Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

“So you’re leaving, then,” Charlie said. If he’d been paying more attention the fact that the cabins were dark would have tipped him off; they’d been fully lit for three, four days now, he’d been getting used to it. Someone had noticed he’d had company. He’d claimed there was paint drying.

“It’s time,” the man said. “Your mother and I have just been going over our accounts.”

And that could be taken two ways. Each of them had an envelope on the table in front of them, inscribed; with their name across the front, Charlie realized, of course. Once upon a time he’d seen his mother’s stack tied up with a black ribbon, one for each time Charlie’s father had gone off on a war cruise. She’d told him. He’d never asked about them again. “All settled and satisfactory, I presume?” He hadn’t decided what he was going to call the man, yet. It had only been a few days.

The man looked up at the kitchen clock above the stove. “Eight o’clock,” he said. “Time to catch my ride back.” He stood up, tucking the envelope with his name on it away inside his jacket. Inside pocket, Charlie presumed. “Thank you for the use of the facilities, Charlie Montrose. It’s been of invaluable help to us.”

Charlie’s mother hadn’t moved. She turned her face up toward the man as he moved past; the man stooped and kissed her mouth with a sort of businesslike tenderness that erased the apparent difference in age between them. Suddenly Charlie was desperately worried: was his mother ever going to see this man again? She certainly took him for exactly who he claimed to be. Charlie couldn’t let this happen.

“Well, you’re welcome to come back and see us again,” he said, trying not to notice the startled hunger on his mother’s face that she turned to him as he spoke. “We get busy during the summer, but we’ll find some way to manage. Any time.” And Charlie stood aside, so that the man could leave through the kitchen door. The store would be locked up. It would be dark all the way down to the dock, and nobody to see what might be waiting for its captain out there on the water.

“Be good to your mother,” the man said, in German now, and held out his hand. “Until I can get back to you both. You’re a good boy, Pieter. I am so proud to have you as my son.”

Charlie couldn’t move.

Those were the words. And in that voice. And the hand-shake. He only barely managed to shake himself loose from his paralysis in time to get his own hand out, to clasp that of his father. “I will,” he promised, because those were the words, though he hadn’t thought of them for decades. “Safe journey, swift return, sir. We will await the day.”

Now, only now, he believed that the man was his father. Only now that the man was leaving. But his mother knew. And his father had known all along, after their first meeting. His father was gone, and Charlie remembered this emotion, the brave front for his mother’s sake, when all his nearly-six-year-old self had wanted to do was cry.

“Your coffee will get cold,” his mother said. He could hear the sound of a mug filling. “Sit down, Charlie. There’s nothing to be done.”

He wasn’t six years old. His heart had not been broken. His father was gone, but it was because Charlie Montrose senior had died of cardiac disease just seven years ago. Nothing to do with Verricht Lachs.

So as inexplicable events went, it was one. “I’ve got to get the groceries,” Charlie said. “Ice cream will melt.” But he sat down anyway and reached for his mug, because she’d told him to. The ice cream wouldn’t melt very quickly. He could take another ten minutes for his mother’s sake; and go see to the cabins in the morning.

Once Lachs was back on board they’d run on the surface for as long as it felt safe—the lookout finding no aircraft, no boats on the water. They kept underwater for the daylight hours, so it was near dawn on the second day after they’d left the Salmon Shore—thirty-six hours, more or less—that they reached their target position. Maybe nobody was up in the sky looking for a U-boat, specifically, and they were a small boat in the grand scheme of things. But U-boats didn’t survive by making assumptions.

They were making one assumption: that the vague reports—rumors—conspiracy theories, outlandish though they were, were founded on fact: another U-boat displaced in space and time; and a specific U-boat, whose commander had been gossiped about. The entire crew of U-818 Lachs were the only ones with certain knowledge that such a thing could happen.

If nobody got to U-797 in time to warn them that the war was over, a catastrophe might occur. One of the gigantic cruise ships torpedoed, with no time to evacuate all of the passengers and crew. The safety redundancies on those cruise ships were impressive: Goond had studied up on them. But nobody had prepared a cruise liner in 2005 to be attacked by a war machine from sixty years ago. U-797 was a torpedo resupply boat. Who knew how many torpedoes it might have on board?

How long would it take the world’s navies to realize that there was what amounted to a terrorist-by-default on the loose? How many torpedoes would it take the White Whale to sink a cruise liner, how many cruise liners would U-797 sink before it was tracked down and destroyed, how many thousands of people might be killed? What if U-797 fired on a British Navy ship, a United States Navy ship, a Russian war-ship, in the current political environment?

For the last hour and a half everybody on the boat got their chance to come up to the bridge for a few minutes, breathe the air, look at the horizon. Goond wanted to linger on, but it was getting lighter and there was no sense in drawing things out. There would be plenty of time to wonder whether they had made a terrible mistake once they started down.

One last look around at the night sky—at the stars—one last breath of the beautiful pure fresh air—and Goond climbed down into the conning tower to secure the bridge. Into your hands, oh Lord, do we commit our spirits , he said to himself. “Tower hatch closed, Herr Ellie!” Goond called down, firmly, decisively. Did they not commit themselves to God every time they closed the tower hatch? Was this really all so very different?

Yes. It was. There was no way to tell whether diving past three hundred meters would reproduce the physical displacement they’d experienced between the Arctic Ocean and the Salmon Shore resort, even for a boat that had been contaminated by contact with the Flying Dutchman . And if it did, what if they were displaced in time once again, as well? What then?

But U-797 had come up in 2005. U-818 had come up in 2005. Maybe they were called to the same year by accident, but maybe once they were here they would stay. They had to try something, and there was simply nothing else to try. They were fifty-three; a single passenger cruise line carried thousands. It had to be done.

Goond descended into the control room, where Lachs already stood—back to the periscope housing—watching the depth gauges past Vilsohn, over the shoulders of the men seated at the hydroplane stations. “Take us down,” Lachs said. “U-818 into the deeps.”

The diesels had fallen silent. Indicator lights went from red to green as air intake valves were closed and secured. The lights were already dimmed to conserve battery power, because even though they were fully charged, who knew how deep they would be able to go, how far they’d have to travel just to get to the surface again? Who knew how much power they would have to call upon, and for how long?

“Flood tanks forward,” Ellie said. Nobody spoke, except to repeat orders. They could do this in their sleep. That was a good thing. The air had been so thick, before they’d come up from the deeps that last time, that he had been all but sleep-walking.