Donald Westlake
Forever and a Death
Curtis couldn’t stop staring at the island, as they moved out away from the Mallory.
Mud. Soup, as Manville had predicted, in which every mark of man had sunk and crumbled and disappeared. And when he was ready, the same thing, the same sudden stripping away and finality, would happen again, on a much vaster scale. The buildings that fell then, when he was ready, the buildings that would crumble and melt away into the sudden soup, would not be low half-rotted barracks, but skyscrapers, concrete and metal and glass, some of which he himself had built, or helped to build.
I gave them, he thought, I’ll take them away. And with just as much pleasure, just as much skill, just as much efficiency, the buildings he had helped put up he would knock down again...
One
1
The helicopter sped eastward under a clear blue sky, low over the Coral Sea. Its flattened footprint scudded beneath it, rolling out the slate-gray waves, then immediately gone, and the waves leaped up again.
Inside, the copter had been custom refitted with light blue industrial carpet over a plywood floor on which stood eight broad swivel chairs in two rows of four, upholstered in a darker blue vinyl. A gray bulkhead up front with a curtain in its doorway separated this main cabin from a small galley, with the pilot’s compartment beyond that. On the bulkhead wall, next to the doorway, was imprinted a large symbol of an entwined RC, in dark red, looking vaguely snakelike or like an espaliered tree.
Richard Curtis, owner of the initials and the helicopter and almost everything else he could see, occupied the rear seat on the right. The other three passengers, two men and a woman, all venture capitalists with whom Curtis had had dealings in the past, were his guests, seated where he could look at them, consider them. There was too much noise inside here from engine and wind to make conversation possible, but Curtis didn’t need conversation, not now. What these three knew of his business and the reason for this flight was what they needed to know, and what they didn’t know was everything that mattered.
They had flown out here from Townsville, on Australia’s northeast coast, into the clear morning air, crossing over the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef, past Tregosse Island and Diamond Island and the Lihou Cays, and now Curtis felt the craft veer slightly to the right, which must mean the pilot had found the Mallory.
Yes, tugging gently at its sea anchor in the modest ocean swell, the yacht Mallory, named for Curtis’s father and with the entwined RC next to the name on both sides of the bow, stood offshore from Kanowit Island, where the final preparations were underway. George Manville, the engineer, would be over there on the island; this experiment was his baby. But he’d return to the Mallory when he saw the chopper arrive.
The circular white landing pad was aft, above and just forward of the observation area at the fantail. The helicopter lowered slowly, delicately, toward that constantly shifting white circle, then at last gently touched it and immediately seemed to sag, as though to clutch and hold onto the moving ship.
Even before the rotor blades had stopped turning, two groups of men ran forward, crouched, converging on the copter. The four men in gray work jumpers secured the craft to guy cables fixed in the deck, while the two in white steward uniforms slid open the side door, lowered the metal stairs, and stood by to offer a helping hand.
Curtis debarked first, nodding at the stewards, needing no help. An ocean breeze ruffled his thin gray hair as he crossed the pad, and he patted it down. He looked toward Kanowit and yes, the launch was coming this way, almost invisible against the gray sea except for its white wake.
Glass doors slid automatically open as Curtis entered the lounge, where a third steward waited, smiling a greeting, saying, “Morning, Mr. Curtis. Good flight?”
Curtis never thought about journeys, only destinations. What was a good flight? One where you weren’t killed? He ignored the question, saying, “Tell Manville to come see me in my cabin as soon as possible.” Turning to his three guests, who had followed him in here, he said, “The stewards will show you your cabins. You’ll have time to freshen up before the show starts.”
“A beautiful boat,” Bill Hardy said, smiling as he looked around in honest envy. An Australian, he was both the most candid and the shrewdest of the three.
“Thank you,” Curtis said, returning Hardy’s smile, though not with as much candor. “I like the Mallory, it relaxes me.” In fact nothing relaxed him.
Then he nodded to them all, and went away to his cabin, forward, just behind the bridge, where he could be alone until Manville arrived. He was consumed with so much anger, so much hatred, that he found it hard to be around other people for very long. The snarl beneath the surface kept wanting to break through.
And of course, everybody knew about it, which only made things worse. Everybody knew they’d driven Richard Curtis out of Hong Kong, those mainland bastards, once they’d taken over. Everybody knew they’d cheated him, and robbed him, and driven him out of his home, his industry, his life. Everybody knew Richard Curtis’s great humiliation. But what nobody knew was that the game wasn’t over.
Binoculars were kept in the drawer of the table by the large picture window in the parlor of his two-room cabin suite. Looking through them, Curtis saw Manville’s launch almost here, and far away — brought much closer through the lenses — Kanowit Island, a round low hillock of scrub in the sea, with the rotten bent shapes of the Japanese army’s barracks and sheds, nearly sixty years old, standing here and there on the island like the ghost town remnants they were.
Curtis watched the island through the binoculars. Manville’s people were still at work over there, just visible, scurrying like ants, completing the preparations.
In how long — two hours? — Kanowit Island would be changed completely from what it now was, wrenched into a new existence. If Manville were right, it would change into something good and useful; if he were wrong, it would become something destroyed and irreparable. But Manville had to be right, Curtis needed him to be right.
In how long — two hours? — step one.
2
Kim Baldur stepped out of her jeans, lost her balance, and grabbed the upright post of the bunkbed beside her to keep her feet. The Planetwatch III had been steaming serenely forward through the sea, at a regular and pleasing rhythm, and had made that one little faltering jounce at just the wrong second.
Kim decided, to be on the safe side, she should sit down on the lower bunk — it belonged to Angela, her bunkmate, already up on deck — while she finished removing the jeans and then pushed her feet down into the legs of the wetsuit. The neoprene felt, as always, a little slick and slimy when she first put it on, but her body would slowly warm it, and later, if she was in the water, it would be the most comfortable thing you could imagine.
Would she go into the water? She wanted to, she always did, but who knew what would happen today, when they finally got to the island? Something, I hope, she thought. Let something happen.
This was her first run on Planetwatch III, the first time she’d volunteered with this ecological guardian group, and she was reluctant to admit to herself that so far it had been mostly boring. She was 23, she had nothing behind her but college and a few discarded boyfriends, and it had seemed to her, before she would have to settle down into an ordinary career, that she should put her time and her intelligence and her enthusiasm to work somehow, for some greater good. To join the volunteers of Planetwatch, to use the SCUBA-diving skills she’d learned as a teenager in the Caribbean, to sail the high seas on a mission to save the world, had seemed beforehand the height of adventure. But it was strange how the days on the ship were merely drudgery, and stranger still how indifferent to her heroism the world remained.