by Damon Knight
“One thing I’m curious about,” Newland said. “I notice that the water motion seems to be in a crosswise direction, but I assume that the camera we’re seeing here is facing toward the bow. Now, if we’re moving with the current, why is that?”
“Wind and current,” said Geller.
“Well, but are the currents different on the bottom? That’s what I meant to ask.”
“There are no currents worth mentioning on the bottom here, but from the surface down to about a hundred meters, the direction of the current does change—it rotates clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. So when we’re moving with the current at the surface, we’re dragging the cable against the resistance of that fan of crosswise currents, and when we reel it in, it comes back at an angle.”
“I see. How long will it take to reel it in?”
“About half an hour, but I can show you what we got on the last grab, if you want.”
Under a large half-cylinder of white-painted metal on the wall beside the window was a marble-topped table on which was spread what looked like a heap of clods and dirt. When Newland looked at it more closely, he saw that the clods were purplish granular lumps about the size of his fist; the rest was brown clay. Geller handed him one of the lumps, and he turned it over curiously. “How do these form, anyhow? If that isn’t a silly question.”
“No, it’s a good question. Nobody knows how they form. There’s one theory that the manganese is in solution in volcanic material under the layer of sediment, and it filters up somehow and condenses out at the sediment-water interface. The reason you find it in fields like this is that it only condenses around solid objects, usually fragments of volcanic rock. But you find other things inside them, too—sharks’ teeth and the ear bones of whales.”
“That’s fascinating,” said Newland. “Like pearls forming around grains of sand?”
A prim scientific smile twisted Geller’s lips. “Well, not exactly.”
Newland did not quite smile in return. “Could we see what’s inside this one?” he asked.
“Sure, if you want.” Geller took the nodule, picked up two others from the table, and took them to a machine that looked a little like a large stainless-steel nutcracker. He put the first nodule into the steel jaws, depressed the handle, and pulled out a little heap of fragments. “Rock,” he said, showing Newland a triangular reddish chunk. He put the second nodule in, cracked it. “Rock.” Then the third. “Well, well.” he said. “Will you look at this?”
Newland bent closer. In Geller’s palm, half-surrounded by fragments of porous manganese, was what looked like a cracked hollow sphere of glass. “What is it?”
“Looks like an australite. That’s a real anomaly.”
“I’m sorry, what’s an australite?”
The horror began when Geller opened his mouth to reply. His eyes closed and he staggered. He came upright again, looking bewildered, with his hand to his brow.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. I felt like I was about to faint.”
“All right now?”
“Sure. Never did that before.” He bent to pick up the fragments he had dropped, and brushed the dirt away from the glass sphere. “An australite’s a kind of tektite. Found near Australia, that’s why they call them that. This one shouldn’t be here.”
“What are they, exactly?”
“Nobody knows that, either. They show evidence of melting and deformation, so they’ve got to be some kind of meteorite, but they’re never found together with any kind of meteoritic material that could have melted to form them. There are theories about that, too. I’m not that crazy about theories. What we need is data.” He put the cracked glass sphere carefully down on the table. “Wait till my boss sees this.”
10
The long murmuring corridors were carpeted in different colors, blue for port, red for starboard, shades of violet and purple in between, so that it was easy to tell where you were in Sea Venture. Stevens roamed the vessel, watching the crowds. Most of the passengers looked Middle American, overdressed and overjeweled, but there was an exotic sprinkling of saris and chadors. He sunned himself beside the pool on the Sports Deck and cultivated a nodding acquaintance with some of the young bathers. He visited the casino in the evening and lost a few hundred dollars at roulette. He sat in the lounge with the older passengers, looking at the sky and ocean in the television screens that cleverly counterfeited windows. Several times as he strolled down the corridors, he saw a gray head over the back of a wheelchair, but when he caught up, it was always an old woman.
From his room Stevens called the operator and was told, not to his surprise, that no Paul Newland was listed among the passengers. In the interest of thoroughness, he asked for Harold Winter, the young man who was known to be traveling with Newland; Winter was not listed either.
Stevens was present for every meal in the Liberty Restaurant: breakfast, the ten-o’clock snack, lunch, four-o’clock tea, dinner, the midnight munch. The man he was waiting for did not appear. Evidently he and his companion were taking all their meals in their room. If this state of affairs continued, it would be seen as a blunder that he had not tried to book a suite on the Signal Deck; but there was nothing to be done about that now.
Meanwhile, both for his own comfort and for professional reasons, he needed a companion: to be alone in Sea Venture was to be conspicuous. For that very reason, there were few unattached women. Stevens narrowed his choice to three, all passably attractive young women traveling with their parents. In casual ways, as opportunity presented itself, he got on speaking terms with all three families. One of them took to him more cordially than the other two: Mr. and Mrs. Prescott and their daughter Julie. The Prescotts had spent some time in Europe, where Prescott had been the art director of an automobile company; they were able to share recollections of Paris. Lausanne, Madrid. In response to their delicate queries, he told them that he was a naturalized American citizen, an executive with a family-owned investment firm, taking a sea cruise for his health. In return, they intimated that the daughter, who was fair-haired and sad, was recovering from some ruptured romance. She had given up a job as a graphics designer, and thought she might paint, or go into social work.
Gradually he became a member of their group; they went to lectures together, dined together, strolled on the Promenade Deck. By occasional glances Stevens indicated that he was more than politely interested in Julie, but he made no overt gesture. Presently the parents began to display a kittenish insistence on throwing the two young people together. One evening, when the elder Prescotts had retired early, pleading fatigue (“It must be the sea air!” said Mrs. Prescott, with a girlish laugh). Stevens took Julie to the Quarter Deck Bar and spent an hour with her exchanging confidences. There had, in fact, been a tragic romance; the man had died. There seemed not to be any particular meaning in life, Julie said, but she knew that she had to go on. He took her back to her suite and left her with a European bow and a chaste kiss on the knuckles. Patience was everything; there was plenty of time.
He took her dancing on the following evening, and they stopped for a nightcap in the Liberty Bar. It was quite late. The only other customers were three couples, one drunk and argumentative, the rest too drunk to talk, and a large young man who sat by himself in a corner, nursing a tall drink. Stevens recognized him instantly from his photograph: it was Harold Winter.
Stevens took Julie home, kissed her goodnight, and went back to his cabin to think about methods. His instructions were to dispose of his victim in such a way that the crime could never be solved; it was to remain a mystery. Since it never would have crossed his mind to conduct himself in any other way, Stevens had accepted this without comment, but he had thought about it a good deal and had drawn a conclusion from it, which was that his new clients were not merely interested in the death of Professor Newland: they wanted the crime to remain unsolved, not out of any solicitude for Stevens, to be sure, but because they wanted the blame to fall on someo
ne else. These were merely speculations, and had nothing to do with him as a professional, but he also noted that appropriations bills for the space-colony program were coming up in Congress, and it occurred to him that if the revered leader of the L-5 movement were to be murdered aboard Sea Venture, it could hardly fail to cause a public outcry which might sway a vote or two. Therefore he thought he knew who his new clients were; the knowledge gave him a certain private satisfaction.
At any rate, he wished to do his job in a way that would be pleasing to his clients, and he was beginning to see the possibility of a pattern: the young nurse-companion who never leaves his employer’s side except when the latter is asleep. If that could be established, the first part of his problem was solved, that was to say, the isolation of the victim. The rest was merely a matter of ingenuity, of finding the most elegant solution.
11
Captain Hartman prowled the corridors of Sea Venture, sensing a whiff of wrongness. In the days before his retirement, when he was captain of the Queen, he had begun every day like this, taking each section in turn except the engineering section, the Chief Engineer’s exclusive domain. He had carried a flashlight to shine under tables and counters, looking for dirt. He had looked for the obvious things, equipment not put away or not in good order, brass work dull, spoiled food in the refrigerators, but that was only a part of it; he had always been alert with some sixth sense for the wrongness that was not obvious, and more than once he had found it.
In a way he felt guilty about inspecting another man’s vessel, but the compulsion would not let him rest. He had nothing to say against Bliss. Sea Venture was too big; Bliss had to delegate the inspections to his deputies; Hartman understood that. He walked the ship every day, nevertheless. He listened to the roar of New Rock in the cabaret and saw the old folks in their dance hall, swaying to the strains of “Louie, Louie.” He went down into the working alleys where the butchers and bakers plied their trades; he watched the maids coming and going with mounds of linen. He walked the Promenade Deck, with its tall angled television screens that almost perfectly counterfeited windows looking out on the ocean; he made the circuit of the Sports Deck, overseeing the cheerful tennis players and bathers, watching the oldsters at their shuffleboards. Through Deputy Ferguson he managed an invitation to visit the perm section, saw the fishery and the hydroponics farm, watched the children playing.
It would have been easy to say that it was only the difference of Sea Venture to any ship he had known that disturbed him. Bliss was quite right, it was not a ship. The Queen had been a floating hotel in name, but this was one in fact. Bar Bliss and himself, there was not a sailor aboard. There were no engines, only a generator for electricity; the cylindrical things that passed for sails were opened and shut by computer-operated mechanisms. The vessel had three independent inertial-guidance systems, and it got its position by satellite signal. A raft was what Bliss called it, and there was some justice in that. But he himself, aboard the Queen, had been nine-tenths manager and one-tenth sailor; it was not the passing of the old days that was on his mind. There was something else. He felt it; he smelled it; sometimes it was near.
Luis Padilla accepted the dishes from the sous-chef, placed them on his cart, lifted the covers to verify the contents—artichoke hearts, jellied consommé, caviar, crackers. Correct. He stopped at the wine steward’s for a half-bottle of Tio Pepe, then wheeled the silent cart out through the service doors, along the corridor to the elevator, up to the Sports Deck. He tapped on the door of Number 18.
“Come in!” That voice, like an overripe apricot. He entered.
She was there, in a frilly garment of no substance, very large, larger than ever, quaking as she moved. The Mrs. Emerton, almost two meters tall and weighing surely seventy kilos, her hair in ringlets. The Mr. Emerton was not there.
“Put it down, Luis dear. I’ll sign later, all right? I’m just about to take my shower.” She looked at him coquettishly as she disappeared into the bathroom.
On the dressing table, half-obscured by the evening gown draped over the chair, was an open jewel case. Pearls, gold chains hung over the edge of it like pirate treasure. At the end of one of the chains lay a pendant, an emerald the size of a thumbnail, winking green.
Padilla transferred the covered dishes to the table, arranged the silverware, whipped out his corkscrew and opened the bottle, sniffed the cork and set it down. He verified that everything was properly arranged before he left, with a last glance at the emerald.
It was not the first time she had allowed him such a glimpse. Mrs. Emerton was very careless, or else she was hoping to tempt him into an indiscretion. But he would never succumb. Once, when he was ten, his American teacher had come to class in a drunken condition and had sung to them a song his grandfather had taught him. It was a song that the American soldiers had sung during the Occupation. Damn, damn, damn the Filipino, lazy, cowardly ladrón. Underneath the starry flag, civilize him with a Krag, and return us to our own beloved home. He had thought that a crag was part of a mountain, and that the American soldiers wanted to crush the Filipinos by dropping a mountain on them. He had found out since that it was Krag, a kind of rifle.
The song accompanied his steps as he wheeled the empty cart back to the elevator. When he was much younger, maybe six or seven, his father had beaten him for stealing a toy in the drugstore. “We are not thieves, do you understand?” Whack. “No somos ladrónes. Do you understand?” Whack. “Do you understand?” It was the best lesson he had ever had. Mrs. Emerton could expose her jewels, or her body if she liked: they were both safe from the staff of Sea Venture. Padilla was whistling as he entered the kitchen.
Later, in the stewards’ lounge, he sat with his friend Manuel Obregón and drank a little wine. Obregón and he were employed in different parts of Sea Venture, but they had joined at the same time and had kept up their acquaintance. They talked in a mixture of Pilipino, Spanish, and English, with many jokes and much laughter. Suddenly Padilla felt a little dizzy; his elbow slipped off the table, and he almost fell forward before he caught himself. To his horror, when he straightened up, he saw that his friend had slumped off his chair and was lying like a dead man, with a bloated face and eyes turned up.
12
Dr. Wallace McNulty, at the age of forty-nine, had had a singular notoriety thrust upon him. A garbled newspaper item about his being elected president of the Santa Barbara County Medical Society, shortly after the death of his wife of twenty years, had been published in The New Yorker, in one of those little quotes they ran at the ends of columns. Instead of just saying that he had graduated from the University of California, the item had gone on to list a whole lot of other states, as if he had graduated from all of them too. Dr. McNulty carried the clipping around in his wallet awhile and showed it to friends, feeling embarrassed but thinking he ought to be a good sport: he found, however, that one out of every three people would read the clipping and then blink at him and say, “Did you really—?” Then he would have to explain that it was a joke, a mistake. He threw the clipping away after a week or two, but whenever he introduced himself to people, there was always a moment when he was waiting for them to say, “Dr. Wallace McNulty? Aren’t you the one who—?” He found that he was becoming suspicious of new acquaintances, and even of his own patients that he had had for years.
The opportunity to join Sea Venture had come along in an almost providential way. A friend of his, Ray Herring, had been hired as director of the medical services there, but at the last minute some family trouble came up and he had to stay in Santa Barbara. Ray asked Dr. McNulty if he wanted the job and Dr. McNulty discovered that he did. He applied and was accepted.
And on the whole, he had never been sorry. He had a little eight-bed hospital on the Upper Deck, the latest in diagnostic equipment, and three cheerful nurses. His work-load was less than it had been at home, but he was making more money, even without counting the free room and board.
One morning when he was in the middle of
his usual series of earaches and sore throats, Janice came to him with the phone in her hand. “Doctor, it’s an emergency—somebody collapsed down in the marine lab.”
“Okay, give me that. Will you finish up with Mrs. Omura?” He walked into the next room, talking as he went. “McNulty. What’s the problem?”
A woman’s voice said, “I don’t know. One minute he was okay, the next—”
“Is he breathing? Conscious?”
“Well, he’s breathing kind of slowly. His eyes are half open, but he doesn’t seem to hear when we talk to him. I think you’d better come down here.”
“On my way. Cover him up with a blanket or something.”
McNulty put his head into the examination room where Janice was swabbing Mrs. Omura’s ears. “I’m going to need a stretcher and a couple of guys. Will you—”
“Already done, Doctor. They’re on their way.”
“Well, hell,” said McNulty, secretly pleased.
When he got to the marine section, he found a little group gathered around a red-bearded man who lay in front of a fish tank, with three or four lab coats thrown over him.
“Okay, who was here when it happened?” McNulty asked, kneeling beside the patient. He checked the airway, began to take a pulse: it was slow and weak.
“I was,” said a dark-haired woman. “We were just standing here talking. He didn’t say anything for a while, and I looked over at him, and he had a funny expression on his face, and then he was going down.”
Later McNulty wrote in his notes: “Randall Geller, marine scientist, age 31. Collapsed in marine lab appr. 9:20 A.M. Dec. 29. No evidence of trauma. EEG negative. Chem scan negative. Patient is stuporous, does not respond to stimuli.”
On the following day he had another patient with exactly the same symptoms: Yvonne Barlow, Geller’s boss in the marine lab. She was the dark-haired young woman he had talked to before, the one who had been with Geller when he collapsed.