Hot Sky at Midnight

of dust that had been building up for months or perhaps years and hurling them upward, so that the downpour became ever grayer as the airborne crud came drifting copiously down again. Streams of garbage were falling from the sky. Yes, Carpenter thought, very lovely, very pretty to behold.

There were places, he knew from his stint in the Samurai Weather Service, where a sweet, cleansing, fertility-giving rain fell practically every day: the eastern end of the Mediterranean, say, or the grain belt of Saskatchewan, or the Siberian plains. But this was not one of those places. Rain along the West Coast was such a rarity that it was more of a nuisance than anything else when it did finally arrive, generally in some kind of absurd excessiveness like this. It came with insufficient frequency to maintain any kind of water supply, serving mainly to liberate the accumulated chemical gunk on the streets and roads and turn them into funhouse slideways, to cut ghastly gullies in the withered and defoliated hills east of the bay, and to churn up the loose particulate grime that lay everywhere in the city, redistributing the mess but not removing it.

What the hell. He was safely home, and with his cargo. So the voyage had been a success, except for the one little blemish of the squid-ship event. And Carpenter tried not to think about that.

He went under cover, into the blister dome at the stern. Caskie was there, doing something to a control panel. Carpenter said to her, “Get me the Samurai facility at the Port of Oakland, will you? I need to know which pier I’m supposed to deliver this thing to. I’ll take the call in my cabin.”

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir!”

“Sir?” Carpenter asked her. Nobody had been sirring him aboard the Tonopah Maru up till now, and there was something unreal and oddly insolent about the way Caskie did it now. But the lithe little radio operator had already gone sprinting away to her communications nest to set up the call for him.

He headed below. In his cabin he found the Port of Oakland operator already waiting for him on the tiny visor of his wall-mounted communicator.

“Captain Carpenter here,” he said. “Reporting safe arrival of Tonopah Maru with iceberg of approximate seventeen-hundred-plus kiloton mass. Requesting docking instructions.”

The Port of Oakland operator gave him the number of the pier to which he was to bring his berg. Then the android said, “You are instructed to report to Administration Shed Fourteen immediately upon transferring command to pier-side personnel, Captain.”

“Transferring command?”

“That is correct. You will be relieved by Captain Swenson and will go immediately to Administration Shed Fourteen for preliminary 442 hearings.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will be relieved by Captain Swenson and will go—”

“Yes, I heard that part. You said ‘442’?”

“That is correct. There is to be a 442, Captain.”

Carpenter was baffled. What the hell was a 442? But the android on his visor would give him only circularities instead of answers. He turned the communicator off after another moment and went upstairs.

“Hitchcock?”

The navigator’s grizzled ebony face peered out of the blister dome.

“You want me, sir?”

Sir again. Something was really wrong.

“Hitchcock, what’s a 442?”

Hitchcock’s expression was impassive, almost smug, but there was a strange glint in the older man’s exophthalmic, vividly white, blood-streaked eyes. “Impropriety charge, sir.”

“Impropriety?”

“Violation of regs, yes, that’s an impropriety. Sir.”

“You turned me in? On the Calamari Maru thing?”

“Sir, the 442 hearing will determine—”

“Answer me!” Carpenter wanted to grab Hitchcock by the front of his shirt and bash him against the railing. But he knew better than that. “Did you turn me in?”

Hitchcock’s gaze was serene. “We all did, sir.”

“All?”

“Rennie. Nakata. Caskie set up the call for us.”

“When was this?”

“Four days ago. We told them you had abandoned a group of sailors in distress.”

“I don’t believe this. You told them I had aband—”

“Was a terrible thing, sir. Was a violation of all common decency, sir.” Hitchcock was terribly calm. He seemed to have swollen to six times his normal size: a monster of rectitude and moral justice. “Was our duty to inform authorities, sir, of this breach of maritime custom.”

“You fucking treacherous bastard,” Carpenter said. “You know as well as I do that we had no room for any of those people aboard this ship!”

“Yes, sir.” Hitchcock spoke as though from several galaxies away. “I understand that, sir. Nevertheless, the impropriety was committed and it behooved us to report it.”

Impropriety! Behooved us! Suddenly Hitchcock had the vocabulary of a schoolmaster. Carpenter made an inarticulate sound deep in his throat. He longed to hurl Hitchcock overboard. Rennie and Nakata had appeared, and were watching from a distance, heedless of the quickening rain. Carpenter wondered what number impropriety it was to throw your navigator into San Francisco Bay in front of witnesses.

He saw now that it had been a crazy thing to do, ordering them to forget his abandonment of the Calamari Maru’s people. They would obey, but they wouldn’t forget. And the only way they could get themselves out from under the responsibility for what he had done out there in the South Pacific had been to turn him in.

Carpenter’s mind went back to that moment in the open sea, when they had seen the three dinghies from the foundering Calamari Maru heading their way. His callousness, Hitchcock’s incredulity.

Playing the scene back now in memory, Carpenter could hardly believe the thing that he had done. He had left those people out there to die, had turned his back on them and sailed away, and that had been that. An impropriety, yes.

But still—

There had been no choice, Carpenter thought. His ship was too small. The iceberg was beginning to melt. They didn’t have enough food for all those extras, or sufficient Screen, or any room for passengers, not even one or two—

He would tell the 442 hearing those things. It had been a matter of situational ethics, he would explain. This fucking lousy world, Hitchcock had said, back there when Carpenter had given him the order to ignore the dinghies. Yes. Sometimes this fucking lousy world compelled you to do fucking lousy things. Carpenter understood that his behavior had seemed callous. But they might all have died, the rescuers and the rescued alike. He would have risked losing his berg, maybe even his ship, if he had attempted to—

They were all looking at him. Smiling.

“Fuck you,” he told them. “You don’t understand a goddamned thing.”

Carpenter moved past them, scowling into their faces, and went back down to his cabin.

Administration Shed Fourteen wasn’t a shed at all; it was a kind of tubelike room, a long narrow ribbon of dull gray steel attached almost haphazardly to one of the upper levels of the intricate webwork of buildings and catwalks that was the Port of Oakland’s operational heart.

Nor was the hearing a hearing, really. Certainly not in the literal sense of the word, for Carpenter’s voice was not heard at all except for a couple of brief sentences. It was more like a formal notification that some sort of proceeding against him was under way: an arraignment, really. An official of the Port presided over it, a doughy- faced, bored man named O’Reilly or O’Brien or O’Leary—something Irish, at any rate, but Carpenter heard the name only at the outset and forgot it, except in its broad outline, almost at once. During most of the session the