Being on the floor in the dark dressing room didn’t bother him. Comfort and ease had never been part of the dream.

On Tuesday, he played three-on-three basketball again and ran again into little Travis Cooke. This time they were on opposing teams. Again, Travis’s fadeaway was on. Even with Lee leaping at him, stretching his incredible arms, Travis could fall backwards and float the ball above his hands.

Twice Travis pulled that move on Lee. Lee could always get his baskets backing his way to the net and reaching up for the pass. But Travis kept coming back and evening the score. He was tiring Lee out.

A third time, Travis took Lee one-on-one, slashed at him, then stopped on a dime, pushed off his front foot and drifted backwards, the ball coming up to shoot as Lee leapt forward after him. Lee’s hands came down through the air on each side of Travis’s arms. The big hands pummeled Travis’s face, the ball flew far off target and bounced away against the fence. Travis fell down on his back, his head slamming the court.

“Sorry. Let me get you up,” Lee said.

On one of the counters in the galley of the Italian restaurant was a line-up of cell phones. Built into the stovetop was one of the few outlets on the ship to carry power. Without Colonel Warrant there to ration their amperes, Rick and Jessica and a few others had been keeping their cell phones charged. They were useless for communicating, but a few of them still found comfort in keeping their phones charged. Just in case.

On Wednesday of the second week, the Italian restaurant ran low on supplies: the endless bounty of gourmet food had been reduced to a final array of unmatchable products. The Theater, or the Italian restaurant, were feeding not just those refugees who had originally been sent to the Theater, but those whose suites had been destroyed, like Lee, Rick and Adam, or whose suites were aft of the closed compartment, which made travel between fore and aft so difficult.

At first, more of them slept outside the Royal Theater, but as days went on many returned, preferring the emergency lights of the Theater to the absolute darkness of the suites and so much of the ship.

“I’ve been in the main kitchen. It’s huge,” Rick said to Lee and Adam. “But you think our food is going fast? Man, they’re feeding five times as many as we are.”

“They were,” Lee said. “There’s a lot less of them now than there used to be. Hesse over there hasn’t been so convincing in keeping people from the lifeboats. A third of that group has jumped ship.”

“Why do you suppose our group has stuck together more?” Adam asked.

“The gun,” Lee chuckled. “It has a certain charisma of its own.”

“My wife thinks so,” Rick said. “She keeps telling me how much better she feels that it’s our guy who has a gun. You know, who knows what people would do if there wasn’t a gun to answer to.”

“Just watch the Atrium and find out,” Lee said.

Rick and Lee went to see Hesse about new food arrangements to include the Theater group.

Adam Melville stayed behind. A chill had grown in his relationship with Lee Golding. From the beginning, when Lee had asserted his leadership in the Theater, he had gravitated to Adam as a partner. Adam had a certain aura about him. His eyes glowed.

He had worked with Lee on the logistics of their group, they had spent hours in discussion on the best courses of action to maintain the longest survival on the ship, and the two had acted together as ambassadors to Hesse and the bigger group. Then, Rick Dumas had somehow made them a triad. Adam disliked Rick. He didn’t trust him, and he could see in the Mighty Lee Golding certain character traits that Rick Dumas helped to bring out- it wasn’t something he could quite put his finger on.

Adam was not a religious man anymore. As a child he had grown up with Sunday school and Christian camps. He had won Bible contests; his mind retained incredible amounts of information and he had spent hours learning whole chapters by heart. In the early Seventies he had become a Christian hippie. He gave his mental efforts to his own interpretation of the text, and soon became disillusioned with the everyday flatness of organized religion. He became just a hippie, and said he was spiritual, not religious, but he always read the Gospels, even while searching for answers in the Upanishads of Hindu and Buddhist Mahayana Sutras.

He trained himself in electronics, and in the nascent field of computer science. Without formal education, he became a tinkerer and soon one of the earliest tech entrepreneurs, a living symbol in certain communities, of the link between hippie and silicon San Francisco.

He’d done well, and had started and sold off several companies during the booming Nineties. He was a groundbreaker, and he had inspired a mystical loyalty in the staff of each company he began. With his unique appearance he’d become a Silicon Valley legend. Now sixty-five, Adam had lost none of the energy and strength of youth.  His great arms were still as powerful as they appeared, and the mind worked as intensely as the eyes showed.

Adam had divorced and sold off his latest company in the last six months. He’d booked this cruise to imagine what was next, and it struck him how those converging turning points in his life had freed him up for this trip to witness this turning point for the world. He was obsessed with information and digital technology and often saw things in terms of information manipulation, computer programs and logic flows. He imagined Lee and Rick going to the Atrium as an arrow in a logic diagram, and he wondered what would be in the next box.

26

Rick enjoyed the looks he always got walking into the Atrium with Lee, like a celebrity. It was a place of sadness and Rick liked smiling in the middle of it, knowing eyes were on him and his friend. This time, there was a different atmosphere. There was fear. At first Rick thought the refugees were scared of him and Lee. He was excited by it. Then he understood that it was not directed at them in particular. It was just everywhere. There was fear in the Atrium, and by the time they got to Hesse’s office, Rick had it himself.

Hesse was with the Colonel; Rick could not remember his name.

Lee shook the Colonel and Hesse’s hands as they entered the art shop.

“How are you for food?” Lee said, while Hesse’s hand was still hidden in Lee’s own paw.

“We’re managing,” Hesse said. “Are you ready to join our food plan?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “Maybe we should think about joining you guys down there. The Theater’s nice, it’s a comfy space, but the dining area’s getting pretty messy.”

“We can’t handle you here,” Colonel Warrant said. “It’s just too difficult to handle these crowds for food alone, let alone the sanitation and sleeping space. Do you have any idea how much work it took to wire the Theater? We’ll bring the food to you. You guys keep taking care of everything else yourself. It’s working.”

“What do you have left in Little Italy?” Hesse asked.

“Meats gone,” Lee said. “Veggies gone, eggs gone. Have a bit of cheese and pasta still. There’s crackers and nuts and lots of cooking oil. What have you got? How long can we last all on your kitchen?”

“We’ll have to lower the rations,” Hesse said. “Not by much. We have enough to last a couple more weeks, but we can lower it again in a week, and again the week after that, well… we can last over a month if we have to. That’s including the Theater, of course.”

“Food will last longer if your people keep deserting,” Rick said.

“Yeah,” Hesse said. “I’ve done what I can. I don’t really have any right to stop anyone from taking the lifeboats. That’s what they’re for, right? It doesn’t hurt us and I can’t stop it anyway, so frankly, I have more important things to worry about. I’m staying on the ship, and my concern is everyone else who stays on. Anyone who wants to leave takes their own chances.”