by Paul Byers
“I don’t know?” Cain said, then turned and looked at Pike. “Gabriel, would you like to answer the question of why you are here?”
Pike reluctantly stepped up to the podium and faced the crowd of reporters. “Safety is never a just a matter of formality.” He began, trying to keep his tone civil. He hated it when people took public safety for granted and thought that it was a given that everything was done right the first time and done with their best interests at heart. “There has been a lot of hard work put in by a lot of different people to make this project come to life. I don’t just read the construction reports and take it as gospel and repeat everything word for word, then rubber-stamp it. It’s my job is to make sure that all these separate compotes come together into one safe unit, not to take what someone else has said and just repeat it. A wise man once said; ‘trust but verify.’ That sir, is my job.”
Pike knew he should have stopped there, but he just couldn’t, then he looked directly at Toupee Man. “But I might ask you the same question sir, why are you here?” Pike tried, but he just couldn’t keep a little sarcasm from slipping in. “Surely there are enough reporters here telling the same story that you don’t need to be here too do you?” Pike said, gesturing to the crowd. “Why do you need to tell your story? Aren’t you just going to say the same thing everyone else does, repeating the same facts? No, sir,” Pike said, shaking his head, “I suspect our jobs are very similar. We both see what’s on the surface and then dig deeper to check to see if all the facts add up. At least that’s what I do.”
The only sound heard was that of the wind whistling around the helicopter blades. Pike knew he had pushed it and shouldn’t have thrown in that last dig, but it felt so good. He thought he had actually heard Mallory gasp at his comment but he wasn’t going to turn around to find out. He stood as steely as he could, facing the crowd. He would brass it out and hope he wasn’t going home in the morning.
Suddenly a middle-aged woman wearing a bright blue ski parka called out, either feeling sorry for Pike and helping him out by breaking the awkward silence or else just taking advantage of it to call out her own question. “Mr. Cain, we heard rumors that Senator Williams will be accompanying you, all of us,” she said waving at the crowd, “on this voyage and that there is speculation that he may be helping you with your own political ambitions?”
Cain smiled looking at the group of reporters and was about to speak when he stopped and looked over their heads. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” He said, pointing out over the horizon. “That’s his chopper coming in now.” As everyone turned to watch the helicopter circle the iceberg and prepare to land, Cain finished speaking.
“Thank you all once again for coming. We will be keeping you informed with regular updates. Now as the Senator lands, please give him your attention, you know how he loves a captive audience. The crowd’s laughter was drowned out by the roar of the landing helicopter.
Cain, Mallory and Pike quietly slipped off the stage and entered the main building. As soon as they were inside, Mallory opened up on Pike. “What were you thinking Gabe? Attacking a member of the press like that. Like it or not these people have a lot of influence that can either help us or hinder us on this project.”
Pike hung his head low. “I’m sorry Beth, Mr. Cain, but something about that man just sticks in my craw.” Pike let out a big sigh, “I’ll make a public apology whenever you want sir.”
Cain looked at Pike with a solemn face, then suddenly burst out in a huge smile. “If I thought I could get away with it, I’d give you a big kiss right now.”
In shock, Pike looked at Mallory who was just as surprised as he was. “My boy,” Cain continued, “you’ve just done what I haven’t been able to do for the last twenty years; put a member of the press in their place.”
“But Nigel…” Mallory started to protest, but was stopped by a raised hand from Cain. “What you said put him in his place and I loved it, but please don’t do it again. All the other reporters out there know he had that coming and they’ll let it go this time, but if you attack one of their own again, even him, then they’ll see you as a threat and start labeling you as an arrogant S.O.B who is full of himself. And that, is something I cannot afford.”
Pike nodded his head, “yes sir.”
“Now if you will excuse me,” Cain said, “I’d better get back out there before the Senator says something that I will regret.”
As soon as Cain left, Pike turned to Mallory. “Sorry Beth, I didn’t mean to embarrass you or Mr. Cain today.”
Mallory just shook her head. “It’s okay, but don’t push your golden boy status. The press made you and they can break you just as fast.”
Pike nodded his head. “Is there anything else on the official agenda for today? If there isn’t, I’ll go to my room and strap on my muzzle.”
Mallory laughed, “No, that won’t be necessary. The rest of the day is clear so you’re free to wander around and do whatever. Enjoy yourself because playtime will be over as you start work tomorrow. It’s time to start earning those big bucks.” Mallory said smiling at him.
“Thanks. I’ll think I’ll just get something to eat in my room and lay low and relax. I need to be bright eyed and bushy tailed for my first day on the job tomorrow.”
“Good idea.” Mallory said as she turned and started to walk away. “Let me know if you need anything else,” she threw in over her shoulder as she rounded the corner.
After a little bit of wandering, Pike finally found his room. It wasn’t the Plaza, but it would do he smiled. It was a typical hotel room, a queen bed flanked by two dressers and a small, round table in the corner with a flat screen TV mounted on the wall. All in all it would suit his needs nicely.
He called room service and ordered a steak, put away his clothes and set up his laptop. While enjoying his steak, he did some research on his latest conspiracies on the moon landings. After eating, he planned to lay down and rest his eyes then get back up and do some more surfing, but that never happened as the busy schedule of the past several days caught up with him and he never woke back up.
The phone rang with the intensity of a foghorn, shattering his sleep and dashing his dreams to pieces on the rocks of reality. Absently he reached over and picked it up and muttered a hello, or the closest thing to it he could manage.
“Good morning Mr. Pike,” the far too cheery voice on the other end of the line said. “Mr. Cain would like you to join him in his office in one hour for a working breakfast. Can I tell him you will attend?
Like I’m going to tell him no? Pike thought. “Yes, please tell Mr. Cain that I will be there.”
“Thank you sir. Your morning coffee and paper will be waiting for you on a cart outside your door. Someone will be there at 6:50 to show you the way to Mr. Cain’s office. Have a pleasant day.” And she hung up.
Pike rolled over and looked at the clock, 6:01. He lay there for a moment and stretched, “I guess Mallory was right, the honeymoon is over, time to earn my pay,” he said as he got out of bed and headed for the shower.
Feeling refreshed and awake after his shower, Pike wrapped his robe around him and opened his door. Just as the anonymous voice on the phone had promised, there was a small serving cart with a large, silver-domed platter and a folded newspaper beside it sitting right outside his door. He wheeled it into his room and when he removed the lid, he found a Starbucks grande black and white mocha, his favorite, and a single Krispy Kreme doughnut. He took a sip of his coffee and instantly felt a twinge of homesickness. After he got dressed, he still had a few minutes to kill before he had to meet Cain so he grabbed the doughnut and the newspaper and sat in the high-back leather chair next to the window.
He took another sip of coffee, a rather large bite of the doughnut and then opened the paper and immediately did a double take. It was the Seattle Times, but what really amazed him was that it carried today’s date. Pike shook his head, took another sip of coffee, another bite and read the paper. It was remarkab
le the things you could do if you had the money.
Pike had just finished reading the comics when he heard a knock. He grabbed his coat and laptop and headed for the door. He was pleasantly surprised to see that Mallory was his escort.
“Good morning Beth.”
“Morning Gabe. All ready to go?”
He gestured with his coat and laptop. “Lead the way.”
They walked down the short hallway to the elevator which emptied into the casino. The lights, bells and whistles of this mini floating Vegas were quiet now, all the one-armed bandits silent and the gaming tables empty.
There was a small restaurant/coffee shop that had a few people in it. Several looked like they were nursing hangovers and there was a couple in the corner who looked like they hadn’t gone to bed yet. While the coffee shop may have been the cemetery, the Starbucks next to it was the wake. There were no living dead in there as most of the people were main-lining their caffeine, getting a jump on the day.
Half the tables were full, cups of coffee steaming and keyboards clicking as the reporters were filing their reports, snacking on biscotti and trying ever so subtly to peer over to see their neighbor’s screen, checking out the competition and seeing if anyone knew more than they did.
That explains the coffee, Pike thought to himself as they walked by Starbucks, but how he got the paper was still a mystery.
They came to the end of the casino and stopped. “We have a little time,” Mallory said, turning to Pike. “Nigel’s office is in the bow; scenic route or expressway?
“Since we have the time, let’s take the scenic route.”
Mallory nodded and pointed to the right. They entered through a set of double doors, then went down a short hallway and opened another set of doors where Pike was struck with a sudden flash of vertigo. For moment, he thought he was going to fall off the edge of the iceberg.
The door opened to an enclosed walkway whose top and sides were made of clear Plexiglas. There were no metal or wooden railings to give a feel of security, just a clear openness creating the impression of walking off the face of the earth.
Pike stepped forward and looked through the glass with the wonder of a small child seeing an elephant or giraffe for the first time.
The morning was dull and overcast and the sky and sea blended together at the horizon, making it difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. With no point of reference, Pike almost felt like they were floating in space.
“Wow.” Pike said after regaining his composure and balance. “When you said scenic route, you weren’t kidding.”
Mallory smiled. “Come on, we’ve got a ways to go and you don’t want to be late for your first day on the job.”
Pike smiled. “No, no I don’t.” They walked quietly, enjoying the view for nearly 200 yards to the end of the walkway. They entered a small conference room that had chairs and tables to accommodate about thirty people. “A short cut.” Mallory said as they went through the conference room to the elevator on the other side. As soon as the door swooshed shut, Pike felt his stomach becoming queasy. Suddenly the reality and enormity of the job finally landed squarely on his shoulders. He loved personal challenges; he only hoped he was up to the task at hand. The elevator ended its short trip with a small jolt and as if that were his cue, Pike felt himself taking a deep breath.
When the doors opened, Pike found himself starring into a large, circular room. Instantly he knew where he was. He remembered seeing the tower and presumed it was some sort of enclosed radar or communications station. Now he knew it was none of the above, he was in the base of the lighthouse; this was Cain’s private office.
Immediately he noticed the room was split into three levels. The main floor was the largest, covered with luxurious carpeting and comfortable couches and chairs strategically placed throughout, looking much like a sunken living room. This level was surrounded by a four-foot high, six-foot wide walkway that encircled it. Here, the walls were covered with rich cherry and teak-wood paneling and shelving, displaying artwork and many, many books. Cain’s workstation was also on this level, discretely built into the wall. Jutting out and curving up alongside the wall was a wrought-iron staircase that lead to a walkway at the top of the room that was surrounded by white stanchions with guide ropes strung between, reminding Pike of the railing of some great ocean liner. It was all crowned with the rounded dome, painted a light, sky blue. Pike wouldn’t have been surprised to see a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel on it. He did think it a bit odd to have an observation deck, with nothing to observe but the room below, but if this was Cain’s only eccentricity, then he would consider himself lucky.
“Elizabeth, Gabriel, do come in.” Cain greeted them with a genuine smile and an air of excitement in his voice. He got up from his desk and ushered them down to the main floor where a mini breakfast buffet had been set up. Cain sipped coffee and talked with Mallory while Pike filled his plate.
“This is where the rubber meets the road as they say Gabriel.” Cain began. “This is a revolutionary, if not visionary way to deal with the crisis that is looming so close on the horizon. This project will be bring much needed clean drinking water to those who need it the most, providing a stable and safe environment. Whether it’s providing life-saving relief from a deadly drought in a third world country or shoring up the supplies to an industrial nation, I humbly believe this is the answer.”
Cain paused for a moment, almost as if he were expecting applause, then his faced looked slightly embarrassed. “Forgive me if you will Gabriel; I get carried away at times. However, I won’t apologize to Elizabeth,” he said, smiling at his assistant. “She’s used to my ranting by now.”
“Given what I have seen, I really am impressed with the engineering feat you have accomplished here. This project is light years ahead of your first attempt at bringing safe drinking water by simply breaking off a hunk of ice and dragging it south. Yesterday after we arrived, I had a chance to look around and noticed that the ice on your berg here seems to be denser than regular ice. What process have you used?”
Cain smiled. “I hadn’t really thought of this before but this is really rather ironic, in two ways I suppose.” That statement made even Mallory pay attention, thinking she had heard all of this before.
“Being, ‘The Blast from the Past’ you’ll appreciate that the technology for this modern day project had its berth in the early days of WWII and that its inventor’s name was also Pyke, spelled with a Y.
“As Elizabeth can well attest and as you have discovered a little through our earlier conversations, I enjoy the what if factors that can shape our lives without our even being aware of it. In one of my rare down times, I stumbled across a television program talking about secret weapons of WWII and how some of our modern day technology is based on those early designs. They talked about Germany’s ideas for a death ray, which led to today’s lasers. A sonic cannon using sound wave to bring down enemy aircraft; a variation of that same technology is used on cruise ships today as a non-lethal way to ward off pirates. All interesting stuff but it was a story about a man who wanted to build ships out of ice that piqued my interest. Who was this madman you ask? Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke.
“Let’s go back to the dark days of WWII.” Cain was sitting down, but he leaned forward as he spoke, partly as if he were revealing a secret, partly like a camp counselor telling a ghost story around the campfire.
“Geoffrey Pyke has been described by some as, ‘not a scientist, but a man of a vivid and uncontrollable imagination, and a totally uninhibited tongue,’ and to call him eccentric would be an understatement. He would sometimes work from his bed, not wanting to waste time by getting up and getting dressed and he would sometimes call military officials to his bedside for conferences.” Cain paused and sipped some of his coffee, then continued.
“I’ll spare you some of the more ‘interesting’ ideas he came up with to win the war, such as sending in Saint Bernard’s with flasks of brandy aro
und their necks to get the German troops drunk. However, he did have one idea that did get quite a bit of attention.
During the early years of WWII, German U-boats were wreaking havoc on allied shipping and threatening to cut Britain off from the rest of the world. Pyke’s idea was to create giant aircraft carriers to help hunt down the German U-boats and save England.”
“What’s so unique about that?” Pike asked.
“His idea was to make them out of ice.”
“Ice?”
Cain smiled as he nodded his head. “His aircraft carrier, the HMS Habbakuk. He named it after a minor prophet in the Bible, whose name Pyke misspelled by the way. It had a hull 30 feet thick and was so large at nearly half a mile long, it could handle all but the heaviest bombers the allies had at the time. The entire ship was to be made from what was later to be called, pykrete, a mixture of water and wood pulp frozen solid. Pykrete was much stronger than normal ice, more stable, and melted a much slower rate.
“One of his greatest supporters was Lord Mountbatten, who was the head of Combined Operations. Mountbatten was so taken by the project that he burst into Churchill’s bathroom and dropped a chunk of Pykrete into his hot bath to show how resistant it was to melting. I only hope Churchill wasn’t in the tub at the time.” Cain laughed.
“Later, at a secret Allied Chiefs of Staffs meeting, Mountbatten wanted to demonstrate the toughness of the pykrete, so he arranged for a demonstration. He had a block of regular ice brought in and to everyone’s surprise, he took out his revolver and fired a round into the ice, shattering it to pieces. He then brought out a chunk of pykrete and fired another round, only this time instead of penetrating or fracturing the ice, the bullet ricocheted and just missed hitting Fleet Admiral Ernest King.
“Having made his point, work proceeded on the project with a small prototype being built in a lake in Canada. The fact that it survived the hot summer was encouraging, but the high projected costs and the successful landing at Normandy doomed the project.”