“It has been a rewarding first meeting for me, and, I trust, for you as well.”
“Yes. Very much so.”
As Rhodes was leaving, Nakamura actually offered him a formal bow of the most punctilious sort. Rhodes did his awkward bearish best to imitate it.
A Level Three, bowing to
Mr. Kurashiki was waiting to lead him back to his car. Rhodes sat in it for a long moment, feeling dazed, wondering where to tell the car to take him. It was still fairly early in the afternoon. Return to the lab? No, not now. Not in the shape he was in. He was as close to drunk as made no difference, he was soaked in sour high- tension sweat, he was altogether exhausted. He felt close to tears. An interview with an actual Level Three; an offer to design a new lab for himself, expenses be damned; and, of all flabbergasting things, Wu Fang-shui himself thrown in as office help. Rhodes was dazed.
He needed to talk to someone about this. But who? Isabelle? Jesus, no! Ned Svoboda? Not really.
Paul Carpenter, that was who. The only person in the universe he completely trusted. But Carpenter was somewhere out at sea jockeying icebergs around. For the moment, Rhodes knew, he was on his own, struggling to contain a secret that was so big it felt like a lump of molten brass in his throat.
“Take me home,” Rhodes told the car.
He didn’t feel at all like a Level Eight departmental head, or like an internationally respected scientist. What he felt like was a small boy who had gone swimming out too far from shore, and had no idea now of how to get back to land.
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
