Hot Sky at Midnight

20

it was raining cats and dogs as the Tonopah Maru came into San Francisco Bay, towing its iceberg behind it. How appropriate, Carpenter thought, that the first rain in God only knew how many months should be falling with crazy superabundance on San Francisco on the very day that the trawler showed up with this huge addition to the local water supply.

The weather had been cruelly cloudless the entire second half of the voyage home, no sign of the usual, even ubiquitous, masses of water vapor that congested and whitened the sky nearly all of the time in most parts of the world. That was one of the greenhouse effects, the increase in atmospheric water vapor, which helpfully served to amplify the relatively small basic warming impulse that the CO₂ and other greenhouse gases caused. But, for some inexplicable reason, day after day out at sea the sky above the Tonopah Maru had been immaculate and the sun had beaten with unrestrained fury against the berg. Which had, mirror-dusted though it was, given up much of its substance to the sea under the daily solar barrage.

Still, there was plenty of it left for San Francisco. And here they were at journey’s end, chugging under the venerable Golden Gate Bridge with something like seventeen or eighteen hundred kilotons of the Antarctic ice cap in tow, heading into a dark squally afternoon, torrents and torrents of H₂O dropping with lunatic irascibility upon the city by the bay.

“Will you look at that,” Hitchcock said, standing on deck next to Carpenter in the drenching downpour. “Actual fucking rain.”

“Beautiful,” Carpenter said. “Gorgeous.”

It wasn’t, not really. The rain was raising clouds of ambient filth from the city streets, lifting the accretions of dust that had been building up for months or perhaps years and hurling them upward, so that the downpour became ever grayer as the airborne crud came drifting copiously down again. Streams of garbage were falling from the sky. Yes, Carpenter thought, very lovely, very pretty to behold.

There were places, he knew from his stint in the Samurai Weather Service, where a sweet, cleansing, fertility-giving rain fell practically every day: the eastern end of the Mediterranean, say, or the grain belt of Saskatchewan, or the Siberian plains. But this was not one of those places. Rain along the West Coast was such a rarity that it was more of a nuisance than anything else when it did finally arrive, generally in some kind of absurd excessiveness like this. It came with insufficient frequency to maintain any kind of water supply, serving mainly to liberate the accumulated chemical gunk on the streets and roads and turn them into funhouse slideways, to cut ghastly gullies in the withered and defoliated hills east of the bay, and to churn up the loose particulate grime that lay everywhere in the city, redistributing the mess but not removing it.

What the hell. He was safely home, and with his cargo. So the voyage had been a success, except for the one little blemish of the squid-ship event. And Carpenter tried not to think about that.

He went under cover, into the blister dome at the stern. Caskie was there, doing something to a control panel. Carpenter said to her, “Get me the Samurai facility at the Port of Oakland, will you? I need to know which pier I’m supposed to deliver this thing to. I’ll take the call in my cabin.”

“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 Company 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, “There 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.”

“Isabelle won’t be coming with you tonight, will she?”

“God, no,” Rhodes said. “Antonio’s, in half an hour. All right? Be seeing you. Welcome back, you old sea-dog!”

“Yeah,” Carpenter said. “Home is the sailor. For better or for worse.”

The rain clattered against the Perspex domes of the shoreside restaurant like pebbles tossed by an angry giant. The bay was almost invisible, lost in the gray of twilight and the turbulent swirlings of the storm. There was practically no one in the restaurant but the two of them.

Nick Rhodes seemed stunned by Carpenter’s account of what had happened at sea. He listened to the entire story in a kind of numbed incredulity, barely saying a word, staring fixedly at Carpenter throughout the long recitation and breaking his rigid concentration only to bring his glass to his lips. Then when Carpenter was done Rhodes began to ask questions, peripheral ones at first, then more directly attacking the issue of whether there might really have been room for the warring factions of Captain Kovalcik and Captain Kohlberg aboard the Tonopah Maru, so that in effect Carpenter found himself telling the story all over again, piecemeal this time.

With each telling, Carpenter had more difficulty in accepting his own version of the events. It was beginning to seem to him as though it would not in any way have been a serious problem to take the castaways on board. Put five of them here, six over here, stick them in closets and heads and any other bit of available space, cut everybody’s Screen ration down so that there would have been enough to go around—

Or maybe just to have towed them in their three dinghies all the way to San Francisco—

No. No.

“It wasn’t doable, Nick. You just have to take my word for it. There were fifteen or twenty of them, and we had just barely enough living space on board for the five of us. Let alone supplies of food and Screen. Jesus Christ, do you think I wanted to maroon a bunch of people in the middle of the Pacific? Don’t you think I suffered like a son of a bitch over the decision?”

Rhodes nodded. Then he looked at Carpenter strangely and said, “Did you report to anybody that you had encountered a ship in distress?”

“It wasn’t necessary. They had a radio of their own,” Carpenter said sullenly.

“You didn’t say a word to the maritime authorities, then? You just turned away and left them there?”

“Yes. I just turned away and left them there.”

“Jesus, Paul,” Rhodes said quietly. He signaled for one more round of drinks. “Jesus. I don’t think that was a good idea at all.”

“No. It really wasn’t. It was like running away from the scene of an accident, wasn’t it?” Carpenter had trouble meeting Rhodes’ eyes. “But you weren’t there, Nick. You don’t know the pressures I was under. Our ship was tiny. I had this huge berg in tow and I wanted to clear out before it melted. The people on the squid ship had been at each other’s throats for weeks and seemed absolutely crazy and dangerous. And they were Kyocera people, besides, not that that was a deciding factor, but it was on my mind. Taking them on board was simply impossible. So I bolted and ran. I don’t expect any applause for that, but it’s what I did. As for calling for help for them, I figured that they had sent out their own SOS and there was no need for me to do it for them. As for filing an official report on the incident, I didn’t do that because— because—”

He fumbled a moment for words without finding any.

Then he said, into Rhodes’ suddenly unsparing gaze, “I suppose I figured that it would reflect badly on me if I told the authorities that I had encountered a ship in distress and hadn’t done anything about it. So I just tried to hush the whole thing up. Jesus, Nick, it was my first command.”

“You told your crew not to say anything about it.”

“Yes. But they did, anyway.”

“The survivors of the other ship probably reported you too, right?”

“What survivors? There couldn’t have been any survivors.”

“Oh, Paul—Paul—”

“It was my first command, Nick. I never asked to be a fucking sea captain.”

“You let them make you one, though.”

“Right. I let them. And so for the first time in my life I did something really shitheaded. Well, I’m sorry about that. But I couldn’t help myself, Nick. Do you see that?”

“Have another drink.”

“What good will that do?”

“It usually does me some good. Maybe it will for you, too.” Rhodes smiled. “I think it’ll work out all right for you in the end, Paul. The hearing, and all.”

“You do?”

“The Company will cover for you. As you say, there was no way you could have brought those people onto your ship. The only thing you did wrong was to fail to make a proper report of the incident, and that’s probably going to cost you some slope, but Samurai isn’t going to want it to come out in public that one of its ships left a bunch of castaways to die—it looks bad even if it was justifiable—and so they’ll square the court in some way and get the charges dismissed, and shove the whole story out of sight, and quietly transfer you back to the Weather Service, or something. After all, throwing you to the wolves isn’t going to bring those Kyocera people back to life, and any kind of finding of guilt would become a matter of public record that wouldn’t do Samurai’s image any good. They’re going to bury the whole event and make it seem as though nothing ever took place out there between your ship and that Kyocera one. I’m sure of it, Paul.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Carpenter said. He could hear an odd mixture of pessimism and desperate hope in his tone.

Up till now, he had regarded everything that happened, including the 442 hearing, as relatively minor, a tough judgment call that he had handled as well as he could, all things considered, and which now because of the innate class hostilities of Hitchcock and the rest was entangling him in an administrative hassle that would at worst give him a black mark on his record. But somehow in the course of half an hour’s conversation with his oldest and closest friend it had all come to seem much worse to him, the act of a criminally panicky man who had funked the only really critical decision of his life. He was starting to feel as though he had murdered the people in those three dinghies with his own hands.

No. No. No. No.

There was nothing I could do to save them. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Time to talk about something else. Carpenter said, “You mentioned on the phone that some sort of complication had come up for you while I was away, that you would tell me about it tonight.”

“Yes.”

“And so—?”

“I had a job offer,” Rhodes said. “Right after you sailed. Kyocera-Merck called me out to their Walnut Creek headquarters and I had an interview with a Level Three of theirs named Nakamura, the most ice-cold human being you could possibly imagine, who invited me to jump to K-M with my whole adapto team. They would give me a blank check, essentially, to set up whatever I wanted in the way of a lab facility.”

“We talked about this, just before I sailed. You were worried about Samurai getting too powerful, having too much control over the genetic destiny of the human race. This is precisely what I told you to do: jump over to Kyocera—I think I mentioned them specifically—and set them up as a competitor to Samurai in adapto technology. Thereby forestalling the Samurai genetic monopoly that you feared so much. Well? Are you going to do it?”

“You haven’t heard the whole story, Paul. There’s a man named Wu Fang-shui tangled up in this. Until about twenty years ago he was the ranking genius of genetic research. The Einstein of the profession, the Isaac Newton, you might say. The trouble with him was that he got his ends mixed up with his means and carried out a truly hideous program of unethical gene-splitting experiments off in one of the Central Asian republics. Using human subjects. Involuntary subjects. Real nightmare stuff: mad-scientist stuff, you might almost say. Except that he was completely sane, just had no moral sense built into him anywhere. Eventually the word of what Wu had been up to got out, and supposedly he committed suicide. But actually what he did was to disguise himself as a very convincing woman and go into sanctuary in space—he disappeared up to one of the L-5 habitats and was never heard from again.”

“And you’re beginning to see yourself as some kind of moral monster equivalent to this Wu Fang person, is that it?”

“That’s not it at all,” Rhodes said. “What has happened is that Kyocera has peeled Dr. Wu Fang-shui out of his sanctuary habitat, don’t ask me how, and has him working on the faster-than-light-starship program for them. Evidently the ship’s crew is going to need some kind of genetic retrofitting, and Wu is doing it for them. After he’s finished with that, Nakamura said, he’ll be made available to my research group as a consultant.”

“This twisted but utterly formidable geneticist.”

“The Einstein of my profession, yes. Working with me.”

“But you abhor him so much that you wouldn’t dream of—”

“You’re still missing the point, Paul,” Rhodes said. “Right now we’re a long way from solutions to some of the biggest adapto puzzles. The big ambitious total-transformation scheme that my kid Van Vliet laid out is full of obvious holes, and even he is coming to recognize that. A mind on the order of Wu Fang-shui’s will be able to deal with those problems and solve them. Put him on the team and we’d be likely to have full adapto technology ready in no time at alL Which would mean that Kyocera would have the genetic monopoly that I’ve been afraid of giving to Samurai.”

“And therefore you’re not going to accept the offer,” Carpenter said.

“I’m not sure about that.”

“No?”

“I still wonder: Do I have any real right to stand in the way of a technology that will enable the human race to deal with the changes that are coming down the pike at it?”

Carpenter knew that a hole in Rhodes’ logic would turn up sooner or later. And here it was. “You can’t have it both ways, Nick. You say you don’t want to impede progress, but you’ve just finished telling me that you’re worried about giving one company a monopoly over—”

“I am. I repeat my question, though. My team plus Wu Fang-shui can probably produce the answers we need for survival. But my team belongs to Samurai and Wu belongs to Kyocera. If we put them together, we get things worked out within two or three years. If we don’t, who knows if anybody will ever come up with the solutions to the problems? Do I want to be the key player that makes total-transform a reality? Or do I want to be the key player who prevents or seriously delays total-transform? It’s all up to me, isn’t it? And I’m not at all sure what I should do. In fact I’m completely mixed up, Paul.” Rhodes grinned. “Not for the first time.”

“No,” Carpenter said. The familiar air of moral confusion rising from Rhodes almost took his mind off his own troubles. “Not for the first time.”

The actual 442 hearing took place three days later, once more at the Port of Oakland’s Administration Shed Fourteen. The rain had not halted for a moment during those three days: a steady maddening downpour, a drumbeat of great filthy drops pelting the entire Bay Area in a demented reversal of the long-standing weather pattern. No one could say how much longer it would go on before the iron band of drought clamped once again over the West Coast. Meanwhile, though, highways were flooding, houses were tumbling down cliffs, whole hillsides were slashed by deep gullies, rivers of mud flowed in the streets.

When Carpenter presented himself for the hearing there were only two other human beings in the room: the hearing officer with the Irish name and the androidal-looking woman bailiff. Carpenter wondered where Tedesco, who was supposed to be representing him on behalf of Samurai Industries, was. Taking the day off because of the rain?

O’Brien, O’Reilly, O’Leary, gaveled the hearing into session. This time Carpenter took the trouble of noticing and remembering his name. O’Reilly, it was. O’Reilly.

“Objection,” Carpenter said immediately. “My counsel isn’t here.”

“Counsel? We don’t have counsel here.”

“Mr. Tedesco of Samurai. My representative. He was supposed to be present today.”

O’Reilly looked at the bailiff.

“Mr. Tedesco has filed a stipulation of posteriori,” she said.

“A what?” Carpenter asked.

“A request to be absent today and to receive a transcript of today’s proceedings at a later time. He will file appropriate responses if he deems it necessary to do so,” O’Reilly said.

“What? I’m on my own today?” Carpenter said.

Impassively the hearing officer said, “Let us proceed. We enter into evidence the following exhibits—”

“Hold it a second! I demand the right to a proper representative!”

O’Reilly gave Carpenter a long cool glance. “You have a proper representative, Captain Carpenter, and he will be given an opportunity to file an appropriate response in due course. I’d like no further outbursts, if you please. We enter into evidence the following exhibits—”

Leadenly Carpenter watched as Exhibit A appeared on a visor mounted at one end of the long tubular room. Exhibit A was the testimony of Maintenance/Operations Officer Rennett, describing her visit to the Calamari Maru in the company of Captain Carpenter. Crisply and efficiently Rennett outlined the conditions she had observed aboard the squid ship, the deposed and sedated officers, the statements of the mutinous Kovalcik. It all seemed accurate enough to Carpenter, and not in any way damaging to him. Then came Exhibit B, the statement of Navigator Hitchcock, telling how the movements of the hooked iceberg in the roughening sea had accidentally swamped the squid ship, and describing the way the three dinghies had come toward the Tonopah Maru seeking help, and how Captain Carpenter had ordered the crew of the Tonopah Maru to ignore the castaways and begin the return voyage to San Francisco. That part sounded pretty horrendous even to Carpenter; but he couldn’t say that Hitchcock had distorted anything, particularly. It was merely what had happened.

He assumed that the statements of Cassie and Nakata would now be played. And then, presumably, he would be given a chance to speak in his own defense—to explain the difficulty of the situation, the limited capacity of his ship and the inadequate supplies of provisions and Screen, and to show how in that instant of decision he had chosen to value the lives of his own crew over those of the strangers. Carpenter had already decided to declare that he felt contrite for having had to abandon the castaways, that he deeply regretted the necessity of it, that he hoped he would be forgiven for having made the choice he had and for having been too flustered afterward to file a proper report. Would Tedesco approve of his taking a repentant stance? Maybe not; maybe it was a weak legal position. Fuck Tedesco, though. Tedesco should have been here to advise him, and he wasn’t.

Carpenter allowed himself to feel a shred of confidence, even so. Rhodes’ words kept running through his mind.

—The Company will cover for you. Samurai isn’t going to want it to come out in public that one of its ships left a bunch of castaways to die—and so they’ll square the court in some way and get the charges dismissed, and shove the whole story out of sight, and transfer you back to the Weather Service, or something.

—They’re going to bury the whole event and make it seem as though nothing ever took place out there between your ship and that Kyocera one.

—I’m sure of it, Paul.

—I’m sure of it, Paul.

—I’m sure of it, Paul.

“Exhibit C,” O’Reilly announced. “The statement of Captain Kovalcik.”

What?

Yes, there she was on screen, stony-faced, icy-eyed, definitely Kovatak in the flesh. She hadn’t perished out there in her open boat after all. No, no, there she was, alive and staring grimly out of the visor, telling a terrible tale of survival at sea, of privation and torment, of eventual rescue by a patrol ship. Half of her people had died. All because the Samurai iceberg trawler’s captain had been unwilling to lift a finger to save them.

Even Carpenter had to admit it was a frightful indictment. Kovalcik said nothing about the mutiny she had led; she went completely around the fact that Calamari Maru had been swamped as a direct result of her own incompetent decision to remain in the vicinity of the huge captive iceberg; she utterly left out of the reckoning Carpenter’s own protests that his ship was incapable of taking on so big a load of passengers. She concentrated entirely on her request for succor and Carpenter’s heartless refusal to provide it. When Kovalcik had finished speaking her terrible image still glared out at him from the visor as though it had burned itself into the fabric of the visor.

“Captain Carpenter?” O’Reilly said.

So at last he was to have his day in court. He rose and spoke, running through the whole grimy tale one more time, the summons to Kovalcik’s ship, the signs of the mutiny, the sedated officers and the request to take them aboard, then the swamping of the other ship and the three dinghies bobbing in the sea. Listening to himself, Carpenter was struck by the hollowness of his own case. He should have taken them on board, he told himself, no matter what. Even if everyone starved on the way back to port. Even if they all ran out of Screen in a day and a half and burned right down through skin and flesh and muscle to the bone. Or else have called in for their rescue by others. But he pushed on through, limning the events, once more offering his self-justification, his arguments from efficiency and possibility, his statement of contrition and repentance for any errors committed.

Suddenly he was all out of words, standingjnute before the hearing officer and the bailiff.

There was a roaring silence. What was going to happen now? A verdict? A sentence?

O’Reilly banged the gavel. Then he turned away, as though to some other case that was before him on the desk.

“Am I supposed to wait?” Carpenter asked.

“The proceedings are adjourned,” the bailiff said. Picked up a sheaf of folders. Lost all interest in him, not that she had ever had much to begin with.

Nobody said a word to Carpenter as he left the building.

As soon as he reached the Dunsmuir, half an hour later, Carpenter put in a call to Tedesco at the Samurai number he had been given. He expected to get some kind of corporate runaround; but to his amazement Tedesco appeared almost at once.

“You weren’t there,” Carpenter said. “Why the hell not?”

“It wasn’t required of me. I’ve seen the transcript.”

“Already? That was goddamn fast. What are you going to do now?”

“Do? What’s there to do? A fine has been levied for your negligence. The Port has stripped you of your sea license. Very likely Kyocera will sue us now for letting their people die out there in the Pacific, and that might be quite expensive. We just have to wait and see.”

“Am I going to be demoted?” Carpenter asked.

“You? You’re going to be fired.”

“I—fired?” Carpenter felt as though he had been punched. He struggled to catch his breath. “The Company is behind me, you said at the first hearing. Fired? Is that how you’re behind me?”

“Things changed, Carpenter. We didn’t know then that there were survivors. Survivors alter the entire circumstance, don’t you see? Kyocera wants your head on a platter, and we’re going to give it to them. We would probably have kept you on if there hadn’t been any survivors, if this had simply been an internal matter involving Samurai and the Port of Oakland—your word against that of your own crew, a matter of officer judgment and nothing else—but now there are accusers rising up publicly in wrath. There’s going to be a stink. How can we keep you, Carpenter? We would have hushed this all up and you might have hung on with us, but now we can’t, not with survivors speaking up, making us all look like shit. You think we can give you a new assignment now? Your new assignment is to look for a job, Carpenter. You have thirty days’ notice, and you’re damned lucky to get that. A termination counselor will advise you of your rights. Okay, Carpenter? You see the picture?”

“I wasn’t expecting—”

“No. I guess you weren’t. I’m sorry, Carpenter.”

Dazed, his breath coming in heavy shocked gusts, Carpenter stared at the visor long after it had gone blank. His head was whirling. He had never felt such inner devastation. Suddenly there was a hole through the middle of the planet, and he was falling through it—falling, falling—

Gradually he calmed a little.

He sat quietly for a while, breathing deeply, trying not to think of anything at all. Then, automatically, he started to call Nick Rhodes.

No.

No, not now. Rhodes would be sympathetic, sure; but he had as much as already said that he thought Carpenter had brought all this on himself, hadn’t he? Carpenter didn’t need to hear more of that just now.

Call a friend. A friend who isn’t Nick Rhodes.

Jolanda, he thought. Nice round jiggly unjudgmental Jolanda. Call her and take her out to dinner and then go back to her house somewhere in Berkeley with her and spend the night fucking her blind. It sounded good, until he remembered that Jolanda was up in the L-5s with the Israeli, Enron.

Someone else, then.

Not necessarily in the Bay Area. Someone far away. Yes, he thought. Go. Go. Far away from this place. Run. Take yourself a little trip.

To see Jeanne, for instance. Yes, sweet Jeannie Gabel, over there in Paris: always a good pal, always a sympathetic shoulder for him.

She was the one who had gotten him into this sea-captain business in the first place. She wouldn’t come down on him too hard for the mess that he had made of it. And during his thirty remaining days of Level Eleven privileges, why the hell not stick the Company for air fare to Paris and a bit of fine dining at the bistros along the Seine?

He keyed into the Samurai trunk line and asked for the Paris personnel node. A quick rough calculation told Carpenter that it was probably past midnight in Paris, but that was okay. He was in a bad way; Jeanne would understand.

The trouble was that Jeanne Gabel was no longer at the Paris office. In good old Samurai Industries fashion she had been transferred to Chicago, they told him.

He ordered the phone net to follow her path. It took only a moment to trace her.

“Gabel,” said the voice at the other end, and then there she was on the visor, the cheerful warm stolid face, the square jaw, the dark straightforward eyes. “Well, now! Home is the sailor, home from the—”

“Jeannie, I’m in trouble. Can I come see you?”

“What—how—” A quick recovery from her surprise. “Of course, Paul.”

“I’ll hop the next plane to Chicago, okay?”

“Sure. Sure, come right away. Whatever’s best for you.”

But his Company credit card seemed no longer good for air fare. After a couple of tries at reprogramming it, Carpenter gave up and tried car rental instead. Evidently they hadn’t canceled that yet, because a reservation came through on the first shot. Driving to Chicago probably wouldn’t be fun, but if he hustled he supposed he could make it in two days, at most three. He called Jeanne back and told her to expect him by midweek. She blew him a kiss.

The car delivered itself to the Dunsmuir forty minutes later. Carpenter was waiting outside the hotel with his suitcase behind him. “We’re going east,” he told it. “Head for Walnut Creek and keep on going.” He put the car on full automatic and leaned back and closed his eyes as it started up toward the hills. There was nothing to see, anyway, but the black unrelenting curtain of rain.