“Adam and I have talked that over, my lord, and we’ve decided to give you everything that is not essential to running the ship. Perhaps I could come up there tomorrow, and we could sort through it together.”
“Uh, Treet? Tomorrow is not a good day. They’re taking my casts off tomorrow, and somebody is going to have to take the boys swimming,” Adam said.
“Nor is tomorrow a good day for me,” the warlock said. “I expect that I’ll spend the day closeted with the duke, discussing your proposal. But there’s no hurry. It’ll be months before you sail.”
Despite my new bruises, I got home feeling that it had been a profitable day. We were well launched on what I felt sure was to be the most profitable and worthwhile business venture of my life, and it was certain to be the most interesting. At dinner, Adam and the ladies were equally enthused. Roxanna was intent on learning English, with the hope that the duke would give her permission to join us on the voyage to South America. Maria and Agnes soon joined in with her plans, and the meal turned itself into an impromptu language lesson. It was late when we turned in. After Roxanna’s rejection of my methods of proposal that morning, I was afraid that I would have to go back to sleeping alone.
Luck was still with me, though, and Roxanna had returned to being her loving self.
TWENTY-FIVE
After breakfast, I went down to the warehouse and found four of the warlock’s apprentices waiting for their first swim with a SCUBA rig. Some of them might have been waiting there for an hour, but ten minutes went by before the last two straggled in.
It wasn’t as though these were slovenly or recalcitrant students. They were all enthusiastic and eager to learn. They were being as prompt as they had ever been, for anybody or anything. It was simply that there was no such thing as a clock or watch on the entire island. They couldn’t get there on time because they didn’t have the slightest idea of what time it was!
I had never realized just how important timepieces were, but these people regularly wasted about two hours of working time a day just waiting around for everybody else to get there. That’s a tremendous amount of waste. Consider. Two hours per capita, twelve thousand people, and two hundred fifty working days a year. If one assumes an average hourly rate of only ten dollars an hour, that comes to sixty million dollars a year, flushed down the toilet for no good reason at all.
Wrist watches. Our first cargo back had to contain at least a thousand wrist watches.
Because of the sharpness of both the coral and the underlying featherrock, it was customary for these people to swim fully clothed, even to wearing thin socks and gloves. Their swimsuits looked like long winter underwear, but they were made of the same incredible fiber that all their other clothes were made of. That is to say, they were not only coral proof, and featherrock proof, but they were probably bulletproof as well.
We gathered up the SCUBA equipment, as well as the snorkeling stuff, and headed for Avalon Bay. On arrival, I discovered that the air tanks were empty. As a safety measure, Adam must have drained them after the last time we used them, back in the Caribbean Sea.
I decided that some snorkeling practice should be held first. I was starting them out with the snorkeling rigs to get them used to flippers and face masks, and to being under water, I said. They loved it.
They’d been swimming all their lives, but without goggles or a face mask, you can’t see anything down there but a fuzzy blur. Water has about the same index of refraction as the cornea of your eye, and with no air gap in front of it, your eye’s optics simply don’t work properly.
Now the boys were in a beautiful new world, filled with strange things that they had always been near, but had never seen before.
There was much to see. The structure of the island went entirely under the bay, such that the average depth was about thirty feet. While I’m no marine biologist, I’m sure that I saw both Atlantic and Pacific varieties of fishes there. The Bay of Avalon was as rich with sea life as any coral reef I’d ever seen on television, and it was totally unpolluted. Magnificent!
Unfortunately, this marvelous coral structure was just what was sinking the islands, and threatening to kill everything, including the coral itself. After all, if the island did sink, the coral and most of its attendant sea life would be at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, where it couldn’t live any more than I could. Yet clearing the lagoon out down to the featherrock seemed like a crime.
In the end, I resolved to start chipping at the edge of the island, where the rock cliffs dropped sheer down into the nothingness that was below. And in truth, it would be much easier, per pound, to simply break loose the coral and waterlogged rock, and let them fall to the ocean bottom, than to have to put what we’d loosened on some sort of raft and haul that raft off to the edge of the lagoon for dumping.
It made me feel much better to have a sound, engineering reason for doing what I wanted to do in the first place. There was plenty of other weight elsewhere to get rid of, and maybe someday I could get the warlock down here and convince him that the bay should be set aside as a nature preserve. Maybe.
At lunch time, as we had arranged, Roxanna had a meal set up for us on the small beach by the bay. As we ate, she talked to the boys about the advantages of learning English, and it turned out that half of them already had at least a smattering of the language. By the end of the meal, it was decreed that all instruction would henceforth be given in my native language rather than theirs.
The old saw about not going swimming for an hour after eating, because of the danger of stomach cramps, is nothing but a stupid old wives’ tale. In the first place, unless you’ve eaten something that has given you ptomaine poisoning, there’s no particular reason for newly eaten food to cause cramping. Nor is there anything about being in the water that can cause them. Severe stomach cramps are a rare malady. And even if you do get the cramps while you are in the water, there is no reason for them to be any more dangerous there than on dry land. Stomach cramps don’t interfere with your breathing, after all, or with the use of your arms. You can keep on swimming with your face above the water even if your knees are up around your chin.
We went back into the water right after eating, went to the mouth of the bay, and started work on the edge of the ocean proper. Adam had arranged for some four-foot lengths of reinforcing rod to be ground to a point at one end for use as picks and pry bars. Still using only snorkel rigs, we each had one of these tied with a two yard cord to our waists, and as a safety measure, I had each of us wearing a safety line that went back up to the rocks on shore.
It was pretty easy to tell what needed removing and what should remain. If it was coral, break it off and let it sink. If it was rock and it didn’t put out a spray of bubbles when you poked it, get rid of it. If it floated to the surface after you broke it loose, you did it wrong, stupid, and don’t do it again!
We didn’t accomplish much that first afternoon, but we did work out the basic techniques needed for the job. Picking and chipping didn’t work well under water, but prying did. We resolved to get some longer and stronger bars made up soon. Also, a lot of time was wasted going up and down, so we rigged some weighted lines down to the work area. It was easier to pull yourself up and down than to swim the whole way.
By midafternoon, the light down there was getting bad, and we knocked off. We were exhausted, anyway. When you haven’t been swimming in months, seven hours in the water takes a lot out of you, especially if you are working your way, very gently, into middle age.
I invited the group over to Roxanna’s place for tomorrow’s breakfast, mostly to insure that we wouldn’t have to wait for the stragglers before starting the next morning. I also asked them to bring along another eight of their friends. Since we had a dozen snorkel rigs, plus the masks and fins from the SCUBA rigs, there was no reason for not putting them all to work.