Free Walking Dead by Peter Dickinson Page A

fall, an area of ceaselessly repatterned eddies which set off the stillness and clarity of the rest of the bay’s surface. The cliffs were blackish, and the volcanic upthrust which had created them had flowed into columns of smooth rock, sombre and massive pillars supporting a frivolous frieze of palm-fronds and garlands of blue flowered creeper among which small parakeets flashed like fishes among seaweed. These cliffs ran through three quarters of a circle, enclosing a space which would have been unspeakably hot under the vertical noon sun but for the mitigating spray from the fall; the fall itself was only about thirty feet high and three or four feet wide, and poured its lacy ribbon down with strange apparent slowness, as though the laws of gravity had been relaxed to conform to by-laws more in keeping with local inertia.
    The final artificiality was negative. There were no hoardings, no neon signs, no tin shacks selling varnished cowries, not even another tourist. An artificial beach, with basting bodies and gaudy umbrellas, would have been more natural than this solitude.
    Dreiser handed Foxe a stubby rod.
    â€œYou’ll have to show me what to do,” said Foxe.
    â€œYou’ll soon learn. I’ll start you off. If we fish over the stern I can cast for you and give you a hand if you’re in trouble, but we’re unlikely to get into anything very big in here. The best ones are round the fall.”
    â€œNot what I’d choose if I were a fish,” said Foxe.
    â€œNo? In that case you’d stay a little fish, David. Fish go where the food is, and never mind the racket—they are like commuters in a city. The stream that feeds the fall is the sewer for three villages. It is strange, David, that you can think like a monkey or a rat, but not like a fish.”
    Foxe shrugged. His skill, such as it was, lay in thinking like a laboratory animal, not like a rat in a burrow under somebody’s warehouse. But at the moment he was more concerned to think like a tourist. His rats were on holiday too. No more needles prodding into their bellies, no more gates and levers—just a few days of lounging around in their cages, while Foxe reorganised the computer data, then a quick painless death and a deep-freeze shipment back to Europe for dissection. So Foxe deliberately studied the scenery, or thought about the new girl—a tourist she’d better be, not too pretty or amusing so she’d be easy to say goodbye to when her plane was due. Or his.
    â€œYes,” said Dreiser, fiddling with bait. “If you look at it you’ll see that the bay is really the bowl of a gigantic lavatory pan.”
    â€œLet’s hope nobody comes and sits on it while we’re here—you might keep that sort of fantasy to yourself, Fred. Wasn’t there anywhere else where we could have gone to catch fish?”
    â€œThe fish here eat pretty good. Now I’ll cast for you …”
    Dreiser reached across with an arm almost as hairy and angular as a spider’s leg. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt patterned in swirls of orange and cerise. His dark and corvine face was shadowed beneath a floppy linen hat, and his sunglasses were very black. The rod became an extension of his arm, whipping the line to and fro above the boat and then letting it curl forward, lazy as the falls, to mate with the tumbling foam.
    â€œEasier than it looks,” he said, handing Foxe the rod.
    â€œWind it in very slowly. If you feel a bite, snatch the tip up to make the hook bite.”
    Foxe obeyed, his mind elsewhere. The odds were about fifty-fifty, he thought—a German girl, perhaps, but an American for preference, easy-going and insensitive … empty starlit beaches and the silky warm sea … half the world away from the fug of the cluttered room on the sixth floor in the Kemperer Strasse …
    â€œBut it’s not only the fish,” said Dreiser. “I don’t see how they