“Right,” I said. “We don’t need battery acid all over the place, or wrecked batteries, either.”
I climbed up into the hull, which was still on its side, and checked out what the men were doing. It was slow going, but they had gotten down to the batteries in two places, and were carefully working around them. I got back out.
“Looks fine to me. You figure on giving the warlock all of them?”
“All but two, and we’ll need the starter battery for the engine. That’s all we really need to run her, and the electronics. Without the solar cells and the genset, we’ll have to fire up the engine every other day, but what the heck. I figure that we’ll only be shuttling between here and South America, and that’s less than a few thousand miles.”
“Makes sense. What about the prop-shaft generator? Won’t that help?”
“I was thinking that by hooking that generator up to some wooden blades that could be made locally, we could rig up a windmill and put it on top of the mountain here. With enough wind, it could probably make more juice than the solar cell array.”
“Why not? We can replace it all in Lima, anyway,” I said.
“Right. Now then, there’s one little job that you’re going to have to handle alone, since I’m wracked up and I’d rather that nobody else knew about it.”
“What’s that?”
“The arsenal. It’s encapsulated just forward of the batteries.”
I stopped and stared at him for a bit. “You never told me we had an arsenal on board. Why do you have it, and why didn’t you tell me about it? Just what do you have in there that had to be kept so secret?”
“It’s not all that much, and there’s nothing illegal in there, but you got to be careful with guns. On the one hand, if you need them, you really need them, and then they’re worth a lot more than gold to you. I mean, what if some drug runners had decided that The Brick Royal was just the thing they needed to make a little midnight run into Miami Beach? On the other hand, more Americans are shot each year by their friends than by their enemies, so until needed, it’s better if your friends don’t know they’re there. Also, some of the girls we started out with would have freaked out at the thought of having guns around. Then there was you. In case you’ve forgotten, for about a year there you were slopping around in the worst case of depression that I ever saw a man live through and survive. You’re better now, so I don’t mind telling you about the weapons, but back then you were awfully suicidal. Enough said?”
“If I’d wanted to kill myself, I could have jumped overboard any night.”
“I know, and if I coulda hid the ocean, I woulda done it. The guns I could just not talk about.”
“All right, and I suppose I owe you my thanks. But for now, just what exactly do you have buried over the keel up by the stem?”
“Two of everything I thought we might need. There are some Remington autoloading 30-06s with Leopold scopes, for hitting something hard when you don’t want to get near it. Some Remington 12-gauge autoloading shotguns, for blowing it away if it’s up close. Some Remington Nylon 66 .22 caliber plinking guns, with scopes, for target practice and small game. Some Browning 9mm Hi Power automatic pistols, purely for self-defense. Some Ruger .22 caliber plinking pistols, for just screwing around with, and some Street Sweepers, for when we’re not screwing around. All the guns are made out of stainless steel and plastic, so corrosion won’t ever be a problem. There’s two thousand rounds of each kind of ammo, except for the .22 long rifle. We got twenty thousand rounds of that, plus cleaning equipment, spare clips, belts, holsters, some knives, and other accessories. It’s a good little arsenal.”
“Wow. What’s a Street Sweeper?”
“It’s a 12-gauge autoloading shotgun with a twenty-five-round drum magazine. It has a collapsible stock and a shoulder sling like what you use with a submachine gun. It has a minimal legal length barrel, and a flashlight that mounts on top where you’d think a scope would go. Where the spot shows is where your shot pattern hits. I thought they would be nice to have if we ever had to stand guard duty.”
“What? No Uzis, assault rifles, or grenade launchers?” I said facetiously.
“The Uzi is a very overrated weapon. It’s as big as a real gun but it only fires puny pistol ammo. As to assault rifles, I think that the army went over to those .223 caliber M-16s because militarily, you’re better off wounding an enemy than killing him. After all, you wound a man and they have to dedicate three medics to haul him away and take care of him. It’s that or getting a hell of a morale problem when they start abandoning their own injured. Wounding an enemy takes four of them out of the fight, but if you kill him, he’s just one more dead martyr. But I don’t ever plan on fighting an army, and if I ever have to shoot somebody, I want him dead! Grenades? They’re illegal and way too dangerous. If we had explosives aboard, somebody would likely drop one, and blow a hole in the bottom of the boat and us, too.”
“Thank God for small favors.”
“You shouldn’t say things like that unless you mean it. Anyway, we are among a bunch of very peaceable people here, and I think the guns would make a bad impression. I’d hate to have to throw them away, so I figure to just hide them somewhere.”
“Why not just leave them where they are?”
“Because it’s three hundred more pounds that could be cargo, each way, every trip.”
“Whatever you say. I think that it was stupid to have them in the first place. Anybody we’d have to defend ourselves against would know so much more about that kind of fighting than we do, that shooting back at them would just get us killed quicker. I mean, I used to be pretty good at Karate, and I’ve always had the feeling that you were something of a street fighter when you were a kid. If it came to trouble, we could probably make a good showing for ourselves with our fists and our feet. But with firearms, we’d be flat outclassed.”
“Nah. People who rely on violence are mostly pretty dumb. We could out-shoot them if we had to. But we’re not faced with that situation, so I think we’d best hide the arsenal.”
“So how do I get the arsenal out of the boat without taking five hours to chip it out of the plastic? I mean, I know you, so I know you wouldn’t put something like guns someplace where we couldn’t get at them if they were needed in a hurry.”
“Well, chipping would work, and it would only take a half hour or so, even if you had to be quiet about it. Or there are the explosive squibs.”
“I figured as much.”
A squib is sort of a hydraulic cylinder that uses a powder charge to move the piston. They work fine. Once. There’s an engineering joke about a new military quality-control specification for squibs. They required one hundred percent testing. That’s funny when you say it in Engineerese.
“Yeah, well, if you want to blow the squibs, there’s a screwdriver in a clip right near the stem. Next to it, there’s a screw that’s just barely covered with clear plastic. Clean out the slot in the screw and then twist it ninety degrees clockwise, like you were driving it farther in. Ten seconds later, the guns should pop up nice and easy.”
“Okay, I’ll do it while everybody else is at lunch. What happens if I turn it the other way?”
“You expected a booby trap, maybe? Nope. Not when I could be the one to get boobied. But the screw will come off and you won’t be able to get it back on again.”
TWENTY-THREE
Such was the feeling of urgency on all sides that it took Tom Strong, E.E., Warlock of the Western Islands, only half a day to set up a meeting with the archbishop.
The meeting of the two rivals took place on the nearest thing they had to neutral territory that was secure from public notice, the rectory of the Monastery of St. Thomas the Doubter. Although the monks here constituted a religious order, as part of the Regular Clergy, they were completely independent and not subordinate to the archbishop’s Secular Clergy. Furthermore, the Order of St. Thomas the Doubter spends most of its efforts on scientific research, much of it in coordination with the wizards.
“Ah, Thomas! It is so delightful to see you again!” the archbishop said, with not a trace of insincerity in his well- trained voice. He sat down at the stone table, opposite the warlock, in the otherwise empty room.