Page 4 (1/1)

You knohat?" said Major Dexter S to have a real treat today if I can e it"

He had spoken aloud, and his breath had stealass of his Pirelli mask He put his feet down to the sand beside the coral boulder and stood up The water reached to his armpits He took off the lass, rinsed it clean, and pulled the rubber band of the ain

The eye in thehim carefully frole sly an inch or two out of the shadows and quested vaguely with its pink suckers uppermost Dexter Smythe smiled with satisfaction Given ti which he had been chu But he wasn't going to have that month Should he take a chance today and reach down and offer his hand, instead of the expected lump of raw meat on the end of his spear, to the tentacle? Shake it by the hand, so to speak? No, Pussy, he thought I can't quite trust you yet Almost certainly other tentacles would whip out of the hole and up his ared down less than two feet for the cork valve on his mask to automatically close, and he would be suffocated inside it or, if he tore it off, drowned He et in a quick lucky jab with his spear, but it would take more than that to kill Pussy No Perhaps later in the day It would be rather like playing Russian roulette, and at about the saht be a quick, a whimsical, way out of his troubles! But not now It would leave the interesting question unsolved And he had prory at the Institute Dexter S for one shape only, the squat, sinister wedge of a scorpionfish, or, as Bengry would put it, Scorpaena plumieri

Major Dexter Smythe, OBE, Royal Marines (Retd), was the remains of a once brave and resourceful officer and of a handsome man who had had the sexual run of his teeth all his life, particularly a the Wrens and Wracs and ATS who manned the communications and secretariat of the very special task force to which he had been attached at the end of his service career Noas fifty-four and slightly bald, and his belly sagged in his Jantzen trunks And he had had two coronary thro" as his doctor, Jiame at Prince's Club when Dexter Smythe had first come to Jamaica, had half jocularly put it) only a month before But, in his well-chosen clothes, with his varicose veins out of sight, and with his stomach flattened by a discreet support belt behind an iure of a man at a cocktail party or dinner on the North Shore And it was a hbors why, in defiance of the two ounces of whiskey and the ten cigarettes a day to which his doctor had rationed hi to bed drunk, if aht

The truth of the matter was that Dexter Sins of this state of mind were many and not all that complex He was irretrievably tied to Jaradually riddled him so that, while outwardly he appeared a piece of fairly solid hardwood, inside the varnished surface, the teruilt over an ancient sin, and general disgust with himself had eroded his once hard core into dust Since the death of Mary two years before, he had loved no one (He wasn't even sure that he had really loved her, but he knew that, every hour of the day, he , and often irritating presence) And though he ate their canapés and drank theirbut contempt for the international riffraff hom he consorted on the North Shore He could perhaps have entleman-farmers inland, the plantation owners on the coast, the professionalsome serious purpose in life which his sloth, his spiritual accidie, prevented, and cutting down on the bottle, which he was definitely unwilling to do So Major Smythe was bored, bored to death, and, but for one factor in his life, he would long ago have sed the bottle of barbiturates he had easily acquired fro to the edge of the cliff was a tenuous one Heavy drinkers veer toward an exaggeration of their basic tey to the point of hysteria and idiocy; the phlegloo drunk of the cartoonists who spends s; and the melancholic succumbs to self-pity, mawkishness, and tears Major S fantasy woven around the birds and insects and fish that inhabited the five acres of Wavelets (the naiven his small villa was symptomatic), its beach, and the coral reef beyond The fish were his particular favorites He referred to them as "people," and since reef fish stick to their territories as closely as do most small birds, he knew them all, after two years, intimately, "loved" them, and believed that they loved him in return

They certainly knew him, as the denizens of zoos know their keepers, because he was a daily and a regular provider, scraping off algae and stirring up the sand and rocks for the bottos and sea urchins for the ser ones And now, as he swah the channels that led out to deep water, his "people" swar at the tip of the three-pronged spear they knew only as a prodigal spoon, flirting right up to the glass of the Pirelli, and even, in the case of the fearless, pugnacious des

Part of Major Smythe's mind took in all these brilliantly colored little "people" and he greeted theory" to the dark blue deht blue spots—the jewelfish that exactly rese of a bottle of Guerlain's Dans La Nuit; "Sorry Not today, sweetheart" to a fluttering butterflyfish with false black eyes on its tail; and "You're too fat anyway, Blue Boy," to an indigo parrotfish that ood ten pounds) But today he had a job to do and his eyes were searching for only one of his "people"—his only eneht, a scorpionfish

The scorpionfish inhabits most of the southern waters of the world, and the rascasse that is the foundation of bouillabaisse belongs to the family The West Indian variety runs up to only about twelve inches long and perhaps a pound ha weight It is by far the ugliest fish in the sea, as if nature were giving warning It is a y head It has fleshy pendulous "eyebrows" that droop over angry red eyes and a coloration and broken silhouette that are perfect cah a small fish, its heavily toothed mouth is so wide that it can shole most of the smaller reef fishes, but its supreme weapon lies in its erectile dorsal fins, the first fehich, acting on contact like hypoderh dotoxin to kill a raze him in a vulnerable spot—in an artery, for instance, or over the heart or in the groin It constitutes the only real danger to the reef swierous than the barracuda or the shark, because, supree and ar except the very close approach of a foot or actual contact Then it flits only a few yards, on wide and bizarrely striped pectorals, and settles again watchfully either on the sand, where it looks like a lu the rocks and seahere it virtually disappears And Major Sive it to his octopus to see if it would take it or spurn it—to see if one of the ocean's great predators would recognize the deadliness of another, know of its poison Would the octopus consume the belly and leave the spines? Would it eat the lot? And if so, would it suffer frory at the Institute wanted answered, and today, since it was going to be the beginning of the end of Major ShtOctopussy—Major Smythe had decided to find out the answers and leave one tiny memorial to his now futile life in soical files

For, in only the last couple of hours, Major Dexter Sed very much for the worse So much for the worse that he would be lucky if, in a feeeks' tie of cables via Government House and the Colonial Office to the Secret Service and thence to Scotland Yard and the Public Prosecutor, and for Major Sot aith a sentence of imprisonment for life

And all this because of a man called Bond, Commander Ja in a taxi froston

The day had started normally Major Smythe had awakened from his Seconal sleep, sed a couple of Panadols (his heart condition forbade him aspirin), showered, skimped his breakfast under the u the remains of his breakfast to the birds He then took his prescribed doses of anticoagulant and blood-pressure pills and killed time with the Daily Gleaner until it was time for his elevenses, which, for some months now, he had advanced to ten-thirty He had just poured hier ales (The Drunkard's Drink) when he heard the car co up the drive

Luna, his colored housekeeper, caarden and announced "Gemmun to see you, Major"

"What's his name?"

"Hun doan say, Major Him say to tell you him come from Govment House"

Major S but a pair of old khaki shorts and sandals He said, "All right, Luna Put hi room and say I won't be a moment" And he went round the back way into his bedroom and put on a white bush shirt and trousers and brushed his hair Government House! Nohat the hell?

As soon as he had walked through into the living room and seen the tallat the picturelooking out to sea, Major Smythe had somehow sensed bad news And, when the man had turned slowly toward hiray-blue eyes, he had known that this was officialdom, and when his cheery smile was not returned, inimical officialdom And a chill had run down Major Smythe's spine "They" had somehow found out

"Well, well I'ather you're from Government House How's Sir Kenneth?"

There was so hands The man said, "I haven't o I've been out round the island most of the time My name's Bond, James Bond I'm from the Ministry of Defense"

Major Smythe remembered the hoary euphemism for the Secret Service He said bonhomously, "Oh The old firm?"