But no matter how fervently Huntington must have been talking with the Big Guy, he finally drifted into a fitful sleep, leaving Hannah and myself huddled by the still sputtering fire.
She was staring absently into the last of the embers. "Were you surprised about Maggie?" she asked.
I had to admit that I was, even though I knew somebody was relaying information to Zercher's people. "All along I figured it was our boy Huntington."
"That's because you don't like him."
"Maybe, but I sure as hell would never have figured it was Maggie."
Hannah sighed, wrapped her arms around her knees and leaned closer to the fire. "Men," she mumbled absently. "I guess I'll never figure them out. You guys seem to think that just because somebody has a good-looking set of legs and big tits that she must be okay."
"Isn't that the case?" I smiled.
Hannah ignored me.
"She must have been planted in Schuster's organization for quite awhile."
"Well," Hannah sighed again, "it was the perfect setup. Somebody knew the old boy liked the ladies, so they planted Maggie. It worked like a charm. Bearing gets hold of Kohler's diary, tells Maggie he's going to put together a team to round up the cylinders, and our little blonde friend relays the information to her real boss. While Bearing was screwing around putting his team together, thinking the whole thing was a big secret, Maggie's real boss already had your friend Crompton down there looking around."
"Speaking of Bearing, what do you suppose the old boy is going to say when we tell him that we had the cylinders right in our hands, only to have his own flesh and blood hijack them?"
"He's going to say you screwed up," Hannah assessed.
I sagged back down on my good elbow. "Well," I said philosophically, "unless we make it back to civilization, no one is going to know what happened to us — or the cylinders."
Hannah's face suddenly lost what little hope that had been mirrored there. "Even making it to Deechapal is a real long shot," she reminded me. "Then we have to get real lucky and find something there that will get us on to the mainland."
The conversation dragged on for a while longer, but gradually the day began to take its toll. Exhaustion started to take over, and the fire was reduced to an occasional orange spark. I tried to bank what was left of it and watched while Hannah curled up in a funny little ball and drifted off.
The names began to tick off in my weary brain — Queet, Crompton, Sargent, Poqulay, Packer. That was the real price of Bearing's quest for eternal life. The goddamn cylinders weren't worth it.
It was sometime in the middle of the night when I felt something touch me on the shoulder. At the same time, the toucher was whispering my name.
''Wages… Wages… you awake?" Huntington's mousey little voice was only beginning to cut through the heavy gauze of sleep.
I opened one eye, looked up at him and then beyond him. Wishing hadn't changed anything. A heavy cloak of fog had enveloped us, and we were closeted in a world of black-gray. There was an eerie, almost deafening silence, like the one underwater. I pushed myself into a sitting position and tried to clear my head.
"What's the matter?"
"The waters are calm," Huntington declared. "The Holbrook woman is down getting the submersible ready to go."
"We're gonna try it in this fog?"
Huntington nodded. "The water is very calm," he repeated.
It took some doing but I managed to stand up. Between the thrashings administered by Schuster and his playmates, the bullet hole in my left arm, and crawling around sunken ships playing games with six gillers, it wasn't any wonder I had trouble finding parts that didn't ache and bones that didn't hurt. It was getting so that a chorus of grunts and groans accompanied every step.
I walked down to the water's edge and decided baleful Byron was right. The waters were calm. In fact, the gentle lapping at the shoreline was just about the only sound.
Huntington walked up behind me. Now
there was reality to deal with. It was one thing to plan a risky journey by daylight but something else altogether to tackle it in the middle of a fog-shrouded night. It suddenly occurred to me that all our options "sucked." We could choose to sit on an island that had been dead for almost half a century with nothing to eat and pray that some errant seaman would happen by — or we could take our chances in a leaky piece of high tech metal through shark-infested waters in dense fog. Nice set of options!
The so-called cryonics expert was waiting expectantly. Doubts were starting to rattle around in my addled brainfuel consumption of the PC-13A, cracked batteries, trying to navigate in the dark — and if that wasn't enough, there was the awareness that those very waters were absolute havens for highly efficient killing machines that marine biologists hadn't even gotten around to cataloging yet.
Maybe it was just another way of stalling. Nevertheless, I headed down the beach to take a look at the battered submersible. Maybe it was nothing more than confirming that we still had only one option. It was there all right, dormant in the coral-crusted sand like a great and strange wounded alien from another world.
The PC-13A was the kind of thing that took on its own personality. In my mind it had almost begun to breathe. It was hope and a connection with tomorrow, if there was to be one. I patted it affectionately and talked to it like a child talks to his dog. "You're gonna get us out of here, you marvelous tangle of wire and plastic and space age materials." Then I had to do the most human thing of all and and ask for a little reassurance. "Right?"
I heard gritty footsteps behind me. It wasn't Huntington; there was too much confidence in them.
"Did I hear you talking to someone?" Hannah asked.
If it hadn't been so dark and foggy, the perceptive lady would have been able to see the uncertainty etched into my face. "I always talk to inanimate objects," I admitted. "It's reassuring to know some things can't do without me."
I could tell by the way she looked at me that Hannah Holbrook wasn't the kind of person who was prone to wax philosophical. In fact she was just the opposite. Life for her was an equation that could always be solved by clear and logical thinking. She dismissed my comment with the true technocrat's shrug.
"Well, Elliott, what do you think? Time to go for it?"
The horizon to the distant east had a hazy, surrealistic hole in it. It was kind of orange — a very, very pale tinge of orange — and even though it looked hopeless now, it was a kind of confirmation that there would be a dawn.
Hannah was more practical, studying the battered PC-13A. "There isn't much on it that works. The vertical situation display is malfunctioning, and the bounce back interval is the only way I can determine what's going on beneath us. When the battery goes, we even lose that. Then we'll be solely at the mercy of the backup system, and that's all a function of our fuel supply which is already critical."
"Which means?"
"Freely translated — we'll be damn lucky to make it."
"Why didn't you tell me all of this last night?" I groused.
Hannah looked at me. "You slept better, didn't you?"
"What do you figure our odds are?"
She thought for a minute. "Four, maybe five to one against making it to Deechapal."
I felt like the air was suddenly let out of me.
"I'm saying we need a hell of a lot of luck. I'll drive and you sit up on top and guide. That's our best hope."