“You loved her very much, did you, Joe?”
“I guess I did … I mean I do.”
I was staring at those shaking fingers and I was thinking to myself: Those are Joanne’s fingers. How can the law allow a thing like this to happen? How can humanity? I could see the pale graft scars at her wrists.
“Joe—” She hesitated. “You know we were … sort of rivals for her love, you and I? You understand that, don’t you? But she liked you very much, Joe.”
“Why the hell do you keep talking as though she’s dead?”
“She cried a lot when I sent her back to the … back to—She was unhappy; she wanted to stay with me, but I couldn’t have her there, not when I knew what I’d done. That wasn’t very brave of me, was it, Joe?”
“You could hardly keep her around, if you wanted to join the Foes of Bondage now, could you?” I said bitterly. Whatever she said now, whatever she had done these last few weeks, I was going to make damned sure she understood she was wrong. Carioca Jones could do no right. I stared at her; she was weeping softly but in an hour’s time she would be laughing. She was evil, and no amount of clever stageplay could disguise that.
Later we were able to talk more normally; I think the scotch loosened us up. It was early in the day to start drinking, but we both needed it. In time the mask of remorse began to slip—or maybe nobody can keep apologizing, keep abasing themselves all day. She said in businesslike tones that she wanted to order a slithe-skin wrap. She peered into her mirror as she said this, making the final reparations to her face, then closed her purse with a snap. The apology was over. Life goes on. She was buying my forgiveness with a large and expensive order.
And what the hell was I supposed to do? Refuse to take her money?
I took her to the factory and Dave sketched out what she needed—he’s clever at designing. I noticed the S. P. girls treated her with respect, which bore out Doug’s theories. Her crimes against morality were forgotten. She was Carioca Jones, member of the Foes of Bondage, valiant fighter for the rights of the underprivileged. It was the here and now that mattered.
“And now you can take me to Pacific Kennels, Joe darling,” she said with a complete reversion to normal. “I have to pick up dear Wilberforce who has been having treatment for his little tantrums, and I need a man in the car to handle him, as he can get fractious when traveling.”
We experienced a certain amount of unpleasantness at Pacific Kennels, which I think was partly responsible for the unfortunate accident which marred the later stages of our visit. Carioca started off by needling the stately Miss Marjoribanks about her bonded girl, Rosalie.
“The first objective of the Foes is to ban the use of bonded state prisoners for dangerous work,” she stated.
“Are you suggesting that my fish are dangerous, Carioca?” asked Miss Marjoribanks distantly, her gaze playing over the peaceful scene in the enclosure.
“You never can tell with fish. Why, even my Wilberforce is unpredictable, as you very well know, Miranda. Otherwise I wouldn’t have brought him for treatment, would I?”
“The only trouble with Wilberforce is that you overfed him, and it is a well-known fact that the fat fish is the bad-tempered fish.”
“Nonsense, Miranda. It’s the hungry fish that snaps.”
Miranda Marjoribanks actually tossed her head, an unusual gesture which I did not at first recognize for what it was. “Really, Carioca, it’s quite obvious that you know nothing about fish. I’m sure I don’t have time to argue such a ridiculous issue. Rosalie! Get Wilberforce, will you?”
“Be careful how you handle him, you poor dear.”
“Carioca, I assure you that Wilberforce is perfectly tractable now that I’ve slimmed him down. A child could handle him, he’s so docile. Oh, and just in case you should have any trouble“—she handed Carioca an ornate little box—”there’s a denticure set for him. It’s specially made for fish such as Wilberforce.”
Carioca opened the box suspiciously. Inside was a little file with an inlaid jade handle, for filing down the brute’s teeth, and a crystal pillbox containing dope to facilitate this dangerous procedure. There was also a small pack of hypo-darts. Carioca sniffed and shut the box without comment.
In due course the kennel maid reappeared pushing a two-wheeled cart, in which lay the menacing form of the land shark.
“What’s the matter?” asked Carioca sharply. “Can’t he move himself?” She bent over the fish and tickled him anxiously around the oxygenator. “What’s she done to you, my pet? What’s the trouble, old boy?”
“Well, really … I took the trouble to sedate him for the journey and this is the thanks I get. Please take him away, Carioca. I’m just too upset to want to see him around anymore.”
Carioca Jones seized the cart handles, pushing aside Rosalie. “I’ll not have him wheeled out of here like a cripple,” she stormed. “He’ll go under his own steam or you’ll keep him here until he’s well. You know what I think? I think he’s too weak to move. I’ll swear I can see his ribs, poor dear.”
So saying she lifted the cart handles violently and Wilberforce slid to the grass, instantly galvanized into snapping fury. We backed off quickly, but Miranda Marjoribanks caught her foot in a tussock and went down with a squeal of alarm.
Wilberforce moved in purposefully.
It was good to be back in the clubhouse of the Peninsula Sling-gliding Club. I sat with the other members of the Committee at the long table, drinking scotch while the sky darkened outside the big windows. I had been relating the incident at the Kennels, the main business of the afternoon having been disposed of.
“So we called the ambulopter and they took her away,” I concluded. “Her foot was badly mauled, I’m afraid.”
“Pity it wasn’t Carioca Jones,” somebody said.
“Can’t you do something about that woman, Sagar?” boomed Ramsbottom, the noisy building contractor. “You seem to have some influence there. Get her to call off this goddamned demonstration, otherwise she’ll ruin the President’s Trophy.”
I shrugged helplessly. “So far as I’m concerned she’s a business acquaintance. You know she’s not the sort of woman to listen to reason anyway, Walter. I can’t do a thing.”
“I wish we knew what form the demonstration is to take,” muttered Bryce Alcester worriedly. “I heard someone talking about picketing. What do you suppose that means? To me it sounds actively hostile. It could frighten a lot of the visitors away.”
Doug Marshall laughed. “They’ll just stand at the marina entrance and shout a few epithets as we go through, like they always do. It’s harmless enough. Hey, Joe, have you seen the catapult since we’ve had it all fixed up?”
Drinks in hand, we walked out onto the concrete jetty at the seaward side of the club where the catapult equipment stood. The rest of the Committee stayed behind, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to discuss Carioca Jones. There was a faint hissing from the catapult; a thin wisp of steam arose on the cool air. It was a fine evening; the sky was clear and a single star glittered near the horizon. I found myself thinking that a good exhilarating glide was what I needed. I examined the catapult; it looked in good shape.
“We were using it this afternoon,” Doug said.
The catapult is used mainly for training purposes, but it is also useful if the equipment or crew for sling-gliding proper are temporarily unavailable, since it will provide a reasonable launch and an enjoyable flight—although without the total thrill involved in the more skilled sport of sling-gliding. The catapult is what its name implies, a simple device for throwing a man and his glider into the air.
It comprises a gas-fired stationary boiler which powers the piston. Rails point seaward; on these sits a trolley, and on the trolley the horse to which the pilot attaches himself, glider strapped to his back. On depressing a lever, the piston accelerates the trolley and its passenger to a speed of around one hundred and sixty miles per hour. After the fifty-yard run the glider, pilot, and horse
rise into the air, the pilot releases the horse which falls back into the water, attached to a cable by which it is retrieved. He then streaks off across the Strait, makes a wide turn among the offshore islands, and returns to stall and drops neatly into the sea beside the clubhouse—into which he then goes to get out of his wet suit and calm his nerves with a drink.
“Care to give it a try, huh?” asked Doug coaxingly. “There’s a good head of pressure in the boiler, still.”
“I’m a little out of practice, Doug.”
“Listen. I want you to be my observer in the President’s Trophy and I’d feel much happier if you’d had recent experience. You know how an observer can panic and call for an abort. You did that on me once last year.”
“Doug, I wasn’t happy with your flying attitude.”
“I probably have one of the best takeoffs in the club, second to Presdee, of course. The truth of the matter was, you hadn’t flown yourself for a few weeks and you began to imagine things. The less you fly, the more dangerous it looks. Go on, your wet suit’s in the locker room.”
A few minutes later I was buckling a training glider, dart-shaped and about twelve feet long, onto my back. I harnessed myself to the horse, shut my eyes, kicked the lever, and tried not to black out as the acceleration hit me. The trolley roared down the track, the horse wobbled, and I was airborne. I pulled the release pin and the horse dropped away.
Lying facedown in the slender fuselage, I flew across the Strait.
It is difficult to describe adequately the thrill that is gliding. The tiny craft are little more than aluminum tubes with sharply swept-back wings of wood or aluminum framing covered with tough plastic. There is no tailplane; the control surfaces are on the trailing edge of the delta wing. The tube of the fuselage is open at the underside; the pilot lifts himself into this slot and grasps the simple controls within the transparent Plexiglas nosecone. Since the entire glider is little bigger than the pilot himself the sensation is the nearest thing to true flying yet devised—with the additional spice of danger. The gliders are built for speed and are innocent of safety devices. Once a man is in the air, the rest is up to him.
I headed across the Strait in a shallow climb, rising above the blackness of the first offshore island until the horizon paled and the rim of the sun reappeared to gild the wing-tips and haze my visibility through the Plexiglas with a crimson glow. I banked and dived, leaving the sun behind, the scattering of islands floating below me as I headed northward with the dark tongue of the Peninsula to my left. I passed over the gaunt concrete boxes of the state penitentiary at the edge of Black Bay.
I wondered about Joanne briefly, but a man in a glider has no time for sentiment. I was losing speed and the tip of the Peninsula was a dark hump beneath me; farther ahead I saw the late hoverferry plowing its silvery furrow toward the mainland. The wind whined over the wings as I dived still lower, picked up speed in a wide turn, and skimmed low over the rippling sea. I swept past a lonely yacht with pale sails and a bright masthead light, and Black Point, the promontory which guards Black Bay, loomed before me. I held my course; my speed was falling and I wanted to be sure of setting down as near to land as possible, if I found that I couldn’t reach the clubhouse in Roberts Bay.
Now I could see the lights of the state pen to my right and I turned toward them slightly. A freakish wind was rocking the glider and I dived lower, as low as I dared with the dark. waves flashing by, beneath my nose. I swept past the broken water and jagged projection of Wolf Rock.
The accident happened so quickly that I can’t recall the exact sequence of events to this day. My speed by this time was comparatively low, probably sixty miles per hour, and this was what saved me.
There was a sudden scream from the structure of the glider; it was instantaneous and deafening and at the time it seemed to come from everywhere; only later did I discover that the left wing had been sheared completely away. The glider slammed left so abruptly that I think my head must have smashed into the Plexiglas; then it went into a crazy spin. I fought the controls for an instant, numb with shock; then immediately I was in the water. The glider was sinking around me as I clawed my way clear; the buoyancy chambers had ruptured and the black cold water bubbled around me as the little craft disappeared.
I coughed up stinging water and looked around as my head cleared. There was a huge black wall moving beside me; it was an old displacement coaster. Lights showed at the portholes and on the decks. Distances can be deceptive in the dark, and I realized too late that I had mistaken these lights for those of the state pen, a mile away.
I shouted but my voice was drowned by the rumble of ancient diesels and swept away by the wind. I looked up and saw the upperworks silhouetted against the sky; several heads were outlined there. Men were looking down at me. A searchlight sprang into brilliance and I found myself blinking and isolated in a pool of brightness—then just as suddenly the light went out.
But the ship slid on and soon there was a terrifying threshing and the water roiled about me as the huge propellers churned past. I saw pale letters against the black of the stern, Ancia Telji, as the old ship forged on.
I yelled obscenities at the Ancia Telji as she merged with the dark coastline.
6
Perhaps there are few situations so lonely as being adrift at sea, at night. The shore may be seen, certainly, and the lights of houses and towns where sensible lucky people are talking and drinking and copulating—but those lights serve merely to enhance the sensation of being totally alone; they are as inaccessible as the farthest star. My morale had dropped sharply as the ship drew away from me, and now I found myself thinking of the depth of water beneath, and the alien things which wriggled down there, and the cold which was steadily penetrating through the insulation of my wet suit. I shouted a couple of times but soon gave up; the sound of my voice yelling into emptiness was unnerving.
The lights of the state penitentiary went out, all at the same time, leaving a few glowing at isolated windows where the night staff worked and wished they were at home in bed. The moon hung low on the horizon, casting sinister shadows among the waves and soon I was seeing the tall triangular fins of killer whales in every ripple. These creatures are common visitors around the Peninsula coast and are said to be harmless—but their large mouths are endowed with a plentiful supply of teeth. I would imagine that only their great size deterred Carioca Jones from keeping one as a pet.
Time went by and I tried to figure out which way I was drifting, but I had nothing to reckon by. I would swim toward the shore for a while and then rest, floating on my back while, I imagine, the current stole the few yards I had gained. My face and hands were numb with cold and I was becoming drowsy. Several times I found I had slipped below the surface; immediately I struggled up again, panicky and coughing, feet thrashing as fear restored me to total alertness. Then I would swim on again, slowly with token movements of arms and legs while some small devil was whispering slyly in my mind, advising me to give up.
A narrow shape fled overhead.
I yelled, treading water and waving at the disappearing glider which banked suddenly against the dark sky and came in for another low pass. I heard it, the roaring hiss of wind on fabric, then a voice.
“Hold on there! We’re bringing a boat!” The last words I guessed rather than heard as the black dart slid behind the promontory in the direction of Roberts Bay. Slowly the water around me was changing color, brightening with an eerie blue fluorescence as the marker dye dropped by the glider spread over the ruffled surface.
A long while later I heard the boat, but by that time I was semiconscious and staying afloat by will alone. I remember coughing violently as the wake rippled about me and filled my mouth and lungs with water, then the hands were around me, lifting; and the wet suit was being peeled from my body. I was rubbed vigorously with a towel which was then left wrapped around me while focus returned to my eyes and I found that I was in a boat cabin, lying on one of the berths. I lay still, wai
ting for someone to force brandy between my teeth.
After a while I became tired of waiting and sat up. “I could do with a drink,” I mumbled petulantly.
Doug Marshall was already busy at the tiny bar in the corner of the cabin. Charles and Tranter and Rennie were there too; they all had drinks. “What the hell happened, Joe?” asked Charles. “Where’s the glider?” The boat was drumming comfortably to the impact of waves at speed.
Marshall handed me a scotch and ginger and I drank gratefully, while they waited for me to explain. It struck me that they were irritated at being called out; they probably thought the mishap was my own fault—and certainly they would be annoyed at my writing off a glider.
“There was a ship,” I said. “I think I ran into one of the mast stays. It was a coaster, an old vessel. I couldn’t see the outline against the shore. They turned the searchlight on me, but they kept going.”
“They what?” exclaimed Charles, while they all regarded me incredulously. “Are you saying they left you to drown?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Do you think you could identify the ship again, Joe?” This came from Warren Rennie, our local police chief.
“I’m goddamned sure I could. I saw the name. It was the Ancia Telji.”
They looked blankly at one another. “What sort of name is that?” asked Tranter skeptically. I’m sure he thought I’d made the whole thing up, as an excuse for losing the glider.
“How the hell should I know what sort of name it is!” I snapped. “It’s just some sort of goddamned foreign name.” Tranter always annoyed me with his supercilious manner; even his name was irritating, sounding like the gait of a hurried pig.
“It’s just that none of us have heard of it, that’s all,” said Tranter. “After all, we know most of the ships which, call around these parts, particularly the old ones—there aren’t so many left now.”
“I’m going to make sure I catch up with those murdering bastards,” I said with heat; the drink was turning fatigue to bravado.
The Girl With a Symphony in Her Fingers Page 6