Gwen refused on their honeymoon, after their graduation, to go into the water. George stripped, ran into the water, blew and puffed and swam the hundred-yard length of the pond, yelled, “The water’s great, honey,” and came out dripping to laugh at her.
“What I want,” he said, brushing clinging drops from his skin so that he could dry in the hot sun, “is to own this point, every acre of it. Then I’ll build a house with the bedroom out on pilings or cantilevered out over the pond. There’ll be a little balcony outside the bedroom and each morning I’ll just walk out, fall into the water and then I’ll never have to take a bath, except in the winter time when the pond freezes over.”
At the time, neither of them dreamed that his talk was more than idle chatter.
Death and a good insurance man made it possible. Back in Winston-Salem, George went to work with his father. His fresh degree in electrical engineering made it possible for him to pass the F.C.C. test for a First Class Radio-telephone ticket. With this piece of paper from the federal government, he was allowed to repair licensed communications equipment, adding a new dimension to his father’s business. In a time when citizen’s band radio was becoming a fad, George was kept busy, but he took time to learn the other aspects of the business, and when he’d been there a year he was made a full partner. His draw, plus end-of-the-year bonuses, made life comfortable for them, but they were not rich until a small commercial airliner crashed coming into a Virginia mountain town, killing, along with a dozen others, George’s mother and father. There was partnership insurance, mortgage insurance, life insurance, two rather hefty travel policies purchased at a vending machine before the elder Ferriers left for their holiday in New York, and a couple of gimmick accident policies which also paid off. George, at twenty-seven, found himself the sole owner of a thriving television and appliance store and, after taxes, holding cash which, when the proceeds of the sale of the store were added, came to just over three hundred thousand dollars.
Gwen understood. “Honey,” he said, “when I walk into that place I look around for Dad. I expect him to pop up from the rear and say, ‘Hey, boy, we aren’t running a bank, you’re due here at ten of nine sharp’; or, ‘Hey, boy, it’s your turn to sweep up.’ It’s damned lonely, honey. I don’t think I can take it. All the fun’s gone out of it.”
“We can’t live the rest of our lives on it,” practical Gwen said.
“No. I can make a dollar. Dad saw to it that I had a little business experience crammed into my head. He didn’t let me spend all my time back at the workbench. I could find a new town, maybe one of the developing areas along the coast. I could start small and just concentrate on repair work. I like that. I’d never want to give up playing with electronic junk. It’s just that, well, it’s not the same at the store.”
So they sold the store and bought the new M.G. and, to take George’s mind off the death of his parents, drove to Florida with the top down. They swam in a clear, cold spring in a national forest near Ocala, where George was reminded of the green, strange little pond on Pine Tree Island.
The area, they found, was changing rapidly. A large electric company had started construction of a multiple nuclear generating plant. In a backward county, where tourism and fishing were the chief industries, the nuclear plant was welcomed, at least by those who owned land and stood to gain by increased land values, and by businessmen and booster types in general. The plant was located near the village of Ocean City, on the Cape Fear. A canal would draw Cape Fear water to the plant to cool the reactors and would extend, in a huge, wide scar, across a natural marsh along a creek on the inland side of the Intracoastal Waterway, go under the Waterway in huge pipes, rise again to cut straight across a producing marsh to Pine Tree Island, and there take a big bite through the end of the undeveloped property next to the point. It would be, the environmentalists said, the last cooling canal built in the United States. Cooling towers cost more money, and, naturally, the power company first filed for permission for the less expensive cooling canal. There were no voices in the county strong enough to stop the despoliation of a good swath of swamp and producing marshland.
When George and Gwen drove to the island they stopped in to talk with a real estate man, an aging fellow who had watched the beach grow from nothing, be destroyed in a killer hurricane, then come back to be an instant slum with cheaply built waterfront cottages, dinky second-row houses and other weekend retreats scattered about the woodlands.
“We might just be able to work something out,” the real estate man said when George expressed his interest in the point property. “The canal is taking a big bite of it. The rest will be on the other side of the canal, sort of an island in itself. The old boy that owned it is dead and his heirs seem to be pretty well off up there in New Jersey somewhere. They sent a lawyer down to dicker with the power people and got the going price for undeveloped land out in the middle of the county. They didn’t even seem to know that waterfront and creek front is worth a dollar.”
George rented a cottage and waited nervously while the real estate man contacted the lawyer who had represented the absentee owners of the point. “I told him,” he said to George and Gwen, “that the place was killed as far as development is concerned. No one in his right mind is gonna build a nice house next door to a canal full of radioactivity.”
“Just George,” Gwen said.
“Actually,” the old man said, “there ain’t much radioactivity in it.”
“I know,” George said. He’d made quite a study of the situation, getting his hands on the power company’s reports, talking to anyone who had either information or gossip to offer. “The radioactive level of the water will be less than that of the background radiation.”
To Gwen, this meant that even if it were less than normal background radiation, it was still an additional amount of radiation. However, her seven years with George had been the happiest time of her life. At last she had someone who loved her for herself. This was surely worth more than exposure to a minute amount of radiation. She’d have braved the Van Allen belts in a bikini for George. If it turned George on, it was fine with her.
Two hundred three and a quarter acres were involved. The lawyer asked seven hundred per acre. George winced. The real estate man, with George in attendance on an extension telephone, snorted. “We’re not even close enough to talk,” he said.
The real estate man offered one hundred per acre, following his offer with a detailed run-down of the disadvantages of the property. Some of it was low, there was no timber, just second-growth stuff, and it was going to be cut off from the island by the canal. But he had told George earlier that the power company would have to build a bridge over the canal to give access to the property.
“If the terms are favorable,” said the lawyer, “we might come down to five hundred.”
“How about cash at three hundred?” the real estate man asked. “That’s our first, last and firm offer. Take it or get stuck with a swamp cut off from the roads by a radioactive hot water canal.”
They took it. George whistled as he tried to crowd the amount into the small allotted space on the check. Sixty- one thousand twenty dollars and no cents. Gwen felt weak. She had worried about money most of her life. To her, writing a check for the amount of the new M.G. was pure extravagance. Now George was laying out over sixty thousand dollars for a swamp cut off from the roads by a hot water radioactive canal. Whee, she thought.