Walkers by Graham Masterton Page A

been very shocked this morning by what she had seen down on the
beach. Probably, all that she could remember with any clarity were the body and
the eels.
    Just as she passed him by, Henry
said, ‘Susan?’
    She stared at him. Her face was
blank. Then she suddenly realised who he was. ‘Oh, hi!’ she said, breathlessly. ‘I didn’t recognise you! You look so
much smarter now!
    Listen, I have to thank you for
being so kind to me this morning. I thought I was going to pass out. In fact, I did pass out, when I got home. Zonk!’
    ‘You look fine now,’ he told her.
    ‘Well, thank you, I have a date.’
    ‘So do I,’ said Henry. ‘That’s why I
waited for you. And look -’ he pointed across the front lot, to where Gil was taking
his parking check from the car-hop. ‘Our friend has a date here, too.’
    Susan turned to look at Gil, and
then she turned back and stared at Henry. ‘Can this be coincidence?’ she asked
him, in a soft, alarmed whisper. ‘I mean, all three of us meeting on the beach
this morning, and now coming here?’ Gil came up to them, and stopped and stared
just as they were staring at him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I sure didn’t expect to
find you two here.’
    ‘And we sure didn’t expect to find you here, either,’ Susan told him.
    ‘Well... as a matter of fact, I was
invited here,’ said Gil.
    ‘Me too,’ said Susan.
    ‘And me,’ added Henry.
    ‘This is weird,’ Gil protested. ‘I
never saw either of you before today, and yet here you both are, waiting for
me. You’re sure this isn’t some kind of a practical joke?’
    ‘If it is, we’re not playing it,’ said Henry. ‘We’re just as much victims of
it as you are.’
    ‘Who invited you?’ asked Susan. ‘I
was asked to come here by a newspaper reporter, from the Tribune.’
    ‘Well, it was a girl who asked me,’
said Gil. ‘She said she was writing an article for San Diego magazine.’
    Henry lifted up his philosophy
books. ‘That settles it. It must be nothing more than an incredible
coincidence. The fellow I’m supposed to be meeting used to be one of my
evening-class students, when I was teaching up at Encinitas.’
    Gil shook his head. ‘Some
coincidence, huh? I mean, the three of us meeting on the beach, and now meeting
here.’
    Henry turned and peered inside the
restaurant doorway. ‘I hope that nothing’s wrong,’ he remarked.
    ‘Wrong?’ asked Susan. ‘What do you
mean?’
    ‘I hope that what we saw on the
beach wasn’t something that we weren’t supposed to see.’
    ‘In what way?’ said Gil.
    ‘Well, just supposing that girl
wasn’t drowned by accident. Just supposing those eels didn’t drift in to shore
on a freak current, or whatever it was that the police were trying to suggest.
Just supposing those eels were actually bred as killers – deliberately bred to
attack swimmers or divers or anybody going into the water. You have your
Scripps Institute just down the road here, and you have your naval base at San
Diego. Supposing the Scripps people have been working on a government project
to supply the Navy with man-eating eels. And just supposing we saw the result,
and now we’ve all been invited along here to be dealt with. You know, like
Karen Silk wood.’
    ‘Boy, do you have an imagination!’
Gil whistled. Then he laughed, and said, ‘Are you serious, or are you just
trying to scare us?’
    Henry said, a little too pompously,
‘I’m a philosopher, Gil. I’m trained to use my mind.
    I’m trained to hypothesise, to think
problems out from every conceivable angle. All I’m saying is that the idea of
specially trained eels is a conceivable angle.’
    ‘But Karen Silkwood was killed,’
said Susan, worriedly.
    ‘This is nothing like Karen
Silkwood,’ Gil protested. ‘We don’t have any evidence at all. It’s just a
theory, right? And if I know anything at all about theories, the real
explanation will be uninteresting. That’s one thing you learn about life, that
the explanation