The Fellowship of the Hand Read Online Free PDF Page A

carried on. Then you will see what real wealth is!”
    “You said you lived on an island.”
    “I live on many islands, all of which I own. My home base is the man-made island of Sargasso.”
    “In the Atlantic?”
    “No, though in a way it was named for the onetime Sargasso Sea. When that calm area of seaweed-infested ocean became clogged with pollution—bits of plastic, beer cans, logs, everything—around the turn of the century, it was my father who helped clear it out. He owned a marine salvage company, one of the best in the business at the time, and the sea-rail companies hired him to do the job. With the profits from it, he built the island of Sargasso in the Gulf of Mexico, and it was there that he drilled his first undersea oil well. You see, Sargasso and these other places are drilling islands—floating islands, anchored in place—whose primary function is the location and production of oil from undersea beds. There are dozens of them now, and they have made me very wealthy.”
    “Is your father alive?”
    “No. He and my mother have been dead for years.” He put down the weight. “But that is enough family history for one day. We’re on our honeymoon, remember?”
    She rolled over on the mat, welcoming him to her.
    Masha’s first glimpse of Sargasso was a bit startling. Somehow she’d envisioned it as a sunny plantation in the middle of the sea, with rolling lawns and a big white twentieth-century house. She’d even imagined that the yacht would be met by hundreds of workingmen, their faces dabbed in oil, who’d turn out to welcome the master home.
    When she told Jason Blunt of her dream, he merely scoffed. “This is no old-time cotton plantation, girl. The drilling is fully automated, done by machine. Except for a handful of technicians and personal servants, we are alone on the island.”
    The following day he showed her around the place, starting with the big glass-and-steel cube that was their home. She had never been in such a house, where buttons controlled everything, where video cameras recorded every move and fed preprogrammed signals to the kitchen computer or the recreation computer or the health computer. She had only to rise from bed in the morning and her video image was enough to prepare the orange juice and eggs and coffee before she’d reached the kitchen. She had only to sneeze and the sound of it electronically adjusted the purity of the air to guard against pollutants.
    The drilling platform itself was much the same. It was a world without workers, where intricate machines pumped the oil and shipped it off by sea-rail to the great refineries along the Gulf Coast. A few computer technologists and a handful of personal servants were the only people she ever saw, and she often wondered if they were present merely to divert her while Jason was away from the island on his frequent business trips.
    It was a boring life at times, but there were compensations. At least twice a year they cruised around the world on the atomic yacht Strombol, inspecting the other drilling islands, and in the spring there was a trip to Paris to attend a world meeting of oilmen. She settled into this routine, with occasional trips to New York or Los Angeles, and became a loving, faithful wife to Jason Blunt. She was all that Stevro promised, and more, even learning the role of charming hostess when Jason began to hold his mysterious meetings on the island.
    Masha had been married to Jason for three years, and thus she was nineteen when the sea-rail deposited a gray-haired visitor at the island one sunny afternoon in early October.
    She went down from the glass-and-steel cube to meet him as a good hostess should, imagining him to be one more of Jason’s shadowy associates. “I am Masha Blunt,” she said, extending her hand. “Jason should be returning shortly. Are you a business associate of his?”
    The gray-haired man, who must have been over sixty years old, smiled down at her. “Not exactly, Ms.