Pohlstars Read online

  "We're recovering nearly a hundred percent on the surface, he boasted. "It's all trapped in the moat, you see, so we just scoop them up again.

  "Good job. But what do you do when the perimeter screens begin to foul? And he laughed and offered to buy me a drink, for that was the weakness in the system.

  I took his drink, and a lot more than one over the three days we were there. I had no quarrel with Betsy's captains or Betsy's crews, but I did not like Betsy's friends. I didn't like May's liking them, either. The women called themselves actresses or models-polite lies. The men lied less politely. They called themselves men. There was Simon Kellaway, Las Vegas-born, slim and quick and temporarily living at sea on Betsy's charity because there was a murder charge in Nevada that he couldn't hush up. There was Dougie d'Agasto from Miami Beach, tall and fair and a pimp's recruiter if I ever saw one. They came from Chicago and Los Angeles and New Orleans, and they all had money, or acted as though they did, and I did not believe that even one of them had got it inside the law.

  The one I liked least was d'Agasto, the handsomest and emptiest of men. What I liked least of all was that May did not reject his company. They sat together at dinner the first night. I assumed he was Betsy's bedmate. I assumed that of every man I saw her with, for she was always, and after Ben died openly, available, accessible and even aggressive about it. Even, to my surprise, with me, for at two in the morning she knocked on my door to announce that she wasn't in the mood for sleep. When I told her that I was, she shrugged and said, "Well, you'd probably be no good to me anyway, old man, especially after you've starched your sheets already over May. She left without protest, and I-I wished we had never come there.

  So I spent my time as far away from Betsy and Betsy's friends as I could. Captain Havrila fed me in the ship's officers' mess. We talked shop-openly-pretty openly, because there were things I did not mention to them, and I know there were a good many they didn't tell me. A lot of what we talked about, though, was no secret. I knew that Betsy was diversifying, because what she sold to the land became public knowledge the minute she sold it. I didn't know, but I would have found out shortly anyway, that she was planning to try total manufacture-refining steel, even. Electric refining, mostly. "The ships that come in are in ballast anyway, said their marketing chief, Jim Mordecai, "so they might as well carry ore-and we've got the electricity-and we've got a lot of extra oxygen, because if we keep on expanding L-H-2 production the way we're going, the extra oxygen's sure to depress the world market. And then there's pollution.

  "Pollution? Out here? I asked.

  "Here's the place for it, Jason, at sea, where it won't make the land worse than it is-although- he grinned- don't know if the folks in Tahiti are going to agree with me. He glanced at the captain before he went on, "We do have a kind of pollution problem, though. The captain must have signaled it was all right, because he completed his thought. "We're pumping so much deep water here that the dissolved CO2 doesn't dissipate right away. We're up to pretty nearly five hundred parts per million.

  "Oh? I didn't notice anything.

  "Well, you won't, boomed Captain Havrila. "As far as we can tell there's no health risk-and actually Miss Betsy says she kind of likes it. It does make the plants grow in her garden! Care for a brandy now, Jason?

  I did. I had one. I even had two with them, but they all had work to do, and I couldn't keep them from it. So I vonulteered to take Jimmy Rex for a walk, and we headed for the gardens so I could see for myself, and indeed it was true. Bougainvillea and orchids and flowering ginger-everything was lush and beautiful.

  Jimmy Rex was being not particularly awful, for he liked picking flowers. He crushed them as soon as he picked them, threw them away and picked more, but there were plenty of flowers. I let him do pretty much as he pleased, following slowly after him and thinking the unpromising thoughts of an aging bachelor, till I heard voices and saw him dart into a cluster of dirty-boy shrubbery. "Come back, James Reginald, I shouted. For a wonder, he did, looking abashed. I heard someone moving away out of sight, and in a moment some other someone came around the shrubs to see who I was.

  It was Dougie d'Agasto. He was partly dressed in shorts and unlaced tennis shoes, carrying a sports shirt slung over one bare shoulder. "Oh, it's you, Jason, he said, smiling-at least I give him the credit of saying that he probably meant it for a smile, though it had a lot of smirk in it. "I figured if Jimmy Rex was here you couldn't be far behind. I'm glad you two didn't get here ten minutes sooner!

  Well, I had no interest in his tacky whoring in the bushes. I put my hand on Jimmy Rex's shoulder-he was behaving well enough to let me-and said, "We were just going.'

  He nodded absently, stretching, yawning, pulling the shirt on over his head, but he kept his eyes on us. "You're smart to keep close to the kid. he said.

  I said stiffly, "I don't let him near the rail. D'Agasto looked at me as though I were talking a foreign language.

  "I'm not talking about accident, for God's sake. I'm talking about snatch. Kidnap, he amplified, and this time it definitely was a smirk. "Do you know what that kid's worth for ransom'?

  Now, if you'd met d'Agasto on a tennis court, say, you might easily think he was just another bright and handsome young sportsman, because he had the wide-eyed good humor and the trim, strong body of healthy youth. I had never thought that. Not for a single second, because before I ever met him I knew he was some sort of second-rate kin to one of the lesser Mob families in Florida. Even if I had ever thought it, listening to him talk would have straightened me out in two sentences. The way his mind worked!

  And went on working. "What is it you've got now, Jason? he ruminated. "Eighteen boats in May's fleet? There's probably construction loans against every one of them, but, say, ten million dollars apiece average net worth? And that's only pocket change, because when old lady Appermoy kicks off, there's no heir left but the kid. Why, you've got your hand on a billion dollars, pal! What say you just quietly sneak him on the plane when I leave and don't say anything until I'm in San Francisco-we'll split the ransom fifty-fifty!

  He was watching my face, so he winked and turned away and left without waiting for an answer. Jimmy Rex stared after him with scared delight. "Was he just making a joke, Uncle Jay'? he asked.

  "What a stupid question! Of course it was just a joke!

  But it wasn't.

  I was glad to be back on our own ship, and the first thing I did was have a talk with the security chief. From that moment on there was somebody near Jimmy Rex every minute he wasn't with me or his parents.

  I didn't stop worrying, but after a while I didn't worry as much. For May and Jefferson Ormondo it was the best time of their lives. When they walked about the boat, they were hand in hand. He was a good husband to her, for all he was no beauty, and would have been a good father to Jimmy Rex if the boy had been capable of being a son.

  The money grew and grew. The more fuel we made, the more hungrily the land people clamored to burn it. We could not fix nitrogen fast enough to meet the demand for fertilizer, and so the price went up and up. We weren't The only boats on the sea anymore - now and then we'd catch sight of Japanese ones, or Australian. We built more of our own, and bigger ones, and yet there was plenty for all.

  When Jimmy Rex was three years old, we moved us all to the newest and hugest oaty-boat on the sea. Two million eight hundred thousand tons. We could have run a nation off the power we produced. It was well along in the shipyards before Jefferson Ormondo ever saw it, but he cherished it as his own, for the last of the fitting, and most of the owner's country, was his own design. May encouraged him to plan on a grand scale. And grand it surely was-but I had been happy enough on the old one. "You're a sentimental man, Jason, said May when I told her as much, "and a very dear one to me. But it's such an old boat. And little-why, it doesn't even have a decent bridle path!

  She was trying to tease me cheerful-she knew I'd never ridden a horse. "So we're going to sell it for scrap metal, then?


  "No! Then less emphatically, "I don't think so. What can we do with it, Jason? The Gulf of Mexico?

  I'd thought of that myself, but it wasn't good sense. There was good grazing in the gulf for smaller boats, but it didn't seem to me there was enough sea room for an aging oaty-boat to get out of the way of bad weather. "Maybe the Brazil Triangle, I said-that was good, too, from the eastern coast of South America to the African Gold Coast-but how did you get it there? It would never go through the Canal, of course, or even the Straits of Magellan, and the seas south of Cape Horn would probably sink it. "I'll think of something, I said, and after a while I did. I sold it to May's old in-laws. They moored it for a fixed OTEC station in the straits off Lahaina, for the gray whales to stare at. It was no joy dealing with the old witch, but she made us a fair price, and even sent May a wedding present into the bargain-a year late and a lot too little, but May took it kindly and even offered to let Jimmy Rex visit his grandmother now and then out of gratitude.

  But I missed the old boat. The big one wasn't just bigger. It was better designed. We put in a new cold- water intake system, with a single pipe five kilometers long and six meters wide. The thicker the pipe was, the better the surface-to-volume ratio, so the water didn't warm up as much on the way up. It does warm a little, of course. But the dissolved gases expand a little, which tends to cool it-in fact, we had to install relief valves along the pipe to bleed out the excess pressure; otherwise it would have ruptured. We were reliably getting a delta-T of 26 or 27-once even 29 for five days in a row. But the damn pipe was so long it wanted to curl up like spaghetti, and so we had to divert scout subs from prospecting for cold-water lenses to pushing it back into shape almost every day. And because we were bringing up so much in the way of nutrients, the fishing fleets from Korea and Peru followed us around. I didn't begrudge them the fish, but I liked it better when we couldn't see other ships on the horizon.

  May just laughed at me when I said as much. "You just don't like to change anything, she told me, halfway between teasing and tenderness. We were on a lower deck, Jimmy Rex pretending to shoot the dolphins that were larking around our moat. Naturally, I'd installed the same sort of warm-water trap as Betsy's flagship, and naturally, the dolphins weren't going to let a little two- meter-high screen keep them from jumping over into a new playpen.

  I said, "I like things to get better, not just different.

  She sighed and pulled Jimmy Rex back from the rail. "And isn't this better'?

  "It is in some ways.

  "Name one it isn't!

  I pointed over the screen, at the open ocean waters. "We didn't see dead squid floating around the old boat.

  "Jason, be fair! That's not the boat's fault. There are fish kills all over this part of the Pacific- And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the boy had climbed up onto the rail to get a better make-believe shot. "James Reginald Appermoy! she yelled, and dragged him back just as he was about to go over.

  Well, it wouldn't have hurt him much, a twelve-meter fall into a warm bathtub, but he wouldn't have liked it, either. He was good for almost a minute, and even let me put my arm around him for almost that long. But I was still worrying about the squid. A dead fish at sea is a curiosity; as soon as anything slows down enough to be dying, something else is sure to eat it. "I hear they're worse off on Hawaii, I said, and May said:

  "Oh, that reminds me. Jimmy Rex is going to see his grandmother next week.

  I said nothing, but I didn't have to. "It's all right, she reassured me.

  "It's all right if he can take Pan and Jeremy along, I bargained-they were the two security men Jimmy Rex hated least.

  "Well, if you don't think Grandma's feelings will be hurt- She saw my eyes and dropped it. ~They'll go, she promised. "But after all, the Appermoys are family. And so's Betsy, and when Jimmy Rex comes back from Hawaii, I'm thinking of inviting some of her friends over.

  "Betsy's family, I admitted, "but the trash she keeps around her are not.

  "But they're amusing, Jason. With all the space we've got now, it's no trouble to have a few guests.

  "That, I said, "is another way the old boat was better.

  But I could not really argue against family. And if we entertained Betsy and her friends, then Betsy must entertain us and ours, so May and Jeff and the boy and the four Mays and I flew over to visit good queen Betsy. Our flagships were not usually very far apart-I speak geographically. With the scouts for both our fleets getting better at finding the best delta-Ts and the hydrologists improving their predictions about how stable they were and the navigators getting more skilled at plotting courses that would graze where the deltas were greenest- well, there are only so many optimal solutions to a problem, especially as we each copied the other's technology as soon as it was proved. It was no wonder that we often came to the same solutions. And the same problems, for looking over the side of Betsy's flagship with Havrila by my side, I said, "I see you've got dead squid, too.

  "The fishing fleet's complaining, too. He nodded gravely and then laughed. "Best thing we ever didn't do, he said, "was diversify into fishing.

  "We thought about it for a while, too, I said, "and decided to stay out of perishables. There are plenty of other fields!

  And there were. We were getting into dozens of them. Mining the hot heavy-metal brine from the springs of the East Pacific Rise. Scooping up manganese pellets from the ocean bottom. The only "perishable we got into was fresh water-we built two experimental sailing tugs, huge devils with revolving masts to catch the winds, and used them to tow icebergs from Antarctica to the Persian Gulf.

  All the ventures prospered-though nothing more than the ocean-thermal that was our core money spinner- even the icebergs. They were Jefferson's own pet. He was land-born and land-oriented, and he could not resist something that would make things better for people on land. He went off to supervise the project now and then, a week at a time. I didn't like his leaving May alone. I liked it least when it began to be so that, as Jeff was leaving, some of Betsy's giddy friends would arrive. The one who came most often was Dougie d'Agasto.

  There was bound to be trouble, and it came. Dougie stayed a day too long. Jeff came home, and he must have been looking for his family with field glasses as the plane came in, for he didn't bother to go to their rooms. He dropped his bags with a deckhand and headed straight for the pool. May. looking ethereally ravishing in her skimpy suit, was watching to keep Jimmy Rex from drowning himself-heaven knows why. Dougie d'Agasto was standing beside her, whispering in her ear. His arm was around her waist, and his fingers were toying delicately with the elastic of her trunks. Jeff did not look like a fighter. His bald head gleamed sweatily in the Pacific sun, and he was shorter and fatter. But he spun d'Agasto around and decked him with one punch. Into the pool went Dougie d'Agasto, and came up screaming and fingering his bloody, but not broken, perfect nose. He was off the boat in an hour, and what May and Jefferson said to each other about it I do not know.

  I know what I said to May. First chance I got her alone I said, "You're a fool to risk Jeff for that little pimp.

  Was it any of my business? At least she didn't tell me it was not. She said seriously, "I am not risking Jeff, Uncle Jason. Dougie's flattering, though. He's such a beautiful boy.~~

  "He's a louse.

  "He's almost family.

  "He's some kind of poor relation to your former mother- in-law, yes, and that's Mob family. Those people are criminals. Drug pushers. Arm breakers. Murderers.

  She laughed good-humoredly and pecked my cheek. "Dougie never murdered anybody, Jay, except maybe a few women he loved to death. But you're right. I shouldn't let him think he's being encouraged. And I won't.

  So for six months I saw nothing of Dougie d'Agasto, but long before that he'd written both May and Jefferson most abject letters of apology. Jeff relented-he didn't ask my advice. Then Betsy came over for a party, and she brought d'Agasto with her.

  We were competing in earnest then, and actually the v
isit was partly so that we could talk over some business. There's a lot of ocean, but only narrow bands of it, and short, where the temperature difference between surface and chilly deep is enough to run the turbines at full speed. We both were sticking pretty close to the equator, too. It wasn't so much for the solar heat, although there was plenty there. It was for protection from the storms. Our boats were getting a lot too big and clumsy to risk in a hurricane. You don't get hurricanes on the equator, or anyway very rarely. The equator isn't north and it isn't south, so there's no Coriolis force to speak of. The funnel doesn't know which way to turn, so the big funnel storms don't develop there.

  So more often than not the ocean wasn't empty anymore. There were other oaty-boats in sight, often ours, more often hers--or Russians or Japanese or Norwegians. The time was coming just beyond the horizon when there might be more grazers than forage for OTECs. So there was some high-powered arguing between Betsy's nav chiefs and ours before the party started, and I can't honestly say the question ever really got resolved. Still, the guests had a good time at the party. It was New Year's Eve, and we'd given everybody any time off that could be spared at all. The guests were all over the boat, the crews were welcomed in owners' country; I saw Betsy and May singing "Auld Lang Syne with the kitchen staff and Dougie d'Agasto slapping the back of an assistant pipe fitter, and if we were out to cut each others' throats in the marketplace as soon as the party was over, the swords were sheathed while it lasted. And the next morning, while most of the ship was nursing hangovers, Jefferson Ormondo was inspecting intake gauges on a hydrogen freezer-ship line.

  There was a leak. Any leak was dangerous, but it shouldn't have been a disaster for two reasons. The first reason was that hydrogen in the open floats quickly up and away. Anyway, as soon as they heard the shriek of escaping gas, Jefferson and every body else broke for the rail-it was only a twenty-meter drop, and the water in the moat was calm and warm. The second reason was that there was no reason for a spark to ignite it. Nothing that could make a spark was ever on a hydrogen ship's intake stage.