Jerry clung to the rail. “But... what about Kim?”
Captain Cousseran gestured at the sea and the island. “See for yourself.”
Jerry saw; he had to admit he saw. Closer to the island, the sea had begun to boil, with whitecaps that leaped like dolphins. The discrete ripples rolled outward like moving rings of Saturn, and the island itself had begun to change, as though it had abruptly gone out of focus. The land seemed to shudder, and the buildings to oscillate wildly, as though an inanimate place could feel agony.
The second ripple hit when Planetwatch III was midway through her turn, so that it helped as much as it harmed, pushing the ship along, farther from the island, at the same time that it battered them all once more, with a harder punch at the stern that rattled doors and strained rivets throughout the ship.
Jerry clung to the waist railing along the wall of the bridge, and stared back toward the island and the sea. Buildings were being sucked down into the ground over there, the land itself had turned into brown sluggish waves, everything within the retaining wall was an eruption of mud.
The sea from there to here was empty, rolling with the energy that punched outward from the island. Jerry stared hard at that water, but there was nothing to see. Not Kim, not Kim’s body; nothing.
How had he done this? Was he responsible for this? He had wanted to destroy Richard Curtis, but he had only destroyed an eager and trusting child.
And himself?
7
“Six,” George Manville said.
So that was the last of the explosions. Manville and the three money people stood in the forward lounge, beneath the bridge, gazing out through the windows at what was becoming of Kanowit. The Mallory was nose-to to the island, tethered by the sea anchor, and it withstood the shock waves far better than that lumbering tub of an ex-freighter over there, now waddling desperately away, rocking and bouncing like a bathtub toy.
Manville studied the island through binoculars, and what he saw was good. The land was liquefying, erupting like slow-boiled water. The structures on the island were breaking apart, collapsing into the mud. The ring wall had held.
Another shock wave passed beneath the ship, tinkling glasses on the back bar, causing Madame deCastro once again to clutch at the railing beneath the windows. She said, “How much longer does this go on?”
“Another two or three minutes,” Manville told her, and Richard Curtis came in from the ladder — actually a wide flight of wooden stairs down from the bridge — just outside. His heavy face was smiling, his tan seemed ruddier.
Manville offered him a smile and a congratulatory salute. He liked this boss, his most recent boss, liked Curtis’s determination and decisiveness, liked the way he described a problem and then got out of the way of the experts. A hefty but solid man of 54, just under average height, Richard Curtis moved through life with a kind of unconscious aggression, as though at all times he were bulling his way through an unresponsive crowd.
Now, he acknowledged Manville’s salute with a nod and said, “We’ve done it.”
Curtis looked out toward the island, and the others followed his lead. The turmoil out there continued.
“Yes, sir, we have,” Manville said.
8
Jerry Diedrich stood at the fantail, looking back at the distant island. The ripples had ended at last, or the ship had outrun them. The sea was itself again, moderate and unthreatening. The air was the same, soft and warm. Even the sky was just as blue as before, all as though nothing had happened. Only that, on the island, everything had changed.
And somewhere in the water, Kim Baldur drifted, dead.
And the reef, the coral? Had anything happened to that, any structural damage, any death of the living coral to make up for the death of Kim?
He didn’t think so. It was a bitter pill, but it seemed to Jerry that Curtis and his engineers had been right, after all. Time would have to pass, experts would have to dive and study the terrain, but Jerry knew this subject, knew it well, and there were none of the telltale signs of environmental damage, no broader upheaval of the ocean, no debris. The retaining wall around the island hadn’t collapsed, so the coral footing beneath it must still be sound. The injuries to the fragile barrier reef they’d predicted and feared and had tried to guard against hadn’t happened.
It was such a delicate thing they had just done over there. If Curtis and his engineers had been off in their calculations, just a little off, the destruction would have occurred, Jerry knew it. And he hated also the knowledge of himself he now had; at this moment, in his heart, he wished the catastrophe had come about, that some terrible harm had been done to the reef and the sea creatures and the sea itself, for no reason other than to prove to the world that Jerry Diedrich was right and Richard Curtis wrong.
“Jerry?”
He turned, and it was Tim, a member of the group, a college student from San Diego, with the bleached hair and eyes and flaking skin of a surf bum but the intense look of the devoted volunteer. Except that Tim now looked mostly worried.
Does he blame me, Jerry wondered, and wiped at his face. “Spray got me,” he said.
There was no spray up here, but Tim ignored that. He said, “The Captain wants to see you, Jerry.”
“Be right there.”
Tim looked as though he wanted to comfort Jerry somehow, pat his arm or say something encouraging, but couldn’t find a way to do it. So Jerry patted Tim’s arm instead, and went away forward, and up to the bridge, where Captain Cousseran said, “We have been in further conversation with the Mallory.”
Steel yourself, Jerry thought, don’t show any weakness.
He couldn’t wait to be alone with Luther, when he could release all these tense muscles, let the misery have him. His face as expressionless as he could make it, he said, “Have we? And what does the Mallory have to say for itself?”
“They’re sending launches to the island, to inspect,” the Captain told him, and looked past Jerry to say, “in fact, they’ve started.”
Jerry turned, and saw the two small boats, partly enclosed, bright red and yellow to be visible in an emergency, just moving out from under Mallory’s white flank.
Captain Cousseran said, “They’ve warned us away. If we try to bring our own launch in close, they’ll call us trespassers, and repel us. They say, with force, if necessary.”
Jerry looked into Captain Cousseran’s eyes, hoping to find sympathy there, or comradeship, but found only a correct dispassion. He said, “Captain, we can’t just— We can’t just leave.”
“You’re thinking about the diver,” the captain said. “The captain of the Mallory promises his crew will search. If they find... the body... they’ll bring it on to Australia.”
And use it in the campaign against us, Jerry thought. He said, “Captain, can’t we—”
“No.” The captain shook his head. “I won’t permit my crew to go where they have been threatened with physical harm. We did not order that person into the water, we didn’t want him to go—”
“Kim,” Jerry said. “It was Kim Baldur.”
The captain raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “It would be her, wouldn’t it? A pity. A nice girl. Over-eager.”
Her epitaph, Jerry thought, and looked out to where the launches slowly moved toward the island. He said, “What do we do now?”