“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 hi
m 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.
Hot Sky at Midnight Page 28
