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bring her about and over the same course again?"
Jellicic looked out at the crashing seas and thought of his little tug broad
onto them. He pointed. Alden glanced up, then back at the chart. The captain
shrugged and went back to the wheel. He wanted to be near the helm for this.
As he watched the seas, waiting for a calm moment when he dared bring her
around, he shook his head again. So they'd found metals. Copper, tin, gold
perhaps. How could they bring anything up from fourteen hundred fathoms below
the Southern Seas?
The discoveries were of no value. He looked back at Alden's grim features and
caught himself.
Perhaps they'd do it at that. But how?
* * *
It took Michael Alden two years. First he had to invent the technology to
bring in mines for profit at two-thousand feet below the stormiest seas on
earth, then he had to convince investors to put their money in it.
Technology, he found, wasn't his problem. The investors were ready for that.
Howard Hughes mined the seas for twenty years before, and Hughes hadn't risked
money on vigia. Alden's techniques were new, but the concept wasn't; and he'd
found the richest source of ores ever discovered.
Economists waxed ecstatic over the potential markets: all of Latin America,
and most of southern
Africa. The minerals would come from the sea onto boats-onto the cheapest form
of bulk transportation known. Given the minerals, Latin America was a fertile
field for industries. Labor was cheap, investment costs low, taxes lower. The
United States had become a horrible place for risk investment, with its
unpopular governments, powerful unions, bad schools, and confiscatory taxes.
U.S. investors were ready to move their capital.
It wasn't technology or economics that frightened investors away from Alden's
mineral finds. It was politics.
Who owned the bottom of the sea?
Eventually ways to avoid the legal problems were found. They always are when
enough money is at stake.
Ten years went by. . . .
There was bright sunshine overhead and new powder beneath his skis. Mont Blanc
rose above him, brilliant in the new-fallen stuff, untouched; and there
weren't many people out. Superintendent
Enoch Doyle released the tension on his poles and plunged forward, schussing
down the fall line, waiting until he was moving dangerously fast before
bringing his shoulders around in perfect form, turning again in a series of
Christies, then back to the fall line, wedeln down with wagging hips.
There was a mogul ahead and he took it perfectly, lift, springiness in the
knees, who said he'd forgotten and he ought to take it easy his first time out
after so long behind a desk?
He had just cleared the mogul when the beeper screeched insistently. "No!"
Doyle shouted into the rushing wind. He scrabbled at his parka, trying to find
the off switch on the condemned thing, but he was moving too fast, it wasn't
possible, and on he went, the enjoyment gone, past the turnoff to the high
lift, around the logging road, through a narrow trail, now that was fun again
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and the hell with the bleep-bleep from under his parka.
Pole down, turn, turn again, cliff to his left, a long drop to doom, and Enoch
laughed. The trail led to a steep bowl crowded with snow bunnies in tight
trousers and tighter sweaters, gay colors against churned snow. Doyle threaded
through them as fast as he dared. His wife was waiting
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ce.txt outside the lodge. Enoch clipped a pole and mitt under one arm and used
his free hand to turn off the bleeper.
She knew. He saw it as soon as he neared her. Her heart-shaped face, ringed
with dark hair, incredible that she was so lovely and yet a grandmother twice
now.
"They can't do this to you," she said. "It's your first vacation in four
years. Tell them no, Enoch."
"Tell them no to what, liebchen? What is it they want?"
"Oh," she said, her mouth perfect roundness, holding it for a moment. "They
did not warn you? You must call them."
"You wanted me to say no," he reminded her.
"But first you must know what it is that you are to say no about," she said.
Her accent was faint, but it always came through in her English. Her French
and Italian had none at all, but Enoch was born on the Scottish border, and
Erica would speak to her man in his own language. Always. As if his German
were not as good as hers, and his French and Spanish better. He put an arm
around her waist to steady himself as he bent with chilled fingers to release
the safety bindings and martinets of the skis. He kept his arm around her as
they went into the lodge.
It was too warm inside, he had overheated on the slopes, only his hands were
cold. He caught the eye of the counterman and was let inside the manager's
office, took a seat at the desk, and called.
"International Security Systems," a pleasant voice answered.
"Doyle reporting in."
"Oh. Ja, Herr Superintendent. A moment, bitte." The phone hummed and clicked.
American telephones didn't do that, he thought sourly. Nothing else in America
worked anymore, except the telephones;
but they always worked. Best in the world. An epitaph of pride. They had the
best telephones in the world.
"Van Hartmann," the phone said. "Doyle?"
"Ja, Herr Hartmann."
They spoke German by tacit consent. "The Argentine has boiled over," Van
Hartmann said. "You must go there at once. Herr Alden has called five times."
"But the residentes," Doyle protested. "And Chief Inspector Menderez. ..."
"Arrested. There is a new military junta in the Argentine. Molina is out,
on his way to
Portugal, And all our people are arrested. There are Argentine soldiers and
police in Santa Rosa.
Herr Alden is not the only one upset. He has called his board, and they are
calling us."
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