The Terminators (8 page)

"Involving The Wonderful Sigmund Siphon," I said. "That's a terrific name, but what does it mean?"

"I don't really know what it means," she said. "Security is very tight on the subject, Mr. Helm, and you shouldn't even breathe the name aloud."

"Sure, sure," I said. "But does it tap the oil well itself or the pipeline where it runs under the sea or what? Either way, it's got to be quite a trick, doing it undetected several hundred feet down. Of course, the North Sea is a good place for it, with the weather as lousy as it generally is. You can lose yourself out there in a hurry, most of the time. Even, I suppose, in a good-sized tanker with a big hose running over the side."

She said, rather stiffly, "Really, I'm under orders not to talk about it to anyone. Matt. I won't help you speculate about it. As a matter of fact, I don't really know. Well, I do know what a siphon is, roughly. And I guess it's all right to tell you that this thing was invented by a kind of defrocked technician with an affinity for the bottle, now

working around the fringes of the oil industry at any job he can get. Meanwhile he cooks up wild inventions, each one of which is going to make his fortune. Well, this one may just do the job, if the Skipper is right about it."

"Jeez," I said. "It's a goddamned circus, that's what it is. A couple of mad scientists, a mysterious oil tycoon with a passion for privacy, and some traumatized victims of the energy crisis."

"You forget that man called Denison."

I said, I hoped casually: "Oh, sure, Mr. Kotko's dangerous Mr. Denison. Add him to the list. You didn't tell me how the gas shortage got you here."

She said, "Actually, I don't know that I'd call myself a victim of the crisis, darling. I may actually be a better girl for it, or at least a less hypocritical one. It made me think for the first time in my life, really think. I mean, there I was pedaling my ecological ten-speed bicycle on my way to save the world and make it beautiful, and shaking my fist dutifully at all those obscene, polluting Chrysler Imperials whizzing past—and suddenly, no more gas. You know, darling, bicycling when you feel like bicycling or want to prove something is one thing. Looking forward to a lifetime of sitting on that hard little seat and pushing those crazy pedals and getting your hairdo ruined and your pants or stockings greasy is something totally different." She shook her head ruefully. "It was . . . a real shock. Matt. Suddenly I realized that all my life I'd been taking my opinions from other people. I'd been thinking just what all my concerned, idealistic friends had been telling me to think. At least I'd been thinking I was thinking it, if you know what I mean."

"Give me time," I said. "I'm a few thinks behind, but I'll catch up eventually."

"Suddenly," she said, "I realized that I—me, Diana Lawrence—didn't feel like that at all. I made the dreadful discovery that I really 
liked
 big, comfortable, air-conditioned cars, and I was going to miss them terribly if they disappeared. And once I started looking, I kept finding more disillusioning things about myself, for instance that I really 
liked
 warm, soft, lovely fur coats and I wasn't really all that disturbed about the poor little animals who'd lost their lives to make them. Well, leopards and such, okay. They're endangered; and I don't want to be the one to push them over the edge to extinction but I never heard that the mink situation was even mildly critical. I even discovered—this is a terrible confession, and I probably shouldn't tell you—that I was pretty tired of hearing about those darling little seals brutally clubbed to death by those dreadful men on the goddamned Pribilof Islands, wherever they are. Hell, maybe the poor guys were just trying to earn a living, and that was the safe and efficient way to do it, and maybe the herd could spare a few seals now and then. Aren't you shocked?"

"I'm tough," I said. "I'll recover."

It's part of the required duties of a secret agent. He's supposed to sit there showing wide-eyed interest, hoping for some useful nuggets of information, but it isn't always easy. I mean, ten-speed bikes and fur seals, for God's sake! I reminded myself that she was a nice kid, or at least an interesting one, and I had, after all, asked for it. I changed position slightly so I could watch the Elfenbeins hitting the herring hard. I decided that tomorrow I'd better try it. I'd done it before, long ago, and survived; and why fly a third of the way around the world just to eat the same old bacon and eggs?

"But the thing that really got to me," Diana was saying, "when I started 
thinking
, was the busybodies who, not satisfied with saving the environment and the animals, kept trying to save me. Without even asking my permission! Here I'd been applauding uncritically every time somebody hung a new safety gadget on my car and now I realized suddenly that I was sick of it. I was sick of people who were forever saving everything from everybody, and everybody from everything. I was fed to the teeth with all the screaming seatbelts and wailing ignition locks—now you can't even start the stupid machine without getting yourself all safetied up! What's that junk doing in a 
car
? A car's for 
driving
, isn't it? If you want to be so damned safe you can stay 
home
, can't you? And anyway,

if I want to go through a windshield headfirst, that's my own goddamn' business. Isn't it?"

''So you decided to go through a windshield headfirst just to show them, and here you are?"

Diana laughed. "Something like that. What I really decided was that I was. fed up with being so damned concerned, so damned idealistic, yes, and so damned safe. I didn't really know what I was going to do about it; but then one afternoon at a Washington cocktail party I got into an argument with a well-heeled society female with whom I'd served on some worthy committees. She tried to tell me how we should look at the bright side of the crisis. What she considered bright was that all the people who'd loved fast cars, or snowmobiles, or dune buggies, or speed boats, or travel trailers, would all be grounded, and wasn't it wonderful, my dear? I mean, think of all those broken-hearted folks with their beautiful, expensive, useless toys—well, like the Skipper and his fancy fishing boat—and this bitch was 
gloating
 about it, damn her! If that was high-minded idealism, I thought, to hell with it!"

Diana paused to look out at the mountainous coastline sliding by. I asked, "What happened?"

She grinned. "Well, I practically shocked that buxom biddy out of her expensive foundation garment by saying that I thought the internal combustion engine had been a good and faithful servant to mankind and if we did have to bury it, the least we could do was show some grief and appreciation, instead of spitting on the grave. She isn't a lady with a great sense of humor, so the argument got pretty hot. I mean, she actually accused me of being a Traitor to the cause. I noticed this rather striking, weathered, gray-haired character standing by, looking kind of amused. The next morning he called me up and said he was Captain Henry Priest, USN, Retired, and would I care to have lunch with him? His intentions were strictly honorable, he said; he was forming a certain organization with government blessing, and he had employment he thought might suit me, judging by the way I'd talked the night before. .. ." She paused and shrugged. "Well, that's about it. Matt. It was just the kind of crazy, crummy, dangerous, antisocial thing I'd been looking for to get the taste of all those goddamned crusades out of my mouth. The blackfooted ferret was just going to have to do without me for a while, I was going out and steal a lot of smelly oil and I wasn't going to buckle a single seatbelt while I was doing it!"

I said, "
The Liberation of Diana Lawrence
, we'll call it when we put it on the screen."

She looked at me for a moment; then she reached out and put a hand on top of mine, a small gesture of protest. "Don't," she said quietly. "Don't make fun of me, darling. Don't make fun of us. Don't spoil it."

"Sorry," I said.

"It's really a terrible thing," she said. "None of those people were real; and the world they lived in wasn't real. They'll never find, or make, that dreamland of theirs where the streams run nothing but distilled water, and the breezes blow nothing but pure oxygen and nitrogen mixed one to five, and no animals or people ever die. This is real. You're real."

"Thanks," I said dryly. "If that's a compliment."

"Death is real," she said. "I learned that last night, waiting in that cabin for somebody to come in and murder me like they'd murdered Evelyn—if I didn't shoot them first. It was wonderful. Why didn't anybody ever tell me that the only way to be alive, truly alive, is to risk being dead? It had never happened to me before. I'd always been protected before. It was horrible and marvelous and I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

"You're a screwball," I said.

She gave me a sudden, boyish grin and squeezed my hand lightly before taking hers away. "Well, as they say, it takes one to know one," she said.

Of course, she was perfectly right.

VII.

AROUND noon, we pulled into a picturesque little harbor called Alesund and I stood on deck watching the docking procedure with interest. It looked very easy. The ship just made its approach well out, somebody forward heaved a light line ashore, and a man grabbed it and hauled across a husky wire cable with a big loop on the end, which he fitted over a giant cleat on the dock. The ship, still gliding ahead slowly, came to the end of the cable and was drawn right alongside by her own momentum, after which the other docklines were put ashore. Simple. I wondered how many years of practice it had taken the guy on the bridge to make it look that way. There was a familiar, youthful, figure in jeans and wind-breaker among the people clustered on the pier. I went below. Diana was reclining on the unmade berth when I knocked and entered her cabin.

"I told you to keep that gun handy, always," I said.

"It's handy, darling. I just didn't want it in plain sight m case you were the stewardess coming to make the bed." She sat up and pulled her hand out of a fold of the blanket and showed me the ugly little snubnosed weapon.

"Is he there?" she asked. "The other one, the one who went ashore last night?"

I nodded. "He's there. The lad seems to take his duties seriously, whatever they are. Judging by my map he must have made a hell of a drive overland to rejoin us, with all kinds of ferries to catch across the fjords. Or maybe he had a friend with a fast yacht or handy helicopter."

"Is he alone?"

"As far as I can see but that means nothing. If he brought reinforcements, they'd be keeping out of sight."

"What do we do now?"

I looked around for something I needed, or thought I might need: a towel. A rather damp one hung over the edge of the washbowl in the corner. I rolled it up and stuffed it into my overcoat pocket.

"You," I said, "do nothing. Don't leave this cabin. If he sees you, and makes the connection, the only way I can keep him from telling the Elfenbeins this isn't the dame he helped dump over the side in Bergen, is to kill him. So keep out of sight while I figure out how to get rid of him without distressing the local constabulary. They're nice Norwegian boys, and we don't want to bother them with any unnecessary dead bodies."

Diana hesitated. "That's . . . kind of risky, isn't it, Matt? Leaving him alive, I mean."

I looked at her sharply. The funny green glow was in her eyes again. They're the most dangerous people on earth: the ones who've been brought up on the cruel fairytale that peace is the natural state of mankind, and that violence is a rare and disgusting aberration. Once they realize how badly they've been conned, if the discovery doesn't shatter them completely, they tend to go so far in the other direction that no self-respecting Mako shark will associate with them.

I said, "You're a bloodthirsty bitch."

"No," she said, "just a practical one."

"Well, maybe," I conceded. "But it depends. On whether homicide is feasible at this point, in broad daylight, without time to set it up properly or get help lined up."

She shrugged. "You may be right, darling. I haven't had a great deal of experience at this sort of thing—less than twenty-four hours, actually. But —" She stopped.

"What?" I asked.

"Be fair, please," she said quietly. "If I were a professional agent, you wouldn't look at me as if I were some kind of a mad vampire lady, merely Because I point out that a certain person is a serious threat that might better be removed."

I regarded her for a moment. Again she was perfectly right. I sighed. "My apologies. You are not a bloodthirsty bitch, Miss Lawrence. Okay? Now keep that gun handy, and don't let anybody in you're not sure of. This may take time, so don't get impatient and start roaming around. I'll be back as soon as I can."

They were just shoving the gangway into place when I got back upstairs—excuse me, topside. Parson Elfenbein and his pretty daughter were not in evidence. The youth whose friend I'd been so mean to last night was still waiting among the greeters and prospective northbound voyagers down on the dock, with his gaudy nylon pack at his feet. He picked it up when the gangplank was opened to traffic, but he had to wait to let the shoregoing passengers get off the ship first, and I was among them.

Alesund was a colorful little community clinging to the side of a mountain valley half-filled with water. Beyond the town limits, the hillsides above the fjord were covered with small evergreens that looked as if they led hard, precarious lives. The dock was fairly long and had a lot of big crates piled on it awaiting shipment to somewhere. I scanned it hastily as I moved downwards with the rest of the landing party, looking for a spot quiet enough for what I had to do.

Then he was right in front of me and it was time for me to go into my act. After all, the groundwork had been laid. My lethal reputation, as Mac had termed it, was supposed to have preceded me. Now, if ever, was the time to cash in on it. He pretended not to recognize me, of course; just glancing at me casually and returning his attention to the ship, looking for someone else. He'd performed his mission, whatever it was, and now he wanted to find his immediate superior and make his report.