“And they can’t all be wrong, eh? Don’t worry, Mr. Carter, I intend to enjoy myself. Can you give us any idea of our itinerary?”
“That’s supposed to be one of the attractions, sir. No set itinerary. Our schedule largely depends on the availability and destination of cargoes. One thing certain, we’re going to New York. Most of our passengers boarded there and passengers like to be returned to where they came from.” He knew this anyway, knew that we had coffins consigned to New York. “We may stop off at Nassau. Depends how the captain feels — the company gives him a lot of leeway in adjusting local schedules to suit the best needs of the passengers — and the weather reports. This is the hurricane season, Mr. Carreras, or pretty close to it. If the reports are bad Captain Bullen will want all the sea room he can get and give Nassau a bye.” I smiled. “Among the other attractions of the S.S. Campari is that we do not make our passengers seasick unless it is absolutely essential.”
“Considerate, very considerate,” Carreras murmured. He looked at me speculatively. “But we’ll be making one or two calls on the east coast, I take it?”
“No idea, sir. Normally, yes. Again it’s up to the captain, and how the captain behaves depends on a certain Dr. Slingsby Caroline.”
“They haven’t caught him yet,” Miss Harrbride declared in her rough gravelly voice. She scowled with all the fierce patriotism of a first-generation American, looked round the table, and gave us all the impartial benefit of her scowl. “It’s incredible, frankly incredible. I still don’t believe it. A thirteenth-generation American!” I could imagine how unthinkably remote thirteen generations of American ancestors must be to Miss Harrbride; she’d have traded her million-dollar cosmetic empire for even a couple of them. “I was reading all about him in the Tribune two days ago. Did you know that the Slingsbys came to the Potomac in 1662, just five years after the Washingtons. Three hundred years! Imagine, American for three hundred years, and now a renegade! A traitor! Thirteen generations!”
“Don’t take it too hard, Miss Harrbride,” I said encouragingly.
“When it comes to skipping with the family silver, Dr. Caroline just doesn’t begin to be in the same class as my countrymen. The last Englishman who deflected to the communist world had an ancestor in the doomsday book. Thirty solid generations. Yet he took off and lit out at the drop of a hat.”
“Faugh!” said Miss Harrbride. “We heard about this character.”
Tony Carreras, like his father, had had his education in some Ivy League college; he was rather less formal in his attitude towards the English language. “Slingsby Caroline, I mean. Makes very little sense to me. What’s he going to do with this weapon — the twister, they call it, isn’t it? Even if he does get it out of the country? Who’s going to buy it? I mean, as nuclear devices go it could be ranked almost as a toy: it certainly isn’t going to change the balance of world power, no matter who gets his hands on it.”
“Tony’s right,” Miguel Carreras agreed. “Who is going to buy it? Besides, there’s nothing secret any more about the making of nuclear weapons. If a country has enough wealth and technical resources — so far, there are only four in the world — it can build a nuclear weapon any time. If it hasn’t, all the plans or working models in the world are useless to them.” “He’s going to have an interesting time in hawking the twister around,” Tony Carreras finished. “Especially since from all descriptions you can’t get the twister into a suitcase. But what’s this guy got to do with us, Mr. Carter?”
“As long as he is at large every cargo vessel leaving the eastern seaboard gets a pretty thorough going over to make sure that neither he nor the twister is aboard. Blows up the turn-round of cargo and passenger ships by 100 per cent, which means that the longshoremen are losing stevedoring money pretty fast. They’ve gone on strike — and the chances are, so many words have been said on both sides, that they’ll stay on strike when they do nab Dr. Caroline. If.”
“Traitor,” said Miss Harrbride. “Thirteen generations!”
“So we stay away from the east coast, eh?” Carreras senior asked.
“Meantime, anyway?”
“As long as possible, sir. But New York is a must. When, I don’t know. But if it’s still strike-bound, we might go up the St. Lawrence first. Depends.”
“Romance, mystery, and adventure.” Carreras smiled. “Just like your brochure said.” he glanced over my shoulder. “Looks like a visitor for you, Mr. Carter.”
I twisted in my seat. It was a visitor for me. Rusty Williams — Rusty, from his shock of flaming hair — was advancing towards me, whites immaculately pressed, uniform cap clasped stiffly under his left arm. Rusty was sixteen, our youngest cadet, desperately shy and very impressionable. Cadets were not normally allowed in the dining room and Rusty’s eyes were goggling as they took in the young ladies at the captain’s table, but he managed to haul them back to me as he halted by my side with a perceptible click of his heels.
“What is it, Rusty?” Age-old convention said that cadets should always be addressed by their surnames, but everyone called Rusty just that. It seemed impossible not to.
“The captain’s compliments, sir. Could he see you on the bridge, please, Mr. Carter?”
“I’ll be right up.” Rusty turned to leave and I caught the gleam in Susan Beresford’s eye, a gleam that generally heralded some crack at my expense. This one predictably would be about my indispensability, about the distraught captain sending for his trusty servant when all was lost, and although I didn’t think she was the sort of girl to say it in front of a cadet, I wouldn’t have wagered pennies on it, so I rose hastily to my feet, said, “Excuse me, Miss Harrbride, excuse me, gentlemen,” and followed Rusty quickly out of the door into the starboard alleyway. He was waiting for me. “The Captain is in his cabin, sir. He’d like to see you there.”
“What? You told me — "
“I know, sir. He told me to say that. Mr. Jamieson is on the bridge” -George Jamieson was our Third Officer- ”and Captain Bullen is in his cabin. With Mr. Cummings.” I nodded and left. I remembered now that Cummings hadn’t been at his accustomed table as I’d come out, although he’d certainly been there at the beginning of dinner. The captain’s quarters were immediately below the bridge and I was there in ten seconds. I knocked on the polished teak door, heard a gruff voice, and went in. The Blue Mail certainly did its commodore well. Even Captain Bullen, no admirer of the sybaritic life, had never been heard to complain of being pampered. He had a three room-and-bathroom suite, done in the best millionaire’s taste, and his day cabin, in which I now was, was a pretty fair guide to the rest — wine-red carpet that sunk beneath your feet, darkly crimson drapes, gleaming sycamore panelling, narrow oak beams overhead, oak and green leather for the chairs and settee. Captain Bullen looked up at me when I came in. He didn’t have any of the signs of a man enjoying the comforts of home.
“Something wrong, sir?” I asked.
“Sit down.” He waved to a chair and sighed. “There’s something wrong all right. Banana-legs Benson is missing. White reported it ten minutes ago.” Banana-legs Benson sounded like the name of a domesticated anthropoid or, at best, like a professional wrestler on the small-town circuits, but, in fact, it belonged to our very suave, polished, and highly accomplished head steward, Frederick Benson: Benson had the well-deserved reputation of being a very firm disciplinarian, and it was one of his disgruntled subordinates who, in the process of receiving a severe and merited dressing-down, had noticed the negligible clearance between Benson’s knees and rechristened him as soon as his back was turned. The name had stuck, chiefly because of its incongruity and utter unsuitability. White was the assistant chief steward.