“But no more. Now you blighters have satellites flying up there at all hours of the day and night. If one of your military spy satellites was to gam in on us, the show would be over, though we’ve managed to stay out of what they would call `sensitive’ areas. Worse yet, we’re big enough for your geosynchronous weather satellites to see, if anybody would believe what they were looking at. As it is, our best guess is that when they do see us, they put it down as some sort of an electronic glitch, and ignore it. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the situation can’t go on forever. Some power or other is going to spot us, and with peaceful intentions or otherwise, they will likely invade us. And for the medical reasons I’ve mentioned, not many of us will survive it.”
“So now you need a way to keep your island hidden from satellite surveillance,” I said.
“That would solve one of our problems, but not the other one.”
We were interrupted as a young woman came in wearing an abbreviated version of the warlock’s robes. All of the other women’s costumes I’d seen on the island had floor-length skirts, even when the bodice was cut as low as possible. This outfit exposed nothing below the neck, but the loose black smock ended just below the serving girl’s crotch.
“Always been a leg man, myself, and my mother always said that a woman should never expose both ends at the same time,” the warlock said.
When I agreed that it would be a shame to cover up such attractive legs, the warlock nodded in agreement, and the young woman winked at me. I’d been impressed with the warlock’s status before, but a man’s having so much power that he could actually get the ladies to dress in a fashion that pleased him, well, it was a thing that was beyond all experience!
It was a moment before I noticed what those lovely legs had carried in for our afternoon snack. Besides the weak, flat beer that the islanders made, I was surprised to find a large plate of sushi!
“We weren’t the only plane to crash here during the war,” he explained. “A Jap patrol plane pulled the same stunt, and one of their gunners turned out to be a pretty good cook.”
“You were saying that you had yet another problem,” I said.
“Right. You see, we’re sinking. Over the centuries, water has been slowly working its way into the tiny gas bubbles that keep the place afloat. We’ve been able to compensate for this reduction in buoyancy by hollowing out all of the mountains above the water level, and by sinking shafts below it, again to reduce our weight, but as one of your songs has it, we’ve `gone about as far as we can go.’ And the coral buildup on the underside hasn’t helped things a bit!”
“Just how fast is it going down?”
“We’ve sunk a foot in the last six years. In twelve more years, a major storm might be able to flood out some of our lower galleries, and that would bring on a total disaster. Do you see the spot we’re in? We can’t leave and we dare not stay!”
“It can’t be that bad. I don’t know much about medical things, but I’m a hell of an engineer. Why don’t you simply go down below the islands and scrape off the coral and the waterlogged featherrock?”
“The islands draw more than half a mile, that’s why, and there’s a little problem with breathing down there!”
“Going all the way down to the bottom might be a problem, but there has to be a lot of excess weight within a few hundred feet of the surface. Ever heard of a SCUBA rig?”
“There have been a few scattered references to such a thing on the radio, but they weren’t very clear,” he admitted.
“SCUBA. Self contained underwater breathing apparatus. We have two of them with us, along with a compressor to pump up the tanks. You are welcome to them, and we’d be happy to teach some of your people how to use the things.”
“Marvelous! Can we start tomorrow?”
“No reason why not. Also, while I’m not sure of all of your needs, there might be a lot of other things that we can help out with.”
“That’s the spirit, mate! Now then, before you go, could you explain to me some of this equipment you had on your boat?”
Which got us into a three-hour-long conversation, and this time with me doing all the talking. On parting, we agreed to meet the next morning down at the boat.
TWENTY-ONE
I got home to find that everyone else had started supper without me. As I caught up with the rest of them, I filled them in on my remarkable conversation with the warlock.
“So what they have is a very old, do-it-yourself scientific organization, with a little World War II technology thrown in. There isn’t any magic at all,” I said.
“But, you say that you are able to see hundreds of miles in the dark, that you can look down to the bottom of the ocean, and that you can hear people speak when they are on the other side of the world. If that isn’t magic, I would very much like you to tell me just what is!” Agnes said.
“With Americans, I guess that you could say that technology is something that we understand, and magic is something that we don’t,” I said.
“Then for me, it’s still magic,” Agnes said. “I don’t understand any of it!”
“Call it magic, if you want,” Adam said. “One word’s as good as another, but `magic’ has two syllables and `technology’ has four.”
“I suppose that the symbols themselves aren’t important, but I’d still rather be called an engineer than a magician,” I said. “But tell me, Adam, how went your meeting with the archbishop?”
“It was beautiful,” he said, with a calm and glowing smile. “I don’t think that I’ve ever met so holy a man before in my entire life. They’re Christians here, but it’s a purer sort of Christianity than anything I’ve ever heard tell of. It’s like they are all living by Christ’s actual teaching rather than what a bunch of abstracted theologians have done with those few parts of it that they understood. There’s . . . Aw, you wouldn’t understand it, Treet, but there’s sort of a joyful acceptance here of the beauty of God’s world, with love being far more important than sin, and heaven being emphasized more than damnation. I don’t think that these people even believe in Hell, or if they do, they aren’t worried about it. It’s like Christ is too nice a guy to do that to somebody.”
“You almost sound as though you’re ready to convert,” I said. In fact, he sounded more like he had gone through the kind of brainwashing that the Chinese Communists always wanted to be able to do, but never could quite get down pat. But I couldn’t tell him that. Trying to argue with a fanatic just hardens his resolve. All I could do was wait and see if he recovered.
“I might convert. I just might, once I’ve learned more. Anyway, I will be taking religious instruction from one of their priests, starting the day after tomorrow.”
“I never thought that I’d see you giving up on being a Catholic.”
“Maybe I’m not. Right now, I don’t see why I have to stop being one thing in order to start being another. I don’t know enough about this whole setup yet, but I intend to find out, and soon.”
If I was still a teenager, I would have gotten into a frothing hot argument with him, but much of wisdom and maturity has to do with being just too tired to bother with the ones that you know you can’t win.
“Okay,” I said. “There seems to be some sort of friction between the warlock and the archbishop, but the warlock didn’t want to talk about it. Did the archbishop say anything enlightening?”
“Some. There’s a big faction in the church hierarchy that doesn’t want to have anything to do with the outside world. They cite the problems that the warlock mentioned, you know, the problem with diseases and the fact that the island is slowly sinking, but those aren’t the biggies with them. They’re more worried about cultural inundation, only they don’t call it that. They say the big problem with outside contact is that it would make the people here materialistic and sinful. That the people would leave the ways of their forefathers and pick up on an evil American lifestyle.”
“You mean that the churchmen are worried about losing some of their influence, not to mention their cushy lifestyle,” I said, and then noticed the shocked expressions on the faces of the servants and our ladies.