G. Edmondson - The Ship that Sailed the Time Stream

There was a splash as Red Schwartz abruptly found himself neck-deep in the bay. He splashed a great deal and took the Lord’s name in vain before he caught an outstretched hand and pulled himself back ashore. They fanned out, searching for the Alice’s mooring line. They didn’t find it.

“Gotta be here,” Gorson was grumbling. There was a worried tone in his voice. “Whole canyon’s not a hundred yards wide. How could we miss it?”

Joe glanced back uphill at the faint glow where they’d left the fire. It was not the fire he was seeing.

The moon was about to rise from behind the ridge. It did and there was no sign of the Alice.

Weaponless, miserable, hungover, they looked hopefully at Joe. “Does anyone think this is my fault?” he needled.

The imam and his Moors huddled to one side, looking even more disconsolate. Joe decided not to rub it in.

The moon rose higher until its direct rays illuminated the pinnacle in the small harbor’s center. And there they saw the Alice. Someone had cut the stern line and taken up on the bow line. It was a good hundred yards to the yawl’s stern. Joe turned to the imam. “Ask your men if they can swim,” he said.

“Why ask?”

Dr. Krom would probably have a heart attack if he tried. “How about the rest of you?” The navy men nodded. “Can you do it with rocks in your pockets and come up fighting?” This time they weren’t so sure.

Joe put them to gathering logs. There was neither time nor tools to make a raft but they could swim the trunks out, using them to rest on. He tried to imagine what they would face aboard the Alice. The girls would all be there, of course. Soft and alluring as they might seem, Joe suspected they would be a match for exhausted hungover men trying to pull themselves aboard the Alice. And what if they had a few men of their own along?

Again he wondered how they’d happened to land on this island. If the girls had been going to Rome they must’ve been shipwrecked or marooned. If shipwrecked, what sort of miracle drowned the whole crew while they saved not only themselves but apparently hundreds of gallons of wine?

Retaking the Alice was not going to be easy. But … whoever boarded her had to sail her away. Engines would be an impenetrable mystery. Perhaps the halliard winches were also beyond them. Had they already discovered they couldn’t sail her? Probably just waiting for a wind. He was composing a silent prayer for continued calm when the first ripple of breeze bit them from behind. The Alice could cut loose and drift out of the harbor mouth now.

“Will you get on the ball with those logs?” he snapped.

A rumble and splash answered him as they finally manhandled one into the water. “All hands in and see if it’ll support us.”

It could, so they began swimming. “Not crossways, for Christ’s sake!” Joe growled. “Turn it lengthways.”

Strung along both sides, they paddled with one hand and kicked their slow way toward the Alice.

What had happened to Raquel and McGrath by now? Something else bothered him too. It kept bothering him during the twenty minutes it took to paddle out.

Finally, as the log bumped gently into the Alice’s stern, he remembered the name of the island where Circe had turned Ulysses’ men into pigs. It was Aeaea.

The log bumped again and Joe mentally cursed. No one seemed to be standing watch. Gorson and Cookie had already pulled half the crew on deck. The log bumped a third time and Joe forced himself between it and the stern. The breeze kept pushing it toward them but he couldn’t cast it adrift until everyone was aboard. He wondered why the Alice stood stern to the breeze until he came aboard and saw that she had drifted round and round until the bow line was hopelessly snarled. The pinnacle was grinding paint away from the bow. “Women!” he muttered.

The deck was deserted. Gorson went forward with half the men while Joe led the remainder to the after scuttle. With rocks at ready they oozed down both hatchways and converged on the galley.

The forecastle was dark. The only light aboard glowed dimly in the curtained galley. Joe stood in the after hatchway and saw Gorson staring aghast from the forecastle. Between them the galley was stuffed with girls.

Not nude—naked was the only word.

Facing a bulkhead, Howard McGrath cringed in one corner. He had both arms firmly over his face. Raquel, still wearing a dress, sat with the other girls, listening intently to an enormously fat woman dressed in the remains of a flowing, Grecian style garment. She squatted crosslegged on the settee and spoke in an unknown language.

When she glanced up and saw Joe her bulging cheeks rearranged themselves into a smile which exposed several gold teeth. “Tell me, sonny,” she said, “did Al Smith win or are we still stuck with Prohibition?”

I’m going nuts, Joe thought dazedly. But he realized he was cutting no ice with the crew by standing there looking stupid.

“Cat got your tongue, sonny?” the fat woman asked.

“From the looks of the still I’d say we’re still in prohibition.” A tremendous sigh rippled up and down her abdomen. “It’s been a hell of a while since I had a drink of good stuff.”

“Wha— What year are we in?” Joe finally managed.

“Couldn’t say, sonny. When I first hit town I looked for a Salvation Army soup kitchen. Near’s I make it, there ain’t a Christer in town.”

Gorson elbowed through the mass of naked femininity.

“Where you from?” he asked the fat woman.

“Windy City,” she wheezed. “You can call me Ma Trimble. Sorry about making you swim, sonny—I wasn’t expecting the navy.

“Why didn’t you come back for us?”

“We were going to if we ever got untangled from this danged rock. Hell, sonny, I never could drive a flivver, much less a boat.”

McGrath squirmed in his corner. Still hunched with arms over eyes, he turned. “Mr. Rate,” he asked, “is that you?”

“Sorry about him,” Ma Trimble said. “One of my girls chunked a rock at him when we came aboard.

When he came to—”

McGrath peeped out cautiously. He immediately ducked his head between his knees again. “I thought I’d gone to hell,” he said muffledly.

Red Schwartz stepped over a couple of blondes and lifted the befuddled puritan to his feet, half carrying him into the forecastle.

Joe surveyed the packed galley helplessly. “What did you intend to do with my ship?” he asked.

Ma Trimble shrugged. “Anything beats starving to death on a rockpile. How was I to guess you were Americans?”

“But how are we all—don’t you have beds or anything ashore? And damn it, Mrs. Trimble, you’re going to have to get some clothes on these girls.”

“Look who’s talking,” the old woman laughed.

Joe glanced down at his shorts. “We can’t all sleep here,” he said. “How did you happen to land on this island, anyhow?”

Ma Trimble waved a pudgy hand. “That, sonny,” she warned, “is a long story.”

It was indeed, and Ma Trimble told it complete with expansive gestures and colorful expressions that set McGrath to trembling anew. What it all boiled down to was that Ma Trimble had grown a bit desperate when three of the best customers at her establishment had gone blind from the booze she served. The booze was sold to her in accordance with what the mob politely called an “exclusive contract,” and Ma had no desire to cause the boys to lose their politeness—but if only there were some way to make the stuff drinkable!

A friend came to the rescue. He knew, he said, a guy who’d “studied chemistry down at Joliet,” and this unworthy gentleman thought he could rig up a rectifying still to salvage the stuff. Ma Trimble grasped at the straw, the still was constructed on a houseboat out on Goose Island, and—