Free An Island Called Moreau by Brian W. Aldiss Page A

and in a good accent:
    I’ve a wife and a lover in fair London Town
    And tonight she a widow will be, will be, will be.…
    The girl brushed against me and caught me by my hair with the fingers that sprouted from her shoulder. Her face pressed into mine. I put an arm about her, feeling her naked and rubbery little body against me. She pushed, and the others were there pushing. I went under the water, kicking out to escape, but the Seal Girl came with me. Her eyes were open, and her mouth. She was excited. We came plunging up, blowing water, she giggling heartily. She dived again, and I knew I was being examined underwater.
    One of the men jerked a shoulder and pointed with a look toward the palm-crowned rock I had observed earlier, standing a kilometer away from the end of Moreau Island.
    â€œHome,” he said. “Is good fun, home. Catch fish, dive. We go, no trouble, one, two, three, four. Yes, hero?”
    â€œYou live on that rock?”
    â€œLive, yes, live rock. No trouble. One, two, three, girl. ‘Get with the loving, forget the Shape …’”
    We were moving forward in the warm water together. It was like talking to dolphins. The girl was laughing in my face; her bright dark eyes, her white teeth, the touch of her body, had an intense impact on me. Suddenly, I felt a colder area in the water. Looking down, I saw that we were moving away from the lip of the lagoon, entering the ocean proper. The water hue changed abruptly from green to a deep blue. We were coming over steep gradients, where the neck of the island tumbled down sheer into the unplumbed abyss.
    â€œNo, no farther!” I was afraid. The understanding came that I had been ill and was still not fully in command of myself.
    I broke away from the girl and swam back toward the crane, trying not to hear their jeering calls and whistles. The episode had shaken me; in more than one sense, I had been on the brink of something unfathomable.
    The island closed round me. I swam to the shore, trod water, pulled myself up by where my clothes lay. Bernie was guarding them; he held out his hand, but I pushed him off and lay down to let the sun dry me, shaking.
    A few paces away, also prone, Maastricht said, “Jesus, I thought you were off then, hero! That might be the one route for escape.”
    â€œIt’s difficult to tell how intelligent these people are. Their mastery of the language doesn’t amount to much.” I tried to stop my voice trembling.
    â€œThose Seal People are smart cookies, you understand. They are the only ones who have escaped the Master, apart from—no, the only ones. He has all of their defects. He don’t got arms and legs. One shoulder blade is missed. That’s the thalidomide drug. I knew a Chinese man in Jakarta who had lost both his legs as a child, and he—”
    Maastricht launched himself into a complicated anecdote. I had no desire to listen. The understanding that had burst upon me—that I had suffered more than I knew from my long exposure in the ocean, followed by the unnatural shocks of this island—took possession of me with all the force of novelty. I needed to think about it. Still trembling in every limb, I got dressed as quickly as I could.
    In his maundering way, Maastricht had reverted to the topic of Dart.
    â€œSee, hero, he had a struggle to manhood, too. But he was lucky. He won by legal suit—no, by lawsuit, he won many compensations from the pharmaceutical company who make the drug. So he could come here and start work. He does not do that old scalpel business like you think. Only drugs, to change the fetus in the womb, savvy? There were all kinds of animals here, left over from Moreau’s time. Also some Japanese fisherman families. Your three swimming friends, they’re triplets born to a Jap girl who took the drug in her second and third month pregnant.”
    I got up and walked away. I did not want to talk.
    â€œIt gives something