Hot Sky at Midnight

by Robert Silverberg

  “Yes, sir. Right away, sir!”

  “Sir?” Carpenter asked her. Nobody had been sirring him aboard the Tonopah Maru up till now, and there was something unreal and oddly insolent about the way Caskie did it now. But the lithe little radio operator had already gone sprinting away to her communications nest to set up the call for him.

  He headed below. In his cabin he found the Port of Oakland operator already waiting for him on the tiny visor of his wall-mounted communicator.

  “Captain Carpenter here,” he said. “Reporting safe arrival of Tonopah Maru with iceberg of approximate seventeen-hundred-plus kiloton mass. Requesting docking instructions.”

  The Port of Oakland operator gave him the number of the pier to which he was to bring his berg. Then the android said, “You are instructed to report to Administration Shed Fourteen immediately upon transferring command to pier-side personnel, Captain.”

  “Transferring command?”

  “That is correct. You will be relieved by Captain Swenson and will go immediately to Administration Shed Fourteen for preliminary 442 hearings.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will be relieved by Captain Swenson and will go—”

  “Yes, I heard that part. You said ‘442’?”

  “That is correct. There is to be a 442, Captain.”

  Carpenter was baffled. What the hell was a 442? But the android on his visor would give him only circularities instead of answers. He turned the communicator off after another moment and went upstairs.

  “Hitchcock?”

  The navigator’s grizzled ebony face peered out of the blister dome.

  “You want me, sir?”

  Sir again. Something was really wrong.

  “Hitchcock, what’s a 442?”

  Hitchcock’s expression was impassive, almost smug, but there was a strange glint in the older man’s exophthalmic, vividly white, blood-streaked eyes. “Impropriety charge, sir.”

  “Impropriety?”

  “Violation of regs, yes, that’s an impropriety. Sir.”

  “You turned me in? On the Calamari Maru thing?”

  “Sir, the 442 hearing will determine—”

  “Answer me!” Carpenter wanted to grab Hitchcock by the front of his shirt and bash him against the railing. But he knew better than that. “Did you turn me in?”

  Hitchcock’s gaze was serene. “We all did, sir.”

  “All?”

  “Rennie. Nakata. Caskie set up the call for us.”

  “When was this?”

  “Four days ago. We told them you had abandoned a group of sailors in distress.”

  “I don’t believe this. You told them I had aband—”

  “Was a terrible thing, sir. Was a violation of all common decency, sir.” Hitchcock was terribly calm. He seemed to have swollen to six times his normal size: a monster of rectitude and moral justice. “Was our duty to inform authorities, sir, of this breach of maritime custom.”

  “You fucking treacherous bastard,” Carpenter said. “You know as well as I do that we had no room for any of those people aboard this ship!”

  “Yes, sir.” Hitchcock spoke as though from several galaxies away. “I understand that, sir. Nevertheless, the impropriety was committed and it behooved us to report it.”

  Impropriety! Behooved us! Suddenly Hitchcock had the vocabulary of a schoolmaster. Carpenter made an inarticulate sound deep in his throat. He longed to hurl Hitchcock overboard. Rennie and Nakata had appeared, and were watching from a distance, heedless of the quickening rain. Carpenter wondered what number impropriety it was to throw your navigator into San Francisco Bay in front of witnesses.

  He saw now that it had been a crazy thing to do, ordering them to forget his abandonment of the Calamari Maru’s people. They would obey, but they wouldn’t forget. And the only way they could get themselves out from under the responsibility for what he had done out there in the South Pacific had been to turn him in.

  Carpenter’s mind went back to that moment in the open sea, when they had seen the three dinghies from the foundering Calamari Maru heading their way. His callousness, Hitchcock’s incredulity.

  Playing the scene back now in memory, Carpenter could hardly believe the thing that he had done. He had left those people out there to die, had turned his back on them and sailed away, and that had been that. An impropriety, yes.

  But still—

  There had been no choice, Carpenter thought. His ship was too small. The iceberg was beginning to melt. They didn’t have enough food for all those extras, or sufficient Screen, or any room for passengers, not even one or two—

  He would tell the 442 hearing those things. It had been a matter of situational ethics, he would explain. This fucking lousy world, Hitchcock had said, back there when Carpenter had given him the order to ignore the dinghies. Yes. Sometimes this fucking lousy world compelled you to do fucking lousy things. Carpenter understood that his behavior had seemed callous. But they might all have died, the rescuers and the rescued alike. He would have risked losing his berg, maybe even his ship, if he had attempted to—

  They were all looking at him. Smiling.

  “Fuck you,” he told them. “You don’t understand a goddamned thing.”

  Carpenter moved past them, scowling into their faces, and went back down to his cabin.

  Administration Shed Fourteen wasn’t a shed at all; it was a kind of tubelike room, a long narrow ribbon of dull gray steel attached almost haphazardly to one of the upper levels of the intricate webwork of buildings and catwalks that was the Port of Oakland’s operational heart.

  Nor was the hearing a hearing, really. Certainly not in the literal sense of the word, for Carpenter’s voice was not heard at all except for a couple of brief sentences. It was more like a formal notification that some sort of proceeding against him was under way: an arraignment, really. An official of the Port presided over it, a doughy-faced, bored man named O’Reilly or O’Brien or O’Leary—something Irish, at any rate, but Carpenter heard the name only at the outset and forgot it, except in its broad outline, almost at once. During most of the session the man had his nose in his visor almost constantly, rarely looking up at Carpenter. Carpenter had the impression that O’Reilly or O’Brien was presiding over two or three cases at once, taking information in from several computer outputs while listening with half an ear to the droning of the bailiffs in front of him.

  There was a Level Seven Samurai man on hand as Carpenter’s representative, a squinty-eyed, sallow-faced fellow named Tedesco, pockmarked along his cheeks and forehead by some kind of allergic reaction to Screen. That the case should involve a Level Seven, that a Level Seven should have been waiting here all morning for Carpenter while he docked his ship and turned over his command, indicated to Carpenter that this was a serious business, that he might be in considerable trouble. But he was sure that once the investigating authorities understood the realities of the dilemma he had faced out there, everything would work out.

  “Don’t say a thing until you’re asked to,” Tedesco told him, right at the outset. “And when you answer, be sure to answer straight to the point, no discursiveness. They hate discursiveness in a place like this.”

  “Do I need a lawyer?” Carpenter asked.

  “This isn’t a legal matter,” said Tedesco. “Not today. And if it becomes one, whatever counsel may be necessary will be provided for you by the Company. Meanwhile take your cues from me.”

  “What kind of penalties am I facing here?”

  “Disqualification from the Maritime Service. You would lose your sea ticket.” Tedesco’s voice was chilly. Everything about him radiated disdain for this whole affair, the sordid event at sea, the troublesome filing of charges against a captain by his crew, the deplorable need for a man of his august grade to be putting in time down here on the Oakland waterfront dealing with such a nasty squabble.

  “What about my grade level in the Company?”

  “That’s an internal Compa
ny matter. What’s going on here is a Port of Oakland matter. First things first; but I don’t think I need to tell you that it isn’t going to do much good for your slope to have been brought up on charges here like this. However, that remains to be—”

  “442 docket 100-939399,” said O’Reilly or O’Brien suddenly, down at the remote other end of the tube, and banged a gavel. “Paul Carpenter, captain, suspended, stand forth and acknowledge.”

  “Get up,” Tedesco murmured, but Carpenter was already on his feet.

  It was very strange, being the focus of a disciplinary action like this. Carpenter felt like a schoolboy being reprimanded for some childish offense. Turning his ship over to Swenson, the relief captain, had been embarrassing enough, especially with Hitchcock and Rennett smirking triumphantly at him from the blister dome as he surrendered his software access; but there had at least been a sort of Conradian drama to that which made it tolerable, a theatrical solemnity. To stand here in this grotesque drafty spaghetti strand of a room, though, listening to the rain beat down on the metal roof and staring at a fat, bleary-eyed bureaucrat who didn’t seem even to be looking at him, but who nevertheless held the power to injure and perhaps cripple his career—it was humiliating, it was ridiculous, it was absurd.

  One of the bailiffs—a woman who looked like an android, but apparently wasn’t—rose and ran through a thick skein of legalisms in a dull monotone. The charges—improper behavior, dereliction of duty, violation of regulation such-and-such and such-and-such. The accusers, named. His own crew. Some yatter about the temporary withdrawal of his maritime license pending examination of the incident. And on and on, five or ten minutes of dense technicalities that Carpenter soon found himself unable to follow.

  “Entered,” O’Reilly or O’Brien said. “Remanded for evidential.” Bang of gavel. “Application for a 376.5 noted and denied. Application for a 793-sub one granted. Hearing date to be set and notification made.” Bang of gavel. Bang again. “Continued.” One last bang.

  “That’s it,” Tedesco said. “You’re free to do as you wish, now. But don’t go outside the San Francisco area until this has been resolved.”

  Tedesco began to leave the room.

  “Wait a second,” Carpenter said. “Please. What was all that stuff he denied and approved? A 376-point-something, a 793-sub-something.”

  “376.5 is a request for a dismissal of all charges. Routinely entered and just as routinely thrown out. 793-sub one is application for release on your own recognizance without bail. You got that because your record has been clean up till now.”

  “Bail? I’m up on a criminal charge?”

  “Purely an administrative investigation,” Tedesco said. “But there’s always the possibility of follow-ups, a criminal action, perhaps a civil action by the legal representatives of the castaways. The Port is responsible to the civil authorities for your continued presence until this has been resolved. We have made ourselves responsible to the Port, which is why no bail has been required, and therefore you are responsible to us to see to it that no breaches are incurred. We believe that we can count on your cooperation.”

  “Of course. But if there are going to be further charges, other court proceedings beyond this one—”

  “We don’t know that there will be. One thing at a time, all right, Carpenter? And if you don’t mind—”

  “Please. I need to know something else.”

  “Go on.”

  “I still have Level Eleven privileges, right? Housing, living expenses?”

  “Of course,” Tedesco said. “You haven’t been found guilty of anything, Carpenter. The Port is only trying to determine the truth of the charges that have been lodged against you. And the Company is behind you. Keep that in mind. The Company is behind you.” It was said without any warmth whatever, but it was the most reassuring thing Carpenter had heard since reaching port. The Company is behind you. His sullen and resentful crew, lacking any intelligent comprehension of the complexities he had faced out there in the Pacific, had landed him in this mess; but the Company, vast and mighty, would not allow a useful Level Eleven to be thrown to the wolves over an issue of class warfare. Carpenter was confident of that now. At the eventual hearing, he would demonstrate that a rescue had been entirely impossible, that it had been necessary for him to perform an act of what was essentially triage, weighing the survival of his own ship and people against the demands of those incompetent and mutinous strangers, and rather than sending everyone in both ships to destruction by overloading his little vessel he had reluctantly—oh, so reluctantly and painfully!—left the personnel of the Calamari Maru to fend for themselves in the sea. This was a difficult era, he would tell them, a time of hard choices. With the best will in the world he couldn’t have saved those people. He had had the best will in the world. It stood to reason that a man of his intelligence and good record would not lightheartedly have left shipwrecked sailors to die, if he had had any options otherwise. Surely Tedesco must see that. O’Brien, O’Leary, whatever his name was, he would be made to see it too. The charges would be dismissed.

  When all of this was over, Carpenter thought, it probably would be incumbent upon Samurai to transfer him out of the Maritime Service, considering the way this sort of thing tended to attach itself to someone’s reputation, and he might lose a year or two’s slope, too; but they would find a post for him in some other division, and in the fullness of time everything would be all right.

  Yes. In the fullness of time.

  Meanwhile it was still raining torrentially. The air outside had a sweet, yeasty smell, almost pleasant, except that Carpenter felt sure that the fragrance was the result of the stirring into the atmosphere of some disagreeable and probably hazardous toxic crap that ordinarily would be lying dormant on the bosom of San Francisco Bay.

  What now?

  A place to stay, first.

  When he had come down from Spokane to San Francisco to take this job, the Company had assigned him to the Company’s block of rooms at the Marriott Hilton, over on the Frisco waterfront. Since he was still a Level Ekven, presumably it was still all right for him to take a room there.

  But when Carpenter called up Accommodations on his flex terminal and requested the Marriott, he was told that a booking had already been made for him at a hotel called the Dunsmuir, on the Oakland side of the bay. Something about that troubled him. Why not San Francisco? Why not the Marriott? He requested a transfer. No, he was told, he must go to the Dunsmuir.

  And when he got there, he understood why. The Dunsmuir was a dump like the Manito in Spokane, where Carpenter had lived while he was a weatherman, only even worse—a dreary commercial hotel that seemed to be at least a century old, in a desolate one-time industrial zone, now largely abandoned, between Oakland Airport and the freeway. It had none of the flash of the Marriott, and none of the comfort, either. It was the sort of place that catered to medium-grade business travelers who might have one night to spend in Oakland before going on to San Diego or Seattle.

  The Company is behind you. Yes. But the Company was already beginning to reduce its overhead insofar as he was concerned, and he had not yet been found guilty of anything. Perhaps there was more to worry about here than he thought.

  It was late afternoon by the time Carpenter was settled in the small, drab, dank room that apparently was going to be his home for a while. He put through a call to Nick Rhodes at Santachiara, and, to his surprise, it went through on the first try.

  “Hey, now!” Rhodes cried. “Home is the sailor, home from the sea!”

  “So it would seem,” Carpenter said, in a dull, flat tone. “As I remember the poem, that’s a line to be engraved on somebody’s tombstone.”

  Instantly Rhodes looked alarmed. “Paul? What the hell’s the matter, Paul?”

  “I don’t know yet. Possibly plenty. They’ve got me up on some kind of fucking court-martial.”

  “For Christ’s sake. What did you do?”

  Wearily Carpenter said, “Ther
e was this ship we met when we were out in the Pacific. There had been a mutiny on board, and—well, it’s a long story. I don’t feel like running through it all just now. Look, are you free tonight? You want to get together and do some serious drinking, Nick?”

  “Of course. Where are you?”

  “Dive called the Dunsmuir, near the airport.”

  “Down by SFO, you mean?”

  “No. Oakland Airport, not San Francisco. That’s the best the Company thinks I’m worthy of, right now. More convenient for you, anyway.” Then, belatedly: “How the hell are you, Nick?”

  “I’m—fine.”

  “And Isabelle?”

  “She’s fine too. I’m still seeing her, you know.”

  “Of course you are. I never expected otherwise. How’s her goofy friend with the lavish equipment?”

  “Jolanda? She’s up in the habitats right now. Should be getting back in another couple of days. She’s been traveling with Enron.”

  “The Israeli? I thought he was back in Tel Aviv.”

  “Decided to stick around in San Francisco. Captivated by Jolanda’s lavish equipment, I gather. And then they suddenly went up to the satellites together. Don’t ask me any more, because I don’t know. Where do you want to meet tonight?”

  “That restaurant we went to on the Berkeley waterfront?”

  “Antonio’s, you mean? Sure. What time?”

  “Any time. The sooner the better. I have to tell you, I feel pretty miserable, Nick. Especially in this rain. I could use some good company.”

  “What about right now?” Rhodes asked. “I’m just about through for the day anyway. And I could use some good company too, if the truth be known.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “I’m not sure. A complication, anyway.”

  “Involving Isabelle?”

  “Nothing to do with women at all. I’ll tell you when I see you.”