The Pleasure Tube (23 page)

The windward side of Chinaman's Hat turns out to be fully hollowed out, a small valley formed by prevailing weather, absolutely desolate. A white beach is at the mouth of the valley, protected by another reef farther out. Well offshore, Werhner puts on his gear and slips into the water to swim in. We power in the rest of the way, pull the boat up on the sand.

I hit the toggles on the electronics built into the center seat. Someone is paging me from the resort—my guess is Eva Steiner—has been paging me off and on for the last ten minutes.

Collette watches me unplugging the battery. "You mean business," she says.

"I didn't come here to be bothered," I say, and look around the spot, what a spot. From here the resort has entirely disappeared. Pristine beach all to ourselves, a thick grove of coconut palms and sprawling sea grape leads up the small valley. A small fresh-water stream drains to the ocean two hundred meters away, then the ridge shoulders over the sand.

I can see the bright red of Werhner's diving flag bobbing with his float on the swells; it appears, disappears, appears in the blue. The sun is booming at two o'clock, absolutely dazzling, a white-hot specter I can feel in my bones, tingling on my skin. The news about Guam is finally sinking in; I feel lighter, find myself starting to think ahead to what I might do when this trip is over. A trip to South America, I think?

"We won't be able to tell what time it is," Collette says amiably as she unloads the mats and the cooler.

"Best news I've heard all day," I laugh.

White beach, warm sand, the surf a low roar since the tide's come up. There are a few seabirds here, skimming the ocean, wheeling overhead to nesting sites on the rocky slopes behind us. We've had to move up the beach because of the rising tide, camp now on a cleared patch above the high-tide line. Collette's pouring the last of our two bottles of champagne, Werhner lies flat on his back looking up into the sky. I'm still wet, just out of the diving gear. My ears ring slightly and I have a mild sense of unreality as I squat down, dripping, at the corner of the straw mat.

"Black holes," Werhner says to the sky. "The most interesting phenomenon to a speculative mind. Rawley wisely just flew the ship. I think I began to think too much about them. I haven't been the same since. Well, neither has he."

"There's something I don't quite understand," Collette says, passing Werhner a paper cup of warm champagne. "Rawley mentioned that within a black hole, a traveler, assuming there's the slightest chance he'd live, would be free in time. Could you explain that?"

"That's a theoretical premise based on what black holes do to light," Werhner says, up on an elbow. "A black hole is so dense that it attracts rather than emanates light—and once you reverse the physics of light, you reverse the physics of space and time. Here we're free in space—we can go back to the cabana, walk along the beach, go wherever we'd like. On the other hand, we're trapped in time—we can't go backward into the past or forward into the future."

"Yes," Collette says.

"Reverse the physics for a black hole and you find yourself like light trapped in its gravity field, trapped in space; but free in time instead, since time depends on the movement of light."

"Feeling champagne," Collette laughs. "Still, you'd be crushed, wouldn't you, by its density, your own gravity? What did you call that state, Rawley? Naked singularity. You'd be pulled to the center of the collapsing black hole and crushed beyond the smallest particle of matter. Staggering to imagine."

As Collette hands me my champagne I tell her about ring singularity, the kind of naked singularity exhibited by spinning black holes. Because they spin, their naked singularity is expressed along their pole axes. And presumably, along the equator, if the black hole were large enough, a traveler could enter and survive, with enough power to orbit within. One theory suggests passing through. "Though if he did pass through, a traveler would find himself in another universe, one that shares with his universe the identical black hole. And that's not exactly passing through."

"Or just be pulsed out somewhere, maybe, pure energy," Werhner says, pushing back his hair. "I don't agree that if the Daedalus had gotten into the rotational black hole we were surveying, we'd have wound up in another universe. Vaporized and pulsed out, maybe. Levsky's idea—Levsky did the physics—is that in the right kind of black hole, with just the right orbit, you'd be caught up in some kind of loop, free in time, so your experience of the loop would be your experience of... Dead enough, Levsky used to say. Stone-cold dead."

"Yet in some paradoxical way always alive," I add; that's also what Levsky used to say.

"Now I am feeling champagne," Collette says. "The freedom reminds me of the hologram."

Werhner holds up his paper cup, swirls the last of the champagne. "The hologram, yes, but the hologram you can shut down. You don't come back from the black hole. Well, one last toast. Reunion of the crew. And thank God we did get back. Theoretical ideas don't get to drink even warm champagne."

After we drink the tart, flat remains of the champagne, we sit in silence for a time, listening to the surf. The rollers far out in the surf line crest and fall into themselves, one after the other, the sets growing with the rising tide. As I swam the outside reef I rose and fell with the waves, the surge and drop still with me. I am on the mat, barely touching Collette, watching a seabird skimming just over the water, so near the surface he disappears behind each crest. Collette asks me where I'd like to be, free in time. I laugh, push my hand through the sand, and say, just where I am. She says she'll file that information for the hologram.

Collette's arms are spidered behind her back, she's untying the scanty top she's wearing. Her breasts jostle free, dark nipples erect. Now she's slipping off her string bottom. "Join me?" she asks, motioning with her eyes toward the calm water inside the near reel.

"Later," I say, watching her rise, run in her side-to-side woman way to the sea. I grip the sand in my hand to feel its presence. It runs through my fingers, filters through in fine streams to the sand below. I grip so hard the sand which remains, the pain shoots through my wrist; squeeze it so tightly it is as if I want to fuse it into glass.

"Some woman," Werhner says.

"I agree." I am thinking about Taylor, though, as I watch Collette laze in the shallow water past the rubber boat, floating on her back, arms straight out, legs spread-eagled, glistening brown in the sun. "God, it's good to be alive. Do you think we're actually through with SciCom?" I ask Werhner.

"That's my guess," he says. "I've seen my new orders, so... You'll feel a little more convinced when you're holding that paper in your hands in another two hours. If nothing happens after a few days... then what difference does it make? SciCom's always watching flight crew, you know that, we'll never be through with that part of it. But this crap we've been going through? The only thing that still has me on edge is the data on Cooper. I don't understand what's going on."

"They must know," I say.

"Not according to Knuth. Knuth says if there was no transcript there was no interview, and what I pulled was probably a visit from a nurse," Werhner shrugs. "A blind? Or a..." He sighs, then smiles, looking at the Zodiac, looking past it at Collette. "You know, this is some place, this whole arrangement."

Handful by handful, I filter sand through my fingers. A woman, I think.

When I plug the electronics back together on the Zodiac, the message pager starts right in, almost as if on cue. It is the same traffic operator with a reminder from Taylor that I'm to meet him in Dome A at 1800 hours, he wants a confirmation.

"Tell him I'll be there," I say. "I wouldn't miss it for the world. Tell him that."

We have a small cocktail-hour snack, a party, at the Palace Garden Club; there are five of us; Collette and myself, Erica and Tonio, Werhner. I'm preoccupied with what I'd like to say to Taylor in an hour, but Werhner's no help. He's really taken by the place, the lush garden setting, the Balinese women dancing, the red snapper, which, he says, has never been frozen. I can see he's also taken with Erica. I think she's playing up to him, and she looks great, her blonde hair bleached by the sun, blown back. She looks as if she's lost some weight; with the food set before us in the last two weeks I can't figure out how, then I recall her bouts of flightsickness. Right now she doesn't look as if she's ever been flightsick: trim, smiling; the sun has given her a glow. She's telling Werhner she spent the afternoon snorkeling, asking him if he's ever been frightened by a shark.

"The only kind were SciCom sharks," Werhner laughs, glancing at me. "I've seen some real sharks. They never bothered me.. Underwater, you have a different sense of danger, it's less direct. I think that's because the medium is heavier. Blue sharks, white tips—seen those, they're pretty common. I expect they're harmless."

"Werhner lived in the water," I tell Erica. "Look at his neck. Beginnings of gills."

"Well, it happens to be very relaxing," Erica says. "It eases your tensions. Your physical tensions."

Tonio is distant, picking at a bright red lobster. There's something as well between him and Erica. He did drag her over to the horseshoe bay at the west end of the island to watch the hydroplanes, but they only watched from a distance and went somewhere else, so that's not it.

"I saw some eels once," Collette says. "They
gave
me tensions. I'd like to try tanks someday, though."

"Didn't use tanks much on Guam," Werhner tells her. "Body chemistry sets a three-hour limit—and, well, Rawley knows the swim off Utama Bay."

"We'd always wonder if he'd come in at sundown."

"It passed the time." Werhner smiles. "The only advantage of tanks is that you can go deeper."

I see Erica guzzle a full glass of champagne, set the glass down with decision.
"Deeper.
That's something I'd like to try. Tonio didn't even put on the fins I got for him. He was too busy chasing boys. That's where we went. He said he wanted to tape the canoe racers, but he never left the beach. He barely left a certain beach blanket. Isn't that right, Tonio?"

So that's it, I think—Tonio barely looks up from his lobster, Collette is looking at me with wry, raised eyes. I am trying to stifle a smile, look at Werhner—he's turned flush, hopelessly embarrassed. A kind of dead weight falls on the table. Poor Tonio clears his throat.

"So, ummm," Collette begins. "Tell us more about, uh, Hong Kong."

"Not much to tell," Werhner says with relief. "Crowded, run-down. It's not the same. And it smells like a sewer. I was sorry I went."

"This is the place," Erica says. "Hong Kong's been out for years."

"Sure, the women here, ahh..." Werhner begins. "I mean..."

Tonio has folded his napkin, he's rising from his seat. He puts one palm up nervously, smiles, uses the other to smooth his white suit. "I do have to meet someone," he says to us all. Erica rolls her eyes and he gives her a sharp look. "Bitch," he mutters. "Bitch," she answers back. He manages to smile at us all. "Good meeting you," he tells Werhner. "See you again, perhaps." Then Tonio, working his fingers, walks away.

Werhner smiles nervously at Erica, she smiles back. Then a long silence falls over the table as we eat. "How did you two meet?" Werhner finally says to me, nodding at Collette. "I don't quite understand the, uh..."

"If a woman's interested in you, she lets you know," Erica says firmly, running her statement right into the middle of his sentence.

Werhner stops for a moment, grins weakly, clears his throat.

"I'd like to sleep with you tonight," Erica says before he can say another word. "And see one of the shows."

Werhner nods a little breathlessly, looks at me open-mouthed, looks at me as if to say, thank you, Rawley, you have somehow managed to set me up. I take the credit with a grin; of course, the credit isn't mine.

"You take good care of this woman," I tell him. "She's a friend of mine, too, and she needs careful handling. Listen to what she says. There's a real woman in that bikini."

Now Erica looks at me with a grateful, romantic sigh. Collette gives me a soft punch in the ribs.

The ride up the crew elevator of the large ship is achingly familiar—twice during the thirty seconds I have the certainty I'm going on watch for the thousandth time. There's a salt scum on the edges of my lips from this afternoon, I lick them to recall exactly where I am.

As usual, Dome A is almost empty—the circular room, twenty meters across, is ringed with electronics of the same order as the Daedalus—and the consoles grouped in the center still use whole rows for vanes. The transparent dome is canted toward the center of the three-cylindered ship. Through the slightly blue glass of the dome's ground the tropical evening sky is just beginning to show; the day's light is failing, but within this chamber there are no interior lights. I spot Taylor standing in the dimness at one of the consoles near the chart table.

"Does feel like home," I say, walking over the familiar magnesium-alloy floor—and I am blithely there before I feel my blood come up, before I realize we aren't alone.

"The technology has not changed very much," the other party says crisply, her voice agonizingly familiar, absolute in the silence. "All new preprogramming, new autopilots over there. But technology develops only to a point. Beyond that point, the interesting instruments are human."