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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.

I had been thinking of them as boys since I was over forty and they averaged about twenty. "Young men" would have been a better term.

Watching them leave, I felt a lot of admiration for them. I've worked with many groups of men in my life, most of the time as their leader. For the last ten years, most of my subordinates have been very competent people, degreed engineers and skilled tradesmen, mostly. But I swear that I have never worked with an entire group of people before who were all as exceptionally intelligent, outstandingly eager, unflaggingly hardworking, and uniformly lighthearted as these young men all were. I tell you, it was like working with a totally different kind of humanity, a better kind.

I've heard that the Japanese average about ten points higher on IQ tests than white Americans. It is difficult to write an accurate interracial or cross-cultural test, but if the data are true, I suspect that it might be because, for a thousand years, a Japanese Samurai was morally required to immediately decapitate any commoner who didn't "act in the manner expected." Since the Japanese had an extremely complicated code of behavior, it must have taken a fairly intelligent person to always know just what "the manner expected" was, in any given situation. I think perhaps that the Japanese were not only selecting for people who were well mannered, but also for those who were intelligent, or at least smart enough so as to have been able to learn all the rules.

The policy of reducing the population by selectively sterilizing the less successful members of their society must have done the same thing for the people of the Western Isles, only much more so, since it was systematic. I can't say that I approve of the method, but I can certainly admire the results.

* * *

Adam was walking the next day, albeit a bit unsteadily. We figured that swimming was just the exercise he needed, so he took the eight new kids into Avalon Bay in the morning while I had the old- timers chipping and prying coral. His crew joined mine in the afternoon, and I let him run the show from then on.

I had to get the genset up and running as well as the diesel engine that powered the SCUBA tank compressor. It took me the better part of two hours to partially disassemble both rigs, and to repair the damage caused by the dunking they got when the boat was sinking. Then I was over an hour figuring out a way to get diesel fuel from the big tanks built into the boat, which was on its side, to the small tanks on the small engines.

Once I had the diesel engines producing both pneumatic and electrical power, I started filling the SCUBA tanks. Then I put the batteries Adam's men had extracted from The Brick Royal to charging, since we had exhausted them in trying to bail her out during the storm. Scrounging around, I found some of our electric lights and set them up, ready to switch on, come dark.

About that time, some of the warlock's men came by with all of the electronic gear that had been taken from us by him for safekeeping. They brought a letter from him saying that we might as well keep everything together, and could I please see what could be done about generating some power for them. I answered his question by switching on the lights for his men. It would have been more dramatic had it been dark, but they acted impressed, anyway.

I set up the satellite dish just outside of the cave, and soon got its automatic tracker going. The guards stared bug-eyed and nervous at the dish, never having seen an inanimate object move before. Culture shock all over the floor.

After that, I got antenna wire, data lines, and power cables to the computer, the television, and the VCR before deciding that the system needed a more thorough test and that I wanted a break, anyway. I was just getting into a tape of Star Wars when Adam and his dripping-wet crew came in. The boys were enthralled.

I stopped the tape and set it to rewinding.

"Gentlemen, this entertainment is best seen from the beginning. Before we start, I want to mention that one of the highest art forms practiced in the outside world is called science fiction. It exists mostly in the form of written stories and in theatrical presentations like the one you are about to enjoy. In this art form, the writer creates not only the characters and all of the things that happen to them, but also the very universe that all of the action takes place in. Thus, he is absolutely free of all constraints, and may exercise his art to the limits of his creativity. Done properly, this fictional world is as internally consistent as the real world around us, so that it becomes easy for the reader or viewer to suspend his disbelief and become thoroughly immersed in the story.

"I tell you this because to you, the real world outside of your island might seem to you to have some of the aspects of science fiction. Out there, they have many devices and forms of communication and transportation that you are not yet familiar with. Please remember that they do not have ships that can travel between the stars, or robots that can talk and think like human beings, or weapons that can destroy entire planets, although they are working on it. Anyway, the following is fiction, it has no purpose but to stretch your mind while you are enjoying yourself, and I wish you a pleasant few hours."

Then I turned the set back on and let them watch those marvelous opening scenes. Judging from their comments, they seemed to be able to follow the plot reasonably well, despite their lack of proficiency in English. It was dark when I sent them home. They had missed supper, except for some junk food I'd broken out of stores, but they didn't seem to mind. They'd just seen their second totally new world in two days.

 

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Framed