Checking current flows under Koitska's eye, Chandler thought detachedly that it might just be possible, if one were both daring and very lucky, to overcome the Exec, destroy the installation, find a way to Hilo and destroy that one too ... One did not take that sort of risk lightly, of course, he acknowledged. It was an easy way to get killed. And he did not want to get killed.
He wanted to live very much as a member in good standing of the Executive Committee.
The Russian POWs who manned Hitler's Atlantic Wall would have understood Chandler's reasoning; so would the Americans who broadcast for the enemy in Korea. The ultimately important thing for any man was to stay alive.
Chandler had not forgotten Peggy Flershem or the Orphalese, or Hsi and his tortured friends around the Monument. He merely thought, quite reasonably, that he could do nothing to help them any more; and meanwhile he had to pick up several hundred more votes or he would join them all in death. He acknowledged that it was in some sense degrading that, chances were, the men and women he curried favor with today were perhaps the very ones who had shot Ellen Braisted in Orphalese, raped and murdered his wife through the person of his friend, Jack Souther, kidnapped the children who had flown across the Pacific with him ... there was no sense in cataloguing all the possible abominations these men and women had committed, he told himself firmly. All that was as dead as Hsi.
Life was important. On any terms, life. Considered objectively, the Orphalese and the people in his own home town who had been destroyed by the execs were of no more importance than the stolid, half-frozen Siberians whom he had actually helped (even if ineffectually!) to work to death. Or the inhabitants of the destroyed village in Hilo. Or the peaceful people of New York when the submarine exploded itself in the harbor. Or...
He sighed. It was very difficult to stop making catalogues, or to turn from that to a friendly smile and a gay, friendship-winning quip.
But he managed the task. It revolted him, said Pooh-Bah. But he did it. When she could Rosalie borrowed the use of a coronet for him and they roamed the world, to night clubs in Juarez and lamaseries under the Himalayan peaks, to every place that she thought might amuse and divert him. On the fourth day she took him to a very special place indeed.
"You'll like it," was all she would say. "Oh! I haven't been there for months."
It was half a world away. Chandler had never learned to read the topologically insane patterns of grayed light but he knew it was very distant, and it turned out in fact to be in Italy. They found bodies to wear and commandeered a boat and headed out over blue water, Rosalie claiming she knew where she was going. But when, after repeated sightings on the coast behind them, she cut the little electric motor, the water in which they drifted looked like any other water to Chandler. "I hope you know what you're doing," he said.
"Of course, love! And I adore your mustachios."
He preened them. He rather fancied the body he had found, too; it had come with a gun and a plumed hat, but he had discarded them on the beach where they found the boat. Rosalie had done herself well enough, in a costume of flesh that was not more than eighteen years old, not taller than five feet one and darkly beautiful. She stood up, rocking the boat. "Everybody in the water!" she called.
"Last one in's a malihinil"
"Swimming? Swimming where?" he demanded. She was already taking off her clothes, the ruffled shirt, the toreador pants; in brief underwear she climbed to the gunwale and tugged at his mustache.
"Straight down, love. You'll like it."
He stood up and began taking off the coat and the uniform pants with their broad stripe of gold. "Wait a minute," he grumbled. "It always takes longer for a man to get his clothes off. He doesn't get as much practice, I suppose."
"Love! You're terribly anti-woman! Follow me!" And she dived from the gunwale, neat and clean, heading down.
Chandler followed. He had never been a great swimmer and was, in fact, not very fond of water sports. You can't get hurt, he reminded himself as he swam down into the dark after the pale, wriggling shape that was Rosalie's body. But it felt as if he could get hurt. He was ten yards down, and fifteen, and the end not in sight; and he could feel his borrowed heart pounding and the carabinieri's lungs craving to breathe. The warm Adriatic water was clouded and dim. He could see nothing except for Rosalie, down below, no. There was something else, he could not be sure what. Something darker, and square in outline...
Rosalie's slim, pale form slipped under it and disappeared. Grimly Chandler followed, his muscles tiring, his lungs bursting. With the last of his strength he skirted the dark square thing and came up beneath it. It was a thirty-foot rectangle of metal, he could see now, pierced with darkened windows, swinging on long chains that stretched downward into invisibility.
Where Rosalie had gone there was a square of a different color. It looked like a hatch. It was a hatch. He bobbed up through it and into a dark bubble of air, puffing and gasping.
Rosalie was there before him, sprawled out of the water onto the metal deck, wheezing like himself. "Whew, love," she panted. "Come on up. You've done the hard part. Now let's see if I can find the lights."
The lights were tiny lanterns for which Rosalie found flashlight cells somewhere. They illuminated a chamber containing tables, chairs, beds, racks of instruments, cupboards of food. "Isn't it nice, love? Wasn't I lucky to find it?"
Chandler stared about, beginning to breathe normally again. "What is it?"
"Some sort of experiment, I think." She had found a mirror, coated with grime and was scrubbing it clean with someone's neatly folded sweatshirt. "People used to live here in the old days," she said, propping the mirror against a wall and pirouetting in front of it. "Oh, lovely! Really I looked a little bit like this once, back in, well!"
"Now what do we do?"
She pressed her hair back, squeezing water out of it. "Why, we rest for a minute, love. And if I can find it, we drink some champagne. And then we do something very nice."
Chandler picked up a harpoon gun and put it down again. He could not help wondering who had built this trapped bubble of underwater living-space. "Cousteau," he said out loud, remembering.
"You mean that skin-diver? Well, no, I don't think so, love. He was French. But it's the same idea." She produced a bottle from a chest. "Champagne!" she crowed.
"Just as I promised. A bit warm, I'm afraid, but still it'll give you heart for the next bit."
"And what's that?"
But she would not tell him, only fussed over him while he popped the scarlet plastic cork out with his thumbs and retreated, laughing, from the gush of foam.
They drank, out of a mug and a canteen cup. Chandler could not help prodding at her for information. "The boat's going to be drifted away, you know. How do we get back?"
"Oh, love, you do worry about the most peculiar things. I do wish you'd relax."
"It's not entirely easy" he began, but she flared at him.
"Oh, come on! I must say, you've got a pretty ..." But she relented almost at once. "I'm sorry for snapping at you. I know it's a scary time." She sat down beside him, her bare arm touching his, and said, "We might as well finish the champagne before we go. Want me to tell you about when I went through it?"
"Sure," he said, stirring the wine around in the glass and drinking it down, hardly hearing what she said, although the sound of her voice was welcome.