Dressed, and with her flippers tucked under her left arm, Kim left the small metal-walled cabin. Outside, the narrow corridor was empty, and echoed as usual with some faint distant clang; something to do with the engine room.
As she moved along the corridor toward the ladder, which was merely a series of metal rungs bolted into the side wall and leading up to a round hatch always kept open except in heavy weather, Kim unconsciously brushed her right knuckles along the cool wall, a habit she had learned early on because of the sometimes unpredictable movements of the ship.
A small freighter that for years, under the name Nyota, had plied the Indian Ocean out of Djibouti, this vessel had been bought cheap by supporters of Planetwatch after Planetwatch II had been sunk by an underwater explosive off a French atoll. She was a solid ship, refitted for passengers but still retaining a bluntness and a tendency to plunge hard into the waves that was a leftover from her freighter days.
Kim climbed the ladder one-handed, lithe as a monkey, the flippers still under her left arm. At the top, she turned to the open doorway in the metal wall just beside her and stepped out onto the deck.
Here she stood at the prow, one deck below the bridge, her ears full of the rushing hiss of the ship as it cleaved its way through the water. The sense of motion this far forward was mostly vertical, short hard slaps up and down as Planetwatch III sliced northward toward Kanowit.
She looked first at the sea; she always did. Today it was a pebbly mid-gray, with darker tones beneath and tiny whitecaps popping here and there. A three-foot sea, at most; bliss to dive in.
And the sky was almost completely clear, a gleaming acrylic blue, except for a bundle of gray clouds along the western horizon, toward Australia. They’d be having a beautiful sunset over there, some hours from now.
It had at first astonished Kim that there were no real sunsets in mid-ocean, not what was meant by the phrase ‘a beautiful sunset.’ The sun did often go down behind the waves in a variegated display of color, pale shades of pink and blue and green darkening toward night, but all in a neat and controlled manner, without that bruised sky, those blazing reds and oranges, that lush riot of purple exclamation points. “What you’re looking at when you look at a sunset ashore,” Jerry had explained, early in the trip, “is pollution. What you see out here is the natural sunset. What people ooh and aah over back home is just rotten air, clouds of toxic waste, streams of acid rain. When the sunset you see off the coast of Malibu looks like that one out there, we’ll know we’ve done our job.”
Jerry Diedrich was Planetwatch’s leader aboard, and Kim was coming to the belief that he knew everything about everything. A lean and weathered man in his early forties, he had a starving poet’s good looks, and Kim sheepishly knew she would have developed a schoolgirl crush on him weeks ago if he hadn’t made his homosexuality so open and unquestionable. (He and Luther Rickendorf were the only couple on the ship.)
Turning away from sea and sky, Kim looked up toward the recessed deck next above her, where Angela stood, in faded cut-offs and a dark green halter, shielding her eyes from the sun with both cupped hands as she stared out at the sea.
“Kanowit Island,” Angela said, and pointed out toward the horizon, northward. “Dead ahead. Jerry says we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Good,” Kim said. She moved away down the narrow port deck toward the SCUBA tanks.
3
“This is George Manville, our genius engineer,” Curtis said. “George, this is Bill Hardy, from Australia, Abdullah Wayarabo from Indonesia, Madame Zilah Graca deCastro from Brazil.”
They all greeted each other, Curtis smiling on them with what seemed like paternal indulgence, seeing the contrasts among them. Manville, for instance, was an engineer, and nothing but an engineer, who had made no accommodation to the fact that he was presently quartered on a ship. He still wore the same workboots, the same chinos, the same button-down work shirt with the ballpoint pen in his breast pocket, as though he were on some construction site in Chicago. He was a simple creature, George Manville, but brilliant, usefully brilliant.
The venture capitalists were as unlike one another as they were unlike George Manville. Bill Hardy, the Australian, was open and hearty, a glad-hander, everybody’s pal, who hid his icy shrewdness as though it were a fault, rather than his greatest strength. Abdullah Wayarabo, connected through various marriages to the Indonesian royal family, had a courtier’s smile and smoothness mixed with the arrogant assurance of the extremely rich; he could command while seeming to be obsequious, and almost always get his way. Madame deCastro, the Brazilian widow of a major construction figure in South America, was a heavyset severe woman in her sixties, who had never been noticed during her husband’s life; since his death, it had become clear she’d been the brains of the company all along.
These three, plus Manville and Curtis, were gathered in the aft lounge for the explanations that would precede the event on the island. Manville had set up two easels with charts and drawings stacked on them, and now stood to one side while Curtis began: “The history of Kanowit Island is brief. I bought it, two years ago, from Australia. They retained mineral rights, but it’s a coral atoll, there’s nothing under it except porous rock and salt water. Australia got it in 1946, at the end of the war, from the Japanese, who had occupied it in 1937. Before that it had been nominally Spanish, having been claimed for the Spanish throne in the eighteenth century, but Spain never occupied the island in any way and no longer contests ownership. The title is skimpy, but it’s clean. The island is mine.”
Wayarabo said, “Does Australia claim legal jurisdiction?”
“Yes.” Curtis spread his hands. “Every dry inch of the planet must be under the legal and political control of some nation, and for us Australia’s not a bad jurisdiction at all. There’s nothing we mean to do on the island that breaks any of their laws.”
Hardy said, “Gambling?”
“My lawyers already cleared that,” Curtis told him. “We’re considered offshore, as though we were a ship. We can operate a casino, but we must pay taxes to Australia. They understand and approve that what we want to do here is create a new destination resort. A championship-level golf course, tennis courts, a casino, a first-class hotel, conference rooms. Kanowit Island stands at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, longest barrier reef in the world, where the best snorkeling on Earth can be found. We’ve already made arrangements with the appropriate airlines for flights, when we’re ready, from Australia, the Philippines and Hawaii.”
Madame deCastro said, “Club Med?”
“More up-market than that,” Curtis told her. “Think Rock Resorts, only international. We’ve done customer projections, we’ll give you all of that. But the point today is the demonstration. George?”
Manville stepped forward as though he were about to run them through a routine of calisthenics. He said, “Kanowit Island is an irregular oval, almost a circle, roughly two miles across. The island was smaller when the Japanese took over in the thirties; they built a very thick concrete ring wall, then did landfill into it from the surrounding ocean floor. The island is really just a bit of coral that sticks above the surface of the sea, and it’s very shallow for almost half a mile out from it in all directions, so no large boats can go in, unless we were to cut a channel in the coral, and that we wouldn’t be permitted to do.”