Looking chilly and gray-faced, the older man braced himself on the bucking deck and looked Fontaine up and down. “Name’s Sullivan, chief of security for Ryan Industries. You’re Frank Fontaine. Am I right?”
Fontaine nodded. “That’s me. Owner and operator, Fontaine’s Fisheries.”
“Mr. Ryan’s been watching your operation out here. Seen you build it up, edge out the competition—make a success of it. And you’ve done a good job supplying us. But you’re nosy. You’ve been asking questions about what’s down below—” He hooked a thumb at the sea and grinned unpleasantly. “You even bribed some of our platform workers with booze…”
“I just want to be part of what you’re building down there. I sent several letters—”
“Sure, we got the letters. Mr. Ryan’s read ’em.” Sullivan looked the trawler over. “You got anything left to drink on this boat, besides water?”
Fontaine took out the flask, passed it over. “Help yourself…”
Sullivan opened the flask, drank deeply. He passed it back empty.
“Listen,” Fontaine said. “I’ll do what I have to—anything it takes to make my way… in Rapture.”
Sullivan pursed his lips. “You know—once you go where Mr. Ryan is, you ain’t coming back. You live there; you work there. Maybe you do real good there. But you
Fontaine looked out to sea, as if he were thinking, puzzling out some great truth. Then he nodded to himself. There’d been a kid at the orphanage—whenever the nuns asked him if he wanted to please God, the kid had looked at them, all mistylike. The kid had ended up a priest. Fontaine put that simple, misty-eyed
Sullivan gave him a long, close look—and then grunted. “Well—Mr. Ryan liked your letters. And he’s inclined to offer you a place in Rapture. Says you’ve earned it, sticking at your vigil out here. I guess we’re taking a chance on you. Same offer goes for your men.”
“So—when do we go? Down to Rapture, I mean…”
Sullivan chuckled and turned to look at the sea, then nodded to himself. “Right now.”
And at exactly that moment, the crew of the trawler gasped and pointed—seeing a submarine suddenly rise to the surface in a roaring wash of froth just forty yards off the port bow.
7
“So what’s your problem with this Tenenbaum woman?” Chief Sullivan asked. He shifted in the stiff little straight-backed chair across from Sinclair’s desk. Glaringly visible through the big round window behind the desk, a SINCLAIR SOLUTIONS sign glowed in red-gold neon outside, against the indigo backdrop of the sea.
Augustus Sinclair rubbed his clean-shaven chin at that, as if he wasn’t sure of the answer himself. The pharmaceuticals investor was a trim, darkly handsome half-Panamanian in his thirties, with a faint line of mustache. You had to look close to see the mustache wasn’t just penciled in. “Well—she’s been working for us, development, see. Me, I don’t understand exactly what she’s working on—something to do with heredity I gather —but I’m a big booster of science. That’s one reason Andrew asked me down here, I guess. That’s where the money is—new inventions, new drugs. Why, if a man can…”
“We were talking about Brigid Tenenbaum,” Sullivan reminded him. Sinclair had a tendency to rattle on. And it was almost five o’clock. Ryan’s security chief was looking forward to a half bottle of what passed for Scotch in Rapture, which he had stashed in his apartment.
“This Tenenbaum,” Sinclair said, running a finger along the negligible line of his mustache, “she’s a damn peculiar woman and… I just want to make sure that if she’s working for us, she’s not breaking any rules around here. She had her own lab, for a while, financed by a couple of interests around Rapture, and those guys dropped her like a hot potato. See, word got out she used to do experiments on people for this doctor of Hitler’s. Vivisections and—I don’t even want to think about it. Now, we do some human experiments at Sinclair—you got to—but we don’t kill people off. We don’t force ’em. We pay ’em good. If a man’s hair turns orange and he starts acting like a monkey for a week or two, why it doesn’t do him no harm in the long run…”
Sullivan started to laugh—then realized that Sinclair wasn’t joking.
“But Tenenbaum,” Sinclair went on, “she’s taking blood from people by the bucket—and more’n one of them collapsed.”
“You afraid you’re doing something… unethical?” This was a word that didn’t get too much use in Rapture.
Sinclair blinked. “Hm? Unethical? Hell, Chief, I’ve been on the same page as Andrew about altruism, all that stuff, for years. Why do you think I was brought in so early? Worrying about ethics—I don’t do it. I came here to strike it rich; you won’t catch me blowing my last bubble for any other personage—” He jabbed a finger at Sullivan to emphasize the words: “ —plural or singular. I read every issue of
“Yes?”
“Well, there’s
“We got detention for troublemakers—but they’ve got to be, say, outright murderers. Thieves. Rape. Major smuggling. Stuff like that. We’re strict about watertight integrity—and about leaving Rapture. But apart from that…” Sullivan shrugged. “Not much in the way of laws. Fella opened a shop called Rapture Grown Coca the other day. Grows his own coca bushes under some kinda red lights. I’m hearing he makes cocaine from the leaves. Or claims he does. Might be anything in those syringes. Gave me a bit of a turn, seeing the people come out of there—looked like they might get up to any goddamn thing. But Ryan’s all right with it. So I guess taking a bit of extra blood… long as it’s voluntary…” He shrugged. “Isn’t a problem.”
“Yeah. Well I hope it isn’t.” Sinclair shook his head. “My old man was sure we got to do things for the greater good—and what happened? I don’t hold with worrying about anything but number one. Still—I don’t want to get the public up in arms neither. You hear any rumblings like that? People talking… unions? That kind of thing?”
Sullivan had been thinking about his Scotch, but this stopped him. “You heard something, I take it? Mr. Ryan worries constantly about Communist infiltrators.”
“Some rumors from our maintenance guys. Heard ’em talking about that place the workers have made up for themselves, down below. Not much more than a shacktown. Who knows what goes on down there?”
Sullivan pulled a paper and pencil from his coat. “Got any names for me?”
Sinclair opened a desk drawer, took out a pint bottle. “A few. Care for a drink, Chief? It’s that time of day. This is from my own Sinclair Spirits distillery. Very good, if I do say so myself…”
“Augustus, you’re a man after my own heart. You pour; I’ll write…”
Andrew Ryan had an odd feeling as he looked up at the sign that read, FONTAINE’S FISHERIES. He and Chief Sullivan watched two burly workmen on stepladders hanging it from the ceiling of the lower wharf area. Ryan didn’t believe in omens, in anything supernatural. But there was something about
