She did not see the stowaway again until the day they were to dock in Naples. The sky and the sea were gray. The air was moist and dispiritingly humid. It was one of those timeless days, she thought, so unlike the stunning best of spring and autumn—one of those gloomy days of which the year, after all, is forged. He came swinging down the deck late in the afternoon with a woman on his arm. The woman was not young, and she had a bad complexion, but they were looking into one another’s eyes like lovers and laughing. As he passed Honora, he spoke to her. “Excuse me,” he said.
This final cheapness infuriated her. She went down to her cabin. Everything was packed—her book and her mending —and she had nothing to distract her. What she then did is hard to explain. She was not an absent-minded or a thoughtless woman, but she had been raised in gaslight and candlelight and had never made her peace with electrical appliances or other kinds of domestic machinery. They seemed to her mysterious and at times capricious, and because she came at them hastily and in total ignorance they often broke, backfired or exploded in her face. She could never imagine that she was to blame, and felt instead that an obscure veil hung between her and the world of machinery. This indifference to engines, along with her impetuousness and her anger at the stowaway, may have accounted for what she then did. She looked at herself in the mirror, found her appearance lacking, took her old curling iron out of the bottom of the suitcase, and plugged it in again.
They drifted into the Bay of Naples without a light showing. Powerless, helmless, they floated stern foremost on the ebb tide. Two tugs came out from the port to tow them in, and a portable generator on the dock was connected to the ship’s lines so that there was light enough to disembark. Honora was one of the first to go ashore. The noise of Neapolitan voices sounded to her like a wilderness, and, stepping onto the Old World, she felt in her bones the thrill of that voyage her forefathers had made how many hundreds of years ago, coming forth upon another continent to found a new nation.
The cast of characters in the Nuclear Revolution changed so swiftly that Dr. Cameron has long since been forgotten excepting for a few disorders he incited. A crucifix hung on the wall behind his desk. The figure of Christ was silver or leaden and it was the kind of thing tourists pick up in the back streets of Rome and carry to the Vatican for a Papal blessing. It had no value or beauty and its only usefulness was to state that the doctor was a convert, a sinful one perforce, since he was known to believe in neither the divine nor scientific ecology of nature, but the priest who had given him instruction had stressed the mercifulness of Our Lord and the old man believed passionately that there was some blessedness in the nature of things although his transgressions were repeated and spectacular. He believed, and said so publicly, that matrimony was not an adequate means of genetic selection. He had administered, for the Air Force, some experiments in the manipulation of chromosomal structures for the production of what we call courage. He believed in sperm banks and, for the immediate future, a clear command of the chemistry of personality. He loosely embraced his belief in blessedness, his science and his own unquiet nature by thinking of himself as a frontiersman, approaching a future in which he would be obsolete. He was a gourmet and knew the foolishness of stuffing himself with snails, beef filets, sauces and wines but he classed his interest in good food as a mark of obsolescence. He similarly classified as obsolete his own sexual drives—that nagging inquietude in his middle. His wife had been dead for twenty years and he had kept a series of mistresses and housekeepers, but the older and more powerful he grew, the more discretion was demanded of him and he had not been safely able to enjoy a relationship with anyone in the United States.
He was one of those blameless old men who had found that lasciviousness was his best means of clinging to life. In the act of love his heart sent up a percussive beating like a gallows drum in the street, but lewdness was his best sense of forgetfulness, his best way of grappling with the unhappy facts of time. With age his desires had grown more irresistible as his fear of death and corruption mounted. Once, lying in bed with Luciana, his mistress, a fly had come in at the window and buzzed around her white shoulders. The fly had, to his old man’s mind, seemed like a singular reminder of corruption and he had got out of bed, bare as a jay bird, and raced and jumped around the room with a rolled-up copy of
