G. Edmondson - The Ship that Sailed the Time Stream

The blondes glanced up from their hair fixing. The girl unraveling a sweater up by the chain locker had disappeared. Up on deck, Joe guessed. He went up through the after scuttle and for a moment wondered if he hadn’t imagined the twisting sensation. The Alice still sailed herself under jib and jigger, beating gently toward the sun in a calm sea. Then he noticed: the ground swell was gone—they were in deep water!

Judging from the cloudless sky, they must be well offshore. He glanced at the binnacle and released a long-held breath. They were in the northern hemisphere.

It was the emptiest ocean Joe had ever seen. The sky had a strange, leaden color and the sun shone like molten brass. Gently rippling water stretched in all directions toward a horizon which curved upward until the Alice seemed alone at the bottom of an immensely empty blue bowl. Which ocean, Joe wondered? There was not a bird in the sky, nor a weed in the water. He took a final glance around and went below.

Gorson and Cookie had dismantled the bell jar so it was safe to turn on the other gear. “Three hundred and ten fathoms,” Freedy reported. “No scattering layer.”

“Tried the radio?” Joe asked.

Freedy’s little mouth flew open. “Hadn’t thought of it,” he confessed, and flipped switches. Joe waited not very hopefully for the set to warm up. He knew there were immense stretches of practically sterile ocean, yet something about that absolute emptiness worried him.

Maybe he’d read too many stories of atomic doom, but if he had overshot and landed ahead of his own time …

He wished there were a geiger counter aboard the Alice.

Gorson nudged him and pointed at the barometer.

Abruptly, Joe understood the emptiness and that weird yellow light, the absence of birds. How many hours did he have? He tried to remember what he knew about hurricanes and typhoons. According to the barometer this was going to be the granddaddy of them all.

The radio warmed up and Freedy started at the shortest band. Aside from clicks and pops of atmospheric electricity, nothing came in. Then Howard McGrath was pulling Joe’s sleeve.

Still wearing nothing but a pair of borrowed skivvy drawers, he hunched his shoulders and humped his thin body unhappily. “Mr. Rate,” he whispered, and glanced about embarrassedly. “Mr. Rate,” he whispered again, more urgently now, “it hurts when I pee.”

Joe clapped a hand to his forehead. Closing eyes tightly, he searched for an adequate phrase. None came.

He lowered his hand and his elbow caught Ma Trimble in the ribs. “Talk yourself out of this one,” he growled.

“My girls were clean when they came aboard,” Ma Trimble snapped. “You think I don’t know the signs?”

Joe turned to Howie. The god shouter swallowed and looked miserable. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. “Maybe it was Chloe, or the old lady. You see, I—”

“Spare me the details,” Joe groaned. “You must’ve really spread that old gospel around.” He turned to Ma Trimble, who still huffed like a catscratched bulldog.

“You’ve had the experience,” he said. “You can hold shortarm inspection.”

Freedy still gaped at the unhappy god shouter.

“Well?” Joe asked.

The minuscule mouthed radioman went back to twirling knobs. Abruptly he pursed his lips and stopped.

After a moment the fuzzy, faintly audible noise broke into dots and dashes. Joe could not recognize a single letter. Freedy was also puzzled. Gorson abruptly took charge. “Get a fix!” he snapped, and reached for the direction finder.

Joe rushed into his cubicle, then returned. He couldn’t lay out a line of position unless he knew where the signal came from. “Can you read it?” he asked.

Gorson gave him a wry look. “No, but I know what it is.”

Joe waited.

“Kana code,” the bos’n grunted. “Imperial Japanese Navy Headquarters, Tokyo.”

“What year we in?” Cookie asked. “You s’pose we’re still at war?”

“Unless it hasn’t started yet,” Gorson said. “I led the working party that blew up that transmitter.”

Freedy switched to another band. Minutes later the RDF left them in no doubt of their position. The Alice lay between thirty-six and thirty-eight degrees north, and approximately a hundred sixty degrees west. The transmitters were too far away to get a closer bearing but no one cared. A thousand miles north of the Hawaiian Islands there was little chance of running aground or into anything else, save possibly the Japanese fleet.

It was New Year’s Day, 1942.

They faced each other, stunned. They had followed the yawl’s meanderings uncomplainingly throughout antiquity but a mere twenty years staggered them. Somewhere at this minute, Joe thought, my mother’s wheeling me around in a stroller. My father is just about to be swindled out of his partnership in the restaurant.

Gorson broke off the revery of his own hectic life in the early days of the war. “What do we do now?” he asked.

Joe glanced around at Ma Trimble’s blondes and felt an unreasoning anger at the casualness with which they combed, mended, and chattered. Might as well get one thing over, he thought. “All hands assemble for a shortarm inspection. Ma Trimble’s the expert.” He retreated to his cubicle and closed the door.

1942. He couldn’t stay here, he knew. Joe had read extensively in the newspaper files of this period. If the Alice showed up in any American port they’d all rot in prison camp while some birdbrained bureaucrat tried to figure the angles behind the Axis sending out a load of saboteurs with such a weird cover story.

No, not even in prison, Joe decided. They’d be lucky if they weren’t shot.

And that miserable god shouting eightball had managed to get himself a dose. Even if there had been any medicaments aboard the yawl Joe would have been afraid to use them. He reviewed all his theories, hunches, and superstitions about time travel.

They were about twenty years from their starting point—which, all things considered, was pretty good.

So far he had learned how to separate forward from reverse. He wondered if further refinements were possible and wished he could understand what Einstein had said about time. Damn it, if only he could learn to separate logic from magic in his thinking!

What was time? All this talk of rhythms and streams and fourth dimensions sounded to Joe like the learned balderdash of scientasters who concealed their ignorance behind Greek-rooted redundancies. Whatever it was, only one time really existed for Joe, for the Alice, and for the Alice’s original company. That was their own time: mid-twentieth century. Everything else was history and no matter how real to those who lived in it, it would never be real to Joe. Only 1965 was his.

The future.was equally nonexistent, except as a series of extrapolations—a branching of probabilities, a budding of possibilities from the only true and real time: Joe’s present.

If the future were equally nonexistent to the machine, perhaps it would not or could not venture forward beyond its own time.

But it was confusing. Did Raquel and these blondes and all the others know they had been living in the past? Probably not. It was their present and only the past for Joe. Maybe a machine built in their time would reject any later era as impossible or unreal. If so they could jump again and cut down the remaining distance to their own era!

Joe smiled momentarily. They could still make that Saturday inspection. But, he sobered, there was not one shred of evidence to prove his theory. Well, what could he lose? Not much, considering that typhoon was due any time now.

Holy Neptune! He’d forgotten about the barometer and that brassy sky. He opened the cubicle door and brushed past Ma Trimble as she tried to say something.