"Why can't I know him?" Laura said. "I know you, don't I?"
"Hey!" Hesseltine said. "I'm no terrie-I'm on your side."
"If Sticky-Nesta-knew what you'd done to his people, he'd be a lot more scared of you than you are of him."
"Really!" mused Hesseltine. He thought it over, then looked pleased. "I guess he would! And he'd be damned right, too, wouldn't he?"
"He'd come after you, somehow, though. If he knew."
"Whoa," Hesseltine said. "I can tell you'd be all broken up about it, too... . Well, no problem. We kicked their ass once, and a couple months from now there won't be a
Grenada... . Look, nobody with your attitude needs to be reading a crazy fucker like Gresham. I'll have 'em bring you the computer instead."
"Okay. "
"You won't see me again, Laura. They're flying me out on the next Yellow shift."
It was the way it had always been with Hesseltine. She had no idea what to say to him, but had to say something. "They sure keep you busy, don't they."
"Don't I know it.... There's still Luxembourg, you know.
The EFT Commerzbank. They think they're safe, since they're embedded in the middle of Europe. But their banking centers are in Cyprus, and Cyprus is a groovy little island. You can think of me there, when they start poppin' caps."
"I certainly will." He was lying. He wasn't going anywhere near Cyprus. He might not even be leaving the boat.
He was probably going into a tank, she thought, to be rubbed down by wet rubber Hollywood dolls while floating in limbo.... But he must have some reason to want her to think about Cyprus. And that might mean that someday they would let her go. Or at least that Hesseltine thought they might.
But she didn't see Hesseltine again.
Time passed. The sub ran on an eighteen-hour cycle: six hours on duty, twelve hours off. Sleep fractured between shifts so that day and night as in all ocean depths-became meaningless. On each shift a crewman would bring her a meal and escort her to the head. They were careful not to touch her.
They always took her to the same. toilet. It was always freshly sterilized. No contact with bodily fluids, she thought.
They were treating her as if she were a retrovirus case.
Maybe they thought she was. In the old days, sailors used to rush onshore, drink everything in sight, and fuck anything in skirts. But then harbor hookers all over the world began dying of retrovirus.
But the world had the virus pretty much whipped now.
Contained anyway. Under control.
Except in Africa.
Could it be that the crew had retrovirus?
The video-game machine had about as much smarts as a kid's watchphone. The games plugged into the deck, little spring-loaded cassettes, worn by endless play. The graphics were crude, big stairstep pixels, and you could see the screens refreshing themselves, jerky and Victorian. She didn't mind the crudity-but the themes were amazing.
One game was called "Missile Command." The player controlled little lumps on the screen meant to represent cities.
The computer attacked them with nuclear weaponry: bombs, jets, ballistic missiles.
The machine always won annihilating all life in a big flashy display. Children had once played this game. It was utterly morbid.
Then there was one called "Space Invaders. " The invading creatures were little pixeled crabs and devil dogs, UFO things from another planet. Dehumanized figures, marching down the screen in lockstep. They always won. You could slaughter them by the hundreds, even win new little forts to fire things- lasers? bombs?-but you always died in the end. The computer always won. It made so little sense-letting the computer win every time, as if circuitry could enjoy winning. And every effort, no matter how heroic, ended in Armageddon. It was all so eldritch, so twentieth century.
There was a third game that involved a kind of round yellow consumer-the object was to eat everything in sight, including, sometimes, the little blue pursuing enemies.
She played this game, mostly, as the level of violence was less offensive. It wasn't that she liked them much, but as the shifts passed, empty hours spinning over and over, she dis- covered their compulsive, obsessive quality... the careless insistence on breaking all sane bounds that was the mark of the premillennium. She played them until her hands blistered.
Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub: the butcher, the butcher, and the butcher.... Three sailors manned the inflatable, un- der a hot towering sun and a cloudless, -infinite sky, on an endless flat, gentle swell of blue-green ocean. The four of them were the only people who had ever existed. And the little rubber blob of boat was the only land.
They sat hunched together, wearing shiny drawstring hooded overgarments of thin reflective foil. The foil glittered pain- fully in the pitiless tropic glare.
Laura pulled her hood off. She flicked at greasy strands of hair. Her hair had grown longer. Since entering the sub she had never truly managed to get it clean.
"Put your hood up," warned sailor #1.
Laura shook her head dizzily. "I want to feel the open sky."
"It's not good for you," said #1, adjusting his sleeves.
"With that ozone layer gone, you're asking for skin cancer in sunlight like this."
Laura was cautious. "They say that ozone problem was mostly scare talk. "
"Oh, sure," sneered #1. "If you take your government's word for it."
The other two sailors chuckled darkly, brief laughter evaporating into utter oceanic stillness.
"Where are we?" Laura said.
Sailor # 1 looked over the side of the boat. He dipped his pale fingers into seawater and watched it drip, murmuring.
"Coelacanth country ..."
"What time is it?" Laura said.
"Two hours to end of Yellow shift."
"What day, though?"
"I'm gonna be glad to see you go," said sailor #2 suddenly.
"You make me itch."
Laura said nothing. A dreadful silence descended again.
They were flotsam, chromed tinfoil dummies in their matte- black floating blob. She wondered how deep the ocean was beneath the film of hull.
"You always liked the Red Shift better," said sailor #3
with sudden shocking venom.
"You smiled at Red Crewmen over fifteen times. You hardly ever smiled at anyone from Yellow Crew."
"I had no idea," Laura said. "I'm really sorry."
"Oh, yeah. Sure you are. Now."
"Here comes the plane," commented sailor #1.
Laura looked up, shading her eyes. The empty sky was full of little vision blurs, strange little artifacts of sight, trailing along with the movements of her eyeball. She wasn't sure what they were called or what made them, but it had some- thing to do with brightness levels. Then she saw something opening in the sky, something shredding and, popping and, finally, unfolding stiffly like an origami swan. Huge parafoil wings of bright life jacket orange. It was gliding in.
Sailor #2 examined his military phone, checking for the homing signal. Sailor #3 attached a long flabby bag to a tank of hydrogen and began inflating it with a loud flatulent hissing.
Then another cargo drop, and another. Sailor #2 whooped happily. Cargo dumpsters crossed the empty sky, bus-sized brown lozenges with broad, unfolding wings of riffling dayglo- orange plastic. They reminded Laura of June bugs, fat-bellied flying beetles from Texas summer nights. They came down in broad, wheeling descent.
Their curved hulls splashed and settled with surprising, ponderous grace. Curling bow waves. Wings refolding with loud pops and creaks.
Now she could see the plane that had dumped them, a broad-winged ceramic air-bus, sky-blue beneath, its upper surfaces cut with dun-and-yellow desert camouflage. Sailor