The Game of X: A Novel of Upmanship Espionage by Robert Sheckley

and a girl giggled.
    The canal turned right, and we lost contact with the retaining wall. When we surfaced, I saw that we were in the Venetian Lagoon. The city lay just behind us, its glistening spires and tilted domes rising from the water like a romantic sketch of Atlantis. A mile or so ahead of us was the marshy Veneto coast; to our right was the island of Murano, and very close on our left was Venice’s causeway to Mestre.
    “Do we swim across the Lagoon?” I asked.
    “No,” Karinovsky said, “We are spared that. We merely follow the shoreline around the Sacca di San Girolamo, to a position near the Ricovero Penitenti. Once there, our troubles should be ended.”
    He was floating with difficulty, his head thrown back and the breath rasping in his throat. He turned over and began to swim, slowly and doggedly, following the contour of the land to the west. In ten minutes we reached a low, flat, deserted piece of land near the entrance to the Cannareggio Canal, almost opposite the slaughterhouse. The Ricovero was fifty yards away, half-hidden behind its stone walls.
    “Behold!” Karinovsky said proudly.
    I saw the boat, dark and sleek, moored to the seawall. Something about its long low hull disturbed me, touching a memory just beyond recall. Suddenly I wanted nothing to do with that boat. But my feeling was illogical and absurd, so I ignored it and followed Karinovsky to the boat, which we boarded by means of a ladder.
     
     

 
    17
     
     
    No one was aboard. We got rid of the air cylinders and crept down the narrow deck into the cockpit. We sat for a while and caught our breath, then changed into dry clothes that had been stored for us under the seat. I was very tired from the long swim, and Karinovsky looked close to exhaustion. But we couldn’t afford to rest now: We had shaken off our pursuers, at least for the moment; but we had to use our advantage before they had a chance to find us again.
    Karinovsky opened the dashboard compartment and took out a map and a small flashlight. The map showed the northern part of the Laguna Veneta, from the Causeway to Torcello.
    “This is our position,” Karinovsky told me. “The causeway is on our left, San Michele and Murano on our right, the mainland straight ahead to the north. We follow the main channel, marked here in red, past Isola Tessera, to the vicinity of Marco Polo Airport. But we do not go to the airport wharf.”
    “Of course not,” I said. “That would be too easy.”
    “Too dangerous,” Karinovsky amended. “We turn eastward before reaching the wharf, take the channel past San Giacomo in Palude, and continue nearly as far as Mazzorbo. Do you see Mazzorbo circled there?”
    “I thought it was a flyspeck. What kind of chart is this?”
    “Albanian. It is a copy of a Yugoslav naval chart.”
    “Couldn’t Guesci have gotten us an Italian chart?”
    “The Government Printing Office was out of stock. The Lagoon is being resurveyed.”
    “A British Admiralty chart would have been best of all.”
    “Guesci couldn’t very well write to London for one, could he?”
    “I suppose not.”
    “In any event, he assured me that a child could navigate by this. Look, the main islands and channels are clearly marked. All you have to do is steer for the airport, then turn right at the next-to-last marker and continue toward Mazzorbo, then turn left at number 5 marker and follow the channel into Palude del Monte.”
    Karinovsky spread his hands to show how easy it would be. I was not so sure. I had done some day-sailing on Long Island Sound, enough to know how tricky it could get trying to follow a nautical chart at night across an unfamiliar body of water.
    I examined the chart. Its markings were conventional. Channels were shown in a series of bold dashes. Navigational aids were white or red dots. Marsh or sandy areas were shaded with little blue crosses; there were plenty of them. Depths in the Lagoon reached a low tide maximum of six feet, but the average