Eileen Gunn: Stable Strategies and Others

There weren’t many of them left, but it was a good crew. For that matter, it was a good ship and a good command. Only the deaths — the futile and meaningless deaths — of so many trained men, of poor Kobinski and all the others, could dampen Grace’s keen appreciation of how fortunate she was to be here.

She made her rounds of the surviving crew, offering a word of praise here, drawing attention to some small deficiency there. The job was to keep the crew crisp and taut as a drumhead — and not a fractional bit tenser. She made sure everybody had work to do, to keep their minds off their strange predicament.

There had been far too many questions about where the ship was and how it had gotten there. She had indicated that their method of travel was top secret, which was true enough. The main secret was that she hadn’t a clue how it worked. That was something she needed to remedy.

Heinlein and Asimov were in the closet-sized “secret” control room, picking through the wiring. She left them for last.

Outside the door, she heard Asimov’s voice: “Plesiosaurs had a wide distribution throughout the world from the Late Triassic, some 190 million years ago, to the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago. So that narrows it down to a period of around about 125 million years.” From Asimov’s tone, Grace could tell that he was quite proud of this bit of useless knowledge.

“What’s out there is bigger than any plesiosaur in the fossil record,” Heinlein said impatiently.

“That’s a good point. The largest of the plesiosaurs was Elasmosaurus , which measured in at about 43 feet, about half of which was neck and head. Our friend out there has that beat by around 75 feet.”

“So I think we should consider the possibility that we’re on an alternate time line,” Heinlein said. “It’s not just that we’re unstuck in time. We are traveling between — ”

Grace entered. Asimov was sitting in a corner, back against the wall. Heinlein was smoking his pipe. Neither was looking at the circuits. “Well, you look busy,” she said coldly. “I guess you gentlemen must already be done with your analysis of the circuitry.”

Heinlein, at least, had the good grace to look embarrassed at being caught gold-bricking. Asimov did not. “We’ve determined that this stuff is all for monitoring.” He tapped the dials that continued their inexorable creep to the right, just slower than human patience could detect. The biggest needle had crept past three notches already — three notches, three jumps? There were a great many more notches on the dial. Hundreds. “The controls are somewhere else.”

“And you’re sitting here gabbing?”

“Well, I’ve always been more of the thinker than a man of action,” Asimov said.

“Mr. Asimov, how would you like to spend the rest of the war in the brig?”

“I’m a civilian! You have no authority over me.”

Grace kept her voice low and even. She had once heard a sailor complain about “getting shrieked at by a squeaky little bitch” after being criticized by a wave lieutenant. Since then, she had been careful to avoid sounding shrill, no matter how angry she got. “You’re on my ship, Mr. Asimov, a military ship in an emergency situation. There’s a war on. I am this ship’s only commissioned officer, and I will do what I need to do to make sure my orders are obeyed.” She studied him as if he were something particularly unpleasant that she had found on the sole of her shoe. “You are a fool, Mr. Asimov. Don’t compound it with insubordination.”

Asimov glanced at Heinlein, obviously hoping for support, but Heinlein was standing very straight, his eyes on Grace. He knew how to take a chewing out; she gave him credit for that.

“We were sorting out the possibilities,” Asimov said defensively.

“Here are some possibilities,” Grace said, her voice icy. “You can obey your orders. You can figure out how to keep us from losing any more men in a phase-shift jump. Or you can spend the rest of the war in the brig. You’re far more expendable than a working crew member.”

“We’re on it now, Ensign Hopper,” Heinlein said. “Give us half an hour, and we’ll have some answers for you.”

“See that you do.”

She left.

Back on deck, the Southern boy she had put in charge of the guns said, “We seen half a dozen of those god-damned sea serpents, beg your pardon, ma’am. They was all headed away from us, so we saved us our ammunition.”

“Good thinking, sailor.”

“Looks like we’re in for a storm, ma’am. I smell rain.” The sky was dark with storm clouds, and the air was hot and muggy. Grace heard the rumble of distant thunder.

It seemed that everywhere they jumped to, a thunderstorm was brewing. Relevant? She filed it away. “Carry on, sailor,” she said, and continued on her rounds.

When next she encountered Asimov and Heinlein, they were busily tracing wires on the bridge. They looked up when she entered.

“Making headway?” she asked.

“Yes, we are, Ensign Hopper,” Asimov said. “It’s our guess that the phase shifts occur when the Tesla coil causes the ship to vibrate at its resonant frequency.”

“You’re guessing? ”

“Extrapolation is a very powerful tool,” Asimov said. “Have you ever studied physics, Ensign Hopper? Do you know what the implications are of the ship vibrating in this way?”

“I have some idea.” Grace reached for a pencil and a scrap of paper. “At the ship’s resonant frequency, we’d get a standing wave. The effect would be strongest at the vibrational anti-nodes.” She made a quick sketch, talking while she drew. “When we jump, we all have to stay close to the nodes, the points of least vibration. The anti-nodes are the most dangerous places to be. The bridge was an anti-node, and so was the spot where we found the unfortunate sailor in the deck. Here’s a start.” She had drawn a rough plan of the ship, with X’s at the spots where people had sunk into decks and bulkheads. Asimov was staring at the drawing with a surprised look on his face. “But this is just an effect. It doesn’t tell us anything about where we are. What else do we have?”

Now it was Heinlein’s turn: “All right, ma’am. You remember that the original plan was to use Tesla coils to create clutter echoes, thus making the ship invisible to radar — only someone made changes to the plan. But suppose those changes were only changes in magnitude? The Tesla coils, after all, merely increase the frequency and magnitude of an alternating current. Suppose the current thus generated was then increased further by another Tesla coil — a Tesla coil the size of a destroyer?

“Once the first Tesla coil was switched on — presumably by the captain, now deceased — the already high-voltage, high-frequency current would feed into the giant ‘Tesla-plus’ coil” (this was Asimov’s ridiculous coinage) “and be oomphed even further.”

“Which would explain the massive electrical discharges surrounding each ‘jump’,” Isaac interjected.

“Are you suggesting,” Grace asked, “that if we managed to reverse the Tesla-plus current, the ship might well jump backward — past plesiosaurs and pirates — back to the Philadelphia Navy Yard? How?”

“Well,” Asimov said reluctantly, “the Tesla-plus current has to be regulated somehow, but we’ve checked the bridge, the commander’s cabin, the radio room, the engine room, everywhere you’d expect to find such a control. Maybe we could — ” The shriek of an alarm drowned out his voice. Without hesitation, Grace raced for the deck.

Quetzalcóatl came walking across the water, with the storm to his back. His temper was as dark as the storm itself. He had sensed the green fire from a thousand miles away, and transported himself here in a rage. This was his world! He had warned the others not to interfere with it. How dare they?