Sandy considered. “I don’t think so.”
“Then give it to me,” she ordered. “Will you be able to hear me at all with it out?”
Glumly, he said, “No.”
“Then, when I give you the sign, spit on your faceplate like this—” She demonstrated. “—and follow me down.” She carefully stowed the little button in a pocket in her scuba gear, sealed the pocket, and gave Sandy a meager smile. She said something. He knew she was saying something because he could see her lips move, but he didn’t hear a sound.
“What?” he bellowed.
She frowned, shrugged, and pointed to the face mask. When he followed her example and spat in it before pulling it on, she looked as though she were sighing, but only waved to him and fell backward into the water beside him.
And they were on their way down, into the dimness of the Wall Street underwater canyon.
He clung to one of Marguery’s heels, letting himself be towed as he stared at marvels. He almost forgot to breathe properly and found himself coughing and gagging before he got the procedure right. But it was worth it!
At street level there were abandoned cars, tossed at crazy angles by the tides. It was twilight there, the sunlight dwindling, but Sandy could pick out objects: a fire hydrant, a bent bicycle frame, a garishly painted cart on which the words “PRETZELS * FRESH JUICE * TOFU” were still visible.
Marguery tapped his shoulder, pointing to a great doorway. Once a revolving door had been the way of entrance, but its wings were folded back. She swam inside, towing Sandy.
They were swimming through what seemed to have been one of those places that the humans called a “bank.” Inside, things became both easier and more difficult. Easier because there were railings and counters to cling to, so that Sandy’s amateurish efforts at swimming weren’t needed. Harder because there was no sunlight at all inside the great room, only diffuse, pale light from outside.
Marguery didn’t seem to mind. She did something to an object on a band around her head, and a beam of light sprang out. Then she swam ahead, beckoning Sandy to follow, right through the doors of a vault. Sandy’s eyes began to compensate, and he could see that inside were cabinets, their doors broken and hanging loose, all empty. At the far end of the vault was a spidery spiral staircase. Marguery pulled herself up it, Sandy following; and at the top of the staircase—
Marguery wasn’t swimming any more. She was walking up the staircase. The water level stopped just before the ceiling of the vault, and the staircase opened into a dark chamber that was not flooded.
When Sandy poked his head out of the water to follow her he saw that she had flipped her breathing mask off. Wondering, he followed her example and found that he was in a room with couches and chairs—all moldering, with a not wholly unpleasant smell of damp.
Marguery was moving around, touching things, the beam of her headlamp picking out walls, ceiling, fixtures—a pole light went on, and they were in a chamber with its own bubble of air trapped under the surface of the flood. She was speaking to him over her shoulder, as he saw when the light came on, but he couldn’t hear anything. “I . . . can’t . . . hear . . . you,” he said.
She paused and opened the pouch on her belt. She unwrapped the little hearing-aid button, rubbed it dry on a cloth over the table, and handed it to him. As soon as he had screwed it into his ear she said, “Do you like this place?”
He looked around. “What is it?”
“It was where the old people kept their valuables. It’s what they call safe-deposit boxes.” She waved at the walls lined with little doors, most of them open. “They kept money here, and jewels, and their wills, and their divorce papers, or anything they wanted to make sure wouldn’t get lost. Then they’d come in here and go into one of those little rooms and clip their coupons, or whatever.”
“What is ‘clip their coupons’?”
She laughed. “Well, that’s a long story. They all had ‘stock’ and ‘bonds’—the rich people did, the kind that used a place like this—and so if they had money it made more money for them, only every once in a while they had to cut off a piece of one of the ‘bond’ certificates and mail it in and then they would get the money.” While she was talking she was taking towels off a rack, tossing one to Sandy, and drying her hair with another. The towel was musty, but dryer than his body. He found himself shivering. Marguery noticed. “Ah, wait a minute,” she said. She touched another switch, and a ring of orange-red light began to glow in a round metal reflector on the floor. “It’s always wet in here,” she said, “but I like it anyway. The electric heater will dry us out a little. Every once in a while I have to recharge the batteries, but they’re good for a few hours yet.”
“Why do you need ‘batteries’?”
“There isn’t any other electrical power down here, of course. There isn’t any communication with the outside world at all.”
Sandy sat down on the leather couch, testing it to make sure it would support his weight. It creaked, but it was a sturdy piece of furniture. He looked around curiously. “What do you use this place for?”
She hesitated. “Well,” she said slowly, “mostly it’s just a place I use to get away to.” She looked at him for a moment. Then she added, “Also it’s about the only place in the world where I can be absolutely sure nobody is watching me or listening to me. Give me your tank, will you?”
He unbuckled it and handed it over, while she opened the valve on her own to just a hiss. “We do need to bring in a little more oxygen now and then,” she said. “Outside of that, it’s a real home away from home, don’t you think?”
Sandy didn’t answer. He was wishing his skills at reading human expressions and tones of voice were a little more highly developed. Marguery seemed different, somehow—her conversation a little forced, and her movement rapid.
“I didn’t know you spent much time in this city,” he said, watching her.
“InterSec’s headquarters is in Hudson City,” she said. “I just like to have a little private place of my own.”
The word “private” again. And she seemed so agitated—almost as much, Sandy thought, as he himself felt in her presence.
Was it possible that human females and Hakh’hli were not so different after all? Could she be reacting to his own growing horniness?
There was only one sure way to find out. It was a risky way, but at that point Sandy’s need to know exceeded his fear of being rejected again. He sat down on the couch beside her and put his arms around her. She stiffened. “Wait a minute, Sandy. Do you think I got you here for some kind of romance?”
He kissed her ear. “Think? No,” he said, trying to be exact. “More like ‘hope.’ ”
She squirmed away. “Cut it out! You’re just as childish as the Hakh’hli.”
He was offended. “The Hakh’hli are not childish,” he protested.
“Well, what do you call it? It’s like boys’ camp, or—” She hesitated. “You know, we used to have things called armies here.”
“I’ve heard of armies, of course,” Sandy said, trying to get closer to her again.
“Of course you have. You probably know more about them than I do, but my grandfather was in one. The way they did in the army, it seems to me, is a lot like you people do on the Hakh’hli ship. In the army they got up at reveille and fell out to go to breakfast, and that was how they did everything all day long. Like, they were ordered. Granddad called it doing things by the numbers. And that was like, I don’t know, like treating all the soldiers like they were children. And because they were treated like children, that’s how they behaved. Do you see what I mean?”
“No,” said Sandy, putting his arm around her again. “The Hakh’hli don’t have armies.”
“But they act that way, don’t they?”
“If you say so,” he said, kissing her on the mouth.
Almost at once she pulled her lips away—almost. “But really—” she began, and then he was kissing her again.
She kissed him back, and then suddenly threw her arms around him. She was strong for a human being, and he was surprised at the power of her grip.
“Oh, hell,” she whispered into his neck. “After all, why not?”
It was not in the least like amphylaxis; there was a lot more moving around, just as the bumpy lumps in the television-film blankets had promised.