This Doll Ship could travel from one LNG port to the next, take on LNG in Bontang, Indonesia, and carry it to Punta Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, or to Kochi, India. And no one ever asked why they were here or there. No one from customs ever asked to look inside the tanks. Why would they? The various sensors all showed the expected readings.
What, you want to stick your head into a vat of supercooled, highly volatile gas?
No, you don’t.
You really don’t, Mr Customs Inspector.
“We’re going to crash,” Benjamin muttered. “Charles and Benjamin Armstrong dead trying to reach their dolls.”
“Why don’t you shut up?” Charles snapped. The helicopter was pitching and vibrating as the rotor hit pockets of vacuum where the blades chewed at nothing.
The helicopter landing pad was aft, behind the superstructure where the crew lived. The crew were not all wired, in fact most were not. It wasn’t necessary. They didn’t need to believe, not yet, they needed only to be paid. Well paid and threatened.
Charles considered calling it off: they couldn’t very well be killed in a fiery crash when they were so close to making major strides in their work. Ah, that would be painful irony, wouldn’t it? To have control, or something very like control, over the heads of the world’s most powerful nations, and then to die because a landing skid caught and pitched them into the sea?
Then those skids hit the deck with a frightening impact. “Ah!” Charles cried out.
But now the whine of the rotors died, and crewmen in bright yellow slickers rushed out to attach cables even as the clouds dumped the rain.
Two crewmen appeared with umbrellas. They opened the helicopter door. There was a gust of cold, wet air, and suddenly the noise of the turbines and the thwap-thwap of the rotors were replaced by the rush of the wind and the thrum of the ship’s engines.
With Min’s help, they climbed awkwardly down the steps, dragging the almost useless third leg, swinging side to side in their awkward way.
A crewman blanched and looked away.
“Get that man out of our sight!” Benjamin yelled.
The crewman looked relieved when the captain tapped him on the shoulder and jerked his head to indicate that the indiscreet lad should find somewhere else to be.
An umbrella shielded the twins’ heads, but cold rain drove against their legs.
“Thank you for having us, Captain Gepfner,” Charles said cordially.
“We are honored.” The captain was a gray-bearded man with haunted eyes and the red nose of an alcoholic. He managed a bow of sorts. His first officer was indifferent, a gray-eyed American named Osman who stared past the Twins.
The Twins sank gratefully into the golf cart. Captain Gepfner personally fastened the clear plastic tarp that kept the rain at bay. Ling was with them. The AmericaStrong security man, Altoona, was not—seasickness had driven him to the railing to throw up.
Charles wondered whether the ship would be able to make contact with their assistant back on shore. It was vital to keep in touch with New York and their many other offices and facilities around the world. Jindal was a tool of limited use, and Burnofsky …Well, how could you ever totally trust a degenerate genius?
But though it was important to stay in touch, it was not as important as simply being able to touch. That was what Charles craved most. Benjamin was different: he enjoyed the sense of power. But for Charles the vital importance of the Doll Ship was that it allowed him to touch another human being. To be touched in return.
Hand on hand. Finger on skin. He was suddenly almost nauseous with desire for human touch.
He had rarely touched another human being. And only on the Doll Ship could he touch without seeing that look of terror and revulsion in her eyes.
Her eyes. In his innermost thoughts it was always a her, a woman, who would recoil in horror. Many had.
Benjamin became enraged when that happened, when they looked that way at him, when they swallowed hard and drew back. Sometimes they fainted.
Sometimes they cried.
Screamed.
Vomited.
The Morgenstein twins, what beauties they had been, those two, and yet they really hadn’t known how to behave. The vomiting, that had been the worst of it.
That’s what had pushed Benjamin over the edge. It had been Benjamin’s idea to have those two pitying, puking little rich girls kidnapped and taken to the first Doll Ship.