"They're trying to spy on us," Jerry said.
But they could not see us watching them. We had outsmarted them, and we laughed softly — even April, who was usually afraid — seeing them struggling upstream in their old canoes.
"They're coming from Jeronimo," Clover said.
"Good thing they ain't see us naked!" Drainy said.
"They'll never find our camp," I said. "No one will find the Acre."
I was glad that we had this safe place in the jungle. And now, because I had seen Seville, I knew that ours was a well-ordered camp — better than the villages made by real jungle people.
We mentioned the canoes in Jeronimo. No one had seen them. Father said, "Maybe Munchies! Maybe Duppies!" and tried to frighten the Maywits.
On the morning Father said we were going back to Seville, Mr. Peaselee, who was doing fireman duty, let Fat Boy's fire go out. The ice melted. Father said, "We might have to cancel the trip. Everyone to the Gallery!" He gave a lecture about responsibility and good habits, and did we think Fat Boy could live without care and attention? Fat Boy was kind because we were careful, but if we were careless he would turn dangerous. If we neglected to do our duty, he would split open and take his revenge by killing us all. Father said, "He's full of poison!"
After Fat Boy was stoked and new ice was made and packed, I heard Father say, "You can't take your eyes off these people for a minute."
Mother said, "That's just what Polski used to say."
"Don't compare me to that turkey."
"You're getting shrill, Allie."
"Poison," Father said. "Hydrogen and enriched ammonia — thirty cubic feet of each one. You'd be shrill too, if you knew the danger."
"I'll get the food," Mother said, and walked away.
Father saw me listening. "I'm the only one around here carrying the ball. Why is that, Charlie? You tell me."
I thought, He really does sound like Polski.
We left for Seville — the Fox family, no one else. Father pedaled and talked the whole time.
"Don't think I'm enjoying this," he said. "The last thing I want to do is go back to Seville. I'd just as soon go back to Hatfield. But we're obliged. We can't drop them after one shipment. I thought we might inspire them, help them out, cool their fish and give them time for farming — do all the things that ice lets you do. That's the whole point, isn't it? Give them the benefit of our experience? But I know what they'll do with the ice — they'll cube it and dump it into their glasses of Coke and just go haywire like everyone else."
"You didn't say anything about Coca-Cola," Mother said.
"Give them time."
We made Seville in under three hours, Father pedaling furiously and shouting about how he was going to dynamite a canal through the jungle and dredge the hyacinths out of the river. In his angry mood he imagined the grandest schemes. At the mahoganies we were met by five Seville people — they popped out of the spinach and the grass and startled us. They had seen us on the river, they said. But we had not seen them. They danced around Mother, telling her to be careful.
"We didn't get a reception like this the last time," Father said.
"I think they want us to follow them," Mother said.
As before, I ran ahead, stamping on the duckboards to frighten away the snakes. Jerry was behind me, looking worriedly from side to side.
He said, "What's that thing?"
"It wasn't here before." Clover said.
It was a wooden box in the clearing of Seville, as tall as me, and from a distance it looked like Fat Boy. It was smaller, somewhat resembling the original Worm Tub. It had a chimney stack and a firebox. Several women squatted near it. stoking its fire.
This pleased Father. "Maybe we inspired them after all," he said. He called out to the Gowdy. who was waiting to greet us. "What have you got there?" Father said. "That looks kind of familiar."
He walked straight up to it while the Seville people gathered around.
The Gowdy said, "Hice!"
Father opened the door, but the hinges of tattered vine were so flimsy the door fell off and the corner of it caught fire when it banged the firebox. Father kicked the fire out. We looked inside. It was empty.
"What the hell is this all about?" Father said.
They had made a copy of Fat Boy. But, Father said, what good was it? Of course it didn't work. It was only good for boiling eggs or setting yourself on fire. "Who gave you this harebrained idea?"
They smiled. They treated this box with a kind of reverence and asked Father to lead them in hymns in front of it. This enraged Father. He began to smell of his anger. The Gowdy tried to present Father with the lame puppy, but Father said he had enough sick animals of his own, and sick people too. So we unloaded the ice, and without even unwrapping it we went back to the Icicle. He said to Mother, "I hope you're satisfied." He also said he would never again go to Seville.
"I didn't come here to give people false idols to worship," he said. But the idol was there for all to see, made of warped planks and fastened by lianas.
"That's the trouble, really," Father said. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
16
"WHAT'S ice good for?" little Leon Maywit had asked. But Father did not mind silly questions from small children. He went on, "Mainly it's a preservative — it keeps food fresh, so it keeps you from starvation and disease. It kills germs, it suppresses pain, and it brings down swellings. It makes everything it touches taste better without altering it chemically. Makes vegetables crisp and meat last forever. Listen, it's an anesthetic. I could remove your appendix with a jackknife if I had a block of ice to cool your nerves and take your mind off the butchery. It doesn't occur naturally on the Mosquito Coast, so it's the beginning of perfection in an imperfect world. It makes sense of work. It's free. It's even pretty. It's civilization. It used to be carried from northern latitudes on ships in just the same way they carried gold and spices—"
We were on the Gallery, all of us, Foxes, Maywits, Zambus, Mrs. Flora Kennywick, and the others — one of Father's dinner gatherings. Father pointed his finger stump at the mountains rising behind Fat Boy.
He said, "And that's next. Injun country. We'll take them a ton."
The newer people looked at his finger, not the mountains, and just as he said "ton," there was an earth tremor and their eyes popped.
It was a noiseless wobble, a slow half-roll that made the Gallery quiver. It was twenty seconds of rotation, like the drop of a boat deck. Nothing fell down, though there was a human yell in the forest and a breathless bark of worry from the river. I had the feeling that everything had moved but us. The world's peel had wrinkled and made a little skid. That was the first shuddering stall, but its various shakes and smoothings lasted a full minute.
Father made a flutterblast with his hps and said, "Gaw!"
Mrs. Maywit said, "Oh, God, Roper, what we do?" and she and Mrs. Kennywick began praying.
When I heard "Roper," I looked at Mr. Maywit. He covered his face and sobbed, "Never mind!" The moment passed. I think I was the only one who heard.
"Pray if you must," Father said, "but I'd rather you listened to me."
Everyone except us looked worried, as if he might point again at the mountains and cause another earthquake.
"I'm just thinking out loud," Father said, "but if I had the hardware, know what I'd do?"
At this, Mother smiled. I guessed what she was thinking — why do anything?
It was plain from where we sat that Jeronimo was a success. We had defeated the mosquitoes, tamed the river, drained the swamp, and irrigated the gardens. We had seen the worst of Honduras weather — the June floods, the September heat — and we had overcome both. We had just this moment withstood an earth tremor: nothing had shaken loose! We were organized, Father said. Our drinking water was purified in a distiller that ran from Fat Boy's firebox. We had the only ice-making plant in Mosquitia, the only one of its kind in the world, and the capability, Father said, of making an iceberg.