The perennial witness, Goddard thought, as he mounted to the boat deck. The third mate was on the starboard wing of the bridge. Goddard knocked at the open door and went in through the office.
Steen lay on the bunk in his stateroom, still fully clothed except for his shoes. His head and shoulders were covered with an improvised tent made of a shower curtain suspended from overhead. A length of rubber hose led in under the edge of it from an oxygen cylinder lashed to a leg of the bedside desk. The first-aid kit and sterilizer were on the desk, and Lind was standing beside the bunk withdrawing the needle of a hypodermic syringe from Steen’s arm. He set it aside and took the captain’s wrist as Goddard came in. He glanced up, but said nothing. Goddard waited.
In a moment Lind released the wrist and nodded with satisfaction. “Much steadier now.” He indicated the shower curtain. “Instant oxygen tent. But Boats is making one out of canvas, with a window in it.”
Goddard thought of Madame Defarge, knitting shroud’s. Before this passage was over maybe the bos’n would sew everybody on the ship into canvas in one way or another. Sparks entered behind them and handed Lind a message. “From the Public Health Service doctors,” he said.
Lind scanned it quickly, muttering to himself, “Umh-umh … digitalis … oxygen …” He folded it and stuck it in his shirt pocket, and said to Goddard, “Just the things we’ve already done.” He turned to Sparks. “Tell the skipper on the Kungsholm we’ll stay in touch, but unless there’s a change we won’t try to transfer him. There’s not much they can do for him we can’t do on here.”
Sparks nodded and went out. If I watch a few more of these performances, Goddard thought, I could qualify as a drama critic. He looked at Steen then, saw the slowly rising and falling chest of this man he was certain was doomed to die without ever waking again, and felt revulsion at this sleazy glibness. But it was only protective, he tried to tell himself; it was one way to keep from picking at the scab of his own impotence.
In the first place, he didn’t know. Maybe it was a heart attack, instead of some kind of poison, and maybe it was digitalis Lind had given him, and not morphine. There was no way to find out, or prove it, and even if he could there was no place to take the information that Lind, the ship’s doctor, was murdering a helpless man except to Lind, the ship’s acting master. At sea, the next step up the chain of command was God.
“Let us know if there’s any change,” he said. He went out. As he passed through the captain’s office his eyes, in spite of himself, were drawn to the framed photograph of the woman and the two young girls. He winced.
IX
IT WAS A HALF HOUR before he had a chance to speak to Madeleine Lennox alone. She joined him on the promenade deck at sunset. “Do you believe it was a heart attack?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It could have been. But watch it.”
“How? You mean I don’t even dare eat anything the rest of the trip?”
“Not that. The only thing sure is that he’s too damned clever to repeat himself. And a heart attack in a woman’s not as plausible, anyway. But keep your door locked.”
“Are you going to?”
“You’re damned right I am.”
“Seems a duplication of effort.”
“What?” he asked.
The smoke-gray eyes were wide and utterly innocent. “Bolting so many doors.”
Trying to warn her was futile, he could see that. “Then you don’t think it’s serious?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “But don’t you remember how effective you were against lightning?”
Barset brought word shortly after ten that Captain Steen’s condition seemed a little better. His pulse was stronger, and less erratic, and he was sleeping. Lind was with him constantly.
Goddard heard six bells strike as he lay naked on his bunk in the sweltering dark. Almost immediately there was a light rap on the screen door. Not even bothering to pull on the shorts, he padded over and looked out through the louvers. It was Madeleine Lennox. He unlocked the door and pulled it open. She stepped inside quickly, and was in his arms while he was still trying to secure the door again. He had an impression of amusement mingled with the eagerness.
“Your reputation’s ruined,” she whispered against his ear. “I think Karen saw me.”
“What about yours?”
“Oh, I’m sure she has no illusions about me. Women never do.” There was a little murmur of discovery and delight then. “Mmmmm. You must haven been expecting me. Or somebody. Are you sure you weren’t in the coast guard, instead of the navy?”
“Why?” he asked.
“That motto of theirs I always adored. Semper paratus.” She began throwing off the robe and pajamas.
She was much better company, he thought, after she’d caught the streetcar than while she was chasing it. She jettisoned all pretense along with her clothing, gave not the slightest damn whether she captivated him or not, and demanded nothing but the mechanics of sex. She reminded him of Wilde’s remark that England and America were two countries separated by the same language; the most intimate of all human relationships was the perfect barrier to any intimacy at all.
With Haggerty it had been speech. They’d been stoned together for five days up and down the coast from San Diego to Sea-Tac, talking constantly, once even spending the night in the same bedroom, and he didn’t know her first name, nor she his. Apparently there was some quality about people who lived in bubbles that enabled them to recognize each other from the first, because in the whole period only once had either of them asked a question to which he expected a serious answer.
He’d met her in the bar at the San Francisco airport. It was late in the afternoon on a weekend, so the place was overflowing, and the one double martini PSA allowed for the forty-minute flight up from Los Angeles International was wearing thin. There was no space at all at the bar, but he spotted a table occupied by a girl sitting alone, a slender, almost fragile-looking blonde with a mink coat thrown over the back of her chair. He went over.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” he asked.
“Not at all.” Her manner was as gravely gentle as that of a nun. “Actually, I’ve always wanted to see Buenos Aires.”
“Oh, I’m off for the weekend,” he said. “I don’t take the job home with me.” He ordered a double martini, and she asked for another Jack Daniels, which could be significant. She looked perfectly sober, but he’d seen more than one ethereal blonde still lifting them off the tray when strong men were asleep in corners.
“Do you use chloral hydrate?” she asked.
“Oh, no. That went out with the crimps on the Barbary Coast. Our labs came up several years ago with a timed-release spansule; the opiate takes effect in about twenty minutes, and then an aphrodisiac eight hours later. Powdered rhinoceros horn.”
“I always assumed that was a male aphrodisiac. Connotation, I suppose.”
“Well, we add estrogen, of course, so there are no side effects, like facial hair. Actually, the world market is so depressed, now that Castro’s cleaned up Havana, we’re diversifying into pornography and textbooks, and phasing out the girl operation as fast as we can take care of key personnel.”
“What’s your average net per unit laid down in, say, Saigon?”
“It depends,” he said. “Age, and so on. Are you a virgin?”
“No, I’m sorry. I was violated in my teens by an ectomorph.”
He shook his head. “Trying to police the whole damn world, and a woman’s not even safe on the street.”
She introduced herself. She was Mrs. Haggerty, she said, from New Bedford. Her husband was a whaler.
Madeleine Lennox gave a shivery little gasp and said something, her lips moving against his.
“What?” he asked.
“You remembered right where they were. Oooooh!”
He was conscious of momentary wonder; he must be programmed by punch cards. They lay nude in each other’s arms in the darkness; he had a leg thrus
t between her thighs while his fingertips softly brushed the erogenous zones of her back. She jumped, and shivered again.
He was away a lot, Haggerty went on, but it was a good job challengewise, with the usual retirement, stock options, country club membership, expense account, and so on. Sparm, Inc., was one of the older companies with a reputation for being a little on the stodgy side, but it had been taken over by a conglomerate, shaken up, and given a transfusion of new blood, so it was a pretty gung-ho outfit and on the move, with plenty of room on the top side for a man who could carry the ball.
“He’s just been picked to head up R and D,” she said, “and I hardly see him from one month to the next. He’s all wrapped up in a new white whale they’re just getting off the drawing board and into hardware. The oil’s much lower in cholesterol, and there’s a big defense contract coming up as soon as they iron the bugs out of the polyunsaturated napalm they’re working on.”
He winced at the subliminal flash of the red Porsche as it spun out and went through the guardrail at a hundred miles an hour. Now and then in an unguarded moment some random word would get to him, even through the bubble, and he’d see Gerry’s face as he’d seen it that last time less than an hour before she was killed, the view itself no more than a flash, two or three seconds at most, as she looked at him and her stepmother with loathing and disgust before she wheeled and ran back through the house and they’d heard the Porsche go snarling out the driveway. It hadn’t burned; that wasn’t why the word “napalm” had triggered it. It was her sense of outrage at the use of it, the bombing, the whole Vietnam war. She’d be proud of him now, too, he thought, and then wondered which now he meant, which manifestation of her father’s talents, the nonstop drunk or the automated lover.
“Did they come up with a revolutionary new deodorant just recently?” he asked Haggerty. “It seems to me I read about it. The go-go funds discovered them, and the stock went up thirty points in a week.”
She nodded. “Yes, that was Sparm, Inc. And another spin-off from R and D and the white whale. But it wasn’t a deodorant; it was a revolutionary new filter that reduces tars and nicotine sixty-seven percent. It’s made of the baleen, mixed with sintered yak wool. He made a lot of money out of it by exercising his stock options, but sometimes I get the impression he’s married to that whale. And when he does get home—”
“I know, that damn wooden leg,” Goddard said. “It must be awkward.”
“It’s not really wood,” Haggerty said. “Except for a Circassian walnut ferrule. Van Cleef and Arpels makes it. It’s anodized titanium with inlays of jade and Mexican opal, and the socket is lined with the belly fur of an unborn agouti. On a special order you can have it fitted with a jeweled clasp to carry your key to the executive washroom.”
He told her about the underground skyway, and how he had discovered this sanctuary, this peaceful subculture existing within the larger, hostile culture of the automobile dwellers. He was a writer, he said, doing research for an article for Reader’s Digest, “New Hope for the Living: Never Leave the Airport.” And while this was aimed at any sector of the populace which might have a cursory interest in survival, it would be of particular interest to serious drinkers.
In all bars except those in airports, you were marooned, he went on. You were safe enough as long as you were inside because the natives were disarmed at the doorway; this tradition had been established in the Old West even before the invention of the automobile, perhaps in anticipation of it, some prescience or foreboding that the day would come when there would be much more sophisticated weapons abroad in the land than the primitive and relatively harmless Peacemaker Colts and Frontier .45’s checked at the door in that happy era. And a Californian, forcibly shucked from his automobile and separated from it for any length of time, while prey to the same vague feelings of resentment and unease as an oyster removed from its shell, will, like the oyster, seldom attack. But, inevitably, bars close, or you have to leave one and move to another to escape some bore, and they’re out there by the hurtling millions, armed with Fords and Chevrolets and, for only dollars a month more, with Cadillacs. But from the airport bar you simply stepped out back, boarded a jet, and went to the one next door in San Diego, Portland, or Los Angeles, at thirty thousand feet.
Of course, at that altitude you did miss some of the beauties of the countryside, the beaneries, filling stations, used-car lots, neon, asphalt, smog, billboards, the proliferating acne of tract housing, and murmuring sylvan streams freighted with condoms and empty beer cans, but that was a small price to pay for being wafted from one sanctuary to another across four hundred miles of hostile territory whose populace was forever torn between devout but conflicting desires to maim you or sell you something. The ecology was simple; all airports had bars, nearly all had hotels, and all you needed was a drip-dry wardrobe and a few credit cards. And there was just enough challenge to keep in interesting; you had to look sober enough to get aboard the airplane in the first place and to buy the two drinks they allowed you during the flight, but still far enough from it to obviate any possibility you might really dry out before you reached the next station on the underground.
She agreed with him that something should be done for serious drinkers, and offered to help with the study. As a minority group, they’d been sadly neglected, and with the oncoming generation turning increasingly to pot and acid there was a very real danger they might become extinct, their entire culture lost forever. Only yesterday, in some bar, she’d heard a man order a frozen daiquiri.
To simplify the logistics of the operation he changed to bourbon too, and they carried a survival kit of three bottles in her luggage for the late hours of the night, morning horrors, and as insurance against election days, civil uprisings, or any natural catastrophe which might cause the bars to be closed. He had never known anybody who could drink as much as Haggerty and show as little effect of it except to talk, to talk incessantly, amusingly, and forever, apparently as a sort of perpetual exercise in the avoidance of all thought or of ever, in an unguarded moment, saying anything she meant. The night they’d shared the same room he had awakened toward dawn to see her sitting on the floor in pajamas, her cheek down on one arm spread across the seat of a chair while the hand slowly clenched and unclenched in agony.
“I’m sorry, Haggerty,” he said, for a moment forgetting the rules. “Is there anything I can do?”
“That,” she said, “is the first stupid thing I ever heard you say.”
She wasn’t entirely in accord with him, however, that the automobile dwellers were hostile. This fallacy, she believed, had grown out of the slipshod methods of some of the early investigators intent only on a quick doctorate and nailing down a grant to be off to Africa, and was based on nothing sounder than the fact that so many anthropologists had disappeared into the California countryside never to be heard of again. Subsequent studies had revealed that nearly all of them were alive and well in Los Angeles.
She explained this one night when they were finishing off a last bottle of Jack Daniels in her room. He’d forgotten which airport hotel it was, but it overlooked a freeway, and they were watching the endlessly hurtling projectiles curving past them.
“All we can do,” he said, “is pray that Slivovitz got through to Fort Huaracha. Can you keep loading the rifles while I deliver the baby?”
“No,” she said, “you’re falling into the same error, and for the same reason, as Huysmann when he first advanced the hypothesis that it was some sort of primate equivalent of the lemming migration. He wasted a whole seventy-thousand-dollar grant trying to find where they were throwing themselves off the cliff, and backtracking to discover where they were springing out of the ground. He simply didn’t notice they were going in both directions. That’s why I can’t believe the intent of it is hostile at all. If they were chasing something, all eight lanes would be going the same way.”
Tieboldt did discover this, she went on, but he was just as baffled by it as Huysmann had been b
y overlooking it. It had already been established that they were highly sexed, and that they were a bartering people who subsisted by selling each other things they called goods and services. His theory was that it was dance of some sort, a ritual evolved out of these aspects of their tribal heritage, but he could never come up with a satisfactory answer as to how either courtship or commerce could be carried on while they were going past each other in opposite directions at a combined velocity of a hundred and forty miles an hour.
Later investigators had decided the only way to the answer was to enter the dance and see where it led, which accounted for nearly all the missing scientists. It was estimated that at the present time there were still twenty-seven anthropologists circling endlessly around the Los Angeles freeways like spaceships in orbit, unable to find a way off.
Frownfelter’s paper, “The Carapace People of the San Fernando Valley,” was by far the most reliable work on the subject, and the one that did the most to dispel the myth that they were hostile. “He spent a whole winter observing the members of a group near Van Nuys,” she went on, “gradually gaining their confidence and allaying their fears that he intended any harm to the carapaces until he was allowed to approach quite near and study them at first hand. He found them quite friendly and open, and even eager to point out the advantages of their particular shells.
“He was surprised to discover that they weren’t physically attached to the carapace in any way, even by an umbilicus, and that they could leave it at will, though they were always reluctant to do so. Whether this emotional attachment was sexual in nature or quasi-religious, he was never able to determine, but he inclined to the latter since it seemed to be shared equally by both sexes. Is there anything left in the bottle?”
And the Deep Blue Sea Page 12