Free Beyond the Poseidon Adventure by Paul Gallico Page B

and you knew you could take them, and batter them down with anvil fists.
    Occasionally, not even once a year, you went through that door and saw a different type of man. It wasn’t size, it wasn’t toughness, it wasn’t anything like that, but you always knew it. “Sure I coulda took him,” he remembered hearing another cop say once, “but not without my .38 I couldn’t.” Here was another one. Rogo was not afraid. He was never afraid. But he was cautious.
    He kept the gun on him. “So c’mon, mister. Let’s hear it. Then mebbe we can talk some.”
    Jason shrugged. “That’s got to stay my business, Batman.”
    The high steel hull of the ship amplified Rogo’s roar to a thunderous boom, and it was not until the last echo had rung in the dark corners that they heard the splashing. Every head turned. A black head, arms, and shoulders appeared out of the small pool and swam to the side. The underwater diver heaved itself out of the water, tore off the mask, her hair tipping in torrents down her shining black back.
    “I’m Hely,” she said, and began to cry.
    Fat ladies wear the finest jewelry. By the time they have found their potential source, have driven him on and up in the world, and have so subjugated him that every anniversary and birthday adds weight and worth to their fingers, necks, and wrists, they have also enjoyed at least thirty years good living. Incentive has gone, and their pride lies in the contents of wardrobes and jewelry cases rather than any steady reading of bathroom scales.
    Fat women, also, are seldom fighters. When that flood gushed through the main dining room, it was the unadorned young who had fought for the surface, until they too sank back into the silence of their tinsel-draped tomb. The overweight and the old, decorated from their husbands’ industry, lay beneath.
    That was the philosophy by which Hely led her team of divers into the vast upturned cavern. It was easily found. She led them down the side of the sunken ship and, swinging on the inverted railings, along the deck and down the first steps. There as she wondered which way to go, she noticed the sign. She flipped her feet up in the air to read it. “Come and Say Hello to the New Year!” She followed the arrow past more steps and through the door.
    The thirty-foot-high chamber had become a sealed bowl containing a carnage made even more hideous by the trappings of carnival. From what had been the floor hung the bolted-down tables. All the other contents of the room had been scrambled together when the ship went over and the seas rushed in.
    After the translucent blues of the clearer sea outside, Hely had to adjust her eyes to the cloudy gray of the water here. The only light seemed to come from the pale blue disks of the portholes, and from an oblong hatch in the far corner at the top of the room. With a wave of her arm she drew her stunned crew after her. She checked the depth gauge on the canvas strap around her wrist. They were well beyond the thirty-three-feet mark. They would have to decompress on the return. There was still no hesitation as she swam straight down into the sodden havoc.
    She was right. The dead lay in mounds, dress shirts and billowing gowns their shrouds, and all around them were the foolish fripperies of good fellowship, the paper hats and streamers, waterlogged. The last few seconds of life had stripped them of standards of civilization which, even after centuries of acceptance, could never compete with the will to live. Men had trampled women. Young men had smashed aside older men. The dead were stacked in layers, according to their strength and determination. Hely smiled inside her mask: if these people, conformers and stalwarts all, could cast away the proprieties, what justification did she need?
    She felt not the slightest distaste as she plunged into their bodies. They moved easily enough, weightless in the water. She grabbed a dinner-jacket collar from behind and pulled aside a young man,