I nudged the skin aside with the tip of my billy club. It looked like a stainless-steel egg in there. There were broken bits of skull bone but beneath it all he seemed to have encased his brain in a protective shell.
I'd heard of it, but never seen it. We monkey with our bodies these days—Lord knows I'd done enough of it myself, for professional reasons—but there are a few hard constants that resist our best efforts. That wrinkled, red-gray, be-veined and be-flustered mass known as the brain was one of them. You could augment it with crystal memory, wire it for radio reception, or bronze it for posterity, as Comfort had done, but if you tampered with it too much it simply stopped working. So I knew that, whatever he had done, it hadn't been proof against repeated blows from a jar of cold cream. That sphere of metal would prevent the gray matter from being penetrated by a knife or a bullet, but nothing could alter its inertia, and slamming it against the inside of the shell produced a concussion, and you were out. Worse, the not infrequent sequella of concussion was brain swelling, which could be fatal even in our current state of medical grace. Isambard's brain would be swelling now, with no more place to go than if it had been in a standard-issue skull.
As I came to that conclusion I saw a tiny network of cracks appear in the metal carapace. The whole construction grew by about a quarter of an inch. It was now more of a fine metal mesh than a seamless helmet.
This was commando stuff, I realized. Damage-control circuits were coming into play.
That's when I realized I wasn't going to kill him. Mainly, it was the conclusion that killing him would not further my cause in any way.
And he'd said he liked Sparky and His Gang.
For well over twenty years Britannic had been cruising a triangular route meant to simulate a trans-Pacific voyage. The original ship could not have made the crossing in less than two weeks. The Plutonian copy did it in four days. This was no great feat of speed, as the entire journey took place in the hundred-kilometer bubble of rock deep beneath the planetary surface known as the Pacifica Environmental Park, still the largest disneyland in the system.
It was a voyage in both space and time, and don't ask me how they did it. I mean, the ship when under weigh always seemed to be making good speed, cutting smartly through the blue water, leaving a long, straight wake behind. It stood to reason that she was actually either tethered in place, or going in large circles, but you couldn't tell it by looking.
The trip started in Edo, in 1853, the year of the arrival of the Black Ships in the bay of what would become Tokyo. Passengers embarked after sampling the culture of feudal Japan, sailed out with magnificent Mount Fuji in the distance as Commodore Perry sailed in.
The next morning brought them to Tahiti in 1789—a very cute trick: two thousand leagues south by southwest, and sixty years into the past in about eighteen hours. Britannic would drop anchor at Papeete alongside the Bounty, met by dozens of outrigger canoes filled with happy, naked brown people throwing tropical flowers, and the passengers would be ferried ashore for a day of sensual pleasures in the sun, surf, and sand. They'd feast, frolic, and fornicate (all included in the price of your ticket, no tipping, please!), have their pictures taken with Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh, then stagger back to feast and frolic and fornicate most of the night, until the morning, when the ship arrived at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, where the Pacifica disneyland management had prepared a little show for them, which the less hungover among the vacationers might actually watch. Even those you might have thought dead to the world were usually awakened; the show was very noisy.
From there the ship sailed for San Francisco, arriving in time for the earthquake of 1906.
I said the trip was triangular, and you might have noticed this triangle seemed to have four corners. No real mystery this time: San Francisco Bay was actually just a few miles on the other side of Fuji. During the night the ship was brought around through a tunnel under the mountain, ready for another group of revelers. Actually, the trip through the tunnel, which the passengers never saw, was as interesting as the Great Quake, in my opinion. I'd gone through it twice.
This schedule allowed Titanic and Olympic to follow at twenty-four hour intervals, which meant that every fourth day Pearl Harbor was spared, Frisco didn't burn, and the Clark Gable and Charles Laughton clones and all the other actors in the four locations got a day off. (Not the crews. We worked thirty days, then had a ten-day furlough.)
Not this time, though. My hiatus would last a bit longer, as I was about to bid an informal good-bye to Britannic.
It was not the first time I'd had to abandon a show in the middle of a run. In fact, thinking back, it had been some time since I'd been able to finish one. There'd been two more before my hasty departure from Brementon. I never felt good about it. The show must go on, don't you know. You hate to let your fellow troupers down. But there was no point in sticking around if you were about to be sent to jail, or the grave. Any way you looked at it, it was understudy time.
Dawn was just breaking as we rounded Diamond Head and steamed into Pearl Harbor. Just down the beach I could see rows of resort hotels that had not been there in 1941. Even at this hour I could see a few fanatics out in the water perched on fiberglass boards, engaging in a Hawaiian version of attempted suicide known as "surfing." I'd tried it my last time through. If God had intended me to surf, He'd have given me gills.
Disembarking was going to be something of a problem. If I waited until we tied up at the wharf, I'd be sure to encounter whoever Mr. Comfort had intended to meet. I felt I could elude him or them with a suitable disguise, but there was no good way to disguise the Pantechnicon, and somebody was bound to wonder why that odd-looking fellow was stealing my luggage. Embarrassing questions were sure to be asked, attracting unwanted attention.
That meant an unceremonious dunk in the drink. Even that presented problems. It would be a good idea not to be seen. With the Day of Infamy about to begin, the decks were jammed with spectators. My one lucky break was that the port side offered much the better view of the festivities, and the stewards had advertised that fact. That was also the side that would tie up to the dock after the show, so the crew preparing hatches and ramps were over there, too. I had found a big cargo hatch near the starboard bow and in the fifteen minutes I'd been standing there, watching the water flow by twenty feet beneath me, not a soul had come down the passageway. Until now.
"Good morning, Elwood," I said. He was ambling toward me, hands jammed down into his pockets, hat jammed down on his head. I hadn't seen much of him during the voyage. No doubt he was spending his time at the bar, telling his tall tales to anyone who would listen.
" 'Lo, Sparky," he drawled.
"Feel like a swim?" I asked him.
"No. No, I think I'll pass on that one." He leaned on the pole that blocked the open hatch door and gazed out at the gray Navy ships, dozens of them, clustered around the dry docks and repair yards of Keanapuaa. All the bigger ones, the behemoths, the battleships named after political divisions of the old United States, were on the port side.
"I looked in on that feller in your dressing room," he said.
"How's he doing?"
"Gonna be a close thing," he said. "A real close thing."
"That's what I thought, too."
He turned to squint up at me.
"Didja have to hit him so hard?"
"You didn't see the fight, Elwood."
"No, you're right. I didn't see it. He must have come at you really hard, for you to do that to him."
"Actually, he didn't come at me at all. He was just holding me at gunpoint."