Expiration Date (75 page)

They exited the dining room through the starboard service door, and now, among the kitchens, they saw people.

Nearly solid men in white chef’s hats were pushing carts in and out of open kitchen doorways, apparently oblivious of the unauthorized intruders; the dishes on the carts were covered with steel domes, and, since the kitchen staff didn’t seem able to see Sullivan and he hadn’t eaten at all today, he reached out and touched one of the covers on a cart that had been momentarily left against the hallway bulkhead. The cover handle was warmly solid, and he lifted the dome away.

From a bed of baby carrots and asparagus, a woman’s face was smiling up at him. Her eyes were looking directly into his, and when her lips opened to puff out a bourbon-scented whisper of “
Hi, Pete
,” he recognized her as Sukie.

Elizalde tugged at his arm, but he pulled her back, feeling the relayed shake as Kootie was stopped too.

“Hi, Sukie,” he said; his voice was level, but he was distantly surprised that his legs were still holding him up. He glanced sideways at Elizalde’s face, but she was looking down at the plate, and then at him, in frowning puzzlement.

“I guess she can’t see me,” said Sukie’s face. “You’ve spilled it all out onto the floor, haven’t you? How long can this magnetic charge last? Who’s your chick, anyway? She’s the one who was on the phone last night, isn’t she?”

“Yes.” Sullivan squeezed Elizalde’s hand. “The charge—I don’t know. An hour?”

“When I consider how my light was spent! And then I’ll be gone, and you’ll probably be sorry, but not near sorry enough. You’re in love with her, aren’t you? How do I look in a halo of vegetables? I’ll see if I can’t wish you something besides misery with her; no promises, but I’ll see what I can muster up. Haul your ass—and hers, too, I guess—and you got a kid already?—up to the Moon Deck. We also serve who only stand and gaff.”

Elizalde barked a quick scream and her hand tightened on Sullivan’s, and then the face was gone, and all that was on the plate was steaming vegetables.

“You saw her, didn’t you?” said Sullivan as he hurried on down the kitchen corridor, pulling Elizalde and Kootie along.

“Just for a second,” said Elizalde, having to nearly shout to be heard over the feverish clatter of pots and pans, “I saw a woman’s
face
on that plate! No, Kootie, we’re not going back!” To Sullivan, she added, “You were…
speaking
to her…?”

“It was my sister.” Sullivan saw a door in the white bulkhead at the end of the corridor, and he tugged Elizalde along more quickly. “She says I’m in love with you. And she says she’ll try to wish us something besides misery.”

“Well,” said Elizalde with a bewildered and frightened grin, “this
is
your
family
, after all—I hope she tries hard.”

“Yeah, me too, in spite of everything.” They had reached the door. “Catch up, Kootie, I think we’ve got another dining room to pass through.” He pushed open the door.

This dining room too was as wide as the ship, but the ornate rowed mahogany ceiling was fully three deck-heights overhead; ornate planters and huge, freestanding Art Deco lamps punctuated the middle height—and there were visible diners here.

All the men at the tables were wearing black ties and all the women were in off-the-shoulder evening dresses. The conversation was quieter in this vast hall, and the air was sharp with the effervescence of champagne. On the high wall facing them across the length of the dining room, a vast mural dominated the whole cathedral chamber; even from way over here Sullivan could see that it was a stylized map of the North Atlantic, with a clock in the top of it indicated by radiating gold bars surrounding the gold hands, which stood at five minutes to twelve.

“I’m not dressed for this,” said Elizalde in a small voice.

Sullivan looked back at her, and grinned at how humble she looked, framed in the glossy elm burl doorway, in her jeans and grimy Graceland sweatshirt. Kootie, peering big-eyed from behind her, looked no better in his bloodstained polo shirt, and Sullivan found that he himself was sorry he hadn’t found time to shave yesterday or today.

“Probably they can’t see us,” he told her. “Come on, it’s not that far.”

But as they strode out across the broad parquet floor, a white-haired gentleman at one of the nearer tables caught Sullivan’s glance, and raised an eyebrow; and then the man was pushing back his chair and slowly standing up.

Sullivan looked away as he hurried past the table-and pulled Elizalde along, glad to hear Kootie’s footsteps scuffing right behind her.

Men were standing up at other tables, though, all looking gravely at Sullivan and his two companions as they trotted through the amber-lit vista of white tablecloths and crystal wineglasses, and now the women were getting to their feet too, and anxiously eyeing the shabby intruders.

“Halfway there,” gritted Sullivan between his teeth. He was staring doggedly at the mural above and ahead of them. Two nearly parallel tracks curved across the golden clouds that represented the Atlantic, but only one track had anything on it—one miniature crystal ship, all by itself out in the middle of the metallic sea.

How could there be a room this big in a
ship
? he thought as he strode between the tables, tugging Elizalde’s hand. Polished wooden pillars, the vaulted ceiling so far away up there, and it must be a hundred tables spread out on every side across the floor to the distant dark walls recessed at the lowest level….

Someone among the standing ghosts began clapping; and more of them took it up, and from somewhere the full-orchestra strains of “I’ll Be Seeing You” began to play. All the elegantly dressed ghosts were standing and applauding now, and every face that Sullivan could see was smiling, though many were blinking back tears and many others openly let the tears run down their cheeks as they clapped their hands.

When he was close to the far doors, a crystal goblet of champagne was pressed into Sullivan’s hand, and when he glanced back, his face chilly with sweat, he saw that Elizalde and Kootie each held a glass as well. The applause was growing louder, nearly drowning all the old familiar music.

Elizalde hurried up alongside Sullivan and turned her head to whisper in his ear: “Do you think it’s poison?”

“No.” Sullivan slowed to a walk, and he lifted the glass and sipped the icy, golden wine. He wished he were a connoisseur of champagnes, for this certainly seemed to be first-rate. He blinked, and realized that he had tears in his own eyes. “I think they’re grateful at being released.”

At the door, on an impulse, he turned back to the resplendent dining room and raised his glass. The applause ceased as every ghost raised a glass of its own; and then the rich tawny light faded as the lamps on the Art Deco pillars lost power, and the music ceased (with, he thought, a dying fall), and finally even the background rustle of breathing and the shifting of shoes on the parquet floor diminished away to silence.

The dining hall was dark and empty now. The tables were gone, and a lot of convention-hotel chairs were nested in stacks against the bulkheads.

Sullivan’s lifted hand was empty, and he curled it slowly into a fist. “The field is beginning to fail already,” he said to Elizalde. “We’d better get upstairs fast.” He pushed open the door at his back.

Across a broad foyer was a semicircular bronze portal like the entry to a 1930s department store. Its two doors were open wide, and on the broad mother-of-pearl ceiling within Sullivan could see the rippling reflection of brightly lit water, and hear splashing and laughter; these doors apparently led to a balcony over the actual pool, which must have been one deck-level below. Sullivan thought the swimmers must be real people, and not ghosts.

Elizalde looked in the same direction and whispered, “Good Lord, stacked like a slave ship!”

An imposingly broad mahogany stairway opened onto the foyer to their left, and Sullivan waved Elizalde and Kootie up—the stairs were wide enough for all three of them to trot up abreast, though Kootie was stumbling.

“Did you see some bathing beauty in there?” Sullivan asked Elizalde as he hurried up the stairs, pulling Kootie along by the upper arm. “‘Stacked’ I get, but ‘like a slave ship’—is that good or bad?”

“I meant those bunks,” she panted, “you pig. Stacked to the ceiling in there, with soldiers all crammed in, trying to sleep. I didn’t notice any damn ‘
bathing beauty.
’”

“Oh…? What I saw was a balcony over a swimming pool,” he told her. Apparently the field
hadn’t
yet collapsed, but was out of phase. “What did you see, Kootie?”

“I’m looking nowhere but straight ahead,” said the boy, and Sullivan wondered which of the personalities in Kootie’s head had spoken.

Maybe one or more of the degaussing coils
have
been disconnected, Sullivan thought uneasily, at the substations along the length of the ship. I’ve got a big wheel spinning—is it missing some spokes? Is it going to fly apart?

“All we can do is get out of here,” he said. “Come on.”

They jogged wearily up two flights of the stairs, and then paused just below the last landing. Peering around the newel pillar, Sullivan assessed the remaining steps that ascended to the broad Promenade Deck lobby area known as Piccadilly Circus.

From down here he could see the inset electric lights glowing in the ceiling up there, and he could hear a couple of voices speaking quietly. Far up over his head on the other side, on the paneled back wail of the stairwell, hung a big gold medallion and a framed portrait of Queen Mary.

“Up the stairs,” he whispered to Elizalde and the boy, “and then fast out the door to the left. That’ll lead us straight off the ship onto the causeway bridge, across that and down the stairs to the parking lot. Ready? Go!”

They stepped crouchingly across the landing, then sprang up the last stairs and sprinted wildly across the open floor, hopping over loops of cable to the wide open doorway out onto the outdoor deck—and then all three of them just stopped, leaning on the rail.

The rail had no gap in it, and the causeway to the parking-lot stairs was gone. The stairs, the parking lot, all of
Long Beach
was gone, and they were looking out over an empty moonlit ocean that stretched away to the horizon under a black, star-needled sky.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

F
OR
a long moment the three of them just clung to the rail, and Sullivan, at least, was not even breathing. He was resisting the idea that he and Elizalde and Kootie had died at some point during the last few seconds, and that this lonely emptiness was the world ghosts lived in; and he wanted to go back inside, and cling to whoever it was whose voices they had heard.

He heard clumsy splashing far away below, and when he looked down he thought he could see the tiny heads and arms of two swimmers struggling through the moonlit water alongside the
Queen Mary’s
hull. The sight of them didn’t lessen the solitude, for he guessed who they must be.

Hopelessly, just in case the cycle might be breakable, he filled his lungs with the cold sea breeze and yelled down to the swimmers, “
Get out of town tonight
!”

He looked at Elizalde; who was half-kneeling next to him, stunned-looking and hanging her elbows over the rail. “Maybe,” he said, “I’ll listen to me this time.”

She managed to shrug. “Neither of us did yesterday.”

The spell broke when sharp, heavy footsteps that he knew were high heels on the interior deck approached from behind Sullivan, and he didn’t need to smell a clove cigarette.

He grabbed Elizalde’s shoulder and Kootie’s collar and shoved them forward. “Wake up!” he shouted. “Run!”

They both blinked at him, then obediently began sprinting down the deck toward the lights of the bow, without looking back; he floundered along after them, his back chilly in anticipation of a shot from deLarava’s little automatic.

But the big silhouette of deLarava stepped out of a wide doorway
ahead
of Elizalde and Kootie, and deLarava negligently raised the pistol toward them.

They skidded to a halt on the worn deck planks, and Sullivan grabbed their shoulders again to stop himself. He looked behind desperately—

And saw deLarava standing back there too.

“I’m not seeing a railing at all,” called both the images of deLarava, in a single voice that was high-pitched with what might have been elation or fright. “To me you’re all standing straight out from the Promenade Deck doorway. From your point of view, you can walk here by coming forward or coming back. Either way, get over here right now or I’ll start shooting you up.”

Elizalde’s hand brushed the untucked sweatshirt at her waist. The night sea breeze blew her long black hair back from her face, and the moonlight glancing in under the deck roof glazed the lean line of her jaw.

“No,” whispered Sullivan urgently. “She’d empty her gun before you half drew clear. Save it.” He looked at-the forward image of deLarava and then back at the aft one. “Tell you what, you two walk forward, and I’ll walk back.”

“And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye,” whispered Kootie. Sullivan knew the remark was a bit of bravado from Edison.

As Elizalde and Kootie stepped away toward the bow, Sullivan turned and walked back the way they had run; and as he got to the open Piccadilly Circus doorway he saw that Elizalde and Kootie were stepping in right next to him, both blinking in exhausted surprise to see him suddenly beside them again. The soft ceiling lights and the glow of another freestanding Art Deco lamp kindled a warm glow in the windows of the little interior shops at the forward end of the lobby.

DeLarava had stepped back across the broad inner deck, and she was still holding the gun on them; though Sullivan could see now that the muzzle was shaking.