'Do we care?' Randy asks. 'Gold and silver don't implode.'
'If her hull is intact, getting the goods out is a hell of a lot easier,' says Doug Shaftoe.
Amy has vanished beneath the pamboat's canopy. Randy and Doug follow her into its shade, and find her sitting crosslegged on a fiberglass equipment case that is encrusted with airport baggage stickers. Her face is socketed into the top of a black rubber pyramid whose base is the screen of a ruggedized cathode-ray tube. 'How's the cable business?' she mutters. Months ago, she gave up even trying to hide her scorn for the dull work of cable- laying. Pretenses are shabby things that, like papier-mache houses, must be energetically maintained or they will dissolve. Another case in point: some time ago, Randy gave up pretending that he was not completely fascinated with Amy Shaftoe. This is not exactly the same thing as being in love with her, but it has quite a few things in common with that. He has always had a weird, sick fascination with women who smoked and drank a lot. Amy does neither, but her complete disregard of modern skin-cancer precautions puts her in the same category: people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.
In any case, he has a desperate craving to know what Amy's dream is. For a while he thought it was treasure-hunting in the South China Sea. This she definitely enjoys, but he is not sure if it gives her satisfaction entire.
'Been adjusting the trim on those dive planes again,' she explains. 'I don't think those pushrod things were engineered very well.' She pulls her head out of the black rubber cowl and gives Randy a quick sidelong look, holding him responsible for the shortcomings of all engineers. 'I hope it'll run now without corkscrewing all over the place.'
'Are you ready?' her father asks.
'Whenever you are,' she answers, slamming the ball back into his court.
Doug rises to a crouch and duck-walks out from under the low canopy. Randy follows him, wanting to see the ROV for himself.
It rests in the water alongside the pamboat's center hull: a stubby yellow torpedo with a glass dome for a nose, held in place by a Filipino crewman who leans over the gunwale to grip it with both hands. Pairs of stunted wings are mounted at the nose and at the tail, each wing supporting a miniature propeller mounted in a cowl. Randy is reminded of a dirigible with its outlying engine gondolas.
Noting Randy's interest, Doug Shaftoe squats alongside it to point out the features. 'It's neutrally buoyant, so when we have it alongside like this, we have it in this foam cradle, which we will now take off.' He begins jerking loose some quick-release bungee cords, and molded segments of foam peel away from the ROV's hull. It drops lower in the water, nearly pulling the crewman over the side with it, and he lets go, keeping his arms extended so he can prevent it from bumping into them with each swell. 'You'll notice there's no umbilical,' Doug says. 'Normally that is mandatory for an ROV. You need the umbilical for three reasons.'
Randy grins, because he knows that Doug Shaftoe is about to enumerate the three reasons. Randy has spent almost no time around military people, but he is finding that he gets along with them surprisingly well.
His favorite thing about them is their compulsive need to educate every one around them, all the time. Randy does not need to know anything about the ROV, but Doug Shaftoe is going to give him a short course anyway. Randy supposes that when you are in a war, practical knowledge is a good thing to spread around.
'One,' says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, 'to provide power to the ROV. But this ROV carries its own power source-an oxygen/natural gas swash-plate motor, adapted from torpedo technology, and
'Jeez,' Randy says, 'isn't this thing incredibly expensive?'
'It is
'Does your friend know what the pressing need is in this case?'
'He does not know specifically,' says Doug Shaftoe, mildly offended, 'but I suppose he is not a stupid man either.'
'Clear!' shouts Amy Shaftoe, sounding rather impatient.
Her father takes a good look at each of the thrusters in turn. 'Clear,' he responds. A moment later, something begins to thrum inside the ROV, and a stream of bubbles spurts from an orifice on its tail, and then the thrusters begin to spin around. They swivel on the ends of their stubby wings until they are facing downwards, throwing fountains into the air, and the ROV sinks rapidly. The fountains diminish and become slight upwellings in the sea. Seen through the water's rough surface, the ROV is a yellow splatter. It shortens as the vehicle's nose pitches down, then rapidly disappears as the thrusters drive it straight down. 'Always kinda takes my breath away to see something that costs so much going off to who knows where,' Doug Shaftoe says meditatively.
The water around the boat has begun to emit a kind of dreadful, sickly light, like radiation in a low-budget horror film. 'Jeez! The laser?' Randy says.
'Mounted to the bottom of the hull, in a little dome,' Doug says. 'Punches through even turbid water with ease.'
'What kind of bandwidth can you transmit on it?'
'Amy is seeing decent monochrome video on her little screen right now, if that is what you mean. It is all digital. All packetized. So if some of the data doesn't make it through, the image gets a little choppy, but we do not lose visuals altogether.'
'Cool.'
'Yes, it is cool,' Doug Shaftoe allows. 'Let us go and watch TV.'
They crouch beneath the canopy. Doug turns on a small Sony portable television, a ruggedized waterproof model encased in yellow plastic, and patches its input cable into a spare output jack on the back of Amy's rig. He turns it on and they begin to see a bit of what Amy is seeing. They do not have the benefit of the dark cowl that Amy is using, and so the glare of the sun washes out everything but a straight white line emerging from the dark center of the picture and expanding towards the edge. It is moving.
'I am following the buoy line down,' she explains. 'Kind of boring.'
Randy's calculator watch beeps twice. He checks the time; it is three in the afternoon.
'Randy?' Amy says, in a velvet voice.
'Yes?'
'Could you give me the square root of three thousand eight hundred twenty-three on that thing?'
'Why do you want that?'
'Just do it.'
Randy holds his wrist up so that he can see the watch's digital display, takes a pencil out of his pocket, and begins using its eraser to press the tiny little buttons. He hears a metallic snicking noise, but pays it no mind.
Something cool and smooth glides along the underside of his wrist. 'Hold still,' Amy says. She bites her lip and pulls. The watch falls off, and comes away in her left hand, its vinyl band neatly severed. She's holding the kris in her right, the edge of its blade still decorated with a few of Randy's arm hairs. 'Huh. Sixty-one point eight three oh four. I would've guessed higher.' She tosses the watch over her shoulder and it disappears into the South China Sea. 'Square roots are tricky that way.'
'Amy, you're losing the rope!' says her father impatiently, focused entirely on the screen of the TV.
Amy jams the kris back into its sheath, smiles sweetly at Randy, and plugs her face back into the rig. Randy is speechless for a while.
The question of whether or not she is a lesbian is rapidly becoming more than purely academic. He performs a quick mental review of all of the lesbians he has known. Usually they are mid-level, nine-to-five city dwellers with sensible haircuts. In other words, they are just like most of the other people Randy knows. Amy is too flagrantly exotic, too much like a horny film director's idea of what a lesbian would be. So maybe there is some hope here.
'If you're gonna stare at my daughter that way,' Doug Shaftoe says, 'you'd better start boning up on your ballroom dancing.'
