“Sneaky Pete?” Brande asked.
“We’ve got two of ’em aboard, Dane, along with SARSCAN,” Sorenson said. “Plus, I’ve backed up the spare parts for damned nearly everything, including computers.”
“Good. How about cable?”
“We’ve got two five-thousand-foot reels of multichannel fiber-optic.”
“Scuba and deep-diving gear?”
“In prime working order, though I doubt that we’re going to go after this reactor with fins.”
“No, but I like to be prepared for anything.”
They took one last tour of the deck, then stopped next to the gangway. Sorenson signaled Fred Boberg, his helmsman on the bridge, and Boberg sounded the air horn twice. It sounded forlorn in the night.
The stragglers emerged from the warehouse and climbed the gangway. Two seamen raised the gangway with the small crane, stowing it on top of the superstructure, behind the guest cabins and next to the eighteen-foot Boston Whaler.
Kaylene Thomas came running out of the warehouse, her arms wrapped around a stack of journals and books.
Brande made the three-foot drop to the pier, met her, and relieved her of her books.
“Did Okey remember to bring his library?” she asked.
“I think so. He’s got a lot of reading to do. But what are you doing?”
“With this much time at sea, I’m going to start reorganizing.”
Brande had not yet announced to the others his decision to relinquish his executive position in favor of Thomas. Despite his glibness at the time, it had come hard. It was like giving up a child he had sired, reared, and nourished.
And then, to his complete surprise, he had felt only relief. Now he could chair a meeting occasionally and spend his time fund-raising or chasing for gold ingots and bronze breastplates. Omit the damned paperwork he hated.
What had come almost as hard to him was admitting to Thomas that he needed her. It might have been his stubborn Swedish heritage — shades of his grandfather — but Brande found such admissions tough to make. And having done it, he again found relief. And he found he was seeing Rae Thomas in a different way. Not one he could describe, particularly, but she was different somehow.
Or maybe he was different. He would have to sort it out sometime.
The Orion’s diesel engines cranked several times, then caught, and a dash of blue smoke escaped from the stern exhaust ports.
Brande handed Thomas’s books up to Sorenson, then said, “Up you go.”
Grasping her waist, he lifted her to deck level, and Sorenson towed her aboard.
“Mel, you take care. You’ve got the new president of Marine Visions aboard. Be nice.”
Under the bright lights, he saw Thomas blush.
Sorenson said, “No shit?”
“No shit.”
“It’s about time, Dane.”
“My grandma used to tell me that frequently.”
Everyone seemed to know more about it than Brande did, he thought.
Sorenson climbed the outside ladder to the bridge wing, then slipped inside.
Brande walked forward along the pier and began releasing the docking lines from their bitts. A seaman named Rogers, on board the ship, stayed with him, pulling the lines aboard. They turned and went aft, releasing those lines also.
“Shut off the lights when you close up, Dane,” Thomas called to him as the Orion engaged her propellers and slipped away from the dock.
“Quit thinking about the cost of electricity,” he called back to her.
He stood alone under the lights of the dock and watched until the Orion sailed out of his view around the point of the Commercial Basin.
“Why is it that progress must always follow tragedy?” Curtis Aaron asked the crowd that surrounded the Ford pickup that was his stage.
The mob, about three hundred strong, did not know. They were waiting for him to tell them.
“Fifty thousand die, and then we learn we should have gotten out of Vietnam earlier.”
“YES!” they yelled.
The bullhorn was heavy, and Aaron lowered it to rest on his left hand during the responses. He was a Vietnam veteran, and he was probably the only one on the pier. His speeches always made frequent reference to the debacle in Southeast Asia.
“A hundred-year-old forest crashes to the ground in Washington, stripping bare the mountainsides, and then we try to recover by planting seedlings that are washed away in the winter snows. A century down the tubes!”
“YES!”
“The oil spreads like thick, deadly blood on the pristine waters of Prince William Sound, killing everything in its path, and then we learn that we need more stringent requirements for tankers and for their operators.”
“YES!”
“How many human beings, seals, cormorants, salmon, sea gulls, whales, and beaches will die before we learn that Nature herself is better suited to governing her flocks?” Aaron asked, more conscious of the rhythm of his deep voice magnified by the bullhorn than of the order of his list.
“Too goddamned many!” somebody yelled, probably Dawn Lengren.
“TOO DAMN MANY!” the crowd echoed.
Aaron let them chant for a while. He smiled at them and looked around. Mark Jacobs of Greenpeace stood leaning against a pier railing, looking back at him. Jacobs had spoken to the crowd earlier but, Aaron thought, with less conviction than was called for in light of the developing news reports. Aaron frequently chided Jacobs for the soft stances that Greenpeace took.
It was more than news reports, of course. Rumors were flying with the agility and speed of F-15 Eagles. The meltdown had already occurred. Fish were dying by the millions, washing up on the beaches. Fishermen had been quarantined. Supermarket chains had already banned the sales of seafood products from Pacific waters.
Rumor or fact, people were frightened. How often could he or Mark Jacobs assemble a crowd this large on the Santa Monica Pier at one o’clock in the morning?
They were an odd lot. A few fishermen, a few freaks that had drifted in from West L. A. and Hollywood, a large number of beach bunnies and surfers, some boating people — judging by their clothing and the pseudo gold braid on the bills of their baseball caps — and a couple of cops. The cops appeared a little nervous as they eyed the weirdos and the louder protesters, and they did not chant along with the crowd.
A chilly wind was blowing in from the sea, breaking against his throat above his navy blue windbreaker. A couple of ships were steaming several miles offshore, but other than that, there was not much marine activity. A fairly steady stream of cars moved along Pacific Avenue. Aaron wondered if their occupants had come down to gawk at the contaminated water.
Donny Edgeworth, Ocean Free’s secretary-treasurer, was at the fringe of the mob, talking on Ocean Free’s only cellular telephone. Edgeworth was a skinny kid with hair so golden it looked green. He was not really a kid, being thirty-five years old, but his slight frame and rampant acne gave most people that impression.
As the chanting died away, Aaron lifted his bullhorn again and said, “And now … ”
“AND NOW…”
“They’ve done it again. Defying Nature, with no concern for the consequences, the powers that be have created yet another catastrophe”
“YES!”
“Doing their best to destroy what God and Nature have provided for mankind.”
“YES!”
“When will they learn to leave alone that which history and fate and nature have given to us?”
Wrong question, or form of question. The mob did not know how to respond.
“Leave it alone!” Aaron said into the mouthpiece. The three words issued from the bullhorn in volume and were blown away by the breeze.