Forever and a Death

1

The helicopter sped eastward under a clear blue sky, low over the Coral Sea. Its flattened footprint scudded beneath it, rolling out the slate-gray waves, then immediately gone, and the waves leaped up again.

Inside, the copter had been custom refitted with light blue industrial carpet over a plywood floor on which stood eight broad swivel chairs in two rows of four, upholstered in a darker blue vinyl. A gray bulkhead up front with a curtain in its doorway separated this main cabin from a small galley, with the pilot’s compartment beyond that. On the bulkhead wall, next to the doorway, was imprinted a large symbol of an entwined RC, in dark red, looking vaguely snakelike or like an espaliered tree.

Richard Curtis, owner of the initials and the helicopter and almost everything else he could see, occupied the rear seat on the right. The other three passengers, two men and a woman, all venture capitalists with whom Curtis had had dealings in the past, were his guests, seated where he could look at them, consider them. There was too much noise inside here from engine and wind to make conversation possible, but Curtis didn’t need conversation, not now. What these three knew of his business and the reason for this flight was what they needed to know, and what they didn’t know was everything that mattered.

They had flown out here from Townsville, on Australia’s northeast coast, into the clear morning air, crossing over the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef, past Tregosse Island and Diamond Island and the Lihou Cays, and now Curtis felt the craft veer slightly to the right, which must mean the pilot had found the Mallory.

Yes, tugging gently at its sea anchor in the modest ocean swell, the yacht Mallory, named for Curtis’s father and with the entwined RC next to the name on both sides of the bow, stood offshore from Kanowit Island, where the final preparations were underway. George Manville, the engineer, would be over there on the island; this experiment was his baby. But he’d return to the Mallory when he saw the chopper arrive.

The circular white landing pad was aft, above and just forward of the observation area at the fantail. The helicopter lowered slowly, delicately, toward that constantly shifting white circle, then at last gently touched it and immediately seemed to sag, as though to clutch and hold onto the moving ship.

Even before the rotor blades had stopped turning, two groups of men ran forward, crouched, converging on the copter. The four men in gray work jumpers secured the craft to guy cables fixed in the deck, while the two in white steward uniforms slid open the side door, lowered the metal stairs, and stood by to offer a helping hand.

Curtis debarked first, nodding at the stewards, needing no help. An ocean breeze ruffled his thin gray hair as he crossed the pad, and he patted it down. He looked toward Kanowit and yes, the launch was coming this way, almost invisible against the gray sea except for its white wake.

Glass doors slid automatically open as Curtis entered the lounge, where a third steward waited, smiling a greeting, saying, “Morning, Mr. Curtis. Good flight?”

Curtis never thought about journeys, only destinations. What was a good flight? One where you weren’t killed? He ignored the question, saying, “Tell Manville to come see me in my cabin as soon as possible.” Turning to his three guests, who had followed him in here, he said, “The stewards will show you your cabins. You’ll have time to freshen up before the show starts.”

“A beautiful boat,” Bill Hardy said, smiling as he looked around in honest envy. An Australian, he was both the most candid and the shrewdest of the three.

“Thank you,” Curtis said, returning Hardy’s smile, though not with as much candor. “I like the Mallory, it relaxes me.” In fact nothing relaxed him.

Then he nodded to them all, and went away to his cabin, forward, just behind the bridge, where he could be alone until Manville arrived. He was consumed with so much anger, so much hatred, that he found it hard to be around other people for very long. The snarl beneath the surface kept wanting to break through.

And of course, everybody knew about it, which only made things worse. Everybody knew they’d driven Richard Curtis out of Hong Kong, those mainland bastards, once they’d taken over. Everybody knew they’d cheated him, and robbed him, and driven him out of his home, his industry, his life. Everybody knew Richard Curtis’s great humiliation. But what nobody knew was that the game wasn’t over.

Binoculars were kept in the drawer of the table by the large picture window in the parlor of his two-room cabin suite. Looking through them, Curtis saw Manville’s launch almost here, and far away — brought much closer through the lenses — Kanowit Island, a round low hillock of scrub in the sea, with the rotten bent shapes of the Japanese army’s barracks and sheds, nearly sixty years old, standing here and there on the island like the ghost town remnants they were.

Curtis watched the island through the binoculars. Manville’s people were still at work over there, just visible, scurrying like ants, completing the preparations.

In how long — two hours? — Kanowit Island would be changed completely from what it now was, wrenched into a new existence. If Manville were right, it would change into something good and useful; if he were wrong, it would become something destroyed and irreparable. But Manville had to be right, Curtis needed him to be right.

In how long — two hours? — step one.

2

Kim Baldur stepped out of her jeans, lost her balance, and grabbed the upright post of the bunkbed beside her to keep her feet. The Planetwatch III had been steaming serenely forward through the sea, at a regular and pleasing rhythm, and had made that one little faltering jounce at just the wrong second.

Kim decided, to be on the safe side, she should sit down on the lower bunk — it belonged to Angela, her bunkmate, already up on deck — while she finished removing the jeans and then pushed her feet down into the legs of the wetsuit. The neoprene felt, as always, a little slick and slimy when she first put it on, but her body would slowly warm it, and later, if she was in the water, it would be the most comfortable thing you could imagine.

Would she go into the water? She wanted to, she always did, but who knew what would happen today, when they finally got to the island? Something, I hope, she thought. Let something happen.

This was her first run on Planetwatch III, the first time she’d volunteered with this ecological guardian group, and she was reluctant to admit to herself that so far it had been mostly boring. She was 23, she had nothing behind her but college and a few discarded boyfriends, and it had seemed to her, before she would have to settle down into an ordinary career, that she should put her time and her intelligence and her enthusiasm to work somehow, for some greater good. To join the volunteers of Planetwatch, to use the SCUBA-diving skills she’d learned as a teenager in the Caribbean, to sail the high seas on a mission to save the world, had seemed beforehand the height of adventure. But it was strange how the days on the ship were merely drudgery, and stranger still how indifferent to her heroism the world remained.

Dressed, and with her flippers tucked under her left arm, Kim left the small metal-walled cabin. Outside, the narrow corridor was empty, and echoed as usual with some faint distant clang; something to do with the engine room.

As she moved along the corridor toward the ladder, which was merely a series of metal rungs bolted into the side wall and leading up to a round hatch always kept open except in heavy weather, Kim unconsciously brushed her right knuckles along the cool wall, a habit she had learned early on because of the sometimes unpredictable movements of the ship.

A small freighter that for years, under the name Nyota, had plied the Indian Ocean out of Djibouti, this vessel had been bought cheap by supporters of Planetwatch after Planetwatch II had been sunk by an underwater explosive off a French atoll. She was a solid ship, refitted for passengers but still retaining a bluntness and a tendency to plunge hard into the waves that was a leftover from her freighter days.

Kim climbed the ladder one-handed, lithe as a monkey, the flippers still under her left arm. At the top, she turned to the open doorway in the metal wall just beside her and stepped out onto the deck.

Here she stood at the prow, one deck below the bridge, her ears full of the rushing hiss of the ship as it cleaved its way through the water. The sense of motion this far forward was mostly vertical, short hard slaps up and down as Planetwatch III sliced northward toward Kanowit.

She looked first at the sea; she always did. Today it was a pebbly mid-gray, with darker tones beneath and tiny whitecaps popping here and there. A three-foot sea, at most; bliss to dive in.

And the sky was almost completely clear, a gleaming acrylic blue, except for a bundle of gray clouds along the western horizon, toward Australia. They’d be having a beautiful sunset over there, some hours from now.

It had at first astonished Kim that there were no real sunsets in mid-ocean, not what was meant by the phrase ‘a beautiful sunset.’ The sun did often go down behind the waves in a variegated display of color, pale shades of pink and blue and green darkening toward night, but all in a neat and controlled manner, without that bruised sky, those blazing reds and oranges, that lush riot of purple exclamation points. “What you’re looking at when you look at a sunset ashore,” Jerry had explained, early in the trip, “is pollution. What you see out here is the natural sunset. What people ooh and aah over back home is just rotten air, clouds of toxic waste, streams of acid rain. When the sunset you see off the coast of Malibu looks like that one out there, we’ll know we’ve done our job.”

Jerry Diedrich was Planetwatch’s leader aboard, and Kim was coming to the belief that he knew everything about everything. A lean and weathered man in his early forties, he had a starving poet’s good looks, and Kim sheepishly knew she would have developed a schoolgirl crush on him weeks ago if he hadn’t made his homosexuality so open and unquestionable. (He and Luther Rickendorf were the only couple on the ship.)

Turning away from sea and sky, Kim looked up toward the recessed deck next above her, where Angela stood, in faded cut-offs and a dark green halter, shielding her eyes from the sun with both cupped hands as she stared out at the sea.

“Kanowit Island,” Angela said, and pointed out toward the horizon, northward. “Dead ahead. Jerry says we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Good,” Kim said. She moved away down the narrow port deck toward the SCUBA tanks.

3

“This is George Manville, our genius engineer,” Curtis said. “George, this is Bill Hardy, from Australia, Abdullah Wayarabo from Indonesia, Madame Zilah Graca deCastro from Brazil.”

They all greeted each other, Curtis smiling on them with what seemed like paternal indulgence, seeing the contrasts among them. Manville, for instance, was an engineer, and nothing but an engineer, who had made no accommodation to the fact that he was presently quartered on a ship. He still wore the same workboots, the same chinos, the same button-down work shirt with the ballpoint pen in his breast pocket, as though he were on some construction site in Chicago. He was a simple creature, George Manville, but brilliant, usefully brilliant.

The venture capitalists were as unlike one another as they were unlike George Manville. Bill Hardy, the Australian, was open and hearty, a glad-hander, everybody’s pal, who hid his icy shrewdness as though it were a fault, rather than his greatest strength. Abdullah Wayarabo, connected through various marriages to the Indonesian royal family, had a courtier’s smile and smoothness mixed with the arrogant assurance of the extremely rich; he could command while seeming to be obsequious, and almost always get his way. Madame deCastro, the Brazilian widow of a major construction figure in South America, was a heavyset severe woman in her sixties, who had never been noticed during her husband’s life; since his death, it had become clear she’d been the brains of the company all along.

These three, plus Manville and Curtis, were gathered in the aft lounge for the explanations that would precede the event on the island. Manville had set up two easels with charts and drawings stacked on them, and now stood to one side while Curtis began: “The history of Kanowit Island is brief. I bought it, two years ago, from Australia. They retained mineral rights, but it’s a coral atoll, there’s nothing under it except porous rock and salt water. Australia got it in 1946, at the end of the war, from the Japanese, who had occupied it in 1937. Before that it had been nominally Spanish, having been claimed for the Spanish throne in the eighteenth century, but Spain never occupied the island in any way and no longer contests ownership. The title is skimpy, but it’s clean. The island is mine.”

Wayarabo said, “Does Australia claim legal jurisdiction?”

“Yes.” Curtis spread his hands. “Every dry inch of the planet must be under the legal and political control of some nation, and for us Australia’s not a bad jurisdiction at all. There’s nothing we mean to do on the island that breaks any of their laws.”

Hardy said, “Gambling?”

“My lawyers already cleared that,” Curtis told him. “We’re considered offshore, as though we were a ship. We can operate a casino, but we must pay taxes to Australia. They understand and approve that what we want to do here is create a new destination resort. A championship-level golf course, tennis courts, a casino, a first-class hotel, conference rooms. Kanowit Island stands at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, longest barrier reef in the world, where the best snorkeling on Earth can be found. We’ve already made arrangements with the appropriate airlines for flights, when we’re ready, from Australia, the Philippines and Hawaii.”

Madame deCastro said, “Club Med?”

“More up-market than that,” Curtis told her. “Think Rock Resorts, only international. We’ve done customer projections, we’ll give you all of that. But the point today is the demonstration. George?”

Manville stepped forward as though he were about to run them through a routine of calisthenics. He said, “Kanowit Island is an irregular oval, almost a circle, roughly two miles across. The island was smaller when the Japanese took over in the thirties; they built a very thick concrete ring wall, then did landfill into it from the surrounding ocean floor. The island is really just a bit of coral that sticks above the surface of the sea, and it’s very shallow for almost half a mile out from it in all directions, so no large boats can go in, unless we were to cut a channel in the coral, and that we wouldn’t be permitted to do.”

Wayarabo, with a faint smile, said, “You’d have environmentalists all over you.”

“We may have anyway,” Curtis told him, and nodded to Manville: “Go on, George.”

“Having enlarged the island,” Manville said, “the Japanese installed structures and equipment to make it a listening post, to track cargo convoys or military fleets. Most of the equipment was in a honeycomb of tunnels cut into the landfill. At the end of the war, most of the equipment was removed. The rest, and the buildings, were abandoned and are now a ruin.”

“Normally,” Curtis said, “what we would have to do, with such a place as that, is bring in bulldozers, heavy equipment, barge them all in and living accommodations for the crews, and painstakingly reconfigure the whole island to our needs.”

“Expensive,” Madame deCastro said.

“Even impractical,” Wayarabo suggested.

“Which is why,” Curtis said, “we’re trying this experiment.”

Manville said, “What we’re going to use today is a wave, sea water itself, a very special kind of oscillating wave called a soliton. The soliton is usually created deep in the ocean, caused by a seismic shift in the ocean floor, and it’s the root cause of the tsunami, the huge destructive wave that every once in a while marches across the Pacific.”

“But not around here,” Curtis hastened to add. “The tsunami normally hits farther north, sometimes gets all the way to Japan.”

Manville said, “The soliton has been recreated in laboratory conditions, by scientists who want to study it, possibly learn how to control it. They’ve written papers on their work. We’re adapting those papers to our own needs. What we’re doing here, we’ve flooded the tunnels the Japanese dug, we’ve sealed off all the exits, we’ve placed small dynamite charges at specific spots in the tunnels, radio-controlled, and they’ll discharge serially, just about ten minutes from now. If we’ve done our job right—” Manville shrugged, while Curtis looked grim “—the charges will create a laboratory-style soliton, an oscillating wave.”

Wayarabo said, “Which will do what?”

Curtis said, “The Japanese increased the size of the island with landfill. The tunnels are in the landfill, because the coral beneath is too porous and the sea would come in. Landfill, no matter how well done, is unstable. In the Los Angeles earthquake a few years ago, several pieces of elevated freeway collapsed, and every one of them was built on landfill. One of the most serious collapses was at a place called La Cienega Boulevard, and in Spanish ‘la cienega’ means ‘the swamp.’ ”

Hardy said, “You mean to break up the landfill with this wave?”

“We mean to turn it into soup,” Curtis told him.

Manville said, “The soliton, once it gets started, feeds itself, builds its own energy for quite a long time. That oscillating wave will break down the tunnel walls and spread through the landfill, breaking it up, so that when it finally wears itself out, the entire island, if our projections are right, will be nothing but a lake of mud, held in by the concrete retaining wall.”

Hardy said, “If the wall doesn’t go.”

“We’ve tested the wall,” Manville assured him, “and it should stand firm.”

Madame deCastro said, “If the wave keeps generating its own force, won’t it eventually push down into the coral, start breaking that up? Then at the end you wouldn’t have any island at all, and possibly some damage to the reef.”

“That’s what some of the environmentalists are bleating about,” Curtis told her, “and they’re wrong.”

Manville said, “The power has exits, through the landfill and eventually upward. Force always takes the easiest route, and the coral isn’t the easiest route.”

Curtis said, “What’s going to happen is, the buildings will break up and sink into the mud. The tunnels will fill in. Nothing will be left but mud, which we think will dry in five to six weeks, draining downward through the coral, to leave a clean, flat, absolutely empty island. Then we come in with our own soil, our plantings, our construction crews. As a way to clear a site—”

“If it works,” Manville said. He had to express that engineer’s caution, he had to keep doing it.

“Yes,” Curtis said, irritated. “If it works, and in my heart I know it will, it can save us millions, not only on this project, but on other projects in the future.”

A steward had appeared in the doorway while Curtis was speaking, and had waited for Curtis to be done. Now he said, “Sir, the captain asks me to inform you, a ship is moving toward the island.”

4

Jerry Diedrich stood beside Captain Cousseran on the bridge of Planetwatch III and looked out at Kanowit Island, so near and yet so far. It seemed deserted, but with some new low metal structures among the crumbling barracks buildings; controls for the explosion? Well off from the island to port waited the yacht, Mallory, solid, starkly white, hardly moving in the small sea. To Jerry, the yacht looked mostly like a dove, impossibly large, resting in the water, wings folded; and what a wrong image that was!

Captain Cousseran, a heavyset Belgian, a man who’d captained Dutch cargo ships until his retirement, when he’d volunteered to join Planetwatch, probably most out of boredom, spoke in French to his steersman, then said to Jerry, “This is as close as we can go.”

“We’ll send a launch ashore,” Jerry said, and the radioman, at his desk behind the others, said, “Captain, the Mallory is calling us.”

Jerry grinned. “I thought he might. Full of threats, I suppose.”

“I’ll take it,” Captain Cousseran said, reaching for his microphone.

Jerry said, “Put it on the loudhailer, let the whole ship hear it.”

“Yes, good.”

When next he spoke, Captain Cousseran’s voice echoed outside the bridge, loud and distorted, but plain enough to be heard and understood anywhere on the ship. The sound, so strong here, would fade away almost to nothing long before it reached the Mallory. “This is Captain Cousseran.”

“This is Captain Zhang Yung-tsien of the Mallory. I am asked to inform you that you are too close to Kanowit Island for safety.”

“It is the intention of some members of our party to go ashore.”

“You cannot approach any closer, the sea is too shallow.”

“They will go by launch.”

“I am asked to inform you that a series of explosions will shortly take place on the island, and it will not be safe there, or anywhere close by. There will be a considerable shock wave.”

“Since my party is determined to go ashore, Captain Zhang, I would ask you to delay the explosion until we can have a face-to-face meeting.”

“I am asked to inform you that that is impossible. The timing devices on the island have been set, and it is too late to change or stop them.”

Jerry, angry, feeling the old frustration, clenched his fists. “He’s lying!”

“Surely, Captain Zhang, there is a fail-safe mechanism to permit you to abort the explosion.”

“There is not. I am asked to inform you that the timing equipment for the explosions is on the island, that they are set to begin the operation in under four minutes from now, and that it would be impossible at this point to get to the island in time to stop them. Anyone who tries to approach the island now is in very grave danger.”

“Lying, lying.” Jerry gritted his teeth, partly because he was afraid Captain Zhang was telling the truth. He needed to stop Richard Curtis, stop him now, stop him for good.

“Captain Zhang. I can’t believe your employer would create such a dangerous situation, leaving himself open to serious consequences if anyone should be harmed. Our launch will be ready to leave in two minutes. Again. I ask you—”

“This is Richard Curtis.”

Jerry’s shoulders hunched at the sound of the voice, the sound of the name. So arrogant, so sure of his power, so sure he’s unassailable. We’ll see.

And the hated voice went on:

“This is my ship and that is my island, and you are trespassing. I have explosives over there on my island that will kill anybody who gets too close to it. You have been warned, repeatedly, and if any harm happens to the sentimental idiots who are your passengers it is on their—”

Jerry couldn’t stand it anymore, and grabbed the mike away from Captain Cousseran. When he spoke, he knew his voice trembled with passion, but he couldn’t help it, and he didn’t care:

“And if harm happens to the reef? Irreparable harm to the coral?”

“Who is that?”

“This is Jerry Diedrich, leader of the sentimental idiots. I will personally be in that—”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw it; an orange-suited figure rolled backwards over the rail and down into the sea.

He was so startled the words faltered in his mouth.

Who was that? He held the mike, but he couldn’t speak.

Kim! It had to be, he knew it, that goddam eager stupid Kim. What was she doing? Did she think he wanted her to kill herself?

Hand trembling, Jerry held the mike against his lips, so that his chattering teeth hit the metal:

“You saw that. You have to stop it now. You have no choice.”

5

“Who is that?”

Curtis stared through his binoculars, held in his left hand with the mike in his right, but the diver had disappeared the instant he hit the water. Into the mike, with impatient sincerity, Curtis said, “Diedrich, don’t be a fool. Get that man back.”

The voice over the radio sounded scared, as well it should: “I can’t. I didn’t— It wasn’t my order.”

Was the diver moving toward the island? Or would he stay by the ship, waiting to be told what to do next? Curtis said, “If that idiot gets too close to the island, he’s dead. I’m telling you, Diedrich, and it’s true. We’re not talking one explosion here, we’re talking half a dozen in a rolling pattern, each with its own shock wave. If that man’s going toward the island, you’ve killed one of your own people. And I will pursue you in the Australian courts.”

“Then stop it!”

“I can’t, you bloody fool! You’ve been told and told. It’s too late.”

The silence from Diedrich sounded shocked, but there was nothing to be done about it, not now. Handing the mike to Captain Zhang, Curtis said, “There’s nothing more to say to them.” Turning away, carrying the binoculars, he stepped out onto the wing, the small open area to the right of the bridge. He leaned on the rail there and, through the glasses, he looked toward Kanowit, empty and silent.

Diedrich. It was him again, Jerry Diedrich. The other environmental groups, and even other arms of Planetwatch, spent most of their time on the government polluters, the bomb-testers and radioactive-waste dumpers. Only Diedrich was always there, every single time, when the Curtis Construction Company was doing anything that impinged even slightly on environmental concerns.

Curtis Construction was large, not as large as it used to be, but still big enough to be a player in most of the major construction work around the globe, the dams, the widening of rivers, deepening of ports, construction of harbors. And every time, sooner or later, Diedrich would appear, a plague, a pest.

Would he show up later, in Hong Kong, when it really mattered? Was there no way to stop him?

Holding the binoculars, Curtis scanned the water between the island and the environmentalists’ ship, but could see nothing. The diver would stay underwater, to move faster, but couldn’t be very deep, not amidst all that coral. If he was out there now, near the island, and if the shock waves didn’t kill him, then being battered repeatedly against razor-edge outcroppings of coral surely would.

He hadn’t meant anyone to die, not this time. Later, when the real thing happened, a whole lot of people would die, but they would deserve it. These environmentalists were merely well-meaning ignoramuses, minor irritations; all except Diedrich. There was no need, as the French had once done, to kill them.

But if the diver did die, could that be used to hamper Diedrich, tie him up, keep him away when it was important for Curtis to be unobserved? There were recordings of the ship-to-ship conversation, there would be proof of the repeated warnings, and of Diedrich’s refusal to heed them. When he got back to Sydney, Curtis would turn it all over to the lawyers, let them harry Diedrich for a while, see how he enjoyed it,

Curtis scanned the ocean through the binoculars, seeing nothing, only the wavelets, the constant shifting movement of the sea. And then the ocean trembled, it flattened into hobnails, and the binoculars shuddered, punching painfully against Curtis’s face.

6

At first the sea seemed to shrink, to turn a darker gray, as though it had grown suddenly cold, with goosebumps. There was a silence then, a pregnant silence, like the cottony absence of sound just before a thunderstorm. The island seemed to rise slightly from the sea, the concrete collar of its retaining wall standing out crisp and clear, every flaw and hollow in the length of it as vivid as if done in an etching.

Then a ripple appeared, faint at first, and rolled outward from the island, all around, just beneath the surface, like a representation of radio waves. With the ripple came a muttering, a grumbling, as though boulders sheathed in wool were being rolled together in some deep cave. And the ripple came outward, outward, not slackening, not losing power, with more ripples emerging behind it.

Planetwatch III lay abeam the island, portside facing it, preparatory to lowering its launch. That first ripple, now visible as a strong surge just below the waves, hit the ship all along its port side and rocked it like a cradle. Crashing sounds came from everywhere aboard as anything on the ship that wasn’t tied down was flung away. Half the ship’s passengers and crew lost their feet, falling awkwardly, bruising elbows and knees and heads.

Planetwatch III righted itself groggily, a fighter who’s been hurt but not yet downed, and Captain Cousseran shouted in French to the steersman. And the next ripple came steadily on, rolling closer.

Jerry Diedrich had been knocked painfully sideways against the metal wall of the bridge, narrowly missing the sidemost large window pane. Now, his left arm streaked with pain, his chest aching, he cried, “Captain! What are you doing?”

“Moving,” the captain told him, short and unapologetic. He was master of his bridge, and of his ship. “We’re too close,” he said, and Planetwatch III started the slow process of its turn, away from the island.

Jerry clung to the rail. “But... what about Kim?”

Captain Cousseran gestured at the sea and the island. “See for yourself.”

Jerry saw; he had to admit he saw. Closer to the island, the sea had begun to boil, with whitecaps that leaped like dolphins. The discrete ripples rolled outward like moving rings of Saturn, and the island itself had begun to change, as though it had abruptly gone out of focus. The land seemed to shudder, and the buildings to oscillate wildly, as though an inanimate place could feel agony.

The second ripple hit when Planetwatch III was midway through her turn, so that it helped as much as it harmed, pushing the ship along, farther from the island, at the same time that it battered them all once more, with a harder punch at the stern that rattled doors and strained rivets throughout the ship.

Jerry clung to the waist railing along the wall of the bridge, and stared back toward the island and the sea. Buildings were being sucked down into the ground over there, the land itself had turned into brown sluggish waves, everything within the retaining wall was an eruption of mud.

The sea from there to here was empty, rolling with the energy that punched outward from the island. Jerry stared hard at that water, but there was nothing to see. Not Kim, not Kim’s body; nothing.

How had he done this? Was he responsible for this? He had wanted to destroy Richard Curtis, but he had only destroyed an eager and trusting child.

And himself?

7

“Six,” George Manville said.

So that was the last of the explosions. Manville and the three money people stood in the forward lounge, beneath the bridge, gazing out through the windows at what was becoming of Kanowit. The Mallory was nose-to to the island, tethered by the sea anchor, and it withstood the shock waves far better than that lumbering tub of an ex-freighter over there, now waddling desperately away, rocking and bouncing like a bathtub toy.

Manville studied the island through binoculars, and what he saw was good. The land was liquefying, erupting like slow-boiled water. The structures on the island were breaking apart, collapsing into the mud. The ring wall had held.

Another shock wave passed beneath the ship, tinkling glasses on the back bar, causing Madame deCastro once again to clutch at the railing beneath the windows. She said, “How much longer does this go on?”

“Another two or three minutes,” Manville told her, and Richard Curtis came in from the ladder — actually a wide flight of wooden stairs down from the bridge — just outside. His heavy face was smiling, his tan seemed ruddier.

Manville offered him a smile and a congratulatory salute. He liked this boss, his most recent boss, liked Curtis’s determination and decisiveness, liked the way he described a problem and then got out of the way of the experts. A hefty but solid man of 54, just under average height, Richard Curtis moved through life with a kind of unconscious aggression, as though at all times he were bulling his way through an unresponsive crowd.

Now, he acknowledged Manville’s salute with a nod and said, “We’ve done it.”

Curtis looked out toward the island, and the others followed his lead. The turmoil out there continued.

“Yes, sir, we have,” Manville said.

8

Jerry Diedrich stood at the fantail, looking back at the distant island. The ripples had ended at last, or the ship had outrun them. The sea was itself again, moderate and unthreatening. The air was the same, soft and warm. Even the sky was just as blue as before, all as though nothing had happened. Only that, on the island, everything had changed.

And somewhere in the water, Kim Baldur drifted, dead.

And the reef, the coral? Had anything happened to that, any structural damage, any death of the living coral to make up for the death of Kim?

He didn’t think so. It was a bitter pill, but it seemed to Jerry that Curtis and his engineers had been right, after all. Time would have to pass, experts would have to dive and study the terrain, but Jerry knew this subject, knew it well, and there were none of the telltale signs of environmental damage, no broader upheaval of the ocean, no debris. The retaining wall around the island hadn’t collapsed, so the coral footing beneath it must still be sound. The injuries to the fragile barrier reef they’d predicted and feared and had tried to guard against hadn’t happened.

It was such a delicate thing they had just done over there. If Curtis and his engineers had been off in their calculations, just a little off, the destruction would have occurred, Jerry knew it. And he hated also the knowledge of himself he now had; at this moment, in his heart, he wished the catastrophe had come about, that some terrible harm had been done to the reef and the sea creatures and the sea itself, for no reason other than to prove to the world that Jerry Diedrich was right and Richard Curtis wrong.

“Jerry?”

He turned, and it was Tim, a member of the group, a college student from San Diego, with the bleached hair and eyes and flaking skin of a surf bum but the intense look of the devoted volunteer. Except that Tim now looked mostly worried.

Does he blame me, Jerry wondered, and wiped at his face. “Spray got me,” he said.

There was no spray up here, but Tim ignored that. He said, “The Captain wants to see you, Jerry.”

“Be right there.”

Tim looked as though he wanted to comfort Jerry somehow, pat his arm or say something encouraging, but couldn’t find a way to do it. So Jerry patted Tim’s arm instead, and went away forward, and up to the bridge, where Captain Cousseran said, “We have been in further conversation with the Mallory.”

Steel yourself, Jerry thought, don’t show any weakness.

He couldn’t wait to be alone with Luther, when he could release all these tense muscles, let the misery have him. His face as expressionless as he could make it, he said, “Have we? And what does the Mallory have to say for itself?”

“They’re sending launches to the island, to inspect,” the Captain told him, and looked past Jerry to say, “in fact, they’ve started.”

Jerry turned, and saw the two small boats, partly enclosed, bright red and yellow to be visible in an emergency, just moving out from under Mallory’s white flank.

Captain Cousseran said, “They’ve warned us away. If we try to bring our own launch in close, they’ll call us trespassers, and repel us. They say, with force, if necessary.”

Jerry looked into Captain Cousseran’s eyes, hoping to find sympathy there, or comradeship, but found only a correct dispassion. He said, “Captain, we can’t just— We can’t just leave.”

“You’re thinking about the diver,” the captain said. “The captain of the Mallory promises his crew will search. If they find... the body... they’ll bring it on to Australia.”

And use it in the campaign against us, Jerry thought. He said, “Captain, can’t we—”

“No.” The captain shook his head. “I won’t permit my crew to go where they have been threatened with physical harm. We did not order that person into the water, we didn’t want him to go—”

“Kim,” Jerry said. “It was Kim Baldur.”

The captain raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “It would be her, wouldn’t it? A pity. A nice girl. Over-eager.”

Her epitaph, Jerry thought, and looked out to where the launches slowly moved toward the island. He said, “What do we do now?”

“We go back to Adelaide,” Captain Cousseran said. “We report the incident. We hope for the best.”

The best. Jerry watched the red-and-yellow launches, out there across the gray water. They were closing with the island. The best seemed farther away than ever.

9

Curtis rode in the lead launch, Manville in the one behind. There were two crew members in each launch as well, and all eyes were supposed to be on the lookout for the body of the diver, but Curtis couldn’t stop staring at the island, as they moved out away from the Mallory.

Mud. Soup, as he had predicted, in which every mark of man had sunk and crumbled and disappeared. And when he was ready, the same thing, the same sudden stripping away and finality, would happen again, on a much vaster scale. The buildings that fell then, when he was ready, the buildings that would crumble and melt away into the sudden soup, would not be low half-rotted barracks, but skyscrapers, concrete and metal and glass, some of which he himself had built, or helped to build.

I gave them, he thought, I’ll take them away. And with just as much pleasure, just as much skill, just as much efficiency, the buildings he had helped put up he would knock down again.

Until recently, when he visualized that destruction, the image in Curtis’s mind of the toppling skyscrapers was immediately supplanted by the image of the ancient bastards in Beijing, the shock and the fear on those age-lined pig-faces when they heard the news: someone has killed your golden goose. The image of those faces had been enough for him, could bring him a smile every time he thought of it.

But just in the last few days, he’d found himself, not willingly, thinking about the people inside the buildings. There would be no warning, merely a low rumble in the earth and then the buildings would go over like chainsawed trees. No escape.

Those people in the buildings weren’t his enemies. But he wasn’t going to worry about them. They’d made their choice when they’d decided to stay, after the bastards from the mainland took over. They could have gone away, almost every one of them could have gone away. They could have gone to Macao, or Malaysia; many could have gone to Singapore (as Curtis had), or Canada, or a dozen other places in the world. But they chose to stay, so what happened was on their own heads.

Still, now that he was thinking about it, it seemed to him, for a number of reasons, he would be better to make it happen at night. He’d always visualized it in daylight, in bright sun, the gleaming glass buildings as they went over, but that wasn’t necessary. He certainly wouldn’t be there to see it.

At night, it would be easier to make the collections.

It would be easier to get away without question. And, at night, the buildings would be nearly empty, all of the workers, the clerks, the bosses, all off to their bedrooms on the mainland, only a few left to feel the sudden sway as the floors shifted beneath them. It was their choice, it was not on Richard Curtis’s head; and yet, it was better to do it at night, when there would be fewer people in the buildings.

The island was very close now. The crewman at the wheel steered the launch forward slowly, cautiously, watching for coral. Curtis opened the leather case and took out the video camera, knowing Manville would be doing the same thing on the other boat.

When he looked back, Manville’s boat was already turning away to port. While Curtis circled the island to the right, Manville would circle it to the left, until they met on the far side. All the way, they would tape the island, showing its condition and the condition of the retaining wall.

Seen through the viewfinder of the camera, the island seemed smaller, and the light brown mud looked almost solid enough to walk on, though Curtis knew it was quicksand there now, it would eat anything it was given.

The launches moved slowly around the island, and the steersman next to Curtis gave a shout when he saw the second launch come around into view ahead of them. Curtis kept filming until his and Manville’s boats met, and then, in the bobbing water just offshore, they both put their cameras down and grinned across the peaceful water at one another. Manville made the A-OK signal, thumb and first finger in an O, and Curtis nodded.

They were almost alone now, on the sea. From here, the Mallory was hidden by the bulk of the island, and the environmentalists’ ship was still in full flight toward the horizon, merely a dark blotch on the ocean. Looking over at Manville, Curtis made a sweeping pointing gesture, to say they should go back around the island now and return to the ship. Manville nodded, and Curtis told the steersman, “We’ll head back now.” Then he turned to stow the camera away, as the launch put about.

It was the second crewman who saw it, part of the way back, a muted thing floating off to port, half-submerged in the slightly deeper water near where the other ship had stood. He called and pointed, and then Curtis and the steersman also saw it, and they veered that way, while Manville and the second launch waited on their original course.

It was the diver, face up, air hose still clamped in mouth, wetsuit zippered shut over body and head, leaving only that blue-gray face exposed.

It was a woman.

The air tanks were still attached to the body, underneath it as it bobbed in the water, making trouble when they tried to grab hold and haul her aboard.

While one crewman held an ankle and the other a wrist, Curtis bent over the launch’s side and managed to unhook the straps holding the air tanks in place.

They drifted free, silver, glistening, and Curtis yanked the air hose from the diver’s mouth and helped the two crewmen drag her up over the rail and into the bottom of the boat.

The body landed face down. Curtis went to one knee beside it, rolled it over, and unzipped the top part of the wetsuit, wondering if the diver carried ID. It would prove they had the body if they could radio the other ship the diver’s name.

The wetsuit’s head piece was peeled back, and ash blonde hair spilled out, not long but very curly. The face within that halo of hair was young, unlined.

Curtis leaned closer. Tiny droplets of blood seeped from the nostrils and the ears. Beneath the pale flesh of the throat, on the right side, a small bird fluttered. A pulse. She was alive.

“Damn,” Curtis said.

10

When Luther Rickendorf got back to their cabin with the two drinks, held in the big palm of his left hand, he thought at first that Jerry had fallen asleep, and was glad of it.

But then Jerry stirred on his bunk, having heard the door open, and rolled over. His face looked a mess, blotchy and drawn, the eyes still frantic. He blinked a lot, and stared at Luther as though he had no idea who Luther was.

“Here you are,” Luther said, and extended toward him the vodka and orange juice, keeping the plain club soda for himself.

Jerry propped himself up on the bunk, back against the bulkhead, and accepted the drink. He gulped some, spilling orange on his chin and T-shirt, then wiped his face with his free hand, looked less manically at Luther, and said, “Thank you.”

“The least I could do.”

“What’s that you’ve got?”

“White wine spritzer,” Luther lied. “To keep you company.”

The truth was, Luther had no desire and little liking for alcohol. He could not remember ever having felt the need to have his mood altered. He remained the same no matter what, an optimistic realist, and let the world swirl around him.

It was because of Jerry that he was aboard this ship, not like the others out of any conviction or sense of mission. Tall and blondly Teutonic, Luther had grown up in Munich, his father an industrialist in the new Germany. He had known he was gay from his early teens, and with his strong good looks had never had trouble finding partners. When his father learned about him, shortly after Luther’s seventeenth birthday, he had proved to be an enlightened parent, up to a point. He would still consider Luther his son, would support him as necessary and acknowledge him as needed, but only so long as Luther stayed out of Germany.

Luther’s exile began auspiciously. His father paid his tuition and expenses through three years to a bachelor of arts degree at Stanford University, in California. After that, with some financial help from home, he had become a ski instructor at Aspen for a few years, then had followed a lover from there who spent his summers as crew on the tourist sailing vessels in the Caribbean. He stayed when the ex-lover returned to the states, quickly became practiced around sail himself, met Jerry Diedrich one night in a bar on Anguilla, and his life as an environmental do-gooder began.

When he thought sometimes of what an instinctive, unrelenting, unrepentant polluter of air and water and land his father was, Luther could only smile. To his father’s question, in one letter accompanying a check, “What after all is Planetwatch?” he had replied, “Something much much worse than homosexuality.”

Now he sat on the other bunk and watched Jerry slurp his screwdriver. There were no large cabins on Planetwatch III, and this one was just big enough for the two bunks bolted into opposite walls, the drawers built in at one end, and the door at the other. If you wanted to make love, you crowded the two mattresses side by side on the floor between the bunks, and were careful to restore everything afterward, not to scandalize the others.

Jerry said, “Did Kim have anybody on the boat? A boyfriend?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Not sleeping with anybody?”

“I have no idea,” Luther said, “but I doubt it.”

Jerry took more of his drink; about a third of it was left. He blinked past Luther at the wall. “You don’t suppose,” he said, his voice mournful, “she died a virgin.”

Luther laughed; he couldn’t help it. “Nobody’s a virgin,” he said.

“But she was so young.”

“Jerry,” Luther said, “she did it to herself. Nobody sent her, nobody wanted her to go. Everybody wanted her not to go. Sooner or later, you’ll have to accept that. She did it to herself, and there was nothing you could have done about it.” He spoke with a faint accent, which usually gave him a pleasant and amusing sound, but when he was trying to comfort someone — though he had no way to know this — he came off mostly like a Viennese psychiatrist, remote and only professionally caring, not emotionally involved at all.

Jerry said, “If anybody’s responsible, it’s Curtis.”

And, as usual, his voice roughened, became harsher, when he spoke Curtis’s name.

Luther wanted to tell him, “Forget Curtis. It’s over. Think about something else.” But he knew he’d be wasting his breath (even if it were possible for him to sound sympathetic), so he said, “What are you going to do?”

“Singapore,” Jerry said.

Luther was surprised. “Leave the ship? Why Singapore?”

“Because that’s Curtis’s base,” Jerry said, “now that he’s out of Hong Kong. Because I have to know what he’s going to do next.”

11

There was no doctor aboard the Mallory, but Captain Zhang had taken a number of accrediting courses, enough to qualify him as a medical orderly, which was sufficient for the safety standards required in a ship of this size and purpose. Once he had the diver safely stashed, Curtis went directly to Zhang, on the bridge, and said, “I need you to look at the diver.”

Curious, Zhang said, “To establish death?” The helmsman was over on the other side of the bridge. Lowering his voice, Curtis said, “To establish life.” Then, before the man could make a startled comment, he added, “This is between us. No one knows. Come down and take a look.”

“Of course.”

Zhang turned to give orders to the helmsman, who would command the bridge during the captain’s absence, then picked up his bulky vinyl medical kit and he and Curtis made their way down through the ship.

When the launch carrying Curtis and the diver had returned to the Mallory and been lifted into position so they could step through the gate in the railing onto the deck of the larger ship, Curtis had surprised the crewmen by insisting that he help to carry the unconscious woman. He lifted her under the arms, and one of the crewmen took her ankles, and they set off.

The crewmen thought she was dead, and Curtis had said nothing to correct that idea. While still on the launch, he had zipped shut the wetsuit around her head again, and her breathing was so shallow that no one who wasn’t carrying her by the torso, as he was, would notice.

He’d taken her down to stateroom 7, with the crewman holding her ankles to lead the way. This was the smallest cabin on the ship, rarely used, with a single bunk and one small round porthole and not much floor space. Curtis and the crewman had left her on the bunk, still in the wetsuit, and after locking the cabin door and taking the key with him, Curtis had come for the captain.

Now they were back at stateroom 7. Curtis unlocked the door, they stepped in, and he shut the door again behind them. “What I want to know is,” he said, “is there much chance she’ll go on being alive. She’s bleeding out of her nose and ears.”

“Concussion,” Zhang said. He was a thin man with a round face, about forty, his black hair very thin, so that streaks of amber skull could be seen. He’d worked as mate on commercial ships — cargo, never passenger — and had been with Curtis for nearly three years now, and very much liked his job. If it were possible for him to satisfy Curtis’s wishes, he would.

Now he leaned over the figure supine on the bunk, with its blue-gray cold face, and said, “We must get this wetsuit off her, to begin. She needs to be warm.”

“Fine.”

They worked at it together, and Curtis found it strange to be undressing an attractive young woman with no sexual element involved in it. But there was no sexual element involved. His preference for this body was that it be dead, though he would much prefer that she did the dying on her own.

Once the wetsuit was bundled onto the floor, out of the way, the girl remained dressed in the top half of a light green bathing suit, white panties, and white socks.

Zhang removed the socks as well, but left the other garments. He tested her pulse, listened to her chest and her breathing, lifted back the lids to look into her eyes. He took her temperature by ear, felt her armpits, kneaded her rib cage and her legs, and forced open her mouth to study her tongue.

Curtis stood watching, growing impatient. We aren’t here to save the girl, he thought, but didn’t quite say. We’re here to be certain she can’t be saved.

Finally Zhang finished his examination. As he put his equipment back in the medical kit, he said, “The bleeding has stopped. That was only temporary, from the concussion. She may have cracked ribs, I can’t be certain, but no other bones seem to be broken. She’s in shock, and she shows some signs of hypothermia. She needs sustenance. I wish I could give her an intravenous drip, but I’m not equipped for that. When she wakes up, she should be given hot soup. And then I can talk to her about her ribs, how they feel.”

Zhang turned away to put a sheet and blanket over the girl, while Curtis stood thinking. He watched Zhang turn the top of the blanket down around her throat. He said, “You think she’ll live.”

“Oh, yes, of course.” Zhang tucked in the blanket along the side of the bunk, and smiled at Curtis. “She’s a healthy young girl, she should survive this.”

“You’re absolutely certain.”

“Well,” Zhang said, “I don’t know that much about medicine. Absolute certainty is... more than I can promise.”

“So she might not make it?” Curtis said, trying to keep the words from sounding pointed. It wouldn’t do to be too obvious. But Zhang was no fool. Surely he could read between the lines.

The captain hesitated, thought about his answer before he spoke the words.

“She might not. But I would think she most likely will. It isn’t certain, but...”

“Likely.”

Zhang nodded.

“Well,” Curtis said. “That would be wonderful, of course. But we can’t count on it.”

“No,” Zhang said.

“She might die.”

“I really don’t think she—”

“I’m just saying she might,” Curtis said. “And I’m sure you know, no one could possibly find fault with you if she did. That girl was badly injured. You are doing what you can, but in the end... Even the finest doctor can’t save every patient. Even the finest doctor, working with the best equipment, in a first-rate hospital, which is not what you have here.”

Zhang nodded. He understands, Curtis decided.

Curtis patted the man on the shoulder and headed to the door. “You will do your job, I know,” Curtis told him.

12

Curtis and the three money people would copter back to the mainland tomorrow. For tonight there was a celebratory dinner in the Mallory’s glass-roofed dining room aft on the top deck. Outside, the black sea breathed in slow respirations, illuminated with gentle brushstrokes from a quarter moon. Above, the thousand thousand stars formed incomprehensible but calming patterns in the black sky. Within, in subdued lighting, Curtis and Manville and the money people sat around the oval table covered with white cloth, and ate off gold-rimmed china with one entwined red RC interrupting the gold ring circling each plate.

Stewards in white served the meal, and nobody talked business. They mostly discussed politics, some economics, and at one point Bill Hardy described at length and with gusto the story of a movie he’d recently seen on tape, about a Concorde in flight threatened by terrorists.

Over the crème brûlée, Madame deCastro said, “I’m told you found that poor diver. He was dead, was he?”

“A girl,” Curtis said, “Yes, a surprise to me, too. An attractive thing, a pity.”

Bill Hardy said, “So she is dead.”

“Oh, yes,” Curtis said. “Surprisingly unbattered, but... No one was going to survive out there.”

“I take it,” Abdullah Wayarabo said, “she’s somewhere in cold storage.”

“No, not cold storage, we’re not really equipped for that,” Curtis told him, and smiled around at the table. “We’re certainly not going to take all our own food out of our only freezer to put a dead body in it.”

Manville said, “Where is she, then?”

Carelessly, Curtis said, “In an unused cabin.”

Madame deCastro said, “Isn’t that — I don’t know how to phrase this delicately, over dinner. Isn’t that a little warm, for a corpse?”

“We turned the air-conditioning on full,” Curtis assured her. “And the ship will make dock at Brisbane some time tomorrow night. It won’t be a problem.” He raised his Château d’Yquem and smiled around at them all. “In the morning,” he told them, effectively ending that conversation, “when we board the helicopter, I’ll have the pilot take us over Kanowit, so we can all see how our island’s coming along.”

13

After dinner, after the others had retired to their cabins, George Manville found himself restless, dissatisfied. And yet, today had been a triumph for him. A comfortable future, even a wealthy future, was now assured for him at RC Structural.

He was an engineer, not a scientist, but he had read the papers the scientists had published, he’d understood the principles, and he’d gone them one better. They had created the soliton in their laboratories; he had created the soliton in the real world, in an island in the ocean. He had seen it work, and he knew it was all his.

And he knew Richard Curtis appreciated him. Curtis had stayed with him every step of the way, showing a genuine interest, asking questions, even taking notes, following what Manville did, until by now Curtis could probably create the same effect himself. They’d been that closely tied together, the last few months.

George Manville was a stolid engineer, 34 years old, more comfortable in a construction trailer on a building site than anywhere else in the world. He’d been married once, just out of college. Jeanne was artistic, without being arty or phony; she acted in amateur theater groups, without convincing herself that Broadway had lost a great star when she’d married young; she was interested in classical music concerts and in opera, and would never find a blueprint fascinating, or want to hear the details of how a problem in stress-weight materials had been elegantly resolved.

Since the fairly amicable divorce, nine years ago, Manville had been lonely but content, and sometimes even happy. And tonight he should be the happiest of all. He had today’s success. He had the confidence and respect of one of the major builders in the world. And yet, after midnight, the stars still fixed across the black sky, the sleeping Mallory running with the minimum of lights, Manville still paced, discontented, troubled. He wasn’t an introspective man, but now he had to be: What’s wrong tonight? Why can’t I just go to sleep, like everybody else?

It was the diver. He knew it was the diver, he’d known it all along, but there was nothing he could do about the diver, not anymore, so he’d been avoiding the thought. But it was the diver, and there was no getting away from it.

From the instant, this afternoon, when that orange-suited figure had gone over the rail of the other ship, disappearing into the sea, Manville had been tense, frightened, hoping against hope. Because if the diver died, he was the one who had done it. He was responsible.

There should have been a fail-safe mechanism, a way to abort the experiment if something unexpected happened. Of course there should have been some way out, as the people on the other ship had insisted, but it had never occurred to him that such a thing might be needed. The experiment seemed so simple, so clear-cut; why would there be a need to abort?

He should have thought about it. His job was not to foresee the unforeseeable, but it was to guard against the unforeseeable, and he hadn’t done so. He hadn’t done his job. And now a human being was dead.

Somehow, it being a girl made it worse. It shouldn’t have, he knew that, a human being is a human being, but nevertheless it did. She’s young, and now she’s dead, through George Manville’s failure. Her life won’t happen, because of him.

And nothing to be done, not anymore. Nothing except roam the empty rooms and decks, waiting to be tired enough to sleep.

He wanted to see her. Was that morbid? He didn’t know why, maybe just to say the words I’m sorry in her presence, but he wanted to see her.

Curtis had said the body was in an unused cabin. The five on the upper level were all occupied, so it had to be one of the two below. So Manville at last decided he would go see her, he would tell her he was sorry, and then he would, no arguments, go to bed.

The interior corridors were dimly lit at night. Manville made his way to the lower deck, along the corridor, and opened the door to cabin 6. The light switch was just inside the door; flicking it on, he saw an empty room, an unmade bed. He clicked the light off again and turned to cabin 7, across the way.

The door was locked. Curtis must have locked it, to keep anybody from stumbling in there unawares. But it only stymied Manville for a second, until he thought, This door isn’t locked against me. I already know what’s in there.

I’m not violating anything if I ignore the lock.

In one pocket, Manville kept a card that gave, in black letters and numbers on white, equivalences: pounds to kilos, quarts to liters, that sort of thing. It was about the size of a credit card, but thinner, more supple. Manville took it from his pocket, slipped it into the crack between door and jamb, and slid back the striker on the lock.

The door eased open, darkness within. Manville stepped inside, switching on the light, leaving the door open. And there she was, in the bed, on her back, covered to her chin.

That was the first oddity that struck him, that her face wasn’t covered. Then he realized the room wasn’t at all cool, it was warm; the air conditioner hadn’t been turned higher at all.

Somebody’s mistake, obviously. Somebody on the crew had misunderstood Curtis’s orders. So it was a good thing Manville had come down here, or things might have got very unpleasant.

He was going to turn the air-conditioning up, but before that, he thought he should cover her face. And look at her, and offer his belated and useless apology.

He stepped closer to the bunk, and looked at her, and she was really very good-looking. And young. Twenty?

There was even, somehow, faint color in her cheeks.

No. That made no sense at all. Manville, not wanting to, reached out to touch that cold stiff cheek and it was warm and yielding.

He pulled his hand back as though he’d been burned. She was alive, not dead.

How could Curtis have made such a mistake? Or Captain Zhang, he was the one who handled medical duties aboard the ship. Couldn’t they tell the difference between her being alive and her being dead? It made no sense, no sense at all.

Unwillingly, Manville found his methodical mind giving him the answer. Richard Curtis had several times in the last months told Manville that he had a nemesis in the ranks of the environmentalists, a fellow named Jerry Diedrich. Why Diedrich had that special hatred or rage toward him, Curtis professed not to know; he only knew, with certainty, that it was there. He’d told Manville a week ago that he half-expected Diedrich would try to make trouble at today’s experiment, and in fact Diedrich had.

And then the diver had happened, and Diedrich was on the defensive. The diver had happened, and Curtis had immediately made it clear he would use the incident to defuse the problem of Diedrich. He’d left no doubt that he had no sympathy to waste for the diver, that the diver’s dead body would be the centerpiece of a legal action to get Diedrich out of his way forever. Because...

Because there was something else coming, something larger. “We’ll be using this soliton thing again,” Curtis had told him, “and in a much more significant way, you wait and see.” And that was the project Curtis wanted to keep Diedrich away from, for some reason desperately needed to keep Diedrich away from.

Desperate enough for him to make certain he had a dead body to deliver to the authorities in Australia? Manville knew Curtis was a hard man, in business he was famously ruthless and cold, famously hard. But was he that hard?

Could he be?

Manville looked at the girl. Her breaths were shallow, but regular. She was not dying, but mending.

He didn’t know what to believe, or he was afraid to know what to believe. It was better now, at least for now, that nothing made sense.

He turned away at last, switched off the light, and left the cabin, letting the door snick locked again behind him. As he’d promised himself, he went straight from there to bed, but it was hours before he got to sleep.

14

Snick.

That was the first sound since the shock wave had taken her that penetrated into Kim’s stunned brain, to bring her up from the cocoon she’d been pending in. Her brain heard the sound, tried to process it, failed to give the sound a meaning, and the resulting unsatisfied curiosity, unanswered question, drove her up closer to consciousness, and more bewildering sense impressions. Her body felt a thrumming vibration, like a ship, but very unlike Planetwatch III. The sheets above and below her were a texture different from what she was used to. The faint odor in her nostrils was like polished wood (the odor on Planetwatch III, not that faint, was of diesel oil). Confused, troubled by the incomprehensibility of where she was, she came closer again to consciousness.

And memory. That great underwater blur roared toward her again, and her eyes popped open, and she was terrified.

Now it came in a rush, just as the shock wave had done. She’d been on deck, on Planetwatch III, and she’d listened with the others to the ship’s PA system relaying the debate between Jerry and the people on the yacht. She’d realized they weren’t getting anywhere, she’d believed Jerry’s insistence that there had to be a way for Curtis’s people to halt the experiment, and she’d finally decided the only way to force the issue was to throw herself in harm’s way. Like the student who’d stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square.

In the water, just beneath the surface, she had at first swum strongly toward the island, seeing the jagged landscape of coral below her. But then she’d decided she shouldn’t get too far from the ship, she should stay close enough so they could signal her when the experiment was called off, so she turned about and headed back, arms at her sides, flippered legs scissoring in strong rhythm as she looked down through the facemask at the coral seabed, receding in bumps and jags as she moved into deeper water.

Some trembling in the sea around her made her look over her shoulder, and at first she couldn’t understand what she seemed to see back there. It was like trying to watch a movie with the projector out of focus. It was a blur, a thick gray-blue-silver-black blur, fifteen or twenty feet from top to bottom, as wide as the whole ocean, and it was rolling at her like an avalanche, like a bulldozer burying an anthill.

In panic, seeing that thing hurtle on, she yearned upward, and her flippers gave one strong kick to propel her toward the surface before the blur caught her and shook her like a puppy shaking a rag doll, and her last thought was, Stupid me, now I’ve killed myself.

She stared upward in darkness in this strange cabin, reliving the moment, clutched by the panic, unable to think, barely able to breathe, living that panic and that surge of impossible power all over again, her entire body clenching until the pain in her chest forced her to let go, to ease back, to take a long slow (painful) breath and get that terrified butterfly brain inside her head to slow down, slow down, settle, settle.

I’m in a bed, she thought. I’m in a cabin on a ship, but not my own ship. The yacht? Why didn’t my own people rescue me?

She turned her head, and her neck and back gave her twinges of pain. In the thin light that seeped into the cabin under its door, she looked at where she was, simple and plain, but also elegant. She thought to roll onto her side, so she could get up and go over there to open that door, but when she made her first move everything gave her a jolt. The fiercest pains were in her chest, as though she might have broken some ribs, but everything else hurt as well. It was like the soreness after too much exercise, but magnified a hundred times.

She couldn’t move. The effort made her dizzy with the pain. She very slowly turned her head back to where it had been. She felt weak, groggy. She was afraid she might lose consciousness again. She breathed slowly, carefully, trying to avoid the whip-stroke of pain that came sometimes to her chest, and again she remembered the blur, how fast it came, how immensely powerful it was, unimaginably powerful.

And once more she remembered her own final thought: Stupid me, now I’ve killed myself. But now she remembered more; she remembered what was inside that thought. Inside the panic and the desperate useless lunge toward the surface, and much more real, had been acceptance.

Resignation, and calm acceptance. She had known, for that second or two seconds, that she was going to die, and she’d accepted the fact, without challenge. She hadn’t even been unhappy.

How easy it is to die, she thought, and realized she’d always assumed it was hard to die, that life pulsed on as determinedly as it could until the end. It was a grim knowledge, that life didn’t mind its own finish, and she felt she had been given that knowledge too soon. I shouldn’t know that yet, she thought, and began to cry. She struggled to keep her breathing regular, to avoid the pain, and tears dribbled from her eyes, and then she opened her mouth and sighed and gave up the struggle and faded from consciousness.

15

Richard Curtis woke early, feeling doubt. He didn’t like the feeling, had no use for doubt. In his mind, indecision was a sign of weakness, second thoughts the practice of losers. He himself was swift and decisive, and known for it, and relished the reputation. Doubt, on those rare moments when it came to him, irritated him, and he did his best to thrust it immediately away.

Hard to do, now. It was far too early to get out of bed, with the fresh sunrise a soft pink on the curtains, giving his cabin a soft rose glow, as though he slept inside a ruby. Too early to get up, but could he fall back to sleep?

He was afraid — this was the doubt, not going away — afraid he’d made a mistake last night. When asked if the diver was dead, he hadn’t hesitated for a second. Yes. Of course she was dead. It was necessary to his future plans that she be dead, so obviously she was dead.

But was it true? Would it be as true as he needed it to be? Could he rely on Zhang?

These were murky waters for Richard Curtis. He’d asked men to commit crimes for him before, mostly of a financial nature, or a lie to get around a regulation, and he’d committed such crimes himself without regret. But this was the death of a person, this was something larger, more severe, something of a different kind. Would Zhang do what he knew he was supposed to do?

In his mind, Curtis didn’t use the word ‘murder’ or even ‘killing.’ She was a severely damaged woman dragged mostly dead from the sea. Zhang was a skilled medic, but hardly a doctor, and this was, as he had taken pains to point out, hardly a hospital — not even a hospital ship. By their deficiencies of equipment and knowledge, enhanced by their neglect, couldn’t they assure she would not survive? And if the flame of life insisted on sputtering inside her, might not Zhang assist its snuffing in some way?

(Curtis was vague on that part. Some medicine? The wrong one, or given in the wrong dose? Or a pillow pressed for just a moment or two on the face? Something barely intrusive in any event, more an encouragement to nature than anything else.)

But here was the source of the doubt. Would Zhang do this thing he knew Curtis wanted? Would he too see it as merely assisting nature, encouraging the proper outcome? Or would he think it was something more significant than that, and falter?

If Curtis hadn’t said yes last night, he would have more room to maneuver now. If the girl’s condition had been left unstated, and if Zhang were to turn out not to be up to the task, then once they reached port Curtis had other people he could turn to. But what he’d done, when he’d told his guests firmly that the girl was dead, he’d made it necessary that the girl be dead, now, while they were still at sea.

And if Zhang wouldn’t do it?

Curtis closed his eyes against the pink morning light. If Zhang wouldn’t do it, and if it had to be done before Curtis left the ship, early this afternoon, then there was only one person left to turn to, and that person had never done such a thing, either. He had planned deaths, he was willing that people should die, he could order death, he could be responsible for death at a distance (and planned to be, in a large way, very soon), but could he do this other thing? Could these hands press the pillow down? Could he be present in the room when it was actually happening?

And so the doubt. And he wouldn’t be sleeping any longer this morning.

16

Captain Zhang was on duty on the bridge from eight every morning, but today he arrived fifteen minutes early, relieving the mate, who had stood the night watch. This morning was windier than yesterday, the Mallory rocking more noticeably in the increased swell. To the east, the pale sky was clear, a great pastel wash around the hot yellow furnace of the sun, but to the west, toward Australia, darkish clouds were piled like low foggy hills on the horizon, and would soon be coming this way. Zhang listened to the satellite weather service, listened to radio traffic generally, watched the sky and the sea, and tried not to think about what Richard Curtis wanted.

Zhang was 43, a coastal Chinese from Qinhuangdao on Liaodong Wan Bay, just across the Yellow Sea from Korea. He’d grown up loving the sea and hating politics, hating having to care about politics, and was 15 when he first shipped out, on a cargo ship from Tientsin. He retained his Chinese passport, but had not lived on the mainland for many years, and now had a wife and three daughters living in Kaohsiung, on Taiwan.

His wife, Yanling, was Taiwanese, and they had lived in Hong Kong until the changeover, when it had seemed safest for her to relocate back home. Taiwan was still, in all the ways that mattered to them, China.

The life Zhang Yung-tsien and his wife and children enjoyed was a good one, an enviable one, and it was made possible almost exclusively by Richard Curtis. Without this job, a semi-stateless Chinese with first-mate papers only — he had not yet qualified for master’s papers, and it hadn’t seemed urgent to do so — he could surely find more work, but not at these wages. He would live on a third of his present income, at best. They would lose the house in Kaohsiung, that was certain. The private school his daughters went to would be beyond his means.

Until now, there had never been any reason to worry about his position. He knew Richard Curtis appreciated his skills and discretion and had no fault to find with him. He did his job well, he was not fearful, and there had been no reason to suspect that anything would change.

But now. Now.

If only they hadn’t found the damn woman, out there in the sea! Or, finding her, if they’d only left her there.

Who wanted her? Why keep her?

What kind of thing was this to ask of a man? He wasn’t that sort, he never could be. If anything, Richard Curtis was more the cold and emotionless type that was needed for a thing like this. So why did it have to come down on the shoulders of poor Zhang Yung-tsien?

What am I going to do, he asked himself, and watched the sea, and the slowly approaching storm front from the west. I know what to do, of course, he thought, that’s simplicity itself. I inject a bubble of air into her veins, as plain as that. No one will find it because no one will suspect it, and therefore no one will look for it. She should be dead, anyway, so what difference does it make?

But Zhang knew the difference. From today on, he would be the man who had murdered a human being. That would be him, that and nothing else; could he live with that self?

But what else was there? What real choice did he have?

He didn’t know this troublesome woman; he knew Yanling and his daughters.

But could he do it? When the instant came, would he be able to do it?

“Morning, Zhang.”

Zhang started, yanked from his concentration, and turned to see Curtis standing there. Just inside the doorway, smiling a greeting at him, easy and confident. “Good morning, Mr. Curtis,” Zhang said, and blinked at the man.

Curtis looked out at the sea. “What news of our patient?”

“I... haven’t looked at her yet this morning.”

Curtis seemed mildly surprised. “You haven’t? I should think you’d want to keep tabs on her. For all you know, she took a turn for the worse during the night.”

“That’s possible, of course,” Zhang said.

“You will see her for me, won’t you?” Curtis asked him. “You will take care of things.”

Zhang found it impossible to meet those cold eyes. Looking fitfully here and there, as though some instrument, some gauge, demanded his attention, he said, “Mr. Curtis, I, of course, I have some skills, but I’m not sure I can, I’m not a doctor, of course, I think...”

Bleak, he now did face Curtis’s bleak eyes, and said, “You might have someone else, someone in all your great organization who’s better qualified than I am.”

“But no one else is here,” Curtis said. He was almost kindly, explaining the situation. “Only you, master of this fine vessel, which I know you enjoy. Don’t you?”

“Yes, I do,” Zhang agreed. “Very much.”

“So here we are, out at sea,” Curtis said, “and you’re the only one I can count on. I can count on you, can’t I?”

Zhang was silent. He wanted to speak, but he couldn’t.

“I need to count on you,” Curtis said, his voice a little raspier, a little harsher. “I need word about our patient, Captain Zhang. I’ll be leaving after lunch, if that storm out there holds off. I’ll need word about our patient before I go. Do you see what I mean?”

Miserable, “Yes,” Zhang said.

17

Manville, having slept little, got up early and went looking for Curtis. He saw him, up on the bridge, in tense conversation with Captain Zhang, and thought he might know what the subject was. So he waited in the forward lounge, below the bridge, where he would be sure to intercept Curtis when he came down.

Standing by the big windows, seeing the flattened island off to starboard and the beginnings of storm clouds to port, far off at the horizon, he thought about what he would do and how he would go about it. There was very little question in his mind that Curtis knew the girl was alive, but he felt, at least at the beginning, he had to give the man the benefit of the doubt. Because if Curtis knew she was alive, but had announced last night that she was dead, it could only mean he was determined to make her dead, and his motive would be the hobbling of Jerry Diedrich.

Could that be reason enough for murder? Or was Manville about to make a serious mistake, at the very moment his career was assured?

I’ll have to say it to him straight out, he thought, and see how he reacts. I’m no good at subtlety, anyway, I’ll just have to be myself, and I’ll know, I’m sure I will, the instant I see his reaction. And here he comes now.

Manville turned at the sound of footsteps coming down the outside stairs. Curtis came through the swing door into the lounge, his expression grim, deep in thought, and he abruptly switched to an enthusiastic smile when he saw Manville: “Good morning!”

“Morning, Mr. Curtis.”

“Going in to breakfast?”

“In a minute,” Manville said.

Curtis looked at him more closely. “Something wrong, George?”

“I looked in on the girl last night,” Manville said.

Well, he’d been right: He would know instantly from Curtis’s reaction. Curtis stared at him for a second, then looked very angry and seemed about to yell something, and then just as quickly gave up anger, shook his head in exasperated defeat, and said, almost pleadingly, “Now why did you do that?”

“I felt responsible,” Manville said. “I thought she was dead, and I’d done it, and I—”

“You? For God’s sake, why you?”

This isn’t the right subject, Manville thought, but he found himself saying, “The fail-safe device, I should have thought to—”

“All right, all right.” Curtis, always a fast study, understood immediately what had gone through Manville’s mind. “You felt responsible. So you went down there to apologize to a corpse...”

“And she’s alive.”

“She’s very badly hurt, you know,” Curtis said. “She’s still alive, but Captain Zhang isn’t at all confident she’ll—”

“She’s improving,” Manville said. “I’m not claiming any great medical knowledge, but anybody can see she’s improving.”

“If she were bleeding internally, we wouldn’t—”

“She’d be feverish by now,” Manville said. “Her skin would be clammy. She’d show the signs.”

Curtis looked increasingly annoyed. He said, “George, this isn’t our expertise, neither of us. You do what you’re good at, and I’ll do what I’m good at, and that girl will live or die, and neither of us can say which it will be.”

Manville said, “If she’s dead when we reach Brisbane, I’ll have to tell the authorities that she didn’t die as a result of what happened to her in the water.”

Curtis frowned at him. “What could you prove?”

“I don’t have to prove anything, Mr. Curtis,” Manville told him. “I only have to tell them there’s a problem. They’ll do their own proving.”

Curtis stood thinking, clearly trying to figure out how to handle this situation. Then he said, “Are you particularly hungry, George?”

“For breakfast?” Manville asked, surprised. “Not very much, this morning.”

“Neither am I,” Curtis said, and touched Manville’s arm, and gestured at the cluster of soft maroon swivel chairs over by the windows. “Sit with me a minute, listen to what I have to say.”

“All right.”

They sat in adjacent chairs, turned slightly away from one another, and Curtis leaned forward, hands on knees, to say, “I’ve already told you, I have another use for this soliton of yours.”

“Yes.”

“Something far better than just clearing land to build a resort. Something much more ambitious. And lucrative.”

“All right.”

“I told you it had to be a secret, and it still does,” Curtis said, “but I didn’t tell you why. The fact is, I’m not as rich as people think I am. Not anymore.”

“You aren’t poor,” Manville said.

Curtis smiled. “No, not poor. But I’ve borrowed a lot, from a lot of banks. No one has seen an accurate financial statement from me in three years, not since before they threw me out of Hong Kong, because an accurate financial statement would show I owe probably four times as much as I’m worth.”

Manville, surprised, gestured to include the Mallory, Kanowit Island, everything. “But, how can you... then how can you do all this?”

“Front,” Curtis told him. “I’m spending to create the perception that I’m rich because only the perception that I’m rich will permit me to borrow the money to go on spending.”

“That’s a—” Manville started, and across the way Captain Zhang entered from the outside staircase, his medical kit hanging from his left hand. He turned aft, and Manville looked at him.

Curtis looked from Manville to Zhang, then called, “Captain!”

Zhang turned around. His face was gray and unhealthy and deeply worried. “Yes, sir?”

“Why not see your patient a little later?” Curtis suggested. “After George and I have had our talk, I’ll come up and we’ll have a word.”

Zhang looked confused, as though he wasn’t sure whether this was a reprieve or not. “Yes, sir,” he said, but seemed for a few seconds unable to reverse his motion. What he’d been going to do was so deeply fixed in his mind — because it was so difficult? — that he found it hard to give it up. Then, with a kind of lurch, he did turn around, and go back out through the swing door, and Curtis turned to Manville to say, “You were going to tell me, I think, that what I’m doing can’t last, that eventually I’ll be so deeply in debt there’ll be no way to hide the fact, and that already I’m probably so deeply in debt I’ll never get clear.”

Manville said, “Are you?”

“Yes,” Curtis said.

Manville leaned back. He didn’t know what to think, couldn’t even imagine why Curtis was telling him all this. Bewildered by what Curtis was saying, he found he was thinking mostly about himself. Had he hitched his wagon to a falling star?

Curtis said, “At first, I thought it was only a temporary expedient, I could dance on the edge of the cliff until I got everything back the way it used to be.” Pointing off to starboard, he said, “Fifteen years from now, Kanowit will be a money machine, but I don’t have the time to wait for it. I have other money machines, but they all require too much priming of the pump, too much money going in before any comes out. And even with all of my efforts, I’m doing most of this for other people. Do you know how much of Kanowit is mine? Ten percent. My three partners here, each of them thinks he’s the only one with thirty, that the other two have ten each and I have fifty. And each of them thinks the other two have been lied to, have been told that he has only ten percent instead of thirty, so none of them will ever compare notes.” With a bitter smile, he added, “None of them will go to apologize to a corpse.”

“What risks you’re taking,” Manville said.

“At first, it was because I was angry,” Curtis explained. “That last year in Hong Kong, the bastards were squeezing and squeezing, they wanted me out, but they wanted everything I owned to stay behind. I fought the best way I could, I moved the operation to Singapore, I kept the business going with borrowed money while trying to salvage what I could from Hong Kong, and my anger at those fucking thieves got in the way of my caution. I overextended myself, and the only cure was to overextend myself even more.”

Manville shook his head. “Mr. Curtis, why tell me this? I’m sorry for the fix you’re in, I had no idea—”

“No one has any idea,” Curtis said, his face grim. “I’m risking a lot, telling you this.”

“You could deny it, if I tried to say anything,” Manville said. “But you know I won’t. I can sympathize with you. I know the Chinese broke a lot of promises when they took over Hong Kong—”

“As everybody in the world except for a few brainless British politicians knew they would.”

“But what does that have to do with that girl, down in cabin seven?”

Curtis thought about his answer, then said, “All right. The fact is, I have a way out of this mess. I am going to be rich again, very rich, a lot richer than I ever was before. But I have to be extremely careful, George. What I’m going to do is dangerous, and it’s illegal, and I have to admit it’s going to be destructive.”

“With the soliton,” Manville said.

“I was going to do it without you,” Curtis told him, “and I still can. I’m not asking you to be at risk, not for a second. But you could share in the profit.”

“Because of the work I did over on Kanowit? Or because of the girl?”

Curtis shook his head. “To do what I’m going to do I have to be able to move without being observed, without being tracked and trailed every goddam place I go. You saw how Jerry Diedrich showed up out there yesterday, as I knew he would, even though this was far from being a publicly known event. It didn’t have to be, it wasn’t illegal, and despite Diedrich and his simple-minded friends, it wasn’t harmful to the reef. But the point is, he was here. He has friends in my own company, clerks, who knows who they are, they keep him informed, let him know what I’m doing, where I am.”

Manville asked, “What does Diedrich have against you?”

“I have no idea!” Curtis was so obviously exasperated that Manville had to believe him. Curtis said, “He’s been after me since just around the time I left Hong Kong, and it’s me he wants, not polluters or environmental criminals or any of that, it’s me. Most of that Planetwatch crowd is off doing something about the ozone layer or some fucking thing, but he’s got this one bunch to fixate on me, he’s got them convinced it’s a crusade and I’m the evil tycoon that has to be brought down.”

“And you need to get away from him,” Manville said, “to do what you want to do next.”

“It’s ridiculous,” Curtis said. “I should be able to bury him under lawyers, clog him with money, but every move I make to protect myself just inflames them all the worse and brings another dozen volunteers out of the colleges and onto my tail. I need him off my tail, George.”

“Then why not have Diedrich killed?”

“Because I don’t know how.” Curtis grinned, with not much humor. “I’ve thought of it,” he said, “of course I have, but that’s not the business I’m in, George. I wouldn’t know how to go about it. I don’t have people killed.”

“What about here? What about now?”

“Death through neglect, death through... ignorance.”

“It’ll take more than that,” Manville said.

“I hope not,” Curtis said. “But in any case, it will give me the leverage I need to get Diedrich and his little friends off my back just until I get this done. A few months, maybe less.” Curtis leaned forward again. “George,” he said, “you’re a good man. You’re also a brilliant engineer. You could have your own business, accomplish... I’m not going to tell you what I have planned, but I will include you in the profit.” Then he leaned back and considered Manville, and didn’t quite smile. “I’ve mentioned your profit twice now,” he said, “and you still haven’t asked me how much.”

“It didn’t occur to me.”

“Ten million dollars,” Curtis told him. “That’s your share. You can have it right away, in gold, if you like, right after it’s done. Or you can wait a week or two and it will become nothing but a number in a bank account.”

“Gold?” Manville said.

“I’ve told you enough,” Curtis decided, but smiled to show they were partners now. “George,” he said, “I have to go up and talk to Captain Zhang. What do you think I should say to him?”

Manville thought. He knew that Curtis was telling the truth about it all; his current financial mess, the existence of a risky and illegal scheme to get himself out of the mess, and the ten million dollars that would be his own if he merely went away and didn’t say anything and didn’t make trouble.

The money didn’t tempt him, which surprised him a bit. His hesitation was caused instead by his fellow feeling for Curtis. The man had truly been mistreated and was truly in a bind. But a poor dumb well-meaning girl shouldn’t be murdered to help Curtis get out of his troubles, and that’s what they were talking about, after all. It was an escalation too far.

Manville sighed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Curtis,” he said, “but I think you have to tell the captain to take very good care of that girl, because if she doesn’t survive the trip to Brisbane there will be too many questions.”

Curtis said, “You’re sure about this.”

“I’m sorry.”

Curtis looked out the window toward the sea. “Well,” he said, “if she has to be kept alive, it might be better to get her to the mainland right away. We could strap her to a mattress, carry her along in the helicopter this afternoon.”

“Then I’d come along, too.”

Curtis frowned at him, showing some of his anger, and stayed silent for a long moment. Then he said, “You’re making an enemy, George. Not a good enemy to have.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Manville spread his hands. “It just isn’t something I can do.”

Another long thoughtful pause. He’s trying to figure out, Manville thought, how to kill me, too. Then Curtis nodded, briskly, in agreement or farewell, and got to his feet, and went off without another word for his talk with Zhang.

Manville sat on, looking out the window, seeing nothing. What a rotten position to be in. Well; what a rotten position they were all in.

He never did eat breakfast that morning.

18

A mistake had been made. Curtis understood that, now; he’d made a second mistake, while trying to adjust for the first. And both mistakes came down to the same error of judgment. He had gauged George Manville too poorly, dismissing him as just an engineer, which was certainly true, but without stopping to think what that meant.

Yes, Manville was just an engineer, and what that meant was, he had too much integrity and too little imagination. Dangle ten million in front of him — in gold, George, in gold! — and he hasn’t the wit to be seduced by it. First he has to take responsibility for the accident to the diver, a responsibility that was never for a second his, but which he assumed for himself simply because he was the project’s engineer. That unbidden, unasked-for scrupulousness leads him to learn the truth about the diver, which makes him a threat to Richard Curtis, to which Curtis responds by making mistake number two. Not taking time to judge his man, he tries to enlist Manville on his side, and tells him too much.

Before this, Curtis had once or twice wondered, if there were unexpected complications down the line, whether or not he’d be able to recruit Manville, and had guessed that a combination of cupidity and the engineering challenge would turn the trick, but now he knew he’d been wrong. Manville was too blunt-minded to be affected by cupidity, and his engineer’s honor would keep him from being caught up by the engineer’s challenge. If he could balk at finishing off one half-dead idiotic girl, how would he react to what was going to happen to all those people in the buildings?

No, Manville could never have been an ally, and now he’s become a danger, a bigger danger than the girl, who was merely a club to beat Jerry Diedrich with. And Manville was now an even bigger danger than Diedrich, because Curtis had told him far too much.

The both of them, Curtis thought, and considered the personnel available to him in Australia, and saw how it could be done. The both of them, when they landed at Brisbane.

Curtis spent the late morning in his cabin, on the telephone to Brisbane and Townsville, looking for the people he needed, assuring himself they would be in the right places at the right time. He couldn’t say very much over the phone — there was no security on these things, particularly the ones that bounced off satellites — but he could at least get them in position, so he could tell them in person, and very quietly, what was needed.

Content with the moves he’d made, pleased that at last the mistakes had come to an end, Curtis went aft to the dining room for the farewell lunch with his three money people. Manville was there, looking worried and uncertain, and Curtis went out of his way to be friendly, to reassure the man. Patting Manville on the arm, being his heartiest, he said, “Forgotten, George. Don’t worry about it. I don’t know what I was thinking before. Desperation, I suppose. I’ll find some other way to deal with my problems, and you’re still my man. All right?”

Manville was obviously surprised, then grateful. Of course, the man without imagination wanted to believe that everything could be all right, that simply, that easily. “Thank you, Mr. Curtis,” he said, answering Curtis’s smile with his own tentative grin. “I am sorry, the situation you’re in, and you can count on me to keep my mouth shut.”

“I know I can, George. I don’t have the slightest doubt.” And, with another pat on the dead man’s arm, Curtis turned to the other three, saying, “Good news. It turns out, I was told wrong. The diver isn’t dead, she’s still alive.”

Beaming at everyone as they expressed their own surprise and pleasure, Curtis said, “We only hope we can keep her that way. Don’t we, George?”

19

Captain Zhang stayed on the bridge to watch the helicopter take off, not wanting one last encounter with Richard Curtis. He was still frightened, still depressed, and still very confused.

Would he have killed the girl? Even when he checked his medical kit to be sure he had a fresh syringe, even when he carried the kit with him down from the bridge, he hadn’t known for absolute certain what he would do when he reached cabin 7. He knew what he felt and believed he should do, which was protect his family, save his job, not permit some stupidly intrusive unknown stranger to destroy his life. But could he have done it?

He didn’t know. All he was certain of was, when Mr. Curtis called to him, in the lounge, and told him not to go down to the patient yet, not until Curtis and the engineer had finished their conversation, Zhang had not immediately felt relief, or pleasure, or anything like that. He’d felt confusion, of course, but also he’d surprised himself with a strange welling up of frustration, as though he’d just been thwarted in the accomplishment of something that had been his goal all along.

But what accomplishment? Killing her? Not killing her, and nobly suffering the consequences? Now he would never know what his decision would have been, and in some terrible way that was even worse than having the decision still out in front of him.

When Mr. Curtis had come up to the bridge, after he and the engineer had finished, he was very angry, red-faced, banging his fist against tabletops, and Zhang knew it was Manville who had made him so angry. “We are going to take care of that girl, Zhang,” he announced, showing his teeth in a snarl. “We are going to keep her alive. Do you understand me?”

“No, sir.” Zhang watched his employer warily, not wanting all that rage to turn in his direction.

“We’re not going to do what we were going to do,” Curtis snapped, and grimaced with his fury. “Mr. Manville won’t let us, you see? Zhang, that girl stays alive until you dock at Brisbane, no matter what. From then on, we’ll see, won’t we?”

“If you say so, sir.”

“I say so,” Curtis repeated, mocking him, then showed him a hard false aggressive smile and said, “Well, at least it’s a happy ending for you, isn’t it? I know you didn’t like the idea.”

“I want to do what I can to help you, Mr. Curtis.”

Curtis could be seen to force himself under control, and when next he spoke he was calmer, more controlled, more himself. “I appreciate that, Zhang. These have been... difficult times for me. Well, it’ll all work out, and I know you’re a willing man, Zhang, and I won’t forget it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And I’m glad, for your sake,” Curtis said, with a shrug, “you don’t have to do it after all.”

“If there’s anything—”

“No, no, that’s it, that’s all of it,” Curtis said, and shook his head, and left the bridge, and Zhang, alone, dropped heavily into his chair at the chart-table and wiped the perspiration streaming down his face.

But of course, that wasn’t all of it. Curtis spent much of the morning on the telephone in his cabin, and Zhang suspected he was making other plans, dealing with people far better at this sort of thing than Zhang could ever be, and that was confirmed just after lunch, while the other guests were in their cabins,

packing for the helicopter trip back to Australia. That was when Curtis came up again to talk with Zhang on the bridge. Zhang saw him coming, and waited, polite on the outside, trembling within.

As usual, Curtis wasted no time on pleasantries. Coming onto the bridge, he said, “Captain Zhang, you intend to dock tomorrow night around seven, early evening, am I right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re going to change that,” Curtis told him. “Without being obvious about it, don’t make your best pace. I don’t want you to round Moreton before one in the morning.”

Moreton was the island that ran along the seaward side of Moreton Bay, with Brisbane at the inner end of the bay. Zhang could make that adjustment, of course, he could travel just a bit more slowly, take a slightly more curved route. A few of the more experienced crewmen might be aware of the difference, but no one else. Certainly not the engineer, Manville, and Zhang was sure the engineer was the reason for this change.

Which Curtis confirmed by what he said next: “I’ll want you to take the bridge tomorrow night, by yourself. No one else has to be up and around at that hour.”

“No, sir.”

“And if it happens,” Curtis said, “that a boat comes alongside, even grapples on, you don’t have to pay attention.”

“No, sir.”

“Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Zhang said.

Curtis looked keenly at him, and Zhang felt he had to meet the man’s eyes. Curtis’s mouth was smiling, but his eyes were icy cold, very hard. Zhang thought, I don’t know if he’s crazy or just brutal, but it doesn’t matter. Either way, I don’t want him to think I’m one of his enemies.

It was very difficult to meet that inhuman gaze, not to flinch or turn away, but Zhang held himself in, waited it out, didn’t even show a tremble, and at last Curtis nodded and said, “I know I can count on you.”

“Yes, sir.” Zhang’s mouth and throat were dry, the words came out crumpled.

Curtis patted Zhang’s arm — Zhang didn’t flinch — and twenty minutes later, as he watched the helicopter with Curtis and his guests aboard lift off from Mallory and swing over to look at the muddy blank they’d made of Kanowit Island, that spot on Zhang’s arm still burned.

What am I going to do? Zhang wondered. I am on Kanowit Island, and I’m slowly being sucked under. To do nothing doesn’t save you, you’ll still be sucked under. But what can I do?

20

Manville was very aware that he was alone on the ship. Once Curtis and his financial people flew off, there was no one on the Mallory that he had ever even had a conversation with, except Captain Zhang, and he expected little comfort from that quarter. The people who’d worked with him on the island, setting the charges and flooding the tunnels and sealing the areas where the explosives would go off, had all flown in from Australia, construction crews of Curtis’s, in two planes that came down on the old Japanese landing strip on the island and then took the crews back home the day before the test.

Usually, Manville didn’t mind being alone. There were always projects he was working on, problems to be solved. But now, for the first time in his life, he was aware of being in personal physical danger, of being threatened by another human being, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He didn’t even know how to think about it. He wasn’t a soldier of fortune, a man of action, a man of violence. He was an engineer, he had tools, not weapons, and his primary tool was his brain.

It would help if there were a friendly face on the ship, an ally, someone to discuss the situation with. Because he wasn’t at all sure he was up to this kind of thing. The main point now, he supposed, was to try to protect the girl. Whatever came at him, Zhang or members of the crew, or somebody else entirely when they reached Brisbane, at least he should be with the girl, not leave her exposed and helpless.

He wished he could move her, possibly to his own cabin, but he was afraid to, not knowing exactly what her condition was. She’d been battered by the sea, and though she was surely going to live — if nobody interfered — she might have broken bones or other injuries. So the best thing to do, if he couldn’t move her, was to move himself.

After the helicopter lifted away from the Mallory with an excited flutter of rotor blades, and swung over to take a last look at Kanowit, Manville went on back down to cabin 7 and let himself in again with his equivalence card. Then he propped the door open while he went across to cabin 6 and picked up a pillow and blanket there. Returning to 7, he let the door snick shut and locked, then put the blanket on the floor at the opposite end of the room from the entry, under the porthole. He propped the pillow against the wall there, took his paperback book from his hip pocket, and sat down, back against the pillow against the wall, face toward the door.

The porthole above his head gave plenty of light for reading. His book was a collection of Maugham short stories of the South Seas; a very different place, then, but he supposed the people were much the same. The stories were comforting, because no matter how serious the problem, there was always some sort of acceptable resolution by the end. Reading, he could hope for the same sort of resolution for himself.

Her head on the bunk was just to his right, and after a while he became aware of her breathing. It was less shallow than before, and less rapid, long slow breaths now, regular, without strain. It seemed to Manville that she had undergone a transition, from being unconscious to being asleep. Which meant she might soon wake, and then he’d have somebody to talk it over with. In the meantime, he read.

21

Kim looked at the ceiling. Daytime. The ship was in motion, and grayish light reflected from the passing ocean came in through the porthole to fidget on the pale ceiling.

She realized she was awake again, and had been awake for... for a while.

She remembered everything this time, and remembered most sharply that her body contained many pockets of pain that would activate if she made any move at all. So she lay still, on her back, and looked at the ceiling, and wondered where she was and what would happen.

A page turned; a faint sound, but clear. Close by, to her left. Cautiously, she turned her head just slightly, waking soreness in her neck and back and shoulders. She looked sidelong, and a man was there, next to her, in profile. He was seated on the floor, head tilted down, legs bent up, reading a paperback book propped against his knees. She had never seen him before in her life.

Slowly she moved her head back to position one, and closed her eyes. He must be a guard of some kind; so she was a prisoner. On Richard Curtis’s yacht? Why a prisoner?

Are they going to arrest me? Is Richard Curtis going to make an example of me, and have me charged with trespassing and endangerment and all sorts of things, and have me thrown in jail? And where? In Australia, or in Singapore?

She found herself afraid of Singapore. It was known to be very stern with lawbreakers, and very accommodating to its businessmen, and Richard Curtis had become one of Singapore’s most significant businessmen since he’d left Hong Kong.

How could she escape? She could feel she was nearly naked, and the wetsuit wasn’t to be seen anywhere in the cabin. Even if her body weren’t so battered, she couldn’t possibly leap from a moving ship in the middle of the ocean.

Jerry will help, she thought. Planetwatch will help, they have lawyers, they can do a lot. Once they find out where I am, and what’s happening to me.

The scratch of a key in a lock made her eyes automatically snap open, and she saw the door start its inward sweep, felt movement to her left as the guard started to get to his feet. They should think I’m still unconscious, she thought, trying to find some advantage for herself somewhere in all this, and shut her eyes.

The newcomer spoke first, sounding surprised: “Mr. Manville!”

“Hello, captain,” her guard said. “Come to see your patient?” He sounded sarcastic, which surprised her.

“Mr. Manville, please,” the captain said, as though he’d been insulted or demeaned in some way. “I’m not going to hurt her.”

“You would have,” the guard said.

“I don’t know.” Now the captain only sounded unhappy, and she recognized his as the voice she’d heard on the Planetwatch III’s sound system, arguing with Jerry. I am asked to inform you... Now he said, “I’m not sure what I was going to do, and that’s the truth. Mr. Manville, I’m not a bad man.”

“Richard Curtis is,” the guard said, which surprised Kim a lot. Wasn’t she on Curtis’s ship? Wouldn’t the guard be one of his men? She listened, wondering, and the guard went on, “Captain, don’t do his dirty work.”

“I will not harm her,” the captain said. “I promise you, Mr. Manville. May I look at her now?”

“I’ll stay here.”

“Of course.”

“I’m awake,” Kim said, because they would soon discover that anyway, and opened her eyes, and studied the two men standing there. The captain was Asian, middle-aged and worried-looking, wearing his dark blue uniform and braided cap without pride or distinction. The other man didn’t seem like a guard at all. He was rugged enough, she supposed, but something in his face seemed at once more intelligent and less brutish. And the man had been sitting and reading, after all.

They both looked at her, and both seemed pleased that she was awake. The guard or whatever he was even smiled at her, as though to offer encouragement, as the captain went to one knee beside the bunk, gazed seriously at her, and said, “I am Captain Zhang of the motor ship Mallory. You were found in the water near Kanowit Island. That was yesterday. At first, it was thought you would die.”

“I’m very stiff,” she said, and the effort of speaking made her cough, which hurt her torso. “And dry,” she whispered. “Very dry.”

“In a moment,” the captain said, “we’ll help you to sit up. But first, if I may? We have not been able to be certain of the extent of your injuries.”

Gently he moved the blanket and sheet down away from her upper body, exposing her down to the bellybutton. She became very conscious of her nakedness, and in a small voice said, “I’d like to have some clothing.”

The guard said, “We’ll find you some. It’ll have to be men’s things.”

“That’s all right.”

“But I’m sure we can find something that fits. Right, captain?”

“Oh, yes,” the captain said, but he was absorbed with other questions. He said, “Miss, you may have cracked or broken ribs. Excuse me, I must test. Tell me if this hurts.”

“Yes!”

“Ah, yes, there and... here?”

“Ahh!”

“And then the stomach, the internal organs. Forgive this.” His hands were blunt-feeling but somehow comforting. He pressed down in several places around her stomach and lower sides, asking each time if she felt pain, and she never did. “Very good,” he said at last, and moved the covers back up over her, then used the edge of the bunk to help him get back to his feet. “You have three cracked ribs,” he told her. “I am going to wrap your torso, just beneath the breasts, with an expanding bandage.”

“Ace bandage?” she asked.

“Yes, exactly,” he agreed. “We want the ribs to rest and remain still, so they can heal, but every time you breathe you strain them again. This is to keep them from moving too much. You’ll feel the constriction, it won’t be very comfortable, I’m sorry to say, but the sharp pains should be less, and in a few days, if you don’t move around too much, exercise yourself too much, it can come off.”

“I ache all over,” she told him. She found she automatically trusted this man.

“Yes, of course you do, you were very strongly battered. But I believe there’s nothing else broken, and the stiffness will ease.” Then, with a small sad smile, he said, “If you are my patient, I should know your name.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “I’m Kimberly Baldur. Everybody calls me Kim.”

“And how do you spell your last name, please? I must put it in the log.”

She told him, and he asked her age, and she said, “Twenty-three. And I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Well, yes, of course,” the captain said. “You’ve been unconscious quite a long time. Mr. Manville? Would you help Ms. Baldur to sit up?”

The captain offered her his hands to grasp, so she could pull herself up, while Manville crouched against the head of the bunk to put his hands behind her shoulders and lift.

Pains shot through her, especially around the chest, and she gasped and clenched her teeth, and sat slumped and miserable while the captain reached under the blanket to pull her legs sideways, and Manville helped to turn her, until she was seated on the edge of the bed with her bare feet on the floor, blanket still covering her from waist to knee.

“Mr. Manville,” the captain said, “would you help her to stay there, please, while I get the bandage? I’m sorry, Ms. Baldur, we’ll have to do the bandage first, before you leave the bed.”

The pain was so intense she felt she might faint. “That’s all right,” she whispered, and Manville sat on the bed beside her, one hand on each shoulder to keep her upright.

The captain had a medical bag with him, on the floor, and while he rooted through it the other man said, “I’m George Manville, I was the chief engineer on that test on the island. I’m the one who didn’t think to put in a fail-safe. So I’m to blame for what happened to you.”

She tried to look at him, surprised, and saw his earnestness, and said, “Oh, no, I don’t have anybody to blame but me. All of my grand gestures end in pratfalls, Mr. Manville, don’t blame yourself for it.”

“Here we are,” said the captain, and he wound the tan elastic bandage around her torso three times, not too tight, fixing the end with two small metal clips. “That should make things a little easier,” he said.

It did. Breathing was somewhat harder, but when she moved there was much less pain. “Thank you.”

“Let us help you to your feet.”

God, she was shaky! Her legs felt like Play-Doh. When she was standing and they let go of her, she swayed back and forth like a sapling in a wind. “I don’t know,” she said, but somehow kept her balance.

They helped her across the narrow room to the lavatory door. “We’ll wait in the corridor,” the captain told her, and Manville gave her another encouraging smile, and they went outside, shutting the door.

She heard them talking together in the corridor as she weakly pulled open the lavatory door and hobbled inside. In the mirror there, she saw what a haggard wreck she was, how her hair looked like last year’s bird nest and there were great dark crescents under her eyes. And all over her body were large irregular bluish-gray bruises. That would be blood, wouldn’t it, under the skin. God, I really did hurt myself, she thought, and felt grateful wonder that she’d survived.

Getting up from the toilet was the hardest part. But then she made it successfully all the way back to the bed by leaning on the wall the entire way. They were still talking outside, a murmur in which she could make out no words, and she wondered at their relationship. They’d seemed like antagonists at first, with Manville so clearly distrusting the captain, but now they were more like partners, at least in the matter of taking care of her.

She arranged herself in the bed, sitting up, back against the wall, covered again with the blanket, and called out, “All right.”

They came in, Manville first, and the captain said how pleased he was that she’d done the whole thing by herself. “You’re a young and healthy person, you’ll recover very quickly.”

Manville said, “By tomorrow, when we reach Brisbane, you’ll be ready to walk off the ship under your own steam.” To the captain, he said, “We’ll be docking around seven tomorrow night, won’t we?”

“Well...” All at once, the captain was evasive, Kim could sense it, but couldn’t imagine why. “It may be later,” he said. “I think probably we won’t arrive until two or three the next morning.”

Manville must have sensed the change in the captain, too, because he frowned at him, but all he said was, “That late, I’m surprised.”

The captain looked away from him, and at Kim, telling her, “I will have some soup brought to you, and some clothing. You should eat the soup, and then you should sleep some more.”

“I am... tired,” she agreed. “But soup, yes. I’m hungry first. Thank you.”

“I’ll be handy,” Manville told her, and it seemed to Kim he was saying it as much to the captain as to her. “If you need me.”

22

Manville had gradually reached the conclusion that the threat would now come from elsewhere. Originally, Curtis had ordered Zhang to make sure Kim Baldur didn’t live to see Brisbane, but after his confrontation with Manville he’d obviously changed that order. It could be seen in the attitude of Zhang himself; the man was weak and frightened, and would have done whatever Curtis asked of him, but would have been miserable while doing it. Now Zhang was a man from whom a heavy weight had been lifted.

But not entirely. Curtis would not give up, he wasn’t the kind of man to accept defeat gracefully; or at all. He had two enemies now between himself and whatever this money-making scheme was, and one of them was Jerry Diedrich and the other was George Manville. He could get at Diedrich through Kim Baldur, but he would get at Manville much more directly.

Why would they be arriving in Brisbane so much later than originally planned? It seemed to Manville that Zhang had been hiding something when he’d told them that, and what could it be but an attack from Curtis? But where, and when? Sometime before they reached Brisbane, and apparently Curtis needed the extra time to get it ready.

In the meanwhile, though Manville felt he and Kim Baldur were both for the moment safe, he still took precautions. He moved himself into cabin 6, across the hall from her, and, while he was there, bolted shut the bulkhead doors at both ends of the passage.

The girl mostly slept, and whenever she awoke she was starving. She moved on from soup to stew and bread, then some red wine, and improved by the hour.

Manville ate his own meals with Zhang, in the crew’s mess, on the same level as cabins 6 and 7 but farther aft. Zhang was still hangdog, but pleasant, and they talked about neutral things: engineering, coastal shipping, the Mallory.

With Kim Baldur, he had only one real conversation, and that was about Jerry Diedrich. He stood in the doorway and watched her eat a bowl of stew, and said, “Do you know why Diedrich has it in so much for Richard Curtis?”

She looked at him in surprise, and said, “He’s a major polluter. Planetwatch is after all those people.”

“I’m sorry, Kim,” he said, “but that isn’t exactly true. Curtis is in construction, he’s no saint when it comes to environmental laws, but he’s no worse than any of the others, and better than a lot of them. It’s Jerry Diedrich who has a personal vendetta against Curtis.”

“Well, he despises Curtis,” she said, “because he’s a threat to the environment. But it isn’t personal.”

“You all showed up at Kanowit because of Diedrich,” Manville pointed out. “That day, I’m sure there were a lot of threats to the environment, here and there around the globe, but what we were doing at Kanowit wasn’t one of them.”

“The risk to the coral—”

He shook his head. “There was none. We didn’t even want to endanger the seawall, much less the coral, because Curtis and his partners have a use for that island. They don’t want to destroy it.”

“The chance you took—”

“I’m an engineer, Kim. Forgive me, but I know the risks better than Jerry Diedrich, and when he showed up at that island it wasn’t because the reef was going to be destroyed, because it wasn’t. It was because Jerry Diedrich has a personal vendetta against Richard Curtis and wanted to harass him.”

“That isn’t true,” she said, and he could see from her face that she was angry, closing down against him.

“Okay,” he said, because it was obvious she had no idea why Diedrich had it in for Richard Curtis. “How’s the stew?”

She took a second to decide if she wanted to hold onto her anger, then abruptly smiled and said, “It’s great.”

“Good.”

“And I do want to thank you.”

He laughed, and said, “Don’t thank me yet, wait’ll I do something.”

That conversation was in late morning of the day after she’d regained consciousness. That evening, Manville had dinner with Zhang, and said, “Captain, originally, we’d have been coming into Brisbane just about now.”

Zhang looked worried and defensive. “Yes. That’s true.”

“Curtis told you to slow down, to give him time to set something up to deal with Ms. Baldur and me.”

Zhang looked down at the food on his plate, and didn’t respond.

“Captain, I know you felt relieved when Curtis told you not to try to... hurt Ms. Baldur. But if you do nothing and say nothing, you’ll be hurting her. At least let us know what’s supposed to happen.”

Zhang looked very deeply troubled. He chewed a mouthful of food, slowly, and at last swallowed it, and drank water, and said, “Mr. Manville, I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I don’t want my family to suffer either.”

“I can understand that.”

Zhang sighed. He couldn’t meet Manville’s eye. He said, “Someone, some people, will board us tonight, around one, when we go past the end of Moreton Island. I was told I should be alone on the bridge, everyone else should be asleep, I should pay no attention to whatever happens.”

“Some sort of ship will come alongside? Grapple on?”

“That’s what I understand.”

Manville leaned back. “So when you dock at Brisbane, I won’t be on the ship anymore, and Ms. Baldur will have died of her experience in the sea off Kanowit.”

“I don’t know,” Zhang said miserably. “I’m not supposed to know anything, and I don’t know anything.”

“Captain,” Manville said, “what are we going to do? To protect you, and your family, and to protect Ms. Baldur, and to protect me. What are we going to do?”

Slowly, Zhang shook his head. “I can’t think,” he said. “If there was something— As you say, to protect us all. But I can’t think what.”

“Let’s put our heads together,” Manville said.

23

A hand touched her shoulder, and a voice softly said her name. Kim frowned, not wanting to be awake, because to be awake was to be in pain, but in thinking that thought she knew it was too late, she was already awake, and not going back.

She opened her eyes and saw the dim room, the door propped open and the corridor light giving shape to George Manville, on one knee beside the bunk, still holding her shoulder, leaning toward her, something hushed but urgent in his manner. She felt afraid, and didn’t know why, and said, “What?”

“Kim, listen,” he said, his voice still low, but with that tremor of urgency in it. “Some people are coming to the ship later tonight, to do us harm. We have to keep away from them.”

“Curtis?” she asked, and wondered why he’d want to do her harm. Or do George Manville harm.

“People of his,” Manville said. “Kim, if you’re dead, he can use that as a lever to pry Jerry Diedrich off his back. It’s that important to him, I don’t know exactly why, and he was hoping you’d die all by yourself, here on the ship. Since you won’t, he’s sending people.”

She stared at him, not wanting to believe, but believing. “To kill me?”

“Captain Zhang and I talked over what to do,” Manville told her. “We’re releasing one of the launches, to try to convince them we already got away.”

“Well, why don’t we?” Feeling the urgency, she moved to sit up, and the stiff pain jolted through her, and she caught her breath with a sudden gasp.

“That’s why,” he told her. “You’re mending, but you’re still very battered. Eight hours in a small launch, on the open sea, would be too much for you.”

“You could get away. Then he wouldn’t dare do anything to me, because you could tell.”

He shook his head. “Who would I tell? Who would I tell, and be believed against Richard Curtis?”

They’ve thought this through, she realized, Manville and Captain Zhang. Stop struggling, stop arguing, just do it, whatever it is they want. You’re not going to have better ideas than theirs. “All right,” she said.

“We’ll scuttle the launch,” he said, “so these other people won’t come upon it accidentally in the water. Then we’ll put you in one of the other launches, cover you with blankets, and hope they believe we already left the ship.”

She could tell immediately that this was a very flimsy plan. “Where will you be?”

“Keeping out of their way, or trying to.”

Very flimsy. But maybe it was the best they could do. “All right,” she said.

“I have jeans and a sweater here for you,” he said, holding them up for her to see. The jeans were faded, with bumpy knees, and the sweater was a dark green acrylic. “They’re clean,” he promised her, “and they should fit you.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m afraid these are the only shoes we could find,” he said, and held them up.

She couldn’t help it; she smiled at the shoes. She’d seen people wear shoes like this, when Planetwatch III docked sometimes, but had never guessed she’d one day wear them herself. The bottoms were roughly sawed out of the sidewall of an old tire, with a loose piece of canvas stapled across the top, and no heel. One size fits none.

“Can I help you sit up?”

“Yes,” she said, lifting an arm for him. “Thank you. I’ll be all right after that.”

But she wasn’t, not really. He had to help her put the sweater on, pulling it down over the elastic bandage that held her together. Then he put her feet into the legs of the jeans, helped her to stand, and pulled the jeans up to her waist.

“I’ve never been dressed by a man before,” she said, feeling awkward as she zipped the fly shut and fastened the canvas belt.

Manville didn’t say anything to that. His concentration was on the shoes, as he held her elbow and said, “Just step into them. There you go.”

Actually, they were better than she’d expected, the rubber firm but not too hard, the canvas stretching to hold her foot. “I’m ready,” she said.

When she started to walk, she realized how weak and dizzy she still was, and she was grateful for his hand holding tight to her upper arm. They left the cabin and started down the corridor, and he said, “Only the captain knows about this, so we have to be quiet.”

She was looking at her surroundings. How plush it all was, in comparison with Planetwatch III. Real wood floor, cream-painted walls, and actual carpeting on those stairs out ahead of her.

Why couldn’t Richard Curtis be content with all he had? Why did he have to ruin the planet to get just a little more?

Manville said, “I’ll carry you up the stairs. It’s just up one deck.”

“Can’t I walk?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so, Kim.”

It was stupid to be so weak, to have to be carried around like an invalid. But she knew he was right; those stairs looked a mile high, and already she could feel what little strength she had draining away. “All right,” she said, and stood obediently still, and he picked her up, one arm under her back, the other under her knees, and she put an arm over his shoulders, for balance.

He carried her slowly up the stairs. At the head of the stairs, he let her stand again, but kept that supporting hand on her arm as they went down a corridor past open doors showing much larger and more elaborate cabins, with large windows rather than portholes to show the black night outside.

At the end of the corridor he guided her through a wide teak door with two diamond-shaped windows in it, and then they were on deck, and immediately she could feel the movement of the ship more distinctly than when she’d been inside. Or was that just from seeing the dim whitecaps passing below?

The captain stood in darkness off to the right, forward, where one of the launches hung in its divots, just beyond the rail. When they walked toward him, Kim saw that a part of the rail was hinged to open inward as a gate, next to the entry steps to the launch.

“Good evening, Miss Baldur,” he whispered, and nodded a greeting. He looked and sounded very worried.

“Good evening. Thank you for helping me.”

“I wish it were not needed,” he whispered. “But since it is, I am happy that this is what I can do.”

To oppose Richard Curtis, she understood him to mean, instead of to give him what he wants, even though the captain worked for him.

Manville stepped onto the launch first, then took her arm to guide her aboard, the captain holding her other arm to steady her. “You’ll stay in the cabin,” Manville told her.

Most of the launch was open, with plank seating along both sides, but the front quarter was roofed in gleaming wood, with a low door next to the steering wheel. Manville opened the door, then steadied Kim as she bent down to step in, finding it so low in here she couldn’t even kneel upright. There were two bunks side by side using most of the space, both neatly made with drum-tight woolen blankets, plus many storage bins and cabinets.

“What you should do,” Manville said, leaning into the small space, “is lie on one of the bunks and cover yourself with the blanket from the other one. Cover yourself completely, if you hear anybody moving outside.”

“I will.”

He gave her leg an encouraging pat, and backed out of the doorway, then closed the door, leaving her alone in the dark.

Not total darkness; it wasn’t completely black inside the cabin. Two narrow slit windows were in the forward end of the prow on both sides, just under the roof; some light from the ship leaked in through the window on the right. In its illumination, Kim pulled the blanket off the right-hand bunk, lay back on the other, and pulled the blanket over herself. And by then she was exhausted.

But not sleepy, not the way she’d been before. Now she was too tense to be sleepy, too worried, too frightened. People coming here to this ship to kill her? It was unbelievable, and yet she had to believe it.

Would she hear them arrive? Would they find her?

Would Manville and the captain be able to help?

She couldn’t sleep, not at all. She lay there in the darkness, eyes open, looking at nothing, and nearly two hours later she heard the distant thump.

24

Morgan Pallifer once had his own ship, but that was years ago, in a completely different ocean. He had the ship because he and the Colombians were useful to one another, and then he lost the ship because the situation changed.

Oh, he was still useful to the Colombians; it’s just that he was useful in a different way. He became useful to the Colombians as a bargaining chip in their sub rosa dealings with the American authorities. They would permit Pallifer and his lovely sloop, the Pally, to be caught by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration when he made landfall at South Carolina with the cabin of the sloop full of duffel bags full of white plastic bags full of cocaine. The Pally was impounded, having been used in the drug trade, and Morgan Pallifer spent seven hard years in a Federal maximum-security prison, and now, gracious me, Morgan Pallifer can’t vote in American elections anymore. Hah!

Oh, he understood how it worked, he wasn’t bitter. The Pally had been in his name, but the Colombians had actually bought it for him, so it was really theirs, so they could take it away from him and give it to the DEA if it suited their needs. And he’d had four terrific years sailing the Colombians’ ship and spending the Colombians’ money, so it wasn’t a bad deal to pay for it with seven years cowering like a cur in that Federal kennel. The American authorities were enabled to rack up yet another wonderful public success in their war on drugs — success after success, and yet nothing changes — and they got to do it by putting away some scruffy unimportant American citizen without harming their vitally important geopolitical interests with the Colombians.

Morgan Pallifer wasn’t bitter, but he wasn’t stupid, either. He did his seven years hard, he worked in a marina in Newport Beach, California for the three years of his parole, and the instant he was a completely free man he applied for and got a new passport and got the fuck out of that country. He’d been a citizen of the Pacific Rim ever since, nearly thirty years now, working when he had to, stealing when he could, living on the sea as much as possible, working other men’s boats but never his own.

Sometimes the boats belonged to Richard Curtis, a good man in Morgan Pallifer’s estimation, who occasionally needed to get around various regulations by bypassing the normal import-export routes, and when that happened, Curtis knew Morgan Pallifer was someone he could depend on, and Pallifer knew Richard Curtis had good money and good boats.

Today, Morgan Pallifer was 62, lean and leathery and mean as a snake. His faded blue eyes could almost look kindly at a distance, but they were not.

Tonight’s work was straightforward, and lucrative. Pallifer had a good power launch of Curtis’s, and a three-man crew of his own, people he could rely on. He’d done this kind of thing before, though not for Curtis, so this was a new level of their business relationship, and one that Pallifer was happy with. He would do his customary efficient job tonight, and Curtis would be pleased, and who knows what other interesting work might lie ahead? He might even have his own ship again one of these days, in waters not polluted by the Americans’ high piousness and low dealings.

They came out from Brisbane Bay after dark, and made their approach to the Mallory keeping the bigger ship to port, so the bulk of Moreton Island lay behind them, to make them just that much harder to be seen. They swung around behind the white yacht, as it sluggishly moved shoreward like some fat nun waiting for the bandits, and Pallifer, at the helm, saw the space along the starboard side of the yacht where a launch was missing.

Did the birdies fly away? Or do they want poor old Morgan Pallifer to think they flew away?

Pallifer was good with boats. He brought this launch in tight to the Mallory’s flank without quite touching her, and behind him Arn swung the grappling hook forward and back, and in the darkness it looked like an unlit chandelier. Arn flung it high, and the curved arms of it cleared the rail up there, and at once Pallifer turned the wheel, so that the launch eased away from the white side of the yacht, making the rope more taut, out at an angle from the ship, so skinny little rope-muscled Arn could shinny up it without trouble.

Pallifer had not brought with him the ship’s plan of the Mallory that Curtis had loaned him, but he remembered the layout, and had planned accordingly. Just ahead of him on this side was the door to the storage area, for loading supplies, a plain white metal door in the ship’s white skin that was barely visible and that would be at deck level when Mallory was in port. Now, once Arn was aboard and had tossed the grappling hook back down into the sea between them for Frank to reel in, Pallifer eased the launch forward to that door. Above, Arn would be scurrying inside the ship into the main corridor, racing down the interior stairs, and then hurrying forward to the storage area. In just a minute, this door would open, and there it was, and there was Arn.

Frank and Bardo were the muscle. While Pallifer held the launch steady beside the open door, those two leaped across the moving space, holding onto the ends of ropes. Aboard, they looped the ropes around small stanchions just inside the doorway, to make the launch fast to the yacht, causing only one thump to sound when the two vessels came together. Once they were secure, Pallifer switched off the launch’s two engines and stepped aboard the Mallory.

This wasn’t his kind of ship. It was more like a country house than something seaworthy, with its carpeted stairways and expanses of glass. This wasn’t the sort of vessel Pallifer loved to sail on and craved to own.

But he wasn’t here to put an option on the Mallory, was he? No, it was a simple killing he was here for, that’s all. Two killings, to be turned into one natural death and one disappearance.

Except that the subjects weren’t where they were supposed to be. Pallifer and Arn and Frank and Bardo padded through the ship, undisturbed, knowing the crew would all be asleep and the captain obediently blind and deaf on the bridge, and when they got to cabin 4, where the disappearee was supposed to be bunked, the place was empty. No clothing, no personal possessions left behind. He’d moved out.

They went down one deck to cabin 7, where the natural death was to be waiting, and it, too was empty, but here at least the bed had been used and left mussed. And so had the bed in the cabin across the way, number 6. So the man had come down here to guard the woman, but then they’d both gone somewhere else.

Where? Off the ship? Pallifer didn’t believe it, not from Curtis’s description of the girl’s condition. No, more likely, the two of them had set loose that launch and then hidden themselves somewhere aboard the Mallory, because they’d be thinking all they were up against was some simple stupid riff-raff. They wouldn’t be expecting Morgan Pallifer.

The four men stood in the corridor between cabins 6 and 7, and Pallifer said, “All right, we’ll find them aboard somewhere, but I’d best check in first with Curtis. He wanted me to ring if there was a complication.”

They all went back up to cabin 1, which was Curtis’s when he was aboard, and where the telephone was located. Pallifer dialed the number Curtis had given him, and the man answered on the second ring; so he’d been waiting right there for the call, it was that important to him. “Yes?”

“Not in their cabins,” Pallifer said, being terse because there was no real privacy on a phone like this. “One launch is gone.”

“No,” Curtis said.

“I agree. We’ll look around.”

“Crew last.”

Of course; only disturb the crew if it was absolutely necessary. Pallifer said, “Do you suppose the captain’s been talking to them?”

There was a silence on the line, filled with electronic rustle, and then Curtis said, “I don’t think so. I think he noticed it slowed down.”

“That’s possible,” Pallifer said. “Means he’s pretty smart, though.”

“He is.”

“Should I discuss it with the captain?”

“If you think you should,” Curtis said. “But discuss it gently.”

Palliser shrugged, a little irritated. Gentle discussion never accomplished anything, “I’ll call you before we leave,” he said.

25

Manville moved back from the doorway to cabin 1 while the leader was still telling his men what he wanted done. The leader hadn’t believed for a second that he and Kim had fled on that launch, had he? No. A waste of time.

Manville had heard the thump of the two ships meeting, and had looked over the rail to see the last of them, the leader, as he moved from their launch into the Mallory. He’d trailed them ever since, as they went first to his cabin and then to Kim’s — Curtis had prepared them thoroughly, all right — and then back to cabin 1 for the leader to make that call.

What now? If he were alone, Manville would try to circle around them, get into an area they’d already searched, and then possibly get to their own launch and take off in it. But he also had Kim to consider, who couldn’t run, who could barely walk, and would not be able to defend herself.

What he needed was a weapon, some sort of weapon. Those four all had pistols stuck down into their belts, and at this point he had nothing. But if he could find something, and then get his hands on one of those pistols...

He’d always been a pretty good shot, against targets, never against anything alive. He’d belonged to a gun club for a few years, people who liked to plink at targets, try to compete against their own previous scores, but then the club was taken over by a group of hunters, “sportsmen” who wanted to politicize the organization and make it a mouthpiece for their own ideas, and Manville was one of those who’d dropped out. But he thought he was probably still pretty good, against something that didn’t move, and didn’t shoot back.

But the first thing was to find a weapon, some way to defend himself, and the second thing was to stay ahead of the search until he could circle around behind it. They were starting to look at the top deck, ignoring for the moment the bridge, moving from forward to aft, two of them on each side of the ship, taking their time. So Manville moved on ahead, and entered the large glass-domed dining room, and from there he went into the small service kitchen.

There were a lot of knives in here, some big cleavers, too, but Manville hoped for something better. Something like a club, to knock somebody out. He didn’t want to go around cutting people, wouldn’t know how to do it, probably didn’t have the stomach for it. The idea of stabbing another person made him queasy.

He looked past the peppermill two or three times before he finally focused on it. It was a large thing, darkly lustrous, like a rook in a giant’s chess set; probably a foot and a half long, it was made of rosewood, and when Manville picked it up it was as heavy as a baseball bat, with most of the weight near the base, where the metal grinding mechanism was fixed.

The peppercorns inside rustled when Manville hefted the thing, and he felt at first that it was too ridiculous to think of defending himself with a peppermill. But it was heavy, and it had the right shape for a club, and there was nothing else in here.

Carrying the peppermill next to his leg, Manville left the serving kitchen and went back through the dining room.

The four men were slowly moving this way, two through the central corridor, checking every door along their route, and one on each side, along the outer decks. Manville would have preferred to tackle the leader, who was older and scrawnier than the other three, but he needed to go after somebody who was alone, and that meant one of the bruisers searching along the deck.

At the aft end of the dining room, glass-windowed doors on both sides led out to the decks. On the starboard side, another door, solid wood, just aft of this one, led to a stairwell going down. The searchers were entering through every doorway they reached, looking inside, then backing out again. Manville stationed himself just inside the dining room door, gripped the peppermill hard, looked through the window, and waited.

Here he came. A big man, he walked with hunched shoulders and with head thrust forward, as though sniffing out his prey. His pistol was in his right hand, and he stepped cautiously, looking over his shoulder often, pausing before entering a doorway, then backing swiftly out again.

The man reached that stairwell door. Manville hung back, looking through the window in the door, seeing only the right side of him, the dark pants and black sweater, the right arm bent, pistol beyond Manville’s range of vision. The man stepped forward, disappearing, and Manville took a deep breath. He’d never done anything like this before, never anything like this. But there was no choice, and the time was now.

He pushed open the door, eased outside, stood with his back to the wall beside the open stairwell door, right arm cocked up across his upper chest, peppermill held up beyond his left ear, and waited for the man to back out to the deck, and from the other side of the ship he heard the scream.

It threw him off. All he could think was: They found her! And it immobilized him for just a second, while the searcher, as startled as he was by the sound of that scream, came lunging out of the doorway, forward rather than backward, pistol right there, and he actually saw Manville before Manville thought to swing the peppermill as hard as he could. It hit the man in the face, at the top of the nose, between the eyes. It knocked him back a step, but it didn’t knock him out. It wasn’t heavy enough, the damn thing wasn’t heavy enough.

And the man still had that pistol. Desperate, Manville swung again, and the heavy base of the peppermill thudded down on the man’s right wrist, and the pistol fell to the deck and went sliding away,

I need that pistol! Manville swung the peppermill with all his might, like a carpenter driving a masonry nail into a brick wall, three hard pounding frantic punches at that face, and then the peppermill cracked diagonally in two, the base and a long triangle of the handle bouncing off the man’s chest to fall at his feet, leaving in Manville’s hand a kind of long jagged wooden dagger.

The man was still on his feet, though goggle-eyed and reeling, hands groping as though for an opponent he couldn’t see. Manville lunged at his face with this new dagger, and the man staggered back, lost his footing, and toppled backward down the steep flight of stairs.

Pistol first. Manville ran to where it still moved on the deck, the polished metal sliding over the polished wood surface with every tremor of the ship. Hurling away the remnant of the peppermill, he snatched up the pistol, then ran back to point it down the stairwell. Only then did he look past the barrel of the gun, to see the man in a twisted heap down there, unconscious or dead.

Kim. Manville hurried back into the dining room and across it and out the door on the other side, and down there to his left, dimly illuminated by the night lights within the ship, he saw the group of them, the three men just now dragging Kim from the launch to the deck while she weakly and uselessly struggled.

Manville was about to run down there, to stop them and save her, when he suddenly realized he didn’t know this pistol he now clenched so hard in his right hand. It was a tool, after all, and you’re supposed to know your tools, and he didn’t know this tool. It would have a safety, he knew that, but was the safety at this moment on or off? He didn’t know.

He stood just out of sight of the people on deck, and studied the thing, a revolver with a bit of bullet showing at the back of each chamber. This small lever here on the side, handy to the right thumb; wouldn’t that be the safety?

The lever moved up and down, and when he first tried the thing it was in the down position. Would the man have done his searching with the safety on or off? There was nothing written on the pistol, no icons, no hint.

I’m an engineer, Manville thought, if I were the one who’d designed this, which way would turn the safety off, which way would turn it on? I would want the more speed when turning it off, would have less reason for speed when switching it on. The quickest simplest motion here is for the thumb to push this lever down, so if I were the engineer on this project I’d design it so the safety was off when the lever was down. The lever’s down.

If I’m wrong, I’ll know it when and if I have to pull the trigger. With luck, I’ll still have time to put my thumb under the lever and push it up. Without luck, I’m dead anyway, because this is nothing I know anything about.

Manville stepped forward onto the deck, the pistol held out in front of him, and moved toward the group, all of them now on deck, clustered around Kim, half-supporting her. The leader was saying, “—down to her cabin,” and of course that’s what they’d want, for Kim to be dead in her cabin, smothered with a pillow.

“Stop!” Manville shouted. “Put your hands up!” They looked at him with astonishment, but without fear. Because they were dragging Kim, none of them had a pistol in his hand, and yet they looked at Manville and he could see they were unafraid of him, unimpressed by him. They know, he thought, they know this is their world, not mine.

It was like meeting a dangerous dog: Don’t show your fear. “Everybody hands up!” he yelled. “Kim, get out of the way! Lean against the rail!”

The tableau they presented to him was this: The leader stood in the middle, one arm around Kim’s waist, holding her up, with the other big man to the right and the smaller man to the left. None of them obeyed him, none put their hands up. The leader didn’t release Kim, but held her even tighter. None of them even seemed worried.

Manville was about fifteen feet from them now, and reluctant to get any closer. He held the pistol out at arm’s length, aimed at the leader’s head, just next to Kim’s, and he called, “I’ll shoot! Let her go!”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” the leader said. He had a raspy scaly voice, like the whispery sound of a lizard moving on a stone wall. “You ever shoot a gun, mister?”

“Yes,” Manville said, and felt immediately calmer, because it was true. “I’m a good shot, as a matter of fact,” he said.

The leader grinned at him. “Ever shoot a man? Not everybody can, you know,”

“I can,” Manville said, but the calm had fled him, because he wasn’t at all sure now that he was telling the truth. He had captured this pistol, they were supposed to obey him, but they didn’t believe he was a threat. They believed he was an amateur, a baby in their hard world. He might interrupt them for a few seconds, but then they’d contemptuously brush him aside and get on with their bloody work.

Yes. The leader turned to the big man, to his left, and said, “Bardo, kill this cocksucker and let’s get on with it.”

It was because Manville was thinking mostly about the safety that he could do it. He wasn’t thinking about the shooting of a human being, he was thinking about time. If I’m wrong about the safety, he thought, I won’t have time for a second chance. That’s why, before Bardo could finish drawing his own pistol out from under his belt, Manville shot him in the chest.

Well. He’d been right about the safety. Good engineering.

They were all amazed, he could see that, and it gave him strength. Pointing the pistol at the leader again, he said, “Let her go.”

This time the leader did, releasing Kim and stepping one pace back, looking now mostly irritated and frustrated, but still not at all afraid. The other man, arms held out from his sides to show he didn’t mean to start any trouble, stood watchful, wary, but also not frightened.

These people are very dangerous, Manville thought. I’ve never dealt with such dangerous people. They’re waiting for me to make one tiny mistake, any tiny mistake, and God knows I’m likely to make a dozen mistakes. Except, no; one mistake is all they’ll give me.

He said, “Kim, get to the side, get out of the way.”

She did, stepping around behind the one he’d shot, who lay now on his back on the deck like a drowning victim who’s just been dragged aboard. She was tottery, but she could walk, she could take care of herself. Looking at Manville past the one he’d shot, she said, her voice shaky and weak, “George? Is he dead?”

“I really don’t care,” he told her, truthfully, and the leader surprised him with a snort of amusement, and Manville knew he didn’t have much time to press this advantage. “Kim,” he said, “get around behind them, get those pistols, hold onto them. Don’t let anybody grab you.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, with a weak smile. “I don’t want to be a shield. I think you’d shoot them right through me.”

That made the leader turn his head to give her an inquisitive look, and to say, “Is that right?”

Manville said, “Now, Kim.”

Kim moved, around behind the leader, who was now studying Manville as though to memorize him, or read him. As Kim put one cautious arm around him to pluck the pistol out from his belt, the leader said to Manville, “You’re some kind of ringer, I think. You’re not what I was told I was gonna find here.”

Oh, yes, I am, Manville thought, but I’m happy if you don’t believe it. And he knew it would be best if he didn’t say anything at all to that. The strong silent type, that’s me.

Kim got both pistols, and went back to lean against the rail. She looked very weak, and not as though she could possibly use those guns now dangling from her hands at her sides, not to save her life.

Manville said to the two men, gesturing at the one he’d shot, “Pick him up.” Not because he needed the man moved anywhere, but because he wanted to keep these last two occupied.

The leader and the other man obediently stepped over to crouch above the one he’d shot, and the leader said, “I think he’s still alive.”

“Pick him up.”

“We oughta get the captain down here,” the leader said, “get my man Bardo some medical attention.”

“Pick him up or I’ll shoot you,” Manville said.

The leader shrugged. “Not the way it was supposed to be,” he commented, and he and the other one picked up the wounded man, the leader at his ankles, the other man at his head.

Following Manville’s orders, they went back down through the ship, the killers first, muttering privately together over their unconscious mate, then Manville, and Kim last.

They made slow progress, because of the weight the two in front were carrying and because of Kim’s weakness and Manville’s fear that if he put any concentration on her, to help her, they’d find some way to take advantage.

He directed them through the ship down to the storage room, where they’d boarded. The outer door stood open there, the moving night sea hissing outside, the two ropes snaking in to the stanchions, their powerful launch nestled snug against Mallory’s side. There, Manville ordered them to put the wounded man down on the metal floor and then to sit next to him. “Take off your shoes,” he told them, and said to Kim, “Throw those pistols into the launch.”

The leader said, “You’re gonna take our boat?”

Manville ignored him. “Kim, get their shoes. Don’t get between me and them. Take the laces out. You two. Face down on the floor.”

The leader said, “I don’t think I can let you do this.”

He’s dangerous, Manville reminded himself, and he meant to kill me, so this is what I’d better do. He pointed the pistol at the leader’s head, just as the leader was putting a hand behind himself to lever up, to stand.

But then the leader looked at Manville’s face, and as Manville was about to squeeze the trigger the leader abruptly dropped back, hands up in front of his face, saying, “All right. All right.” And now, for the first time, a small flicker of fear did show in the man’s eyes.

I would have killed him, Manville thought, astonished at himself, a little disapproving of himself. I was going to kill him, and he saw that.

The two men lay face down on the metal floor, as he’d ordered. He said, “Hands behind your backs. Kim, use the shoelaces, tie each one’s thumbs together. Tie them tight. Use a lot of knots.”

“Not their wrists?”

“No. If you tie their wrists, their hands are still free, and they can untie one another. If you tie their thumbs, they can’t use their hands anymore.” He had no idea how he knew this, or how it had occurred to him, but he knew he was right.

Once Kim was finished, Manville used the other two laces to tie their ankles, then helped Kim into the launch, saying, “I’m sorry, we’re going to have to do the bumpy trip, after all.”

“That’s all right,” she said, “I’m a lot better.”

Manville climbed into the launch and started the engines. Then he went back to the open door to deal with the ropes, and the leader had twisted around, was propped on one elbow, staring at him. Their eyes met. The leader said, “I’d like to run into you again some time.”

“I wouldn’t,” Manville said, and freed the ropes.