G c edmondson, p.1
G. C. Edmondson, page 1
The Ship that Sailed the Time Stream
by G.C.Edmondson
Version 1.0
A #BW Release
I
THOUGH HE was given to daydreams of a wooden ship and iron men era, Ensign Joseph Rate was captain of a wooden ship in a predominantly atomic navy. And a sailing ship at that!
The Alice was an 89-foot yawl, engaged in very secret work which involved countermeasures against enemy submarines. Since the Alice could move without thump-ings or engine noises, she was well suited for this kind of work. Ensign Joe Rate was less suited to be her skipper.
A year ago he had been one of Dr. Battlement’s Bright Young Men, youngest assistant professor in the history of Athosburg College.
At the moment he was arguing with Dr. Krom. “If we don’t start hauling your perverted - Christmas tree out right now there won’t be time,” he said. “That squall isn’t going to wait.”
Dr. Krom sighed and passed a hand through his shock of white hair. “We could be through in another hour,”
he protested. Joe showed no signs of weakening so the doctor played his trump card. “Finish these tests today and we’ll spend the next two weekends in San Diego.”
A glance at the bulletin board would have advised the old man that Ensign Rate and the Alice were already scheduled to spend tomorrow in port. Nothing could have given Joe more pleasure than not doing so.
Joe knew perfectly well Dr. Krom saw him as a navy-minded oaf. He reflected charitably that he didn’t regard the doctor as a mad scientist. Feebleminded, perhaps … “Will you absolve me if we have to cut it loose?” He spoke loud enough to be overheard and repeated come Board of Inquiry day.
“You won’t have to,” Dr. Krom said confidently. He was not a meteorologist.
“On thy head be it,” Joe muttered.
Twenty minutes later the yawl was plunging with that corkscrew motion peculiar to sailing hulls when stripped of the canvas which steadies them. Sailors fought to lash the flogging main boom someplace where Dr. Krom’s nightmare would not make the yawl list quite so soggily aport and perhaps work a trifle less doggedly at smashing the midships planking.
Krom’s Christmas Tree was a fantastic, hydrophone-studded pyramid which was grunted overboard with much winching and taking of the Lord’s Name in vain while accomplices in the dinghy exploded half-pound charges of TNT at varying distances. While the Christmas tree draped from the end of the main boom no sail could be set, and the Alice listed uncomfortably.
“Be careful,” Dr. Krom begged. “Two years’ appropriation went into that.”
“You’d better go below, sir,” Ensign Rate said.
“But maybe I can help.”
Joe choked back his I-told-you-so as he glanced at the skinny old man. “Let me handle it,” he said. “We pay taxes too.” Joe had learned a little about handling superannuated genius back in his History Department days—but not enough.
If getting an education had not exactly meant starving in a garret, still it had not been easy for Joe. Were it not for his phenomenal memory the hours he’d spent keeping body and soul together might have kept the young man from passing a single course. As it was, college had seemed to him a mere variation and expansion on themes he could still quote verbatim from sixth grade texts. But he had never learned how to out-guess Dr. Battlement or his daughter. He wondered if he’d ever be able to handle Dr. Krom.
Ten hectic minutes passed before the Alice’s boom was secured. Under bare poles and with her diesel barely ticking over, the yawl crabbed into the swell. Krom’s monster hung from a hundred feet of cable and would be safe, providing the Alice maintained steerageway and didn’t drift into shallow water. The squall blew the tops from short, steep waves. A thunderhead drew lightning from a wavecrest a mile away. There hadn’t been time for oilskins and Joe was soaked. “You all right?” he asked. The helmsman nodded so he ducked below.
‘
Gorson and Cookie were fumbling with something inside a bell jar as he passed through the galley. “Coffee, Skipper?” Cook asked. Joe shook his head. He knew he ought to say something about the still but they had been in the navy longer than he. The chief had a theory that their dried-apple brandy’s foul taste came from too much heat—hence their experiments with low temper-ature vacuum distillation.
He went into his cabin and rummaged for dry clothes.
In the galley Cookie humped energetically over a hand vacuum pump while Gorson studied the gleaming copper coil inside the bell jar.
At that moment lightning struck.
Most of the charge bled harmlessly down the Alice’s standing rigging to the waterline, but there was enough left over to stand everybody’s hair on end. Balls of St.
Emo’s fire danced merrily about the ship’s innards and the single echoless CRACK was felt rather than heard.
In the galley Cookie and Gorson stared at the melted coil which crumpled amid shards of the shattered bell jar. “Holy balls,” Gorson mumbled, “Hey Skipper, look!”
But Ensign Rate, clad only in non-regulation skivvy drawers, was clambering up the ladder.
Seaman Guilbeau stared glassily at the binnacle. The Alice was 90° off course. The ensign pushed him away and fought the struggling yawl back up. Schwartz and Rose, who had been tending the winch, sat up dazedly.
Dr. Krom’s bushy head emerged from the forward scuttle. “Stop worrying,” Joe called. “Your monster’s still with us.” He glanced upward to see how much of the Alice’s standing rigging had been cremated by the flash.
There were no loose stays dangling. No one was dead.
He reached for a cigarette and abruptly learned he was only drawers distant from naked.
The squall was dying now and Joe was troubled by a feeling that something was wrong. Then he knew what it was: the wind was blowing from the wrong direction.
Freedy came on deck. “Radio’s dead,” he reported.
“Both ways?”
The radioman shrugged. “Nothing coming in. Can’t tell if I’m getting out.”
The bos’n came on deck and took the wheel. Joe herded the dazed deck watch below. Cookie was sweeping up the shattered bell jar when he passed through the galley. “Any other damage?” the cook asked. Joe shook his head and went into his cabin to finish dressing.
“Mr. Rate—hey, Joe!” Gorson screamed. The skipper abandoned his coffee and scrambled on deck again.
The bos’n was staring at a ship off the port bow. It was also a wooden ship, with a single furled square sail.
Bearded faces stared from behind shields which lined the side. An armored and helmeted man braced himself at the dragon figurehead and chanted as oars flashed.
“A fine day to be shooting a movie,” Joe growled.
The actors shipped oars and drifted toward the Alice. “How’d you make out in the squall?” Joe shouted.
The man in the bow yelled back. Joe didn’t understand him. He yelled again. When Joe didn’t understand a second time the bright bearded man threw a spear. It landed with a thunk and stood thrilling in the after scuttle. “Hey, take it easy,” Joe yelled, “That’s navy property! What studio do you guys work for anyway?”
Abruptly, bearded and armored oarsmen stood behind the bulwark and more spears winged toward the Alice. Gorson’s mouth opened and he flattened himself in the foot-deep cockpit.
“I knew all actors were nuts,” Joe muttered. “But this’s carrying Stanislavsky too damn far!”
Helmeted men crowded into the Viking ship’s bow, brandishing half moon axes. The ships were only fifty feet apart now. Joe scrambled from behind the binnacle and rammed the throttle forward. The diesel roared and the Alice strained for her full ten knots. But something was wrong. She wasn’t answering her helm properly.
Gorson sat up. “Oh no!” he moaned. Krom’s Christmas tree still dangled a hundred feet below the Alice’s port side. Straining against it, the Alice swung hard aport—straight for the boatload of spearhappy actors.
Gorson and Joe knocked each other down in their scramble for the reversing lever. There was a splintering noise as the Alice knifed into lapstrake planking. The two men looked at each other. “Shall we jump overboard arm in arm?” Joe asked.
But things were not finished. Robbed of forward mo-mentum, the Alice belatedly answered her reversing gear. As she backed away water rushed into the hole in the other ship. Men were boiling out of the Alice’s hatches now and the Alice, still shackled to Krom’s Christmas tree, was doing her level best to swing full circle and ram her stern into the Viking ship’s opposite side. And the reversing gear was stuck again!
Joe had to throttle down before he could kick it into forward. Water boiled under her stern and the yawl stopped a scant dozen feet from a second collision.
Gorson meanwhile had sprinted to the winch and was lowering Krom’s Christmas tree to give the Alice a longer tether.
The Viking ship was settling on an even keel and Joe realized he would have to cut Krom’s nightmare loose if he hoped to save any of the actors. He hoped the wetting would cure some of their rambunctiousness.
And what had gotten into the Coast Guard to let a hundred armor-clad men go asea in this overgrown ca-noe without so much as a life jacket between them?
He grabbed a life ring and flung it Vikingward. The bearded actors shied away as if it were radioactive.
Finally one picked it up gingerly with his sword point and dropped it over the side.
A double bladed axe whizzed and clattered to a s
Dr. Krom opened and closed his mouth like a freshly boated cod but the bos’n still weighed the axe in one hairy paw.
The armor-ballasted actors made surprisingly little outcry. The longship gave a final gurgle and left floating oars by way of epitaph. In an hour Joe supposed he’d be sick but at the moment it was simply unbe-lievable. Half the the actors had gone down with their crackerbox ship. He headed back to pick up those who still clung to oars and water kegs. They yelled things which sounded vaguely Scandinavian and definitely insulting. As the Alice approached each man let go of whatever he held and let his armor pull him down.
Stanislavsky to the last, Joe decided. He wondered what he was going to say before the inevitable Board of Inquiry.
“See if Freedy’s done anything with the radio,” he said. Gorson nodded and went below. Joe pulled the cam lifter and the diesel sneezed itself to death. “Drop anchor,” he called. There was a rattle of chain.
“No bottom, sir,” Seaman Guilbeau reported moments later.
“You’re kidding.”
“No ah ain’, sir.” The little Cajun was emphatic.
Ensign Rate took a wild look around the horizon.
The coast was hidden in a haze. He dived down the cabin scuttle.
“Still dead,” Freedy reported. “Can’t find anything wrong but all I get is static.”
“Try the fathometer.”
The radioman flipped switches until a needle inked across a sheet of graph paper. All the way across! He switched to the next range. Again the recorder pinned itself. He switched again and shrugged. “Damned lightning must’ve ruined everything. There’s no place that deep within fifty miles of San Diego.”
Since the Alice was required to anchor under unusual circumstances her chain was extended with a hundred fathoms of hot-stretch nylon. “We’re all out and no bottom,” Joe said. Freedy looked at him unhappily. They went on deck where Dr. Krom was pacing like the caricature of an expectant father.
“Drifting,” the little man wailed. “We’ll never find it again.”
Joe told him about the fathometer.
“Impossible,” Krom said. “I corrected the charts for most of this area myself.”
“All right, so you’re an expert. What does an anchor cable all out and dangling straight down mean?” Joe studied his watch and then the sky. The squall had blown itself out but the breeze still came at them wrong.
“Look at the binnacle,” he said.
The old man studied the compass and frowned.
“What time have you?” Joe persisted.
“2 P.M.”
“Pacific Standard?”
“Naturally.”
“Look,” Joe said. The sun was barely visible through thin clouds. The doctor frowned as he looked from sun to compass. “Are you suggesting we’ve lost three hours?”
“Either in time or in longitude. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get the book out and learn how to take a noon shot.”
An hour later the Alice still drifted with one man on deck. Seven sailors, Dr. Krom, and his civilian assistant, sat around the galley table. Ensign Rate cleared his throat. “My noon shot places us way north of where we ought to be. I’ll get a star sight tonight and pinpoint the latitude. As for longitude, we could be anywhere.”
Seaman Guilbeau squirmed. “Ain’t we gonna be in San Diego tonight, sir?”
Rate shook his head. For the last couple of hours a wild suspicion had been growing on him. “How’re we fixed for food?” he asked.
Cook’s Adam’s apple bobbed twice. “We’re supposed to be in Dago tomorrow,” he protested.
“Well, we won’t be. Now how much’ve we got?”
Cook shrugged his thin shoulders. “I dunno; maybe ten days.”
“Were the water tanks topped up before we left?”
Gorson nodded. “Enough for two weeks, providing the shower’s secured.”
“It is as of this moment. How about fuel?”
MM3/c Abe Rose mouthed his cigar. “Enough for forty hours cruising.”
Joe pushed his cap back to an improper angle. “Providing Cook goes easy on the stove, I suppose?”
The engineman nodded. “Everything runs off the same tank.”
“All right. Now, I don’t, want to harp on this, but it’s hard telling when we’ll see any more food, water or oil. From now on if you need a bath use a bucket of brine on deck. It takes fuel to charge batteries so douse the record player. No lights unless they’re absolutely necessary. Cookie, what’s in the refrigerator?”
“The usual stuff—milk, eggs, meat and butter.”
“How about dry provisions and canned goods?”
“You know the navy,” the cook said. “Flour, beans, Spam and fruit.”
“All right. Use up the perishables first. As soon’s the box’s empty, secure it. That’ll save a little fuel.”
Cook nodded. “But what happened? How’d we get so far away from San Diego?”
Seaman Schwartz stuck his unlovely face down the scuttle. “Something in sight,” he said. Everyone followed Rate up the ladder.
The ship was about a mile away, sailing on a beam reach. “Came heading straight toward us out of the fog,” Schwartz said. “Soon’s they caught sight of us they sheered off. But what is it?”
Ensign Rate studied the lines of the retreating ship.
He’d never actually seen one before but he thought he knew what it was. He cringed at the idea of wasting electricity on the heels of his economy lecture but he could think of no way to bring in a hundred fathoms of anchor line without using the electric winch.
While it was whirring in they hoisted the jigger. It was the first time Rate had ever set sail without using the engine to keep a heading into the wind. He hoped the flat sheeted jigger would be enough to weathercock the yawl while the mains’l was being winched up. It was, and by the time the last fathom of chain rattled through the winch the Alice was under all plain sail and chasing the stranger.
After a moment’s internal debate Joe decided against setting the spinnaker. They could probably catch the stubby little merchantman without it and he didn’t want to worry about hundreds of yards of flapping canvas, should they have to come about suddenly.
Visibility was still less than two miles and the ship had disappeared several minutes ago. Joe thought about firing up the radar but he didn’t want to waste power.
He’d sail an hour toward where they had disappeared first. He took the helm himself and tried to piece together what he knew about the other ship and the men who sailed her.
Dr. Krom lit his pipe. “Looked like something out of the Hanseatic League,” he guessed. All hands Crowded aft into the cockpit, eager for any scrap of information.
“It’s not a Hanse ship,” Joe said.
Dr. Krom raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t really expected this navy-minded oaf to know what he was talking about.
Joe took a deep breath. “The ship we’re following,”
he began, “is a knarr. They averaged eighty to ninety feet, carried a single square sail on a short, heavily shrouded mast. Bow and stern are pierced for eight oars which are used only when docking. The decking amidships is removable to load cargo.”
Every time Joe made one of these impromptu lectures he was dogged by the suspicion that he was a showoff—
the kind of pompous fraud who’d shill for a rigged quiz show. He knew perfectly well he wasn’t a genius; he was merely cursed with a good memory. But even Dr. Krom was impressed so he continued. “My noon shot placed us on a latitude corresponding to the Gulf of Finland, Davis Straits, Hudson Bay, the Bering Sea, or the North Atlantic. The knarr was used to transport merchandise from and to Iceland and the longship, according to all the books, was used only on raids between the Scandinavian peninsula and the British Isles. Since knarrs bound for Iceland commonly took their departure from the Shetlands or the Orkneys, I’d guess we’re somewhere north of Scotland. And in time, we must be somewhere between nine and twelve hundred A.D.”
“Whooee, Mr. Rate, what’s a smart man like you doin’ in the navy?”
