She laughed. “Silly, that’s part of the thing. Nobody knows. It’s a secret.”
Clark remembered seeing the tickets in her bedroom. They had been paid for by Advance. “Tell me,” he said. “How did you hear about this place?”
She sighed. “You doctors. You never get away from your patients long enough to…”
She picked up the latest issue of Holiday magazine and thumbed through it quickly, finally turning back a page. She handed the magazine to Clark.
The full-page ad read:
EDEN ISLAND
Everything Under The Sun
Never was there a resort like this before! Name your game: tennis, swimming, badminton, skin-diving, deep-sea fishing, hunting (wild boar), water-skiing—Eden Island has the finest, most modern facilities for everything. Or you may prefer to spend your time in our casino, dancing and dining at one of our twelve different clubs. Everything has been provided for you, all under the most expert management.
The sun, of course, takes care of itself.
Eden Island: there’s never been anything quite like it before.
There was also a large color photograph showing a beach, a dock with sailboats, and back from the shore, secluded in manicured grounds and shaded by palms, an enormous white resort complex of hotels, swimming pools and tennis courts. It was breathtakingly beautiful.
“Ads like this,” Sharon said, “have been running for weeks. Everybody’s talking about it. Everybody’s going. They say it will be the resort of the century, when it’s finished.”
“It’s not finished?”
“No. San Cristobal—that’s the real name of the island—is five square miles. The company that is developing it says they won’t finish for twenty years.”
“What company is that?”
She shrugged. “Some American corporation.”
He looked at her steadily. “Advance?”
“Advance what?”
“The Advance Corporation,” Clark said.
For a moment, she seemed puzzled, and then she laughed. “You really did check up on me, didn’t you? That’s George’s company. He’s such a dear—but no, Advance has nothing to do with this.”
“How do you know?”
“Because George told me about it. They’re into all sorts of stuff—electronic control of the brain, and new birth control chemicals—but not resorts, love.”
“You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.” She was looking at him in an odd way, as if she might become angry.
“Where’d you get the tickets?” he asked.
She shook her head. “You’re a glutton for punishment.”
“Just curious.”
“George got them for me,” she said. “You see, I was originally going with him.”
“Oh.”
“But he canceled out at the last minute. Some conference on enzymes in Detroit.” She looked out the window as the plane taxied down the runway, gathered speed, and began to climb into the air.
“And now,” she said, “I’d like to change the subject.”
An hour later, over drinks, he said, “You were right about one thing. I did check up on you. I even went to see Abraham Shine.”
“He’s a dear man,” Sharon said, biting into a shrimp hors d’oeuvre.
“He mentioned that you were concerned about corporations.”
“Concerned? That wasn’t it at all.” She munched on the shrimp. “I was terrified.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It was this kind of irrational thing, a fear. Like there were so many huge complex companies, and I was just a little person, all alone. I felt… powerless.”
“And you were worried about—”
“Being controlled,” she said, nodding. “I was. It was an awful period in my life. I would go to bed at night and dream that some giant corporation was manipulating me, like a puppet and its master, behind the scenes, pulling the strings. I felt I couldn’t control anything, that I was just being tugged this way and that.”
“Why did you feel that?”
“Listen,” she said, taking a sip of her drink. Her face was already flushed from a previous drink; she looked young and pretty and very sexy. “I’ll tell you something. The life of a young girl in this town—I mean LA—is pretty miserable. You want to get into the business, and you grow up thinking, dreaming about it, how wonderful it would be, attending your opening night and climbing out of the limousine wearing a chiffon gown and a white fur coat… And then you start working on it, you quit school one day at sixteen and you say the hell with algebra, I’m going to make pictures, and you start working. You get an agent. I had a jerk named Morrie Sandwell. He set up some meetings with producers, sort of introducing me around. The producers explained how tough it was for a newcomer to break in, how a new girl really needed the guiding touch of an experienced person in the business, someone with contacts. So okay, you get your contacts, you go along with the touch, because you have that dream of the opening night, and getting out of the limousine and looking up at the marquee with your name there. It’s a good dream.”
She pushed her drink away.
“And then one day you wake up and realize what the hell you’ve been doing, hanging around with a bunch of nasty old guys and nasty old hotel rooms and too many drinks and too many sour laughs. And all you’ve got to show for it is a walk-on in Gunslinger and two lines as the cook in Gorman’s Heroes. And you just see it, clear and plain: you’ve been used.”
“And then?”
“Then you start seeing someone like Dr. Shine. He was very good for me. He got me out of this corporation-manipulation thing, and into something else. He made me believe that I could control my destiny. So I fired my agent got a new one, and started fresh. I played with a new set of rules—my rules—and it was a whole new game.”
She looked at him steadily.
“And I’m winning,” she said. “This time, I’m winning.”
It was raining in Miami—a cold, October rain that presaged a hurricane brewing to the south. They had two hours in the airport and wandered around together, looking at the shops, having a hamburger and a drink. Then Sharon said she wanted to try on sweaters in one of the airport stores, and Clark went off by himself. He walked aimlessly, not paying much attention to anything.
And then he realized.
He was being followed. It was a short man with a plastic clear raincoat which showed a rumpled blue suit underneath. Clark walked on, then looked back.
The man was still there. He had a bland, expressionless face. Clark wondered if he was one of the passengers on the plane, but could not recall his face. But he was attentive when he boarded flight 409 from Miami to Nassau, New Providence. The man in the raincoat did not board the plane with him. Odd, he thought. Sharon was already in her seat. As he sat down, he said, “Find anything?”
“No,” she said, “they were all wrong for me.”
There was a hazy, humid sun in Nassau. They were met at the small terminal by a representative of Eden Island, who helped them all through Bahamian customs with remarkable ease, and then led them outside to a bus. It was a normal sort of bus, except that it was painted flame red and hot orange, with black lettering on the side: EDEN ISLAND EXPRESS.
They climbed aboard and were given grapes and other fruit while the man explained that the bus would take them to the seaplane.
“Purely a temporary arrangement, folks,” the man said. “You see, we haven’t yet built the airstrip on Eden. But they’re working on it. Of course,” he said, “most people find a seaplane quite an experience, yes indeed, quite an experience.”
Clark stared out the window for the duration of the dreary trip from the airport to the port of Nassau, set down beneath the crest upon which the old fort was erected. The bus drove directly to the waterfront, and pulled up before a large seaplane. Everyone got on board.