The others followed, one by one.
"Mr. Myers?" one elderly woman said after she'd stepped through.
"Yes, Ms. Caruthers?"
She pointed. "What does that sign mean?"
Just beyond the metal detector they were faced now by a somewhat ominous white tunnel and several blue-uniformed security guards. A sign on a metal pole to one side read:
Please form single line for x-ray security screening.
Procedure is safe and unobtrusive.
Passengers may request hand search in lieu of X-ray scan.
The procedure is for your safety.
Royal Sky Line regrets the inconvenience, and hopes you have a wonderful cruise. thank you.
"Just another security precaution," Myers told her. "Like it says. It's 'for your safety.'"
"X-rays can be harmful," Caruthers told him. "My doctor told me so."
"Ms. Caruthers, I'm very sure they wouldn't do it to people if there was any chance of harm."
"It's just like in that movie, Elsie," Ms. Jordan said, placing a reassuring hand on Caruthers' arm. "The Terminator, I think it was. The one with Arnie Schwarzenegger, before he became governor of California? The security people could see him on a big screen as a moving skeleton, remember?"
"That wasn't Terminator, Anne," Caruthers snapped back. "It was Total Recall And that's beside the point."
"But they could see he was carrying a gun!"
"Well, I'm not carrying a gun," Caruthers said with a defiant upward lift of her chin. "And I'll keep my skeleton to myself, thank you!"
Myers sighed. He didn't like Ms. Caruthers, and she didn't like him. The woman had once had the effrontery to correct him in the middle of a lecture he'd been giving back at the Walters, part of a Western arts lecture series presented by the museum foundation. She'd actually interrupted to correct him on some fine point about Doric and Ionic columns in front of the rest of the class.
The fact that, when he'd looked it up, he'd found she'd been correct only made it more irritating.
"You have to go through, Ms. Caruthers," Myers told her. "Either that, or let the guards frisk you. It's for your safety."
"Young man, I don't have to do anything! They want to frisk me like I was some kind of criminal? I won't stand for this!"
"Well, if you wish to leave the group —," Myers began, but she cut him off.
"As tour guide you can make special arrangements," Caruthers told him. "People like us shouldn't have to go through these machines like we were riffraff! And you should have known that, and made those arrangements in advance!"
"What seems to be the problem here, folks?" a security guard asked, joining them. The tour group was piling up now in front of the X-ray machine as they came through the metal detector, bringing progress to a halt.
"I'm sorry, Officer," Myers told the man. "Ms. Caruthers, here, has some concerns about the safety of this X-ray scan."
"It's perfectly safe, ma'am," the guard said. "You'll get more X-ray radiation walking outdoors on a bright, sunny day."
"My sunblock," Caruthers told him with an acid touch to her voice, "is over there, in my carry-on luggage, which you people seem to think is hiding bombs or drugs or something!"
"Ma'am — "
"On my flight from Baltimore, they confiscated my knitting and a plastic bottle of water, and then they made me take off my shoes so they could see if I had explosives hidden inside them!"
"I'm sorry, ma'am, but — "
"Young man, I am sixty-nine years old and I'm not a threat to anybody! Except, perhaps, to certain overzealous civil servants and incompetent tour guides!"
"Please, Ms. Caruthers!" Myers said. "If you make a scene — "
"So now I'm making a scene, am I? Good! I refuse to be frisked like a common criminal, and I refuse to be zapped by X-rays! What are you going to do about it?"
"I'm going to ask you to step outside the line, ma'am," the guard said, "so we can allow the other passengers to continue boarding."
"What's the matter, Elsie?" Nancy Haynes asked, grinning. "Don't want your picture took?"
"I don't know about this," Mabel Polmar said, looking worried. "Elsie's right about X-rays. My doctor told me when I had my hip surgery last winter that I couldn't have too many X-rays, or else I'd — "
"It's safe, Ms. Polmar," Myers said. He turned to the guard. "Look, is there anything else we can do?"
"Company rules, sir. Everyone goes through the scanner, or they allow themselves to be searched."
"I'd better discuss this with your supervisor, then."
"Very well, sir. But can we get the rest of these people moving? They're holding up the line."
"Okay. Let me go through and show them it's okay."
He walked into the white smooth-surfaced tunnel, turned, and held out his arms. "See, everyone? Nothing to it!"
One by one, the members of Myers' tour group followed him through the tunnel, some hesitantly, some with dogged determination, some fearfully, some with good-natured banter. Judy Dunne hobbled through step-by-step with her walker. Myers hoped that the security personnel were getting a good look at all of their skeletons, or whatever it was that they were looking at. A more unlikely terrorist group he couldn't imagine… though Ms. Caruthers did come close. She was, in his opinion and at the very least, a royal pain in the ass.
A few — Caruthers, Polmar, Jones, the Kleins, Kathy Morton — chose to follow the security guard off to the side and were engaged in a spirited discussion with him.
The Elderly Ladies' Home Terrorist and Sewing Circle, Myers thought. With a grimace, he turned and walked back to join the discussion.
This really was going to be his last time as a tour group guide.
The gray morning's overcast was breaking at last, giving way to bright sunlight. Several hundred feet aft from the Atlantis Queen's boarding gangway, the garage-sized doors to her main cargo hold on A Deck had been slid open and another lorry filled with crates of provisions drove up alongside.
Chester Darrow picked up his electronic clipboard and walked down the loading ramp to meet with the driver. "Good afternoon!" he called cheerfully. "What do you have for us?"
"More food," the driver said with a disinterested shrug. "Where do you want it?"
"Let's see what it is first," Darrow said. "What's the lading number?"
A cruise ship the size of the Atlantis Queen had a population as large as many towns — almost three thousand in all. The amount of food and other consumables required for a two-week cruise was staggering in its amount and in its variety. So far, Darrow had checked aboard twenty-five tons of beef, five tons of lamb, five and a half tons of pork, four tons of veal, a ton of sausage, seven and a half tons of chicken, three tons of turkey, nine tons of fish, and two tons of lobster… and the loading was continuing as more and more shipments arrived at the pier. In two weeks, the four restaurants on board the Queen would run through almost twenty-five tons of fresh vegetables, four thousand liters of ice cream, four tons of rice, five tons of coffee, fifteen tons of potatoes, twenty tons of fresh fruit, five tons of sugar, and twenty thousand liters of milk. Her alcohol lockers routinely stocked over four thousand bottles of assorted wines, three hundred of champagne, four hundred of vodka, five hundred of whiskey, and a thousand of assorted liqueurs… not to mention some eighteen thousand cans or bottles of a bewildering selection of beers.
The Atlantis Queen's guests and crew wouldn't consume all of that vast mountain of food and drink in two weeks, of course. A percentage was held against the possibility of a delay somewhere along the line and as a precaution against the unthinkable — that the ship's larders would actually run out of something toward the end of the cruise. The ship's commissary department would also have the opportunity to buy fresh provisions along the way — in Greece and Turkey, especially — if anything in the ship's computerized lists of stores appeared to be running low.