10

When Luther Rickendorf got back to their cabin with the two drinks, held in the big palm of his left hand, he thought at first that Jerry had fallen asleep, and was glad of it.

But then Jerry stirred on his bunk, having heard the door open, and rolled over. His face looked a mess, blotchy and drawn, the eyes still frantic. He blinked a lot, and stared at Luther as though he had no idea who Luther was.

“Here you are,” Luther said, and extended toward him the vodka and orange juice, keeping the plain club soda for himself.

Jerry propped himself up on the bunk, back against the bulkhead, and accepted the drink. He gulped some, spilling orange on his chin and T-shirt, then wiped his face with his free hand, looked less manically at Luther, and said, “Thank you.”

“The least I could do.”

“What’s that you’ve got?”

“White wine spritzer,” Luther lied. “To keep you company.”

The truth was, Luther had no desire and little liking for alcohol. He could not remember ever having felt the need to have his mood altered. He remained the same no matter what, an optimistic realist, and let the world swirl around him.

It was because of Jerry that he was aboard this ship, not like the others out of any conviction or sense of mission. Tall and blondly Teutonic, Luther had grown up in Munich, his father an industrialist in the new Germany. He had known he was gay from his early teens, and with his strong good looks had never had trouble finding partners. When his father learned about him, shortly after Luther’s seventeenth birthday, he had proved to be an enlightened parent, up to a point. He would still consider Luther his son, would support him as necessary and acknowledge him as needed, but only so long as Luther stayed out of Germany.

Luther’s exile began auspiciously. His father paid his tuition and expenses through three years to a bachelor of arts degree at Stanford University, in California. After that, with some financial help from home, he had become a ski instructor at Aspen for a few years, then had followed a lover from there who spent his summers as crew on the tourist sailing vessels in the Caribbean. He stayed when the ex-lover returned to the states, quickly became practiced around sail himself, met Jerry Diedrich one night in a bar on Anguilla, and his life as an environmental do-gooder began.

When he thought sometimes of what an instinctive, unrelenting, unrepentant polluter of air and water and land his father was, Luther could only smile. To his father’s question, in one letter accompanying a check, “What after all is Planetwatch?” he had replied, “Something much much worse than homosexuality.”

Now he sat on the other bunk and watched Jerry slurp his screwdriver. There were no large cabins on Planetwatch III, and this one was just big enough for the two bunks bolted into opposite walls, the drawers built in at one end, and the door at the other. If you wanted to make love, you crowded the two mattresses side by side on the floor between the bunks, and were careful to restore everything afterward, not to scandalize the others.

Jerry said, “Did Kim have anybody on the boat? A boyfriend?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Not sleeping with anybody?”

“I have no idea,” Luther said, “but I doubt it.”

Jerry took more of his drink; about a third of it was left. He blinked past Luther at the wall. “You don’t suppose,” he said, his voice mournful, “she died a virgin.”

Luther laughed; he couldn’t help it. “Nobody’s a virgin,” he said.

“But she was so young.”

“Jerry,” Luther said, “she did it to herself. Nobody sent her, nobody wanted her to go. Everybody wanted her not to go. Sooner or later, you’ll have to accept that. She did it to herself, and there was nothing you could have done about it.” He spoke with a faint accent, which usually gave him a pleasant and amusing sound, but when he was trying to comfort someone— though he had no way to know this—he came off mostly like a Viennese psychiatrist, remote and only professionally caring, not emotionally involved at all.

Jerry said, “If anybody’s responsible, it’s Curtis.”

And, as usual, his voice roughened, became harsher, when he spoke Curtis’s name.

Luther wanted to tell him, “Forget Curtis. It’s over. Think about something else.” But he knew he’d be wasting his breath (even if it were possible for him to sound sympathetic), so he said, “What are you going to do?”

“Singapore,” Jerry said.

Luther was surprised. “Leave the ship? Why Singapore?”

“Because that’s Curtis’s base,” Jerry said, “now that he’s out of Hong Kong. Because I have to know what he’s going to do next.”