And then there was a Christmas season coming when Betsy was all smiles and triumph.
She must have hunted all over the boat for me, for I was down in the boiler room to see if there was a need, as ship's gossip said there was a plan, to buy new generators. "Well, Jason, she said, beaming so fondly that my heart sank, "getting ready for Christmas?
The engineers and oilers watched us from a distance, whispering to themselves, although no one needed to whisper with the great coughing sigh of the low-pressure turbines in every ear. I wished her a Merry Christmas civilly and excused myself to let my office know where I was-there was no reason not to now, you see, because Betsy had already found me. When I finished with the phone, she giggled. "Next week that will cost you a quarter, she said.
I had known she would bring bad news, of course, because that was her nature, but what she said was astonishing. "It will cost money to use the ship's phone? She pursed her lips and inclined her head. "To use the phone, and to run your video, and to turn on a fan, yes, she said, the sallow face and the pale eyebrows twitching with pleasure. "Father says it's time we started charging for all the electricity the crew uses. Fifty cents a kilowatthour to start, Father says.
"It makes no sense!
"Dollars and cents, she said gleefully. "That's our electricity, old man. It's worth money. Why should we give it away when we can sell it?
I drew back from her, because she had pressed her face almost into mine and her breath was like a sewer. Betsy was fifteen years old then, but the freshness of youth had never touched her. I said, "We can't sell electricity, Betsy, only what we can make from it. If we want to produce more to sell, we'll have to devote more space to conversion processes, and where's the space to come from?
"Good question, old man, she said triumphantly. "Father has of course thought of all that. To begin with, there's a thousand cubic meters wasted under the foredeck. We'll do our hydrogen electrolysis up there, which gives more room amidships for the ammonia and-
"Owner's Quarters! I said.
"Old man, she lectured, "people like us won't live on this little tub forever. We've got new boats building ten times the size of this. We're going to move the flag.
The ship's gossip was not only gossip, then, and the truth was worse than the gossip. It was worse than I knew, in fact, for Betsy had saved the worst for the last. "When May comes home for Christmas, we'll see what she has to say, I said, for it was in the Commodore's will that May's own quarters were hers forever. And I had delivered myself into Betsy's hands.
"When May comes home for Christmas, she parroted spitefully, "what we'll see, old man, is that she isn't coming home for Christmas. Why, Jason! Do you mean she never told you that she's got a boyfriend? His name's Frank Appermoy, and she's spending her Christmas with him and his mother.
And May had not written me a word! As Betsy well knew. She did not bother to disguise her triumph as she glanced at her watch and moved her lips for a moment before she spoke, that charnel breath well suited to the words she said. "Allowing for the time differences, she said, "I'd guess they're probably humping in his big water bed on Hawaii right now. Tough shit, old man, she said, and turned and left me standing.
Back in my office, the first thing I did was order up all the data we had in store on Frank Appermoy and the rest of the Appermoy clan. The second thing, while I was waiting for the readouts, was to put through a call to May at the Appermoy estate on the Big Island. It was 10 P.M. on the 'Kona coast, and according to the butler who answered my call, Miss May and Master Frank were at a luau and were not expected to return for at least two hours. So I asked them to call me, and got down to the hard-copy prints.
I already knew that the Appermoys were rich. I even knew that they competed with us, or wanted to, though their total production of nitrogen and hydrogen in a year was less than that of the smallest of our boats. Their process was not the same as ours, either.
The Appermoy money came, in the first place, from radioactive waste. Old Simon Appermoy had been as clever as the Commodore and as diligent. He had worked out a plan, and then had sought out and signed disposal contracts with every nuclear power plant he could find and half a dozen national defense departments, all of them so madly happy to find anyone who would take their waste radionuclides away that they paid huge amounts for every ton. Then Simon Appermoy vitrified the dirty stuff. He dissolved it in glassy chunks, and then he did the clever thing. He bought a couple of seamounts in the Pacific, the tail end of the Hawaiian chain, the volcanic islands that had risen from the sea bottom and been planed flat by the waves over tens of millions of years. Whether the sovereign state of Hawaii had any title to sell them was a whole other question, but a clouded title never worried old Appermoy-I'll say why in a minute. Then he drilled holes in the flat summits of the seamounts and dumped the glassy radionuclides in.
So far it was simple waste disposal. Enough to make him rich, but only the beginning. His next step was to become our competitor.
Some unsung genius on Appermoy's payroll had informed him that all that hot stuff a thousand fathoms down would start a warm-water plume moving up toward the surface; and that plume contained energy that Appermoy could suck out with slow, huge, vertical-axis blades. And so he did, and used that energy just as we did, to make electricity that would fix nitrogen and split water into fuel. But he did not suck all the energy out, because he wanted some of that warmed plume to reach the surface so that it could carry with it the organic detritus from the bottom that had accumulated for tens of millions of years. If you saw that trash in your living room, you would call it filth and try to mop it away; but if you saw it in your garden, it would delight your heart, for it was rich in organics. And as it came to the surface, it fed microorganisms to feed krill to feed fish. Any kind of fish Appermoy chose to stock, in fact, because the steel skeletons that held his works above the seamounts made marvelous habitats for food fish arid game fish and every fish that swam in the sea. I don't know what reward Simon Appermoy gave the flunky who devised this plan. Most likely Appermoy gave him cement overshoes and a quick drop without a face mask to the surface of the seamount, where his poor empty-eyed skull could watch the muck swirl slowly upward.
But it all worked. It was almost the opposite of our process, you see. We pumped up cold water to condense the warmed vapor that the sun boiled for us. Appermoy warmed the waters of the deep with his radioactive filth- to make much of the same end products, yes, but also to gain what we did not, several thousand tons a day of high- quality ocean fish to feed the billions on the land.
A rich family they were. A decent family they were not. Their empire was built on poisons at the base, and the money that gave Appermoy his start was more poisonous still. He got it the same way the Commodore did- he married it-but while the Commodore married a lady, what Simon Appermoy married was the spawn of four generations of Mafia chiefs. That was how they got their first contracts for disposing of radioactive waste. That was how they kept competition away. Others saw what Appermoy had done and tried to find seamounts of their own, but if strikes did not befall them, unexplained accidents did.
So the family was foul; young Frank Appermoy himself, less so. There were no great sins to his record in the datastore, unless you call polo playing a sin. He did not, however, meet Ben Zoll's specifications except for the first of them. He was rich. But you can't call someone who lives to hit a little ball from horseback sensible, and handsome he certainly was not. One of his horses had thrown him and kicked him. He was not yet fully recovered, the datastore said, and the picture confirmed it. Although the right side of his face had been very much rebuilt since the accident, he looked odd. He did not look terrifying or repulsive, but not even a mother could call him handsome-not even the mother of all lies and wickedness who had borne him, Simon Appermoy's wretched wife.