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"They're worth more to me than they are to you, Ben, I said, and turned my back on him. As I walked to the lift I could hear him coughing behind me. He was a sick man.

I went to my desk and began to study my reports, but I did not have my mind on them. Part was on May, as part of my mind was always. But part was on Ben. I wished the bastard no good at all, but I did not wish him dead. I knew who would inherit his stock when he died. And the Reykjavik lawyer had told me that Ben could name his successor as May's guardian and, for all that she was years younger and the guardianship a mockery, I knew who he would name.

I could not get out of my head that May had been about to say something to me before she left, and so I decided to hear what it was. Three days after she was gone, I called in my assistant and told him he was on his own for a week, and took the same plane.

We were cruising in the Philippine sea at the time, so it was VTO jet to Manila, then orbital craft to the great floating terminal off Sandy Hook, and a helicopter to the roof of my hotel.

I do not like the land. I do not like the crowds and the roar and the stink of the land, and especially I do not like a city. I had taken rooms in the same hotel where May was staying, and I did not intend to leave it except to see her. So as soon as I was settled in my suite I walked out into the hall and took the elevator a dozen flights and knocked on the door. Tse-ling Mei opened it. "Uncle Jason! she cried, with pleasure and surprise in her voice, and maybe a little worry, too. "Oh, come in, please!

All four of the other Mays were there. So was little Jimmy Rex, bawling at the walls of his room because he was being made to take a nap, but my May was not.

The young beauties sat me down and clustered around me like meadow flowers in the spring. "Some tea? asked Mei, and, "Have you eaten? from Maisie, and "What Jason probably needs most is a drink, from May Bancroft, and from May Holliston-Peirce, "Oh, tell us what's new on the boats!

So we chattered for a while and I felt almost at ease, though concerned that they seemed to have no idea when May would be back. Then May Bancroft sighed and said, "Oh, hell. We all turned and looked. Jimmy Rex was standing in the doorway, glowering at us, escaped from his crib and come to make us unhappy. In one hand he waved the perfectly dry diaper he had managed to squeeze out of. With the other he guided himself as he pissed deliberately on the Auhusson rug. Do you see what a foolish lottery we gamble in when we make a child? He could have taken after his mother, May. Even after his father, and been nothing worse than a fool. But in the random lottery of the DNA exchanges he had caught the very soul of May's bitch mother-in-law, and how heavily that has cost me since.

It cost me then, too, because it broke the mood of the party. I got up to go. Tse-ling Mei was holding the brat down while Maisie tried to pin the diaper back on him, and May Holliston-Peirce was bringing towels from a bathroom to mop up the rug. May Bancroft said, "I'll walk you to your taxi, Uncle Jason. I had no intention of a taxi, but the look on her face stopped me from saying so.

So we walked through the hall with her hand in mine, and dropped like stones in the elevator-my heart in my mouth, for there are no such high-speed lifts on the oatyboats-and she walked me through the lobby to a back entrance, and around a corner and another until she found a taxi that suited her. I was dressed for the Philippine sea, not New York in November, and May not much more warmly, not to mention the crush, and the stink, and the noise. But I let her keep up her chatter all the way without interrupting. Tse-ling Mei had been given a marvelous new part, and one May was to be married and another to run a hospital somewhere in New Jersey or Indiana, and May Bancroft herself was back in school for a law degree. And then she peered inside a parked cab and nodded her head and leaned forward to kiss my ear. She did not give me just a kiss. She gave me an address and a room number, and then turned and hurried off without looking back. I had wit enough to change cabs and walk a bit before I hailed the second one, although I nearly froze while I was doing it, but in five minutes I was there.

The address was the seediest of old hotels. The room number was on the seediest floor. The air in the hall was choked with marijuana fumes and the smell of human sweat, and the door was opened by a man of forty or more. He was wearing pants that he had zipped but not belted, no shoes, and a shirt that he had left unbuttoned. He was a sober-looking, serious sort of a man, not what you would expect to find in a whore's hangout like this, far from good-looking but solid.

And behind him, lying on an unmade bed, wearing a thin muumuu, was my May. Her expression was filled with fear.

"It's not what you think, Uncle Jason, she said to me at once, and to the man, "Hurry! Let him in!

The man moved quickly to do it. He pulled me in by the elbow, showing surprising strength for a pudgy little man not much younger than myself. He stuck his head out into the hall, and looked both ways before he closed the door. Then he turned to me.

"I'm Jefferson Ormondo, he said, "and I'm an investment banker. I apologize for this place and the way we look, but the windows don't open and the heat won't turn off. And Ben Zoll has willing ears in too many places. He was buttoning his shirt while he spoke. He sat to put on his shoes and said, "I'll take a look around the lobby to make sure it's all right. May will tell you what's going on. And he was gone, and there I was in a sweaty halfhour room with my sweet May gazing up at me out of a rumpled bed.

"We're going to get Ben's guardianship set aside, she said.

"That's impossible, I said-with my voice, but I know that what my face was saying was,
That's unfair, May, to try such a thing without me!
And she answered my face.

"Jason, dear, it's no secret from you. I can't do it without you."

"The best lawyers in Reykjavik say you can't do it at all", I told her, "for the will is in proper form."

"But what if it is forged, Jason?"

I goggled at her.

"Forged", she said, nodding. "Not all of it. Just the matter of dates. The guardianship was supposed to stop when I was twenty, and Ben had someone get into the datastores and add ten years to the time.

Now, that was getting close to a line of conversation I did not want to pursue. I didn't know-I have never known-if the Commodore ever told his daughter about the favor I had done him. She did not say anything then, or ever, to give me an answer one way or another, but hurried on: "And that is fraud, Jason, and somebody may well go to jail. But proving it! It's so hard. And Ben has everything on the boats bugged, of course. I couldn't speak to you there-and besides, she said, sitting beside me and touching my arm, "he knows you're smarter than I am, so he watches you twice as hard.

I said, "You don't have to explain anything to me, May. But I wanted explanations all the same. I got them. The plump little bald-headed man, Ormondo, worked for the bank that held Ben's stocks, and it had seemed to him that there was something funny about the records. For one thing, the will should have existed in several data- stores, not just the bank's. But the Commodore's own bank had been swallowed up by another and its records were unavailable, and in the hall of records where the will had been filed the system had crashed, all the data lost.

Ormondo came to believe that there was a forgery. He could not prove it, but it made him curious to look further. There was plenty to find.

Ben had been milking the fleet. He had set up corporations of his own to buy the hydrogen from the oatyboats and to sell the ammonia on land, and to lease to us the pilot cutters that prospected for cold, deep water, and even the aircraft that carried us to shore. Everything the Fleet bought cost a little more than it should, and everything we sold went for a little less, and the difference went to Ben.

And then Ormondo had met May at a party, not by chance, and whispered in her ear.

And ever since then, for the best part of a year, the two of them had been searching out records and interviewing people who might know things. Whispers had got back to Ben, surely. But Ormondo was a careful man.

And they had the pattern almost complete.

"The next step, Jason, she said, "was going to be to talk to you. I almost asked you to come with me this time. I'm glad you didn't wait to be asked.

"Of course I'll do everything you want, I assured her.

She smiled sweetly and touched my arm. "Of course you will, dear Jason. There's one other thing.

She looked embarrassed. She pursed the pretty lips, hesitating, her eyes gazing at the chipped paint on the ugly wall as though she were staring over the wide sea. Then she said, "I need a husband, Jason.

She had caught me unaware. "A husband?

"I need a husband for me, and for help in this fight, because it will be a terrible one. And most of all I need one because of Jimmy Rex. He must have a father, Jason. Not a silly boy. A grown man, wise and kind and sensible. It doesn't matter if he's older than I am. It only matters that he be someone I can trust and love with all my heart.

These were the words I had been dreaming of hearing for all the long years. I could hardly speak. "Of course, my dearest, I said, and reached out for her, and was puzzled by the astonishment that sprang into her eyes.

It was a terrible fight, indeed. For months we were more on Iceland than in our propper home, all of us. That was a high enough price to pay in itself, for me. Iceland is where the Law of the Sea is administered, and indeed it is land that has come from the sea, bubbling up in roaring steam, some of it within the memory of living men. But it is still the land, and all the geothermal steam and hot swimming pools do not make up for losing the warm breezes of the southern seas.

But we won. Or mostly we won. Bastard Ben might well have gone to jail indeed, if he had not gone to the hospital instead and did not come out alive.

So it was Betsy who lost the suit, not Ben, and she did not lose it all. We could not prove the falsification of the will. The litigation was long-drawn and savage, and three of our witnesses disappeared, but the records of the dummy corporations did not. So May settled at last for a division. The guardianship was annulled. All Ben's contracts to buy and sell were voided. The Fleet was divided in two. Half the oaty-boats went to Betsy, the rest, with half the money from Ben's loot, to May. And Betsy began at once to build more.. . but we were at ease at last, back at home on that first old boat, steaming slowly through the Strait of Malacca, and the Commodore's daughter was at last the undisputed queen of the grazing isles. She ruled us happily, along with her child.

And with her husband. Who was not me.

She was the kindest of women, my May, but she could not be kind enough to allow me to forget how foolishly I had missed her meaning when she was trying to tell me that she meant to marry Jefferson Ormondo.

* * *

For the sake of her son and to claim her due, At four and twenty she wed number two. They battled and won in the struggle to keep Her fair-owned gifts from the generous deep. Blest was the respite from worries and trials In this short happy time for the queen of the isles.

Although I had lost her again, it was a good time. May was happy. Jefferson Ormondo had the good sense to be happy-well, what else could he be? Even little Jimmy Rex became more tractable, since he was away from Betsy's constant need to spur on his own born-in meanness.

We even made a sort of peace with Betsy herself. It was not easy or comfortable. Yet she came to pay a visit to our quaint old thermal grazer, and then there was nothing to do but for us to visit her great new flagship. Though I took no joy in seeing Betsy, I was glad enough of the trip. Her Works Captain was a decent enough man-we'd sailed together under the Commodore-and besides, I wanted to see some of their engineering.

What we want for the heat exchangers is the hottest surface water we can get, the top meter if we can get it, for that's where the sun's heat is strongest. But when you pump a hundred tons a second, the suction tubes are not fastidious about what they take. So when Captain Havrila took me up on his bridge, beaming with pride, I knew what he was going to show me. I'd seen it from the air. The boat was surrounded with a screen that lay thirty meters away from the hull in all directions; I'd seen it, and realized at once that there was a shallow lip all around. "You pump direct from the hull, I guessed, ~ and you've trapped surface water in a moat. The screen's to keep out fish?

He grinned ruefully. "I knew once you laid eyes on it, Jason, I wouldn't have to say a word. We pump from a reservoir ten meters deep, but all that comes in to replenish it is the very top of the sea.

"It's a nice solution. I complimented him. "But doesn't it cut down your maneuvering, with all that drag?

"It
destroys
it, he said happily, "but we're not going anywhere very fast anyway. And we've been getting delta-Ts of twenty and up -well, most days, he corrected himself. "Tell me, Jason, what are you doing about organic fouling? "Same as you, I guess. Reverse fluse every ten days with little plastic marbles. We lose nearly half of them every time, though. The sea is full of little living things that want something to cling to-unfortunately, they don't care what. The lining of our intake tubes is as good a place as any. There's not too much trouble with the deep- water intakes, because the water down there is too cold for them to be very active. But the surface intakes are another story.

"We're recovering nearly a hundred percent on the surface, he boasted. "It's all trapped in the moat, you see, so we just scoop them up again.

"Good job. But what do you do when the perimeter screens begin to foul? And he laughed and offered to buy me a drink, for that was the weakness in the system.

I took his drink, and a lot more than one over the three days we were there. I had no quarrel with Betsy's captains or Betsy's crews, but I did not like Betsy's friends. I didn't like May's liking them, either. The women called themselves actresses or models-polite lies. The men lied less politely. They called themselves men. There was Simon Kellaway, Las Vegas-born, slim and quick and temporarily living at sea on Betsy's charity because there was a murder charge in Nevada that he couldn't hush up. There was Dougie d'Agasto from Miami Beach, tall and fair and a pimp's recruiter if I ever saw one. They came from Chicago and Los Angeles and New Orleans, and they all had money, or acted as though they did, and I did not believe that even one of them had got it inside the law.