“Yes.”
Frank turned back to Kelly. “So what is it?” he said.
Kelly wasn’t ready. Stammering a little, he said, “What’s what?”
“The letter,” Frank said. “The ticket. The twenty dollars. It isn’t to sell me comic books.”
“No. Uh—”
“Anyone here?”
It was another voice from up on deck, and Kelly leaped gratefully at the interruption, shouting, “Yes! We’re down here.”
Frank, watching the steps with some curiosity, said, “Another one?”
“I don’t think you know him,” Kelly said, and the third man joined them. “Robby,” said Kelly. “Nice to see you again.”
Robby stopped three steps from the bottom. “Kelly,” he said. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Robby could have been Harry Belafonte’s younger brother, brown and lithe and handsome, but with a somewhat more sour smile. He was wearing black oxfords, dark gray trousers with a knifelike crease, white shirt, narrow silver tie, light blue sport jacket, and wire-framed sunglasses with blue lenses. He was carrying a small blue bag that said Lufthansa on the side.
Kelly pointed to the bag. “You’ve never been overseas,” he said.
“Swiped it at the airport,” Robby said. He came down the last three steps, dropped the bag, removed his sunglasses, shook Kelly’s hand, and turned expectantly toward Frank. He moved gracefully, with social calm, the kind of young man whose major at college was women.
Kelly made the introductions: “Frank Ashford, Robby Creswel. I knew Frank when he used to be a used-magazine dealer, when we were both in our teens. Robby and I were at Sherman Tech together for a semester.”
“Till you blew up the dormitory,” Robby said. “Why all the secrecy, with the letter and all? Why not just call me on the telephone?”
“Just the question I was asking when you got here,” Frank asked.
Kelly had rehearsed this part, he and Starnap had decided the best method of approach. “Let me tell you in a way that might sound roundabout,” he said.
“Oh, boy,” said Frank. “You got anything to drink?”
“You’ll find a well-stocked liquor cabinet there,” Kelly told him. “I’ll take a gin and tonic.”
“Good. Robby?”
“That sounds fine,” Robby said.
Kelly watched them. Neither seemed more than idly curious. Would it work? He cleared his throat and said, “One reason we three are together here right now is that we have so much in common.”
Frank looked up from the open refrigerator. “We do?”
Robby laughed and said, “You wouldn’t know it to look at us.”
“We all need money,” Kelly said.
The other two lost their good humor. Frank shut the refrigerator door, not having gotten any ice, and said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What it says.”
Robby said, “What makes you think you know about me?”
“I know about you,” Kelly told him. “I know about both of you. I won’t start talking about you in front of each other, but I do know that neither of you has much money, neither of you has a good job or good prospects, and if you did have a chance at a good job you probably wouldn’t want it. Frank, won’t you make the drinks?”
Frank, suddenly sounding exactly like W. C. Fields, said, “Maybe I better. I have a feeling I’m going to need a drink soon.” He opened the refrigerator door again, got the ice cubes out.
“You both want,” Kelly said, “what I want. A lot of money. Enough money so we can retire and live on the interest and devote our lives to our private concerns without having to worry about jobs or rent or payments on this and that or any of the other many things that hold us down.”
“Amen,” said Robby.
Frank, opening the tonic bottles, said, “An annuity, that’s what I want. I’m not greedy. Just enough to live on, that’s all. I don’t want yachts.” He gestured at the cabin around them. “None of this stuff. I could live on ten thousand a year.”
“Figuring a five percent return on investments,” Kelly said, “conservatively, that is, you’d need a principal of two hundred thousand to earn ten thousand a year.”
“That’s a lot of dollars,” Frank said. He poured gin over ice, tonic over gin.
Robby, a little smile playing around the corners of his mouth, said, “You aren’t leading up to something crooked, are you?”
“Of course I am,” Kelly said. “Nobody can get two hundred thousand dollars legally.”
Frank brought the drinks, then raised his glass. “To crime,” he said, and his voice was suddenly that of Edward G. Robinson.
They drank.
Robby said, “What sort of crime, Kelly?”
“You’ll have to tell me yes or no first,” Kelly said. “I can’t tell you the details and then have you say no and go away.”
Frank said, “Kelly, be realistic. I don’t know about Robby, but I can’t say yes or no till I hear it. I say yes, you say go shoot your old man.”
“Nobody will be killed,” Kelly said. “Nobody will be injured.” He pointed to the closed door to the front cabin. “In there,” he said, “I have a computer, a small self-sufficient computer named Starnap. That stands for Selective Timed Abstract Reactional Neutronic Abduction Positioner.”
“What’s that stand for?” Frank said.
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” Kelly said. “The point is, that computer is going to plot the crime for us. A scientific crime. Starnap can consider every possible detail, every circumstance, every available possibility. It would take a hundred professional criminals a year to come up with a plan that Starnap could do, once we’ve put in all the information, in five minutes.”
“Well, you haven’t changed,” Robby said. “You’re still a mad scientist.”
“Starnap works,” Kelly said.
“I don’t doubt it,” Robby told him.
Frank said, “Just a second. As I understand it, you want to start a life of crime here, and—”
“One crime,” Kelly told him. “One crime, big enough to give the three of us enough money to live on comfortably the rest of our lives.”
“How much is that?” Robby said.
“Not quite two hundred eight-five thousand dollars each,” Kelly said.
There was a little silence, and then Robby said, “Fort Knox?”
“Better than Fort Knox,” Kelly told him. “Safer.”
Frank said, “And nobody gets killed. Nobody gets hurt. And you’ve got a computer to do the planning.”
“Yes.”
“And we say either yes or no before you tell us what it is.”
“Yes. And one more thing, we would have to leave here today. We’ll have to be in the Caribbean tomorrow to start getting things organized. So you’ll have to decide right now.”
Robby said, “And if it’s yes, we leave right away?”
“Yes.”
Frank and Robby looked at one another.
Kelly said. “You’ll probably want to think about it, maybe discuss it with each other. I’ll go in here for a while; just knock if you want to talk to me.”
“Sure,” said Frank faintly. He seemed distracted.
Kelly went into the forward cabin and sat down at Starnap’s console. “I think they’ll go for it,” he told the machine. He sipped at his gin and tonic. It was delicious.
Three minutes went by before the knock came at the door. Kelly got to his feet and opened the door, saying, “Want to see Starnap?”
Robby and Frank were both in the doorway. They gazed in at Starnap.
Kelly said, “It’s my own design, really. An adaptation of components from IBM, Burroughs, Control Data, ITT, RCA, and National Cash Register.”