I took a deep gulp, and began to push myself forwards as hard and as fast as I could. 
Something had sensed that I was there, and was already coming after me. Something vicious 
and evil that was out to destroy me. I tried to dive deeper, twisting around in the water 
to evade capture, but I felt something seize my ankle, something as crushing and painful 
as a steel mantrap.
    I woke up. For a while I couldn't work out where I was. I couldn't understand that I 
was on dry land, and that I was breathing air instead of water. I sat up, and I was 
chilled with sweat. Outside, it was a cold, pale morning, and the cows were munching 
peaceably on the rocky slopes of the farm. I left the bedroom and went back through to 
the living-room, where the fire was crackling and spluttering and burning up well. I 
stood naked in the middle of the room and swallowed down another Jack Daniel's.
    Coughing, I returned to the bedroom. But the bed didn't look so appetizing any more. 
I was still tired, but the twisted sheets looked too much like the surface of an 
unpleasant and nightmarish ocean.
    I called Rheta at the laboratory. Dan had left to get some sleep, but she was still 
there working on the water samples. She seemed surprised that I wasn't sleeping, too.
    'I sleep very badly when I'm by myself,' I told her. 'You wouldn't consider coming 
out here and assisting me to rest, would you? Purely in the interests of public safety, 
of course.' She laughed softly. She might have been cool and independent and three times 
more brainy than Shelley and me put together, but she wasn't above responding to an 
improper suggestion or two. I like that in a girl. Especially when a girl takes me up on 
it.
    But Rheta, of course, didn't. She was too busy saving the world from the prehistoric 
lobster people. She said: 'Dan's really worried about what's happening here. He thinks it 
could be some kind of disease that's been lying dormant for centuries. Like when they dug 
up an old mass burial pit from the Black Death in London, three hundred years later, and 
two of the construction workers went down with plague.'
    'He really believes that?' I asked her.
    'He doesn't know for sure. We still have more tests to run on the mouse but there's 
no question that it's a pretty sick little animal.'
    I rubbed my eyes. 'Is it a disease that anyone's heard of before?'
    Rheta said: 'I've been doing some checking, but it's real hard to come up with 
anything conclusive. I found out a couple of things.'
    'Such as?'
    She riffled through her notepad. 'Well, for instance, I called a paleontologist I 
know this morning. He said that the Currie expedition of 1954 to the Central Rift Valley 
of Africa found seven or eight fossilized creatures, and that two of them, even though 
they were early mammals, a species of deer, had skulls and front limbs like crustaceans. 
They looked as if they were gradually turning from endomorphs into ectomorphs. Or, of 
course, the other way around.'
    'Was anything proved?' I asked.
    'Not a thing. There was a minor ruckus about them at the Wendell Institute, but in 
the end they were shelved as hoaxes, or completely atypical oddities. The truth was they 
didn't fit into any of the established theories of mammal development, and it was easier 
to discredit them and forget them.'
    I sipped some more whisky. 'Is that all?' I wanted to know. 'There's only one thing 
more,' said Rheta. 'There was an outbreak of what was thought to be leprosy in Cuttack, 
in India, 1925, but the British doctor who treated most of the patients, a man called 
Austin, wrote a long report saying that it certainly wasn't leprosy. He said it was a 
form of scaley ossification-you know, a sort of bony growth. He tried to pinpoint what 
caused it, and in the end he decided the disease had stemmed from the local drinking 
water. There was a very heavy monsoon that year, and the rivers had overflowed into the 
irrigation ditches and the dug wells.'
    'Did he describe this ossification?' I asked her. 'Did he say what form it took?'
    Rheta said: 'He did better than that. He put together a beautiful descriptive 
addendum to his report, all in copperplate handwriting, with drawings.'
    'He did drawings?1
    'He sure did,' she said. 'And the terrible thing is that his report was lost, about 
twenty years ago. It was borrowed from the Harvard University Library and never returned.'
    I reached for a cigarillo and lit it. 'That's a goddamned shame. I'd like to have 
seen those drawings, even if they proved that what young Oliver Bodine went down with was 
something else altogether.'
    'Well, me too,' said Rheta. 'But I managed second best. I called my old professor of 
specialist medicine. He lives in Miami now, in retirement. But he remembers looking 
through -the Austin repert when he was a student. He thought Austin must have been off 
his head, and so he didn't take much serious notice of it. But he does recall one phrase 
in particular.'
    'What was that?' I asked.
    'He said it came at the point where Austin was describing a patient he had visited in 
a village on the River Mahdnadi, in September of 1925. Apparently Austin had to drive 
fifty miles through heavy rain and thick mud before he found this village, and he was 
exhausted when he got there, and so he says himself that his impressions might have been 
distorted by tiredness. But he was taken to an isolated hut on the outskirts of the 
village, and led inside by an old woman. The hut was almost totally dark inside, with 
drapes over the windows and a blanket screening the door. There was somebody lying on a 
bed in there, but Austin could scarcely make him out, and the old woman insisted that he 
stood at least five or six feet away, and shouldn't make any attempt to examine the 
patient. But Austin wrote that he'd made out a heavy and bone-laden head, and an arm that 
was strangely oval in section, with the shine of dull leather. He also said that the 
patient's voice was hoarse and difficult to understand.'
    'Go on,' I told her. Austin's evocation of his crustaceous patient was making me feel 
distinctly uneasy. I only had to half-close my eyes and I could imagine young Oliver 
Bodine's shell-plated thighs and buttocks, and that hideous spiney bone in the bath.
    'There wasn't much more to tell,' said Rheta. 'Except that Austin was nauseated by 
what he called "a stench of decaying fish so strong that I thought I must stifle".'
    'That's it,' I said quietly. 'That's exactly what Alison Bodine said about the water 
I took from their well, and that's exactly what Carter's deputy noticed in the Bodines' 
house. And I've smelled it myself now. A strong, overpowering stench offish.' Rheta said: 
'I know. And I think there could be a connection. But we mustn't leap to instant 
conclusions. Just because Austin smelled fish in 1925; and Alison Bodine smelled fish 
yesterday, that doesn't mean we've established a scientific connection beyond reasonable 
doubt. There are plenty of things that smell like fish apart from fish. Have you ever 
smelled an overheating electric plug?'
    'I know there weren't any overheating plugs at the Bodines' house,' I said. 'And I 
don't suppose Austin's patient on the banks of the River Mahdnadi had an overheating 
plug, either. Not unless a fuse was going in his hair rollers.'
    Rheta didn't laugh. Instead, she said: 'I know it's tempting to come to snap 
conclusions, but we mustn't do it. This is too serious a situation to make mistakes. 
We're going to have to go through dozens more tests before we have any clear idea of 
whit's happening.'