Authors: Irving Wallace
Claire’s cigarette had burned out, and she dropped it beside her feet.
She heard the creak of a seat, caused by Maud’s plentiful person beside her, and she turned to find her mother-in-law seated erect, arms up, stretching, wagging her head to shake off drowsiness.
“I must have been sound asleep,” said Maud, yawning. “Have you been up all this time?”
“Yes. I’m wide awake. I had all that rest after dinner.”
“What’s been happening? Has Rasmussen come back in here?”
“No. Everything’s very quiet. Only Mrs. Hackfeld and I have been awake.”
Maud was peering down at her large stainless-steel wrist watch. “It’s after six. Rasmussen said we’d be there by daybreak. We should be very near.”
“I hope so.”
Maud studied Claire. “Are you all right?”
“Of course. Shouldn’t I be?”
Maud smiled. “A young person’s first field trip is like her first date. Something new and important. She has a right to be uncertain. What is ahead? How will she react and perform?”
“I’m all right, Maud.” She hesitated. “It’s just—” She halted.
“Go on. You were about to say … ?”
“My only concern is that I might be useless on this trip. I mean—what is my specialty? Wife?”
“Heavens, Claire, sometimes the wife of an anthropologist can be ten times more important on a field trip than her husband. Countless reasons. A man-and-wife team seems less intrusive, less outsiders, more acceptable in many cultures. Furthermore, a wife can find out more about wifely things, and understand them better, than her husband. You know—household care, child rearing, nutrition—it is easier for her to recognize differences in these areas and absorb them. Perhaps more important is the fact that—well, countless societies have tabus against men, foreign men, observing and interviewing their females. I don’t know how it will be on the Sirens, but Marc might be barred from learning about—oh, menstruation, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, how these women feel about being women, their pleasures, dislikes, longings—simply because he is a male. But his wife could be acceptable, even welcomed. You know—she’s one of the girls, etcetera, just as I am, except I’ll have other tasks to keep me occupied. So you’ll have plenty to do, Claire, and real value.”
“Pretty speech and thank you,” said Claire, drawing her sweater about her blouse and buttoning it.
“Besides, I hope you’ll continue to give me a hand with notes and—”
“Of course, I will, Maud.” She was amused by her mother-in-law’s anxiety for her. “In fact, I already feel overworked.”
“Good.” Maud lifted herself from the bucket seat. “Come on, Claire, let’s find out where we are.”
Claire rose and preceded Maud into the aisle. Slowly, in the semidarkness of the plane’s interior, they progressed up the passageway, past the landing-gear compartment, past the mail and baggage sections and lavatory, past the main entrance hatch, and suddenly they came upon Rasmussen and Hapai in the smoke-filled cockpit of the flying boat.
At the sound of their approach, Rasmussen quickly turned from the controls and, like a naughty boy caught with a coffin nail behind the barn, he lowered his cigar. He brushed away a bluish cloud of smoke with his free hand, and ducked his head in a greeting.
“Hiya, there,” he said, and leaned sideways to squash his cigar stub in a metal tray on the floor.
“I hope you don’t mind our curiosity—” Maud had begun to say.
“Not at all, ma’am, nope. You’re payin’, so you’re entitled to a free look.”
Claire squeezed herself beside Maud, behind the pilot chairs. Her eyes lifted from the complex instrument panel to the windshield, and sought what lay beyond the twin engines. It was still night, no longer black night but gray night, as if a dense fog were lifting and lighting. The ocean below was not yet visible.
“It’s getting light,” Claire said to Maud.
“Yes, but I can’t see—”
“Give her another fifteen minutes, ma’am,” Rasmussen interrupted, “an’ you’ll have the first piece of sun and have yourself a look at the ol’ Pacific.”
“Uh—Captain—” Even Maud found it difficult to give him rank. “Do we have very far to go?”
“I said fifteen minutes to see the day—an’ give it five minutes after to see your first look of the Sirens.”
Conversation with Rasmussen was as easy as sludging through a quagmire, but nevertheless Maud went on. “How did The Three Sirens get its name?”
Rasmussen covered his mouth and belched, and mumbled an apology. “That’s the sort of thing to ask Tom Courtney, but, matter of fact, I know pretty well from him. Back in 1796, when old Wright—the first one—was sailin’ up from Down Under, lookin’ for some place to roost, he was doin’ lots of readin’ in between times, readin’ the old books. An’ when the lookout yelled that he spotted some new islands—these ones you’re goin’ to—old Wright was below in his bunk, readin’ away at the writer with one name—Homer—you know Homer—?”
Maud and Claire nodded gravely.
“—he was readin’ the book, never can remember the name, where the fellow is wanderin’ all around, in an’ outa trouble, tryin’ to get home to the old lady—”
“
The Odyssey
,” said Maud tolerantly.
“Well, whatever the name, anyways, old Wright is down there an’ he’s readin’ about where this fellow is sailin’ past the islands where
vahines
are singin’, tryin’ to seduce—beg your pardon—so as he’s got to put wax in his ears not to listen and gotta get hisself tied up to the mast—forgot how it goes—”
He fell to ruminating about the passage, and Claire summoned up her courage. “Circe said to Ulysses, ‘First, you will come to the Sirens, who bewitch everyone who comes near them. If any man draws near in his innocence and listens to their voice, he never sees home again—’ “
“Yup, that’s it!” Rasmussen shouted. He squinted at Claire as if she were an admirable discovery. “You’re mighty smart, ma’am, just as smart as Courtney.”
She was pleased to be as smart as Courtney. “Thank you, Captain.”
“Anyways,” Rasmussen went on, “there’s old man Wright up on deck an’ he’s sayin’ those three islands look beautiful an’ if they’re the ones, why he’s goin’ to name them what he’s readin’ which is like you said—the Sirens—an’ since there was three he always called them The Three Sirens, so that explains it.”
For Claire, the utter incongruity of the discussion, considering both the backgrounds of the participants and their position of animated suspension somewhere between six and ten thousand feet above sea level, amused her and made her happy.
“Captain Rasmussen,” Maud was saying, “do you mind a personal question?”
His rough, worn face closed suspiciously, so that he appeared toothless. “Depends what,” he said.
“Professor Easterday, everyone, has imposed such a curtain of secrecy over the Sirens,” Maud said, “that I keep wondering how anyone, outside those islands, knows about it. For example, this Courtney. And yourself, too. How do you know about it?”
Rasmussen contracted his brow, as if examining the reply he must make. Obviously, thinking was a slow and painful process for him. He needed time for his reply. At last, he made it. “Won’t speak for Tom Courtney. It’s his business an’ he might not wanna tell how he come there, an’ you ask him. You’ll have time enough. He’s a good easy talker, like all of us down these parts, but he’s not given much to talkin’ about hisself. So you ask him.”
“But what about you?” Maud persisted.
“Me? I got no secret about that from you, specially since you’re goin’ in there. Me? Well now, haven’t remembered it for a century, maybe. Was like thirty years ago, when I was more a kid than grown, an’ shovin’ my nose in everywhere, an’ sometimes even gettin’ it bent out of joint, you bet. Well, I’d been workin’ for them big copra outfits—the ones that took over from J. C. Godeffroy an’ Son, an’ those British, the Lever Brothers—an’ I got me a little stake roll, an’ I was pretty feisty. I bought me a schooner—a beaut—an’ went off on my own. Well, on one of my tradin’ voyages, I got off the regular path, kind of lookin’ around—an’ one mornin’ we sighted this young Polynesian fellow adrift in an outrigger canoe—had a ripped pandanus sail—an’ was kinda wheelin’ around in the water. Well, we picked him up, sorta got him revived, an’ what happened was he was goin’ somewhere, then got sick in the gut—beggin’ your pardon, ma’am—an’ he went out like a light an’ then just layin’ there he got sunstroke. Anyways, I don’t know much what to do with him. He says he’ll die unless we take him to his home, which he says is near. He says they can fix him. He tells where his place is an’ I thought he was sick an’ off his rocker at first, ‘cause I never heard of no such place, an’ I knew most of them. Anyways, we take him there—in the direction—an’ sure enough—we find the Sirens an’ drop anchor off. By the time I got the kid on shore—he’s feelin’ better by then—he’s scared stiff, because he give me the directions when he was delirious an’ no one up to then knew about this place an’ strangers are strict tabu. But bein’ a feisty kid myself, I don’t give no damn about that native nonsense, an’ I see the kid’s in no condition to even get off the shore. So I kinda get whichway outa him an’ half lug him to the village. Well, I tell you, instead of takin’ off my head, those villagers make me practically a hero, because the kid I saved, he’s a blood relative of the Chief. He’s also—well, he’s dead now—but he was Dick Hapai’s father.”
Maud and Claire followed Rasmussen’s finger to the dark-haired, light-brown young man bent over the controls. He turned slightly, briefly meeting their eyes, and he bobbed his head. “Yes, true,” he said.
“To make a long story short,” said Rasmussen, “the medical guy in the tribe, he saved Hapai’s father. He only died a few years ago. Me—they wouldn’t leave me go—wined an’ dined me till I couldn’t hardly move—an’ to overcome the tabu, they had rites an’ made me an honorary member of the tribe. How do you like that?”
“Yes, it is sometimes done,” said Maud.
“It was done for me an’ they couldn’t do enough. I could have whatever I wanted. Well, after a year or two I got to the habit of droppin’ in for a visit, just for the sport—it’s a great rompin’ place, full of high jinks, wait’ll you see—an’ I keep learnin’ about the place an’ them. Then, one day I find out they gotta special product which I can see is better than copra or pearls or Trochus shell an’ I ask permission to exclusively export an’ trade it, in return payin’ them with outside goods they need from other islands. An’ I been doin’ this ever since. In the olden days, I used to come here in my schooner maybe four times a year, but after the second war I could see everything was turnin’ to speed an’ flyin’. So when there was a chance to grab this old flyin’ boat, I bought it. I miss the lazy olden days of the schooners—”
“What about your crews?” asked Maud. “Why didn’t they go out and tell everybody about the Sirens?”
Rasmussen snorted. “Crews? What crews? I used to take along two drinkin’ Chinks, see? They couldn’t read a compass even, never knew where we were, an’ I kept them boozed up whenever we got near here. They never even once went ashore. Later on, when the Chinks was dead, Paoti started tellin’ me I should use his own people to keep it safer, so that’s how I got Hapai here, an’—I had his cousin before him. Good boys. So there’s how the place is still secret. I never had cause to snitch to anybody about it, ‘cept once, an’ that’s my business. I always kept it secret because it give me the exclusive rights on the produce I export, but that’s not the real reason either, ma’am. You see, I’m part of these people now, honorary kin, an’ I’d die before betrayin’ them—or havin’ the place spoiled by outsiders. That’s what was drivin’ me nuts about that professor, old Easterday, his hittin’ on this by accident an’ forcin’ my hand.”
“Captain Rasmussen,” said Maud, “you need have no fear about us. We are all, every member of the team, pledged to protect the privacy of the Sirens. And even if one of us were indiscreet, not one of us knows, has the slightest knowledge, of where we are.”
“You still gotta be careful,” said Rasmussen, “because now you know the general area. If someone had a clue, and searched long enough, they’d find it sure one year or another.”
“When I do my paper,” said Maud, “I intend to locate it in Polynesia, saying no more, no less.”
“Captain,” Claire said, “I’m surprised someone didn’t find it during the Second World War. The Pacific was buzzing with Japanese and American aircraft and ships. And since then—”
“I’m sure loads of flyers and ship lookouts seen it,” said Rasmussen. “But from the sea, it looks uninhabited, and the ones who seen it, they also seen it don’t look like much an’ it got no bay, an’ is too shallow, and often there’s a hard surf runnin’. As to the airplanes, sure they passed over, but they seen nothin’ either—that’s the great thing about the Sirens—it’s so set up that the one village is practically all hidden from sight, from the sky or the sea—there’s nothin’, looks like nothin’. As to these days, all the same holds true, an’ besides it’s off the main trade routes an’ everyone wants to go to the known islands anyways. They figure everythin’ good is known and everythin’ else is nothin’. That’s what’s saved us.”
Maud was about to say something more, when Hapai’s hand touched Rasmussen’s arm.
“Cap’n,” said Hapai. “Siren Islands ahead.”
They all looked off. The night had disappeared, and it was sunrise. The ocean below, gray-blue and gold-flecked by the early rim of sun, stretched before them for seemingly endless liquid acres. Claire’s eyes swept the sea, and there, somewhere before infinity, exactly as Easterday had described it in his letter of months ago, she saw the vague sketch against the horizon of an arc of land. She savored the announcement: Siren Islands ahead.
Maud’s sighting of it came seconds later. She exhaled pleasurably. “I can see it, Captain. What would you call it—a moist atoll or a weathered volcanic island?”
“I’d call it both and be right,” said Rasmussen, who had turned his back to them. “Actually, callin’ it a high island would be correcter, because it’s got that small empty volcano—you see, where the thick white clouds are bunched above—but it’s not as rugged and jungly as most of the high islands out here, an’ while it’s got a ring of coral, it’s also got some salt swamps, an’ better vegetation than the atolls. The good thing about it, you’ll see—from the Sirens’ point of view—is that it’s craggy and steep-to an’ hard to get into like Aguigan and Pitcairn.” He paused. “You’ll be seein’ for yourself in a few minutes.”