Pohlstars (2 page)

And for seven years baby May grew, and wasn't a baby any more.

There are little girls with a face so fine and a look so sweet that they'll break your heart. May was one. She was slight for her age, and all her life. Yet even when she first toddled she would pause, and stick her thumb in her mouth, and gaze out over the privet and the boxwood hedges at the southern seas with an ancient mariner's look of sadness and resignation that made you forget the rumpled hair and the dragging diaper; and when she was old enough to talk and tie her shoes, I fell in love. It is not a thing I want to have laughed at and so I will say no more, but it's true. I did. I loved her truly and purely, and went on doing so. Not as a godfather.

She had a father's love for those seven years, though. She was the Commodore's only daughter and his only legitimate child-the only child of his I saw then, for the bastard was away at school and then at work in the Fleet's landside offices. He was busy every minute, the Commodore, but he always found time to see May and to play with her, and to tuck her in at night. I was less busy than that. There was not much work attached to being the Managing Director of the May Mackenzie Trust, for every penny of it was invested in the oaty fleet, two ships, and then seven, and then a dozen; the money rolled in, but every spare penny went back into building more. So I competed with Elsie Van Dorn. I became May's other nanny. They were the best years I have ever lived. I took her with me around the boat. We watched the dry ammonia powder being pumped out of our belly into the hold of a tanker, kerchiefs to our noses to keep from sneezing, and we listened to the screaming hydrogen flow as it went into the refrigeration ships, the huge red flags warning us not to light a match or scratch a spark-as though anyone in the Fleet were such a fool! We watched the huge slow spinning of the low-pressure turbines as they transformed the heat into power, and we waved good-by to the crews of the scout skimmers as they went out to seek colder depths and warmer air to steer toward. Every member of the crew knew May, and petted her when she would let them. They weren't truly a crew. They were more like a city, for we had power workers and fertilizer chemists and oceanographers and engineers and navigators and cooks and cleaning men and fire wardens and a ship's master and five assistants to guide us and half a dozen gardeners for the greensward and the farms on the afterdeck. There were more than eighteen hundred human beings on board, and I think May knew the name of every one. She knew none better than me. I was her godfather and her friend. There were a hundred other children on board, and four who were her special friends, but there was no person who was more special than I.

And then the Commodore one morning came to breakfast in May's room, as he always did when he was aboard, and looked tired, admitted he'd had a bad night's sleep, got up from the table, fell face down on his plate, and died.

I could forgive the Commodore for dying. He didn't plan to do it, and it happens to us all. But I will never forgive him for dying with his will so written that his bastardly bastard son, Ben, became May's guardian until she was thirty years old.

He was aboard before the body was cold and had moved into the Commodore's rooms before the smoke of the Commodore's cigars was aired out. The will gave him the voting rights on May's stock. I could forbid him to sell a share. I could take the dividends and invest them anywhere I chose-but where was there a better investment than the oaty fleet?
I could, in fact, do nothing.

For a month, then, I looked over my shoulder every minute, expecting to see the Commodore's hired assassin, but the assassin never came. All that came was a note, one day, mailed from Papua New Guinea via the boat's air service, and all it said was, "It's not your fault, this time.

The Commodore never broke a promise to me but two. The first was that he'd have me killed if I failed to protect May's interest. I did fail her then, and knew I had, but I didn't die. The other promise was that I would never have to worry again, because after he died, for twenty years and more. I did nothing else.

Later on, in Twenty-three, The queen she married, but not to me. Later still, in Twenty-four, A scowling imp of a son she bore. She bore him and raised him for years and miles, The son of the queen of the grazing isles.

When May was fifteen, Van Dorn went at last back to the engines, and May went off to school. She took her four friends with her, the four other Mays with whom she'd grown up, but Ben would not allow me to join them. "You can keep your job and your pay, Jason, he said to me, "but leave my sister May alone, for when she's ready to fall in love it will be with a rich boy and a sensible boy and a handsome boy, and not with a dirty old man who sleeps with her socks under his pillow. That was a lie. I told him it was a lie. But what was behind it was no lie, for the love was still there. If May had been five years older, if she had been a year older even, I might easily have told her what I felt before I let her go. And might have got a good answer, perhaps. There was thirty years between us, and I am not handsome. But she was easy with me, and trusted me, and had good reason for trust.

So Ben the Bastard fouled Owner's Quarters with his fat dark wife and their sallow brat, Betsy, who never liked me. Nor I her, to be sure. That whole family was repellent. I never knew Ben's mother, but I knew who she was. A file clerk in a lawyer's office. The Commodore seduced her to get a look into the lawyer's contract files, where there was something worth money for him to see. He got his look. She got his child. He would never marry her, of course, for she hadn't a dime, and when she pupped his bastard, he was long gone away. I will say for the Commodore that he acknowledged the son. He paid the bills to bring him up, even when it was hard for him. He sent the boy through school and gave him a place with the Fleet, though not at sea, but would never give him his name.

So it was Benjamin (which means "gift of God") Zoll (for that was the woman's name) who came aboard with the will in his pocket and the resolve in his heart to reign.

Well, he had more than arrogance. He was a mean- hearted man, but a hardworking one. The first day he was over the side in a diving mask, discovering cracks in the antifouling plates and surfacing in a fury. Twenty maintenance workers lost their jobs that day, but the next crew kept the plates repaired, and we saved a thousand dollars worth of steaming fuel a week.

An ocean-thermal generating boat lives off the temperature difference between deep water and sun-warmed surface water. The top water warms the working fluid- a halocarbon with a low boiling point-and it becomes steam and goes through the low-pressure turbines to make electricity; the electricity splits water into hydrogen and fixes nitrogen from the air, and we sell what it makes. The difficulty is the halocarbon working fluid. It is too expensive to vent to the air. It must be condensed and recycled, and for that we need something cold. The sea gives us that. There is plenty of cold water in every deep sea, but it is half a kilometer down or more, and so we must pump it to the surface. Pumping and pumping. Pumping cold water up from the deep. Pumping the working fluid through the solar collectors. Pumping water past the electrodes to be split into its gases; pumping the gases into the refrigerator ships to be carried away. Out of every hundred kilowatt-hours of energy we make, ninety-seven go into running the gear itself.

But that three percent left over makes us rich, for once the boat is built it is all free.

Ben Zoll had never worked on an oaty-boat, and so he had much to learn He learned it fast If he did not have the Commodores name, he had at least inherited his drive.

May had the name. And bastard Ben kept her from everything else, kept her from the presidency of the Fleet, kept her from the voting rights to her stock.

He did not begrudge her money. She had the best schools. She had horses to ride and clothes for a princess. It was no sacrifice to Ben to allow her any money she needed. The billions of land people hungered insatiably for every grain of ammonia and every wisp of hydrogen we could make. The company prospered under bastard Ben.

And so did I, for my pitiful fifty shares of stock had already made me a millionaire. I didn't need the job anymore. But I kept it, and I stayed on the O.T. Where else was there to go? No sensible person would want to live on a continent with all those writhing billions. Land people are a suing, assassinating, conniving bunch. And I had formed the habit of living under the Law of the Sea- And, besides, every now and then May came home to visit.

She did not come often. But there were school holidays. Any time there were afew days together, she would take the long five-hour flight from Massachusetts to the Bismarcks or the Coral Sea or wherever we were grazing, and in the summers, always, for weeks on end. It was not May alone, for the four other Mays always came too, to visit their families and to get away from the stink and strife. They were beautiful girls. Girls to break a thousand hearts, and I suppose they did. There was Maisie Richardson, huge and blond and glowing with health, and May Holliston-Peirce, the hydrologist's daughter, with trusting blue eyes and a sweet, guileful tongue, and Tseling Mei, who became a movie star, and May Bancroft, black and handsome and the wisest of them all. And May herself. My May. She was always the most beautiful of them all. There are pretty babies who grow up blotchy or sullen or fat, but there was never a day in any company when May was not the most beautiful there. They were all almost of an age, May and the four other Mays, and, oh, heaven, how they brightened up the old O.T.! There was a May for any man's taste, and all of them for every taste, for they were kind and clever, they were lovely and loving. They chattered and whispered among themselves, and if ever a joke went the wrong way or a word touched a nerve, they made it up at once with a kindness and a kiss.

And then there was Betsy.

Betsy Zoll. Bitch child of the bastard, Ben. If you take the raw materials for two young women and give all of the beauty and kindness and grace to one-say, to May- what is left over is Betsy Zoll. May was a diamond. Betsy was flawed glass. When the Mays were not aboard, Betsy was the princess royal, and sometimes, on a good day, she almost looked the part. But in their shade she drooped and sulked. The shiny glass was beside true diamonds, and its luster was gone. They let her tag along with them, out of kindness. Out of envy, she wished them dead. So the holidays were no joy for Betsy Zoll, and she couldn't wait, couldn't wait for them to be over and the Mays back in school so she could try to reign again.

And then there was a Christmas season coming when Betsy was all smiles and triumph.

* * *

She must have hunted all over the boat for me, for I was down in the boiler room to see if there was a need, as ship's gossip said there was a plan, to buy new generators. "Well, Jason, she said, beaming so fondly that my heart sank, "getting ready for Christmas?

The engineers and oilers watched us from a distance, whispering to themselves, although no one needed to whisper with the great coughing sigh of the low-pressure turbines in every ear. I wished her a Merry Christmas civilly and excused myself to let my office know where I was-there was no reason not to now, you see, because Betsy had already found me. When I finished with the phone, she giggled. "Next week that will cost you a quarter, she said.

I had known she would bring bad news, of course, because that was her nature, but what she said was astonishing. "It will cost money to use the ship's phone? She pursed her lips and inclined her head. "To use the phone, and to run your video, and to turn on a fan, yes, she said, the sallow face and the pale eyebrows twitching with pleasure. "Father says it's time we started charging for all the electricity the crew uses. Fifty cents a kilowatthour to start, Father says.

"It makes no sense!

"Dollars
and cents, she said gleefully. "That's our electricity, old man. It's worth money. Why should we give it away when we can sell it?

I drew back from her, because she had pressed her face almost into mine and her breath was like a sewer. Betsy was fifteen years old then, but the freshness of youth had never touched her. I said, "We can't sell electricity, Betsy, only what we can make from it. If we want to produce more to sell, we'll have to devote more space to conversion processes, and where's the space to come from?

"Good question, old man, she said triumphantly. "Father has of course thought of all that. To begin with, there's a thousand cubic meters wasted under the foredeck. We'll do our hydrogen electrolysis up there, which gives more room amidships for the ammonia and-

"Owner's Quarters! I said.

"Old man, she lectured, "people like us won't live on this little tub forever. We've got new boats building ten times the size of this. We're going to move the flag.

The ship's gossip was not only gossip, then, and the truth was worse than the gossip. It was worse than I knew, in fact, for Betsy had saved the worst for the last. "When May comes home for Christmas, we'll see what she has to say, I said, for it was in the Commodore's will that May's own quarters were hers forever. And I had delivered myself into Betsy's hands.

"When May comes home for Christmas, she parroted spitefully, "what we'll see, old man, is that she isn't comming home for Christmas. Why, Jason! Do you mean she never told you that she's got a boyfriend? His name's Frank Appermoy, and she's spending her Christmas with him and his mother.

And May had not written me a word! As Betsy well knew. She did not bother to disguise her triumph as she glanced at her watch and moved her lips for a moment before she spoke, that charnel breath well suited to the words she said. "Allowing for the time differences, she said, "I'd guess they're probably humping in his big water bed on Hawaii right now. Tough shit, old man, she said, and turned and left me standing.

* * *

Back in my office, the first thing I did was order up all the data we had in store on Frank Appermoy and the rest of the Appermoy clan. The second thing, while I was waiting for the readouts, was to put through a call to May at the Appermoy estate on the Big Island. It was 10 P.M. on the 'Kona coast, and according to the butler who answered my call, Miss May and Master Frank were at a luau and were not expected to return for at least two hours. So I asked them to call me, and got down to the hard-copy prints.