Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (15 page)

           
Damn right. One of the key issues
for the voters in every election is jobs, and one of the very finest sources of
local jobs is a nice military base. Every congressman fights to get more than
his share of the nation’s military presence in his district, and Schlurn had
seniority enough, clout enough, friends enough, to have done very well in that
department.

           
But so what? Warily, the congressman
said, “We do have a few army bases, yes, and air force, too. And that supply
depot, and a few other things.”

           
“One of those,” Carson said, “one of
the army bases, say, might be just the perfect spot for Dr. Philpott.”

           
“Oh, now,” Schlurn said, stalling,
putting his cupped hand up in front of his mouth (his habitual gesture, though
he didn’t know it, when in a tight spot), “now, wait a minute, I’m not sure the
army would like—”

           
“If Unitronic Laboratories, meaning
Tony here,”
Carson
interrupted, “were to finance the
construction of a new lab for Dr. Philpott to military specifications,
guaranteeing that whatever— incidents—might occur would be contained away from
the normal areas of the base..

           
“I suppose we could do that,” Tony
said, “but on an army base? Steve, do you think you could deliver such a
thing?”

           
He did not. Schlurn imagined himself
in conversation with one of those desk-cowboy generals over at the Pentagon,
trying to introduce explosions to an army base. In no way did he want to make
such an attempt, to even ask the question, to get the outraged refusal he fully
anticipated and knew he would fully deserve. No way.

           
How to get out of this? How to
refuse to even make the request? They were all watching him, waiting. Aware of
the sympathetic panic in Jerry SeidelbaunTs eyes, knowing Jerry was not going
to come up with any last-minute rescue here, he temporized, saying whatever
came into his head: “Well, you know, uh, these are difficult days for the
military—”

           
“All the more reason,” said the
implacable Carson, “for them to be accommodating.”

           
Oh, God. What to do? Schlurn turned
to Tony. “What exacdy is this research Dr. Philpotfs into? Something about
alternate sources of energy?”

           
“Strange matter,” Carson said
sardonically, as though the words were some sort of presumptuous stranger at
the gate.

           
“Yes, that’s right,” Tony said. He
told Schlurn, “We’re using up the most fruitful sources of energy on the
planet, so eventually, and sooner rather than later, we’ll have to go into other
realms to find fresh energy.”

           
Schlurn, not liking the sound of
that, said, “Other realms?”

           
“According to the scientific
chaps,” Tony said, “the two likeliest new sources of energy—almost infinite
energy, in either case—are strange matter and black holes.”

           
Schlurn said, “Aren’t black holes
something in outer space?”

           
“Yes, they are. Extremely dense
areas between the stars that give off no reflection at all. Such great density
means, if we could tap into a black hole, we’d have energy and to spare for as
long as human beings exist.” Tony grinned, and shook his head. “Putting the
necessary cable into place,” he said, “several light-years long, is a problem
we haven’t quite surmounted yet. Or alternatively, like the Saudis roping an iceberg
and dragging it home to the Persian Gulf, to lasso a black hole and tug it to
the solar system also still has a few bugs in it to be ironed out. Which leaves
strange matter.”

           
Schlurn said, “Which is?”

           
“Well, I’m not quite sure,” Tony
admitted. “Something like anti-matter, I take it. But very dense, like black
holes, and therefore potentially another limitless source of energy. Some
scientists, our Dr. Philpott among them, believe it would be possible to create
strange matter here on Earth, which eliminates the access problems of the black
holes.”

           
Schlurn nodded, thinking hard. “So
what Dr. Philpott is doing,” he said, “is looking for an extremely powerful new
energy source.”

           
“That’s about it.”

           
And
that,
Schlurn told himself, is what I’m supposed to sell the
Pentagon as a desirable new neighbor. Lord, deliver me from this. How do I get
out of this?

           
And then, in the depths of his
sweaty despair, he suddenly remembered that litde piece of paper in his jacket
pocket, the reminder from A1 Metz, delivered by Carson’s secretary. His hand
came down from his mouth. His head lifted. His spine straightened. “Green
Meadow,” he said.

           
They all gave him the same blank
stare. Finally, it was
Carson
’s number two, Harrison, who said, “What about it?”

           
Schlurn turned to Tony Potter.
“Your Unitronic is connected with Anglo Dutch, isn’t it?”

           
Tony smiled. “We are their
creature,” he said.

           
“And isn’t Anglo Dutch one of the
partners in the consortium that owns Green Meadow?”

           
Now
they got it, and they stared at him as though he’d completely lost his mind.
Again, it was Harrison who first found voice: “Congressman, Green Meadow is a
nuclear power plant?

           
“Of course it is, I know that, I had
more than a litde to do with making the state adjust some of its regulations so
the thing could be built in the first place.”

           
Harrison shook his head. “You’re
suggesting we take a man who makes explosions and put him in a nuclear power
plant?”

           
“Why not?” Schlurn was fired by his
idea now, and could defend it as though before the entire House. “God knows the
place is
used
to explosions, that’s
what a nuclear power plant is, an endless series of controlled explosions from
which we draw off useful power. If it’s possible to build Dr. Philpott a
laboratory that would contain any explosion he might come up with, if you’re
saying we could do that at an army base, then why not at a nuclear power plant?
And the corporate entities involved are interconnected: Unitronic, Anglo Dutch.
No complexities of the kind you’d get if it were a government installation.”

           
Carson
, brow corrugated with doubt, turned to
Tony. “What do you think, Tony?”

           
“At first blush,” Tony answered,
flashing Schlurn a forgive-me smile, “the idea sounds absolutely bloody
bonkers. But if it’s possible to make the lab at all safe, then why not at
Green Meadow? And our Marlon would be in a congenial atmosphere there, among
like-minded chaps.”

           
“Exactly,” Schlurn said, as though
he’d thought of that argument himself, which he hadn’t.

           
Hope smoothed Carson’s brow. “Tony?
You think it’s possible?”

           
“Let me make a few phone calls,”
Tony answered. “Bruit the idea around a bit. Having our chief researcher
actually inside one of our own operations... Yes, let me see what may be done.”

           
Carson
smiled at his guests. “I feel calmer
already,” he said.

           
Here is a thing I’ve learned about
the humans. Everything they do is motivated by a crazy quilt of reasons. Almost
never do they perform an act merely because it’s the most sensible thing to do
at that moment. There are always political reasons as well, or social reasons,
or emotional reasons, or religious reasons, or financial reasons, or reasons of
prejudice...

           
Oh, who knows? They wind up doing
the wrong thing, usually, is the point, even though that small rational part
inside them will briefly have shown the right road to take. A human who can’t
ignore common sense to leap firmly into the saddle of the wrong horse is a
pretty poor example of the species, all in all.

           
Me? I was the voice on the phone. I
wanted Congressman Schlurn to have Green Meadow in his mind, so I put it in his
pocket. To help his reason find, as usual, the wrong action.

           
Kitchen staff were not wanted up on
deck. The Europeans paying for this ocean experience in the great world were
not supposed to have their vacation interludes spoiled by the sight of Oriental
riffraff.

           
So that was yet another way in which
Kwan was wrong for the job. He was middle class, educated, intelligent,
gregarious. Down in the kitchens, in what was almost literally the bowels of
the ship, surrounded by uneducated illiterate rural peasants with whom he
shared absolutely nothing but race, Kwan was bored, frustrated, silenced,
imprisoned in his own persona. He had nothing to say to his co-workers and
they, God knows, had nothing to say to him.

           
The kitchens were beneath the dining
rooms, one deck below. All food was brought up to the passengers by waiters
riding escalators, and for the first few weeks, until he found his own private
route, Kwan had often lifted his head from his potscrubbing to gaze toward that
moving staircase, rising endlessly from this steamy hell to the heaven of easy
laughter, good food, intelligent conversation, and beautiful women. Beautiful
women: that was probably the hardest deprivation of all.

           
Kitchen staff were housed in small
four-man interior cabins on the same deck as the kitchens. From his room, Kwan
could go forward along the narrow long corridor—yellow-painted metal, glaring
light bulbs overhead in screened enclosures like catchers’ masks—to the kitchen
and the deep sink where he spent his working hours six days a week, or he could
go aft an even longer way and eventually out through a heavy metal bulkhead
door to a small oval deck.

           
This was the kitchen staff’s outside
exercise area, but few of them ever came out here. Not that very much concern
had gone into making the place either useful or attractive. It was an empty
space, ringed by a rusty railing. The bumpy metal deck was thickly painted in
dark green with rust showing through. Out here, there was a great rush of
engine noise and spray- drenched wind, a smell of oil mixed with the clean tang
of sea, and the great empty horizon slowly seesawing miles and miles away over
the indifferent hungry ocean.

           
And a ladder.

           
Afterward, it seemed to Kwan it had
taken him far too long, weeks, to notice that ladder, those metal rungs bolted
to the skin of the
Star Voyager,
leading upward to the next setback two decks above. Placed at the farthest
starboard edge of this lower deck, the rungs marched up past the picture window
of a sternward bar, and then to some unimaginable area reserved for passengers.
Kwan saw it, at last, and knew he would have to go up.

           
Not the escalators; only the waiters
were permitted on the escalators, and only while at work. Not the elevators;
kitchen staff were forbidden to use them at any time, except for medical
emergency, and even then to be accompanied by a ship’s officer. But this
ladder; this was Kwan’s route out of hell.

           
The first time he climbed,
frightened, his tense fingers clutching the cold rough metal of the rungs, was
a blustery morning when few passengers would be outside and when the bar with
the picture window was not yet open. That climb had merely been exploratory, informational.
Once he had climbed high enough to see what was beyond the ladder, once he
could peek over the level of that upper deck, he stopped, the ship’s vibrations
running through his body, and drank it in.

           
A passenger promenade, one that made
a great oval all around the ship. Kwan was startled to see joggers pounding by,
even in weather like this. The first of them to thud past, a trim thirtyish man
with a fierce inward expression, had scared Kwan mightily, but then he realized
the joggers were so thoroughly involved with the interior of their own bodies
and minds that they were hardly aware of the outside world at all. A tiny face
at the lower right of their peripheral vision made no impact on them.

           
They won’t jog at night, Kwan told
himself, and climbed back down.

           
His day off was Tuesday. The other
six days he worked from eight till eleven in the morning, from one till four in
the afternoon, and again from seven till eleven at night, sometimes later. So
Tuesday was the only time he’d be able to use his sudden access to what he
thought of as the real world.

           
He still had the clothing he’d worn
when he’d come aboard the ship: decent tan slacks, maroon polo shirt, brown
loafers. If he shaved more carefully than he usually did these days, if he
spoke English, if he kept his nerve, there was no reason why he couldn’t pass
as a passenger; there were a few Asiatics sprinkled among the mosdy Europeans
up there, along with some Americans and even the occasional black. If only the
weather would be good next Tuesday; in high seas or driving rain, he wouldn’t
be able to make the ascent.

           
Tuesday was beautiful all day,
though Kwan had no way to know that without going out onto that aft deck. By
nine at night, the deep black sky showed a million pinholes of stars, with a
half-moon low in the east, forward of the ship, where its light would not touch
a man climbing the stern ladder. The only truly tricky part was to edge past
that picture window, but the crowded bar was filled with people in boisterous
conversation, who had long since learned that what they mosdy saw at night in
that window was their own reflections, and so no longer looked over there.

           
Hugging the metal wall, Kwan climbed
past the window, past the laughing, chattering, drinking people inside, and
went on up and up. To stop, and wait, at the very top, while a loving couple
with their arms around one another strolled with infuriating slowness past the
spot where he crouched. At one moment, he could have reached out and clawed the
woman’s ankle.

           
Gone by at last. Using the rail for
support, slipping beneath its lowest crosspiece, he rolled out onto the deck,
stood, brushed himself off, and went for his first stroll in the free air.

           
There were still at this hour people
in the dining room, but they had also spread into the lounges and the half
dozen bars and the two casinos. Passing through one bar, Kwan picked up an
unattended drink and carried it off with him, more for protective coloration
than anything else. He was not a drinker, never had been, didn’t believe in it.

           
But it was impossible to carry the
glass around like that without finally at least sipping from it. The taste was
sharp, not very pleasant, but as he strolled he continued to sip the drink, and
in a surprisingly short time there was almost none of it left.

           
He was in one of the casinos when he
realized he had to either stop drinking or walk around foolishly with an empty
glass in his hand. The trouble was, he’d been concentrating on the passengers
and on the simple pleasure of walking among ordinary people, and had been
paying too litde attention to himself.

           
The passengers. Those in the bars
were mostly European, tanned, rich looking, young to middle-aged. Those playing
cards in the lounges were mostly American, older and not so prosperous looking.
And the casinos seemed to attract a generally older crowd.

           
Though not entirely. Here and there
in the casinos, too, were attractive younger people, like the deeply tanned
blonde he now found himself standing next to, watching the action at the craps
table. She looked to be in her late twenties, tall and slender and bored,
observing the dice and the players with a jaundiced eye. Kwan became aware of
her, covertly watched her a while, and then said, “Excuse me.”

           
She turned her head, raising a
skeptical eyebrow: “Yes?”

           
He gestured at the table: “Do you
understand the rules of that game?”

           
She had known, of course, that he
was somebody trying to pick her up, but she hadn’t expected
this.
She gave a surprised snort of
laugher, and then said, “I’m afraid I do, yes.”

           
“Afraid you do?” Kwan echoed, and
vaguely moved the glass: “I’m sorry, my English—”

           
“Is as good as mine,” she informed
him. “Where are you from?”

           
“
Hong Kong
.”

           
“I am from
Frankfurt
,” she told him, and nodded toward the
table. “That is my husband with the dice. You see? There he throws. He’s trying
to match a certain number. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses.”

           
Kwan said, “Do you play?”

           
“Oh, no.” She shrugged. “I could,
but Pm not interested. It is Kurt’s vacation to play, and my vacation to
watch.”

           
“Well, at least it’s a vacation,”
Kwan said.

           
Again she looked at him, with more
curiosity. “Aren’t you on vacation? Or are you with the ship?”

           
“Oh, no, not with the ship,” he
said, and went into the spiel he’d worked out while waiting for Tuesday. “I am
a maritime student, I am doing my thesis on these ships, the company very
kindly permitted me to come aboard.”

           
“Your thesis? About the ships?”

           
“Well, they have no real
transportation purpose,” Kwan told her. “No one is here to travel to a
destination.”

           
“No, of course not,” she agreed.
“It’s a vacation.”

           
“So the competition,” Kwan pointed
out, “is not airplanes, but islands.”

           
She laughed. “Yes, I suppose that’s
true.”

           
“So the thesis,” Kwan went on,
beginning to half believe his own story, “is about why people choose
this
sort of vacation.”

           
She pointed at the craps table.
“That’s your answer, right there. The casinos. No law against gambling on the
high seas.”

           
Smiling, he said, “I’ll need to fill
my paper with more words than that.”

           
“Yes, I suppose you will. I am
Helga.”

           
“Kwan.”

           
“How do you do?”

           
Her hand was dry, cool, strong. With
a knowing look at him, she said, “Isn’t this when you invite me for a drink?”

           
In honest confusion, not at all feigning,
Kwan said, “Oh, I wish I could, I’m sorry, I—”

           
“An impoverished student? Really?”

           
“That’s so.” There was something
about being in the presence of a beautiful woman that always turned Kwan into
the most supple and glib of liars. Showing her his glass, he said, “I only
permit myself one an evening.”

           
“In that case,” she said, “let
me
buy
you
a drink. Is that Scotch?”

           
He looked at the dregs in the glass.
“Yes,” he hazarded.

*
 
*
 
*

           
He’d been wrong. When they settled
at a tiny booth in one of the quieter bars—but still lively—and he tasted the
tall Scotch and soda the red-jacketed waiter placed before him, it was a very
different taste. No telling what that first drink had been.

           
And no matter. He was seated at a
comfortable banquette in a happily humming bar, beside a good-looking woman who
kept smiling around her drink and eying him with speculation, he was speaking
English, flirting, happy, pretending to be himself at last (much more himself
than that kitchen slavey he counterfeited daily down below), and even drinking
a second Scotch though he never drank and his head had already begun to swim.
But what release was this!

           
She leaned closer to him, lowering
her voice but making sure he could still hear her. “The casino closes at two.
Kurt
never
leaves before it closes,
and I can’t possibly stay here that long. Walk me to my cabin, will you?”

           
“I will,” he said.

*
 
*
 
*

           
She woke him with sharp fingers and
sharp shakings: “We fell asleep!”

           
At a loss, he stared up at this
naked woman bending over him in the amber light, narrow strong breasts
presenting themselves but angular face filled with urgency and rejection. “You
have to go, it’s nearly
two o’clock
!”