Forever and a Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Of course.”

  Zhang turned to give orders to the helmsman, who would command the bridge during the captain’s absence, then picked up his bulky vinyl medical kit and he and Curtis made their way down through the ship.

  When the launch carrying Curtis and the diver had returned to the Mallory and been lifted into position so they could step through the gate in the railing onto the deck of the larger ship, Curtis had surprised the crewmen by insisting that he help to carry the unconscious woman. He lifted her under the arms, and one of the crewmen took her ankles, and they set off.

  The crewmen thought she was dead, and Curtis had said nothing to correct that idea. While still on the launch, he had zipped shut the wetsuit around her head again, and her breathing was so shallow that no one who wasn’t carrying her by the torso, as he was, would notice.

  He’d taken her down to stateroom 7, with the crewman holding her ankles to lead the way. This was the smallest cabin on the ship, rarely used, with a single bunk and one small round porthole and not much floor space. Curtis and the crewman had left her on the bunk, still in the wetsuit, and after locking the cabin door and taking the key with him, Curtis had come for the captain.

  Now they were back at stateroom 7. Curtis unlocked the door, they stepped in, and he shut the door again behind them. “What I want to know is,” he said, “is there much chance she’ll go on being alive. She’s bleeding out of her nose and ears.”

  “Concussion,” Zhang said. He was a thin man with a round face, about forty, his black hair very thin, so that streaks of amber skull could be seen. He’d worked as mate on commercial ships—cargo, never passenger—and had been with Curtis for nearly three years now, and very much liked his job. If it were possible for him to satisfy Curtis’s wishes, he would.

  Now he leaned over the figure supine on the bunk, with its blue-gray cold face, and said, “We must get this wetsuit off her, to begin. She needs to be warm.”

  “Fine.”

  They worked at it together, and Curtis found it strange to be undressing an attractive young woman with no sexual element involved in it. But there was no sexual element involved. His preference for this body was that it be dead, though he would much prefer that she did the dying on her own.

  Once the wetsuit was bundled onto the floor, out of the way, the girl remained dressed in the top half of a light green bathing suit, white panties, and white socks.

  Zhang removed the socks as well, but left the other garments. He tested her pulse, listened to her chest and her breathing, lifted back the lids to look into her eyes. He took her temperature by ear, felt her armpits, kneaded her rib cage and her legs, and forced open her mouth to study her tongue.

  Curtis stood watching, growing impatient. We aren’t here to save the girl, he thought, but didn’t quite say. We’re here to be certain she can’t be saved.

  Finally Zhang finished his examination. As he put his equipment back in the medical kit, he said, “The bleeding has stopped. That was only temporary, from the concussion. She may have cracked ribs, I can’t be certain, but no other bones seem to be broken. She’s in shock, and she shows some signs of hypothermia. She needs sustenance. I wish I could give her an intravenous drip, but I’m not equipped for that. When she wakes up, she should be given hot soup. And then I can talk to her about her ribs, how they feel.”

  Zhang turned away to put a sheet and blanket over the girl, while Curtis stood thinking. He watched Zhang turn the top of the blanket down around her throat. He said, “You think she’ll live.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.” Zhang tucked in the blanket along the side of the bunk, and smiled at Curtis. “She’s a healthy young girl, she should survive this.”

  “You’re absolutely certain.”

  “Well,” Zhang said, “I don’t know that much about medicine. Absolute certainty is…more than I can promise.”

  “So she might not make it?” Curtis said, trying to keep the words from sounding pointed. It wouldn’t do to be too obvious. But Zhang was no fool. Surely he could read between the lines.

  The captain hesitated, thought about his answer before he spoke the words.

  “She might not. But I would think she most likely will. It isn’t certain, but…”

  “Likely.”

  Zhang nodded.

  “Well,” Curtis said. “That would be wonderful, of course. But we can’t count on it.”

  “No,” Zhang said.

  “She might die.”

  “I really don’t think she—”

  “I’m just saying she might,” Curtis said. “And I’m sure you know, no one could possibly find fault with you if she did. That girl was badly injured. You are doing what you can, but in the end… Even the finest doctor can’t save every patient. Even the finest doctor, working with the best equipment, in a first-rate hospital, which is not what you have here.”

  Zhang nodded. He understands, Curtis decided.

  Curtis patted the man on the shoulder and headed to the door. “You will do your job, I know,” Curtis told him.

  12

  Curtis and the three money people would copter back to the mainland tomorrow. For tonight there was a celebratory dinner in the Mallory’s glass-roofed dining room aft on the top deck. Outside, the black sea breathed in slow respirations, illuminated with gentle brushstrokes from a quarter moon. Above, the thousand thousand stars formed incomprehensible but calming patterns in the black sky. Within, in subdued lighting, Curtis and Manville and the money people sat around the oval table covered with white cloth, and ate off gold-rimmed china with one entwined red RC interrupting the gold ring circling each plate.

  Stewards in white served the meal, and nobody talked business. They mostly discussed politics, some economics, and at one point Bill Hardy described at length and with gusto the story of a movie he’d recently seen on tape, about a Concorde in flight threatened by terrorists.

  Over the crème brûlée, Madame deCastro said, “I’m told you found that poor diver. He was dead, was he?”

  “A girl,” Curtis said, “Yes, a surprise to me, too. An attractive thing, a pity.”

  Bill Hardy said, “So she is dead.”

  “Oh, yes,” Curtis said. “Surprisingly unbattered, but… No one was going to survive out there.”

  “I take it,” Abdullah Wayarabo said, “she’s somewhere in cold storage.”

  “No, not cold storage, we’re not really equipped for that,” Curtis told him, and smiled around at the table. “We’re certainly not going to take all our own food out of our only freezer to put a dead body in it.”

  Manville said, “Where is she, then?”

  Carelessly, Curtis said, “In an unused cabin.”

  Madame deCastro said, “Isn’t that—I don’t know how to phrase this delicately, over dinner. Isn’t that a little warm, for a corpse?”

  “We turned the air-conditioning on full,” Curtis assured her. “And the ship will make dock at Brisbane some time tomorrow night. It won’t be a problem.” He raised his Château d’Yquem and smiled around at them all. “In the morning,” he told them, effectively ending that conversation, “when we board the helicopter, I’ll have the pilot take us over Kanowit, so we can all see how our island’s coming along.”

  13

  After dinner, after the others had retired to their cabins, George Manville found himself restless, dissatisfied. And yet, today had been a triumph for him. A comfortable future, even a wealthy future, was now assured for him at RC Structural.

  He was an engineer, not a scientist, but he had read the papers the scientists had published, he’d understood the principles, and he’d gone them one better. They had created the soliton in their laboratories; he had created the soliton in the real world, in an island in the ocean. He had seen it work, and he knew it was all his.

  And he knew Richard Curtis appreciated him. Curtis had stayed with him every step of the way, showing a genuine interest, asking questions, even taking notes, following what Manville did, un
til by now Curtis could probably create the same effect himself. They’d been that closely tied together, the last few months.

  George Manville was a stolid engineer, 34 years old, more comfortable in a construction trailer on a building site than anywhere else in the world. He’d been married once, just out of college. Jeanne was artistic, without being arty or phony; she acted in amateur theater groups, without convincing herself that Broadway had lost a great star when she’d married young; she was interested in classical music concerts and in opera, and would never find a blueprint fascinating, or want to hear the details of how a problem in stress-weight materials had been elegantly resolved.

  Since the fairly amicable divorce, nine years ago, Manville had been lonely but content, and sometimes even happy. And tonight he should be the happiest of all. He had today’s success. He had the confidence and respect of one of the major builders in the world. And yet, after midnight, the stars still fixed across the black sky, the sleeping Mallory running with the minimum of lights, Manville still paced, discontented, troubled. He wasn’t an introspective man, but now he had to be: What’s wrong tonight? Why can’t I just go to sleep, like everybody else?

  It was the diver. He knew it was the diver, he’d known it all along, but there was nothing he could do about the diver, not anymore, so he’d been avoiding the thought. But it was the diver, and there was no getting away from it.

  From the instant, this afternoon, when that orange-suited figure had gone over the rail of the other ship, disappearing into the sea, Manville had been tense, frightened, hoping against hope. Because if the diver died, he was the one who had done it. He was responsible.

  There should have been a fail-safe mechanism, a way to abort the experiment if something unexpected happened. Of course there should have been some way out, as the people on the other ship had insisted, but it had never occurred to him that such a thing might be needed. The experiment seemed so simple, so clear-cut; why would there be a need to abort?

  He should have thought about it. His job was not to foresee the unforeseeable, but it was to guard against the unforeseeable, and he hadn’t done so. He hadn’t done his job. And now a human being was dead.

  Somehow, it being a girl made it worse. It shouldn’t have, he knew that, a human being is a human being, but nevertheless it did. She’s young, and now she’s dead, through George Manville’s failure. Her life won’t happen, because of him.

  And nothing to be done, not anymore. Nothing except roam the empty rooms and decks, waiting to be tired enough to sleep.

  He wanted to see her. Was that morbid? He didn’t know why, maybe just to say the words I’m sorry in her presence, but he wanted to see her.

  Curtis had said the body was in an unused cabin. The five on the upper level were all occupied, so it had to be one of the two below. So Manville at last decided he would go see her, he would tell her he was sorry, and then he would, no arguments, go to bed.

  The interior corridors were dimly lit at night. Manville made his way to the lower deck, along the corridor, and opened the door to cabin 6. The light switch was just inside the door; flicking it on, he saw an empty room, an unmade bed. He clicked the light off again and turned to cabin 7, across the way.

  The door was locked. Curtis must have locked it, to keep anybody from stumbling in there unawares. But it only stymied Manville for a second, until he thought, This door isn’t locked against me. I already know what’s in there.

  I’m not violating anything if I ignore the lock.

  In one pocket, Manville kept a card that gave, in black letters and numbers on white, equivalences: pounds to kilos, quarts to liters, that sort of thing. It was about the size of a credit card, but thinner, more supple. Manville took it from his pocket, slipped it into the crack between door and jamb, and slid back the striker on the lock.

  The door eased open, darkness within. Manville stepped inside, switching on the light, leaving the door open. And there she was, in the bed, on her back, covered to her chin.

  That was the first oddity that struck him, that her face wasn’t covered. Then he realized the room wasn’t at all cool, it was warm; the air conditioner hadn’t been turned higher at all.

  Somebody’s mistake, obviously. Somebody on the crew had misunderstood Curtis’s orders. So it was a good thing Manville had come down here, or things might have got very unpleasant.

  He was going to turn the air-conditioning up, but before that, he thought he should cover her face. And look at her, and offer his belated and useless apology.

  He stepped closer to the bunk, and looked at her, and she was really very good-looking. And young. Twenty?

  There was even, somehow, faint color in her cheeks.

  No. That made no sense at all. Manville, not wanting to, reached out to touch that cold stiff cheek and it was warm and yielding.

  He pulled his hand back as though he’d been burned. She was alive, not dead.

  How could Curtis have made such a mistake? Or Captain Zhang, he was the one who handled medical duties aboard the ship. Couldn’t they tell the difference between her being alive and her being dead? It made no sense, no sense at all.

  Unwillingly, Manville found his methodical mind giving him the answer. Richard Curtis had several times in the last months told Manville that he had a nemesis in the ranks of the environmentalists, a fellow named Jerry Diedrich. Why Diedrich had that special hatred or rage toward him, Curtis professed not to know; he only knew, with certainty, that it was there. He’d told Manville a week ago that he half-expected Diedrich would try to make trouble at today’s experiment, and in fact Diedrich had.

  And then the diver had happened, and Diedrich was on the defensive. The diver had happened, and Curtis had immediately made it clear he would use the incident to defuse the problem of Diedrich. He’d left no doubt that he had no sympathy to waste for the diver, that the diver’s dead body would be the centerpiece of a legal action to get Diedrich out of his way forever. Because…

  Because there was something else coming, something larger. “We’ll be using this soliton thing again,” Curtis had told him, “and in a much more significant way, you wait and see.” And that was the project Curtis wanted to keep Diedrich away from, for some reason desperately needed to keep Diedrich away from.

  Desperate enough for him to make certain he had a dead body to deliver to the authorities in Australia? Manville knew Curtis was a hard man, in business he was famously ruthless and cold, famously hard. But was he that hard?

  Could he be?

  Manville looked at the girl. Her breaths were shallow, but regular. She was not dying, but mending.

  He didn’t know what to believe, or he was afraid to know what to believe. It was better now, at least for now, that nothing made sense.

  He turned away at last, switched off the light, and left the cabin, letting the door snick locked again behind him. As he’d promised himself, he went straight from there to bed, but it was hours before he got to sleep.

  14

  Snick.

  That was the first sound since the shock wave had taken her that penetrated into Kim’s stunned brain, to bring her up from the cocoon she’d been pending in. Her brain heard the sound, tried to process it, failed to give the sound a meaning, and the resulting unsatisfied curiosity, unanswered question, drove her up closer to consciousness, and more bewildering sense impressions. Her body felt a thrumming vibration, like a ship, but very unlike Planetwatch III. The sheets above and below her were a texture different from what she was used to. The faint odor in her nostrils was like polished wood (the odor on Planetwatch III, not that faint, was of diesel oil). Confused, troubled by the incomprehensibility of where she was, she came closer again to consciousness.

  And memory. That great underwater blur roared toward her again, and her eyes popped open, and she was terrified.

  Now it came in a rush, just as the shock wave had done. She’d been on deck, on Planetwatch III, and she’d listened with the others to the ship�
�s PA system relaying the debate between Jerry and the people on the yacht. She’d realized they weren’t getting anywhere, she’d believed Jerry’s insistence that there had to be a way for Curtis’s people to halt the experiment, and she’d finally decided the only way to force the issue was to throw herself in harm’s way. Like the student who’d stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square.

  In the water, just beneath the surface, she had at first swum strongly toward the island, seeing the jagged landscape of coral below her. But then she’d decided she shouldn’t get too far from the ship, she should stay close enough so they could signal her when the experiment was called off, so she turned about and headed back, arms at her sides, flippered legs scissoring in strong rhythm as she looked down through the facemask at the coral seabed, receding in bumps and jags as she moved into deeper water.

  Some trembling in the sea around her made her look over her shoulder, and at first she couldn’t understand what she seemed to see back there. It was like trying to watch a movie with the projector out of focus. It was a blur, a thick gray-blue-silver-black blur, fifteen or twenty feet from top to bottom, as wide as the whole ocean, and it was rolling at her like an avalanche, like a bulldozer burying an anthill.

  In panic, seeing that thing hurtle on, she yearned upward, and her flippers gave one strong kick to propel her toward the surface before the blur caught her and shook her like a puppy shaking a rag doll, and her last thought was, Stupid me, now I’ve killed myself.

  She stared upward in darkness in this strange cabin, reliving the moment, clutched by the panic, unable to think, barely able to breathe, living that panic and that surge of impossible power all over again, her entire body clenching until the pain in her chest forced her to let go, to ease back, to take a long slow (painful) breath and get that terrified butterfly brain inside her head to slow down, slow down, settle, settle.

  I’m in a bed, she thought. I’m in a cabin on a ship, but not my own ship. The yacht? Why didn’t my own people rescue me?