Hot Sky at Midnight

18

hitchcock said, “what I think, Cap’n, we ought to just take hold of them, the whole damn shipload of them. Nakata can put a couple of his spare hooks into them, and we’ll tow them into Frisco along with the berg.”

“Hold on,” Carpenter said. “Are you out of your mind? I’m no fucking pirate.”

“Who’s talking about piracy? It’s our obligation. We got to turn them in, man, is how I see it. They’re mutineers.”

“I’m not a policeman, either,” Carpenter retorted. “They want to have a mutiny, let them goddamn go and mutiny. What business is that of mine? I’ve got a job to do. I just want to get that berg moving east. Without hauling a shipload of crazies along.”

Hitchcock said nothing. His broad dark face turned grim.

In rising anger Carpenter said, “Look, don’t even think I’m going to make some kind of civil arrest of them. Don’t even consider it for an instant, Hitchcock. It’s out of the question and you goddamned well know it.”

Mildly Hitchcock said, “You know, we used to take this sort of thing seriously, once upon a time. You know what I mean, man? We wouldn’t just look the other way.”

“You don’t understand,” Carpenter said. Hitchcock gave him a sharp scornful look. “No. Listen to me, and listen good,” Carpenter snapped. “That ship’s nothing but trouble. The woman that runs it, she’s something you don’t want to be very close to. We’d have to put her in chains if we tried to take her in, and taking her in’s not as easy as you seem to think, either. There’s five of us and I don’t know how many of them. And that’s a Kyocera-Merck ship there. Samurai isn’t paying us to pull K-M’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

It was late morning now. Kovalcik had already called twice to find out what Carpenter was planning to do. He hadn’t taken either call. The sun was getting close to noon height, and the sky was brighter than ever, fiercely hot, with some swirls of lavender and green far overhead, vagrant wisps of greenhouse garbage that must have drifted west from the noxious high-pressure air mass that sat perpetually over the midsection of the United States. Carpenter imagined he could detect a whiff of methane in the breeze.

Just across the way from the ship was the berg, shining like polished marble, shedding water hour by hour as the mounting warmth worked it over. Back in San Francisco they probably were brushing the dust out of the empty reservoirs by now. Time to be moving along, yes. Kovalcik and Kohlberg would have to work out their problems without his help. Carpenter didn’t feel good about that, but there were a lot of things in the world that he didn’t feel good about, and he wasn’t able to fix those either.

“You said she’s going to kill those five guys,” Caskie said. The little communications operator ran her hands edgily over her shaven scalp. “Does she mean it?”

Carpenter shrugged. “A bluff, most likely. She looks tough, but I’m not sure she’s that tough.”

“I don’t agree,” Rennett said. “She wants to get rid of those men in the worst way. Probably was just about to do it when we turned up.”

“You think?”

“She can’t keep them on board. They’re running out of sedatives, is what she told us. Once those men are awake, they’ll figure out a way to get loose. So they have to go. I think that what Kovalcik was doing anchored by the berg was getting ready to maroon them on it. Only we came along, and we’re going to tow the berg away, and that screwed up the plan. Well, now she wants to give them to us instead. We don’t take them, she’ll just dump them over the side soon as we’re gone.”

“Even though we know the score?”

“She’ll say they broke loose and jumped into the ship’s boat and escaped, and she doesn’t know where the hell they went. Who’s to say otherwise?”

Carpenter stared gloomily. Yes, he thought, who’s to say otherwise.

“The berg’s melting while we screw around,” Hitchcock said. “What’ll it be, Cap’n? We sit here and discuss some more? Or we pull up and head for Frisco?”

“My vote’s for taking them on board,” said Nakata, who had been silent until this moment.

“I don’t remember calling for a vote,” Carpenter said. “We’ve got no room for five more hands. Not for anybody. We’re packed as tight as we can possibly get. Living on this ship is like living in a rowboat, as it is. Come on, Nakata, where would we put five more?” Carpenter was starting to feel rage beginning to rise in him. This business was getting too tangled: legal issues, humanitarian issues, a lot of messy stuff. The trouble was, there were no rules any more. If he took the five on board, was he saving five lives or just becoming a co-conspirator in a mutiny that he ought to be trying to suppress?

And the simple reality underneath it all was that intervening in this squabble was impossible for him to do. He couldn’t take on passengers, no matter what the reason.

Hitchcock was right that there was no more time for discussing it. The berg was losing water every minute. Even from here, bare eyes alone, Carpenter could see erosion going on, the dripping, the calving. And the oscillations were picking up, the big icy thing rocking gently back and forth as its stability at waterline got nibbled away. Later on the oscillations wouldn’t be so gentle. They had to get that berg sprayed with mirror-dust and skirted, and start moving. San Francisco was paying him to bring home an iceberg, not a handful of slush.

“Cap’n,” Rennett called. She had wandered up into the observation rack above them and was shading her eyes, looking across the water. “They’ve put out a boat, Cap’n.”

“No,” Carpenter said. “Son of a bitch!”

He grabbed for his 6x30 spyglass. A boat, sure enough, a hydrofoil dinghy. It looked full up: three people, four—no, five, it seemed. He hit the switch for biosensor boost and the squid fiber in the spyglass went to work for him. The image blossomed, high resolution. Five men, yes. Carpenter recognized ex-Captain Kohlberg sitting slumped in front.

“Shit,” Carpenter said. “She’s sending them over to us. Just dumping them on us.”

“If we doubled up somehow—” Nakata began, smiling hopefully.

“One more word out of you and I’ll double you up,” said Carpenter. He turned to Hitchcock, who had one hand clamped meditatively over the lower half of his face, pushing his nose back and forth and scratching around in his thick white stubble. “Break out some lasers,” Carpenter said. “Defensive use only. Just in case. Hitchcock, you and Rennett get out there in the kayak and escort those men back to the squid ship. If they aren’t conscious, tow them over to it. If they are, and they don’t want to go back, invite them very firmly to go back, and if they don’t like the invitation, put a couple of holes through the side of their boat and get the hell back here fast. You understand me?”

Hitchcock nodded stonily. “Sure, man. Sure.”

Carpenter watched the whole thing from the blister dome at the stern, wondering whether he was going to have a mutiny of his own on his hands now too. But no. No. Hitchcock and Rennett kayaked out along the edge of the berg until they came up beside the dinghy from the Calamari Maru, and there was a brief discussion, very brief, Hitchcock doing the talking and Rennett holding a laser rifle in a casual but businesslike way. The five castoffs from the squid ship seemed more or less awake. They pointed and gestured and threw up their arms in despair. But Hitchcock kept talking and Rennett kept stroking the laser, casual but businesslike, and the men in the dinghy looked more and more dejected by the moment Then the discussion broke up and the kayak headed back toward the Tonopah Maru, and the men in the dinghy sat where they were, no doubt trying to figure out their next move.

Hitchcock said, coming on board, “This is bad business, man. That captain, he says the woman just took the ship away from him, on account of she wanted him to let them all have extra shots of Screen and he didn’t give it. There wasn’t enough to let her have so much, is what he said. I feel real bad, man.”

“So do I,” said Carpenter. “Believe me.”

“I learn a long time ago,” Hitchcock said, “when a man say ‘believe me,’ that’s the one thing I shouldn’t do.”

“Fuck you,” Carpenter said. “You think I wanted to strand them? But we have no choice about it. Let them go back to their own ship. She won’t kill them. All they have to do is let her do what she wants to do and they’ll come out of it okay. She can put them off on some island somewhere, Hawaii, maybe. But if they come with us, we’ll be in deep shit all the way back to Frisco.” And worse when we get there, he added silently.

Hitchcock nodded. “Yeah. We may be in deep shit already.”

“What are you saying?”

“Look at the berg,” Hitchcock said. “At waterline. It’s getting real carved up.”

Carpenter scooped up his glass and kicked in the biosensor boost. He scanned the berg. It didn’t look good, no. The heat was working it over very diligently.

This was the hottest day since they had entered these waters. It was almost like the mainland out here today, the swirls of garbage gas in the sky, the steady torrid downpour of solar energy, a river of devastating infrared pouring through the murk up there and slamming earthward without mercy. The heat was building, accumulating. The sun seemed to be getting bigger every minute. There was a nasty magnetic crackling coming out of the sky, as if the atmosphere itself was getting ionized as it baked.

And the berg was starting to wobble, all right. Carpenter saw the oscillations plainly, those horizontal grooves filling with water, the sea not so calm now as sky/ocean temperature differentials began to build up and conflicting currents came sluicing in.

“Son of a bitch,” Carpenter said. “That settles it. We got to get moving right now.”

There was still plenty to do. Pro forma, Caskie radioed over to the squid ship to warn them that they were going to begin spraying mirror-dust. No reply came. Maybe they didn’t care, or didn’t know what was involved. The squid ship was still sitting at anchor next to the ice tongue, and it looked like some kind of negotiation might be going on between the men in the dinghy and the women on board.

Carpenter gave the word and the mirror-dust spigots went into operation, cannoning shining clouds of powdered metal over the exposed surface of the berg, and probably all over the squid ship and the dinghy too. It took half an hour to do the job. The sea was still roughening and the berg was lalloping around in a mean way. But Carpenter knew there was a gigantic base down there out of sight—enough, he hoped, to hold the berg steady until they could get under way.

“Let’s get the skirt on it now,” he said.

A tricky procedure, nozzles at the ship’s waterline extruding a thermoplastic spray that would coat the berg just where it was most vulnerable to wave erosion. The hard part came in managing the extensions of the cables linking the hooks to the ship the right way, so that they could maneuver around the berg. But Nakata was an ace at that. They pulled up anchor and started around the far side. The mirror-dusted berg was dazzling, a tremendous mountain of white light.

“I don’t like that wobble,” Hitchcock kept saying.

“Won’t matter a damn once we’re under way,” said Carpenter.

The heat was like a hammer, now, savagely pounding the dark cool surface of the water, mixing up the thermal layers, stirring up the currents, getting everything churned around. They had waited just a little too long to get started. The berg, badly undercut, was doing a big sway to windward, bowing way down like one of those round-bottomed Japanese dolls, then swaying back again. God only knew what kind of sea action the squid ship was getting, but Carpenter couldn’t see them from this side of the berg. He kept on moving, circling the berg to the full extension of the hook cables, then circling back the way he had come.

When they got around to leeward again, he saw what kind of sea action the squid ship had been getting. It was swamped. The ice tongue they had been anchored next to had come rising up out of the sea and kicked them like a giant foot.

“Jesus Christ,” Hitchcock murmured, standing beside him. “Will you look at that. The damn fools just sat right there all the time.”

The Calamari Ma.ru was shipping water like crazy and starting to go down. The sea was boiling with an armada of newly liberated squid, swiftly propelling themselves in all directions, heading anywhere else at top speed. Three dinghies were bobbing around in the water in the shadow of the berg.

“Will you look at that,” Hitchcock said again.

“Start the engines,” Carpenter told him. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Hitchcock peered at him disbelievingly.

“You mean that, Cap’n? You really mean that?”

“I goddamn well do.”

“Shit,” said Hitchcock. “This fucking lousy world.”

“Go on. Get ’em started.”

“You actually going to leave three boats from a sinking ship sitting out there in the water full of people?”

“Yeah. You got it.” Carpenter’s head felt as if it was stuffed with wool. Don’t stop to think, he told himself. Don’t think about any of this. Just do. “Now start the engines, will you?”

“That’s too much,” Hitchcock said softly, shaking his head in a big slow swing. “Too goddamn much.”

He made a sound like a wounded buffalo and took two or three shambling steps toward Carpenter, his arms dangling loosely, his hands half-cupped. Hitchcock’s eyes were slitted and his face looked oddly puffy. He loomed above Carpenter, wheezing and muttering, a dark massive slab of a man. Half as big as the iceberg out there was how he looked just then.

Oh, shit, Carpenter thought. Here it comes. My very own mutiny, right now.

Hitchcock rumbled and muttered and began to close his hands into fists. Exasperation tinged with fear swept through Carpenter and he brought his arm up without even stopping to think, hitting Hitchcock hard, a short fast jab in the mouth that rocked the older man’s head back sharply and sent him reeling against the rail. Hitchcock slammed into it and bounced. For a moment it looked as if he would fall, but he managed to steady himself. A kind of sobbing sound, but not quite a sob, more of a grunt, came from him. A bright dribble of blood sprouted on his white-stubbled chin.

For a moment Hitchcock seemed dazed. Then his eyes came back into focus and he looked at Carpenter in amazement.

“I wasn’t going to hit you, Cap’n,” he said, blinking hard. There was a soft stunned quality to his voice. “Nobody ever hits a cap’n, not ever. Not ever. You know that, Cap’n.”

“I told you to start the engines.”

“You hit me, Cap’n. What the hell you hit me for?”

“You started to come at me, didn’t you?” Carpenter said.

Hitchcock’s shining bloodshot eyes were immense in his Screen-blackened face. “You think I was coming at you? Oh, Cap’n! Oh, Jesus, Cap’n. Jesus!” He shook his head and wiped at the blood. Carpenter saw that he was bleeding too, at the knuckle, where he’d hit a tooth. Hitchcock continued to stare at him, the way you might stare at a tyrannosaurus that had just stepped out of the forest. Then his look of astonishment softened into something else, sadness, maybe. Or was it pity? Pity would be even worse, Carpenter thought. A whole lot worse.

“Cap’n—” Hitchcock began, his voice hoarse and thick.

“Don’t say it. Just go and get the engines started.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, man.”

He went slouching off, rubbing at his lip.

“Caskie’s picking up an autobuoy SOS,” Rennett called from somewhere updeck.

“Nix,” Carpenter yelled back angrily. “We can’t do it.”

“What?”

“There’s no fucking room for them,” Carpenter said. His voice was as sharp as an icicle. “No way. Nix.”

He lifted his spyglass again and took another look toward the oncoming dinghies. Chugging along hard, they were, but having heavy weather of it in the turbulent water. He looked quickly away, before he could make out faces. The berg, shining like fire, was still oscillating. Carpenter thought of the hot winds sweeping across the continent over there to the east of them, sweeping all around the belly of the world, the dry, rainless winds that forever sucked up what little moisture could still be found. It was almost a shame to have to go back there. Like returning to hell after a little holiday at sea, is how it felt. But that was where they were going. And, like it or not, he was going to leave these people behind in the sea.

Sometimes you had to make lousy choices, just to cope with the circumstances. That was all there was to it, Carpenter thought. Life was tough, sometimes downright rotten. And sometimes you had to make lousy choices.

He turned. They were staring at him, Nakata, Rennett, Caskie, everybody but Hitchcock, who was on the bridge setting up the engine combinations.

“This never happened,” Carpenter told them. He felt numb. He tried to push what had occurred out of his mind. “None of this did. We never saw anybody else out here. Not anybody. You got that? This never happened.”

They nodded, one by one.

There was a quick shiver down below as the tiny sun in the engine room, the little fusion sphere, came to full power. With a groan the engine kicked in at high. The ship started to move away, out of the zone of dark water, toward the bluer sea just ahead. Off they went, pulling eastward as fast as they could, trying to make time ahead of the melt rate. It was afternoon, now. Behind them the other sun, the real one, lit up the sky with screaming fury as it headed off past them into the west. That was good, to have the sun going one way as you were going the other.

Carpenter didn’t look back. What for? So you can beat yourself up about something you couldn’t help?

Home, now.

Back to the wonderful world of North America in the greenhouse age.

This fucking lousy world, Hitchcock had said. Yeah. This berg here, this oversized ice cube, how many days’ water supply would that be for San Francisco? Ten? Fifteen? And then what? Go and get another one? And every berg you took was water that somebody else wasn’t going to be able to have.

His knuckle was stinging where he had split it punching Hitchcock. He rubbed it in a distant detached way, as if it were someone else’s hand. Think east, he told himself. You’re towing two thousand kilotons of million-year-old frozen water to thirsty San Francisco. Think good thoughts. Think about your bonus. Think about your next promotion. No sense looking back. You look back, all you do is hurt your eyes.