G. Edmondson: The Ship that Sailed the Time Stream

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 momentum, 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 canoe 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 stop beside Gorson. The chief had had enough. He picked it up and swung. Sheaves squealed and the yawl righted herself as two years of Dr. Krom’s appropriation and a hundred feet of the Alice’s cable gurgled downward. The yawl abruptly took a reasonable attitude toward steering.

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 unbelievable. 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.