. Except for bright sunlight, which may bother him a little, he seems able to see well enough without glasses.”

  She clicked in another slide, which showed Mark about a foot beneath the surface of the pool, lying face up, eyes closed, body still.

  “What’s happening there, Doctor?“

  “He may be sleeping. At this moment we didn’t have the monitors hooked up, but our data at other times indicates that he does sleep in that position, under water.

  “I see. You’ve been able to keep him quite comfortably in the lab?”

  “Yes sir. At the moment he’s undergoing out-of-water fitness tests. We’re continuing with all the tests, duplicating them, to get as good a fix on
him as we can, before, unh, we have to end our tests. He’s quite docile and cooperative—and I think he’s becoming as curious about us as we are about him.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “Well, he hasn’t spoken as yet, though he’s obviously teachable and has vocal equipment. But he likes to examine our facilities, and he looks over the equipment quite carefully, as if he is very curious about it. And he listens carefully too, to me especially. He responds quickly, just so long as I explain everything beforehand. So, except for the fact that he doesn’t actually ask questions, he clearly seems to be curious.”

  “You say he has vocal equipment.”

  “Yes sir, apparently fully developed.”

  “Do you have any theory on why he doesn’t talk?”

  “Not really. Except for obvious guesses. For example, he may never have spoken human language before. He may be shy until he knows it better.”

  “To say he’s shy is to impute to him a quite human characteristic.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I do that a lot. It is easy to think of him that way. But the fact is, he seems to understand so much of what I say that it’s difficult to suppose that the language is entirely alien to him. Or perhaps he just chooses not to speak for some other reason, maybe self-protective, so as not to reveal himself too quickly. It’s all pretty much guesswork just now, on that point. Maybe one day he’ll surprise us all.”

  “What about his emotions?”

  “Well, psychologically he appears cool and calm at all times. If he has emotions, he conceals them. At least from me, from what I can detect. He neither smiles nor frowns, for example. He shows no kind of impatience, even when our computers indicate that he may be straining or tired. But I’m reluctant to say he doesn’t have emotions, since in fact we know so little about how his mind works.”

  “I agree with you.”

  “I’m glad you do, Admirai. I’m afraid others might want too quickly to categorize him in human terms.”

  “Speaking of human terms,” the admiral swivéled back and forth, “is there any danger of you getting involved with him?”

  “Sir?” Her face froze.

  “Very handsome fellow, whatever he is.”

  “Sir,” her voice turned cold, “I can safely say that there is no more danger of my ‘getting involved with him,’ as you say, than there would be if you were the attending scientist, and the subject were a woman.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that, if the subject were a woman just as nice-looking.”

  “Sir,” she fixed her icy gaze on him, “I must beg your—”

  “I’m teasing you, Dr. Merrill.” His eyes twinkled. “No offense. Don’t be so sensitive. Please continue with your presentation.”

  A bit unnerved, she turned back to the slides. The picture showed Mark Harris eating from a plate, rather clumsily holding his knife and fork over a serving of greens.

  “His diet is kelp and plankton. I didn’t have to guess too much at that. He had trouble with meat and potatoes, so I went right to kelp. He eats often, not much at a time. He drinks sea water, although he seems able to tolerate non-saline water, and milk. Coffee is out. It made him nauseous. At first we thought it might be because it was hot. But iced coffee had the same effect. So did tea. Coke too.”

  “They all have caffeine.”

  “Exactly. That’s what we figure is the reason. Or one of them.”

  “If only he could, or would, talk.”

  “That would certainly save a lot of time. As for his origins, he’s given us very little to go on. Nonverbal associative tests indicate possible amnesia.”

  “Amnesia?”

  “Yes. And that makes everything tougher for us. Because we can never be sure whether something is really new to him, or he just forgot he knew it. We have no way of knowing whether he’s ever been on land before, since apparently he has no need to leave the water.”

  “Then you’re doing even better than I thought, figuring out as much as you have about him. Perhaps that even accounts for his not speaking, the amnesia.”

  “Perhaps.”

  The next slide showed a computer terminal.

  “So we took every scrap of information we had and fed it to the WRW 12,000 at the Defense Department, and the computer sent back an answer. Sort of an answer.”

  A computer readout flashed onto the screen. “... LAST... CITIZEN... OF... ATLANTIS...?”

  She left the slide on and watched the admiral’s expression. He narrowed his eyes and furrowed his broca as he gazed intently at the message.

  “Atlantis,” he said softly.

  “We’re not sure what that means, and frankly,” her voice was calm, matter-of-fact, “we don’t know if there are any more like him or not. But we know we have the absolute obligation to protect him while we’re finding out everything we can about him.”

  “Atlantis,” the admiral repeated, shaking his head slowly. “That would put him in the eastern Atlantic.”

  “Well..”

  “And he was found in the eastern Pacific.”

  “Well,” she gave a faint smile, “we’re not sare about any of that, the Atlantis part. That’s mythology, after all, even if it was Plato who first brought it up. And even if Plato was right, the island of Atlantis would have sunk into the Atlantic centuries ago, and people have been looking around the bottom all over from Gibraltar west for decades, without finding anything. Or without finding anything convincing. I don’t know where the computer would have dug up such a story from its memory bank.”

  “Computers don’t scorn mythology, if certain facts fit certain supposedly mythological circumstances.”

  “That’s true, Admiral, but...”

  “And you have no better theory to apply.”

  “Not yet, but...”

  “So,” he shrugged and smiled, “maybe he went through the Panama Canal.”

  She stared at him, watching him smile.

  “In any event, Doctor, we have your computer’s message, valid or not. We don’t have to worry about it right now. We just put it in our own memory banks for storage.”

  She sighed finally and smiled back. “Good. For a moment I was just afraid you might think that I, that I...”

  “That you believed it yourself? Relax. I admire you for having an open mind. You needn’t pretend to have a closed one just to convince me you have a grip on reality.”

  “Thank you, Admiral.”

  “Now then. We’ve had a nice excursion into data and theory. I think this is all very exciting. Don’t you, Ainsley?”

  Ainsley, who had been listening to this latest dialogue with openmouthed amazement, suddenly straightened. “Oh, yes sir, definitely.”

  “So let’s turn for a minute to something quite specific and practical. Doctor, I’ve got several pieces of underwater hardware put together by the best scientific geniuses in this country.” His look turned sober. “This hardware is capable of lifting two thousand tons from a depth of twenty thousand feet. It can track a target in the ocean six miles down. It can take divers to a depth of three thousand, five hundred feet and bring them safely up again. Can your man do as well?”

  Elizabeth stared at the wall. “I’m not sure.”

  “But,” he smiled briefly, “I suspect you think it possible.”

  “Well, I... of course I’d like to know what he can really do. We haven’t had the money to find out.”

  “You have it now.”

  She spun toward him, startled.

  “Don’t look so surprised. You’re not as shocked as all that, Dr. Merrill. After all, you knew you were putting on a strong demonstration of your progress here this afternoon. You knew you would impress the man with the power to fund your program further.”

  She blushed. “I was only hoping,” she said softly, “that you’d think I was doing a good job.”

  “How delightfully modest.” He chuckled lightly. “Except that your statement is a bit disingenuous. Like all scientists, you want more money for your pro
jects. Nothing wrong with that. Well, as I said, you have it. I like what you’re doing. It’s more important even than you may think. Now then, you say he’s in the testing lab?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What say we all go have a look at your pet, Doctor.”

  “Of course.” She ran her hand through her hair and took a deep breath. “Let’s just ease in on him, though, so we don’t disturb or frighten him.”

  “We’ll just watch quietly, like good little boys.”

  “Fine,” she said firmly.

  The young lab assistant finished his cup of coffee, stood up, stretched, and checked the stopwatch that dangled around his neck. He picked up his clipboard, went out of the galley and down the hall toward the testing lab.

  He pushed open the door, turned immediately to his right, and headed toward the bank of monitors at one end of the room, not looking at the treadmill rumbling at the other end.

  “Okay, Mark, you can stop now. Time’s...” He glanced back at the treadmill now and stopped, stunned.

  The treadmill was running, but Mark was not running on it. He was gone. The door behind it leading to the dressing room was ajar.

  The technician trotted toward it. “Mark? Mark?”

  Mark’s locker was open and his clothes were gone. All that was left on the bench in front of his locker was the pair of running shorts he had worn to work on the treadmill.

  The technician sank back against the wall and stared at the open locker. “Oh my dear Lord,” he moaned. “It had to be me.”

  Then he sprang into action, running out of the lab and down the hall. The first person he had to find was Dr. Merrill, before he would even begin the search for Mark Harris. And while he ran through the corridor, scenes of his entire naval career flashed before his eyes, all two years, four months, seven days, and six hours.

  For a moment Mark Harris stood outside the main Center building, just beyond the front steps. He was wearing an ordinary Navy work outfit, and dark glasses. He looked around the grounds, blinking occasionally behind the glasses when he faced the sun.