No one else was there, and even if they had had to climb, the view would have been worth it. In spite of himself, Sandy found that he was entranced. He was gazing down at the whole human world! There was Hudson City to the west and north, across the wide span of river and bay; there was the almost-unbroken sweep of ocean to the south and east, punctuated with the few islands that had been heaped up in Brooklyn and Queens by the glacial drift ages earlier; there were the surviving lesser towers of old New York City, and the greater pair at what had once been the tip of the island. And there—he could see it plainly—sticking up from the middle of the great sweep of the bay was the body and upraised lamp of that most famous of heroic sculptures, the Statue of Liberty.
He said happily, “It’s great up here!”
Marguery didn’t answer. She was looking at a fixture in the ceiling, and when she looked back at him her gaze was clouded.
“Marguery?” he ventured.
She shook herself and glanced around. They were still alone on the old observation deck, though they could hear the hammering of a salvage crew only a floor or two below. She glanced at the fixture in the ceiling and then she seemed to make her mind up—about something, though Sandy could not tell what. She turned to him with an unexpectedly warm smile.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s really nice to be alone, isn’t it?”
Surprise made him scowl at her. The woman almost seemed to be giving him some sort of sexual signal! He cursed internally at the baffling rites of the human libido. What was he supposed to do? Should he throw his arms around her and do that right here, on the sundrenched observation platform of the skyscraper, with every chance that someone would step out of that elevator at any moment?
It almost seemed that he was. She had moved a step closer to him, still smiling. She had even bent her head toward him, so that her lips were no more than an inch or two above his own.
Angrily Sandy lifted his face to her and reached out for her. To his great astonishment, though she allowed his arms to circle her and even put her own around his neck, she turned her face away. She nuzzled his ear. When he tried to twist his face to hers she held tight.
He realized she was whispering to him.
It was only her breath that told him that; she was whispering into the wrong ear. He pulled back and said, “That’s the wrong one. The hearing aid is on the other side.”
She scowled, then quickly put the smile back on her face. She moved her lips closer to the good ear, and whispered again.
“Sandy. Don’t say anything. This is important. I’m going to ask you if you want to do something. Just say yes, and then we’ll do it. And don’t argue.”
He pulled away, perplexed, and was even more perplexed to see that she was smiling at him in a way even more overtly inviting than before.
“Ah, Sandy,” she sighed, caressing the back of his neck, “this place isn’t quite perfect, is it? Listen, hon. I know a neat place downtown—you’ll have to swim to get there, but we can work that out. What do you say? Would you like to find a more private spot, so you and I can get together?”
And she winked at him.
Sandy exhaled a deep sigh. Whatever was going on, it was sure to be interesting. “You bet,” he said, and then added, “Hon.”
Chapter 17
New York city’s central island of Manhattan does not have many hills. It used to have them, long ago. The English colonists and the Dutch before them, the Indians who were there first of all—they all spoke of hills, valleys, ridges, wide streams, and ponds big enough to sail on. Only vestiges have remained of any of these. When New Yorkers began the task of covering their island with concrete, they didn’t want any grades steeper than a horse could pull a wagonload of bricks—or, later, than an eighteen-wheeler tractor could pull twenty tons of steel girders. So they lopped off the tops of all the hills, and they filled all the ravines, and they piped all the streams into sewers underground. They did not count on what might happen to that flattened island when the carbon-dioxide warmup began. When it happened, their descendants tried diking the island to keep the rising waters out. But storms overrun dikes when the storms are big enough . . . and the storms of the Age of Warmup are definitely big enough.
“I should have brought your bathing suit,” Marguery sighed when Sandy came out from behind the shelter on the building roof in only his bright green underwear. She inspected him absently. Her mood was still curiously detached, almost somber—considering, Sandy thought resentfully, that she had all but promised that they were going to do it. She concluded, “I guess you look all right. Nobody’s here to see, anyway. Here, put these on.”
He took the inflated rubber thing she handed him and managed to squeeze his head through the hole, tying the tabs at his waist as ordered. They were on the roof of a low building—the water level was only feet below. He could not help being distracted as he saw Marguery peel off her slacks. She had her bikini bathing suit on underneath her other clothes and looked quite ready for anything.
Sandy was a long way from ready—for anything. All this equipment was bafflingly new. There was not just the air-filled rubber thing to get on, there was a backpack tank to strap into place, and a mask to try to learn to breathe through, and weights to hang on his belt for what Marguery called “neutral buoyancy.” Sandy scowled. “Can’t we just let a little of the air out?” he asked.
“I don’t want to drown you. No,” she said shortly. “Let’s get in the water. We really shouldn’t stay exposed to the sun this far south.”
She sat on the edge of the roof and eased herself over, floating easily in the water just below him. “Well?” she called, waiting.
Sandy took a deep breath and followed her example.
He didn’t do it as rapidly as she. He took a firm grip on the parapet and lowered himself, inch by inch, into the water. As soon as his legs were in he gasped in astonishment; it was cold. Well, not really cold, he conceded; it wasn’t really unpleasant, except at the first unprecedented shock. But it was water rather than air that his legs were in, far quicker than any gases at soaking heat out of his body.
If Marguery Darp could stand it, he could. Grimly Sandy lowered the rest of his body into the unfamiliar medium. It took an effort of will to make his fingers release the edge of the wall.
Then he was floating.
It was a queer sensation. It was a dozen different queer sensations, none of them ever experienced before. When he moved his arms through the water his body moved in the other direction—just like the main drive engines on the interstellar ship; action and reaction held here, too! The first chill disappeared as his skin got used to the surrounding liquid. It felt, actually, rather nice. When he ducked his face under the water experimentally, some got into his mouth; it was salty, but not at all unpleasant.
He called to Marguery, floating watchfully a yard away, “I think I like it!”
“Let’s get your weights adjusted,” she said.
That didn’t take long. Marguery had made a good guess, and only two small ones needed to be added to counteract the buoyancy of his floats, so that his whole body, flesh, floats, tanks, weights, and all, added up to just about the density of the water he was in.
Then there was the necessity of learning to breathe out through his nose and in through the rubber tube held in his mouth. Sandy choked and strangled half a dozen times before he finally got the hang of the breathing procedures.
Then he peered down into the water. It was less clear here than it had been in midtown, or perhaps simply deeper. “What’s down there?” he asked.
“You’ll see. Nothing to worry about. There’s not much that can hurt you around here, outside of the occasional shark.”
“Shark?” Sandy gasped.
“They won’t bother us,” she promised. “You just keep an eye on the little fish; as long as you see them, there aren’t any sharks around.”
Sandy wanted to believe her. He tried to believe her, but he couldn’t help ducking his head underwater to see if some great, gray, mean thing was down there.
She stopped him. “Don’t go all the way under yet.” She meditated for a moment, then said, “I guess you’re as ready as you’re going to be. Is that hearing-aid thing of yours waterproof?”