G. Edmondson - The Ship that Sailed the Time Stream

“Two hundred fathoms,” Freedy reporter a moment later.

Joe slapped a hand to his forehead and went below to the chart again. He decided to head south and try to thread his way out of this cluster of Cycladean islands. Even if he had the fantastic luck to catch a fisherman, these smaller islands changed names every twenty years. Every other one was Iraklia, Herakleon, Herculaneum, or some such thing, all named after the omnipresent hero. Cape Malea, the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese, couldn’t be more than another fifty miles south. And if the Roman had been heading west for Athens this morning, it must be at least a hundred miles west.

They rounded the island, whatever it was, and two hours later another appeared. Joe took the BuShip’s name in vain. He could be three different places in the Aegean and still see two islands this far apart on this course. Damn the navy’s meaching economy with charts! If he ever got back he’d write letters and damn the promotions.

Things were finally shipshape again. Not as shipshape as they had been, for all her arms and many other bits of the Alice were gone forever. From now on, Joe decided, he’d keep plenty of sea room. If the wind held and if all his other guesses were right, they’d clear the passage between Kithera and Andikithera just about daybreak. The next obstacle in their westward run would be Sicily.

The Alice galloped along on a broad reach under all plain sail. There had been disturbances and tidal waves throughout the day but it seemed to be over now. The Alice’s people were tired unto stumbling. They’d had several hours less sleep than Joe during the last forty-eight. Tired as he was, he was still the freshest man aboard.

“All hands sack out,” he said. “I’ll take the wheel.” He wanted to steer awhile—not to spare the crew so much as to be alone. When had he last had an interval of peace and quiet? He needed to think. This time travel business: there was something odd—well, it was all odd, but there was something even more than peculiar about it. He had thought it was the lightning and the still. Thank Mahan the Romans had brought back all the parts for the still… . But something else came into it.

Lightning, yes. And the copper coil inside the still’s vacuum chamber obviously had something to do with their jumps. But what else? If it were this simple every moonshiner would have ended up in the Roman army.

There had to be another factor—something which existed only aboard the Alice. The standing rigging might serve as some sort of antenna. Even though not connected with the still, there might be some resonance between them.

Assuming time travel was an electromagnetic phenomenon—but how did he know there wasn’t some entirely new form of energy involved? To dislocate an object in time must require an enormous expenditure of energy. That was where the lightning came in. What else? Radio? Freedy hadn’t turned it on since they’d skipped back to an era without transmitters.

The moon rose and silhouetted the Alice. It was a clear, cloudless night and the horizon betrayed no hint of land. It would have been nice to check his reckoning with the fathometer and make sure they were in the deeps off northern Crete but he hadn’t the heart to wake Freedy.

Fathometer … By Mahan, that was it! Joe thought back carefully, reconstructing the events preceding each time jump. Each time the still had been set up; each time lightning had struck. But what had been the triggering factor? The fathometer! How, Joe wondered, could a sonic echo from its transducer heterodyne with whatever lightning was feeding through the still’s coil produce the time travel effect? Whatever it was, it was beyond him. But it seemed to work. How could he reverse it?

If he set up the still and fathometer and waited for another lightning flash, according to past experience, he wouldn’t be home—he’d be another thousand years backward, about the time of the Trojan war. A hundred years before Solomon would get around to building his temple. Good God, what a chance … Joe sighed and pulled the Alice back on course. His first obligation was to his people and ship. If he ever got them home …

Gorson came on deck, yawning and stretching. “Still two-thirty degrees?” he asked.

Joe nodded. “If you spot any small islands, try to keep them astarboard.”

“By the way,” Gorson asked, “what became of those Roman swabbies you had aboard?”

“They died.”

“All at once?”

Joe explained briefly about the looped hawser, then went below before Gorson could ask any more questions.

How had he been able to do such things? His one undergraduate adventure had been the time he’d organized an anti-vivisection campaign and the biologists had landed on him like a ton of tormented tomcats. He felt his way through the darkened galley, marveling at his own bloodthirstiness, admitting to himself that it had taken no great effort of will to perform this auto da fe. He remembered the horror with which he’d watched Raquel carve her initial in the Viking woman.

Oh well… . He closed the door to his cubicle and turned on the light. After staring at the narrow, monastic bunk for a moment he sat on it and took off his shoes.

“What the hell were you expecting?” he muttered, and flipped the light out.

Dawn brought one of those bright sunny days when sails draw well and seagulls sing hymns to the sun-when porpoises, filled with joie de vivre, crisscross the bow and startled anchovies waste millions of tailpower frothing Homer’s wine-dark sea. Cookie fried over a hundred rye pancakes—light, fluffy ones, thanks to some yeasty miracle—and though the butter was long gone, he had produced a sweet syrup, vaguely reminiscent of dried apricots.

Guilbeau was steering. Joe, after a glance at a morning worthy of the young King David’s harp, decided to hold his meeting on deck. He reviewed the time travel business and explained his hypothesis of the night before.

Freedy pursed his little mouth. “How do we keep from going farther back in the past?”

“A good question,” Joe said. “My guess is it takes power to drive anything out of its own time and that no matter how far away, that person or thing must always have an affinity for his proper position in time.

Perhaps if the same process which dislocated him in the first place were repeated, but without power. …”

Lapham’s Adam’s apple bobbed several times. “You mean the lightning?”

“Right,” Joe said. “It was the still and, I think, the fathometer which got us in this fix, coupled with a couple of googol watts from a lightning discharge.”

Dr. Krom broke in excitedly. “Let’s try it—what can we lose?”

“Nothing we haven’t already lost,” Schwartz said.

“No one else objected, so Joe said, “Gorson, you and Cookie set up the still. Try to get everything like it was when we tangled with those Vikings off Catalina or Iceland or wherever.

“Freedy, make sure your gear’s all there. Whatever you do, don’t turn anything on!

“Rose, how are the batteries?”

“Half charge,” the engineman said. “If the breeze holds and the windmill doesn’t give out they’ll be up in another day.”

“Everyone spend the day thinking over my theory. How many things can go wrong? After you come up with your objections I’ll spring mine. If that doesn’t scare you to death we’ll throw the switch tomorrow.”

He glanced automatically at his wrist and remembered his watch had gone down with the Romans. Damn them; I might have been willing to let them live if it hadn’t been for that.

Raquel appeared beside him. “You expect more trouble?” she asked.

“No,” Joe said, “but I didn’t expect to get out of television range of San Diego the day I sailed. Incidentally, how much English do you understand nowadays?”