The Sea-Story Megapack

by Jack Williamson

  “Want seamen, firemen, and landsmen. What’s your occupation? You look like a tramp.”

  “Yes,” he answered bitterly, “I’m a tramp. That’s all they’d let me be. I used to be a locomotive engineer—before the big strike. Then they blacklisted me, and I’ve never had a job above laborin’ work since. It’s easy to take to the road and stay at it when you find you can’t make over a dollar a day at back-breakin’ work after earnin’ three and four at the throttle. An engineer knows nothin’ but his trade, sir. Take it away, and he’s a laborin’ man.

  “I’d ha’ worked and learned another, but they jailed me—put me in choky, ’cause I had no visible means o’ support. I had no money, and was a criminal under the law. And they kept at it—jailed me again and again as a vagrant—when all I wanted was work. After a while I didn’t care. But now’s my chance, sir, if you’ll take me on. I don’t know much about boats and the sea, but I can fire an engine, and know something about steam.”

  “A fireman’s work on board a war-vessel is very different from that of a locomotive fireman,” said the officer, leaning back in his chair.

  “I know, sir; that may be,” the tramp replied eagerly; “but I can shovel coal, and I can learn, and I can work. I’m not very strong now, ’cause I haven’t had much to eat o’ late years; but I’m not a drinkin’ man—why, that costs more than grub. Give me a chance, sir; I’m an American; I’m sick o’ bein’ hunted from jail to jail, like a wild animal, just ’cause I can’t be satisfied with pick-and-shovel work. I’ve spent half o’ the last five years in jail as a vagrant. I put in a month at Fernandina, and then I was chased out o’ town. They gave me two months at Cedar Keys, and I came here, only to get a month more in this jail. I got out this mornin’, and was told by the copper who pinched me to get out o’ Pensacola or he’d run me in again. And he’s outside now waitin’ for me. I dodged past ’im to get in.”

  “Pass this man in to the surgeon,” said the officer, with something like a sympathetic snort in the tone of his voice; for he also was an American.

  An orderly escorted him to the surgeon, who examined him and passed him. Then the recruit signed his name to a paper.

  “Emaciated,” wrote the surgeon in his daily report; “body badly nourished, and susceptible to any infection. Shows slight febrile symptoms, which should be attended to. An intelligent man; with good food and care will become valuable.”

  The tramp marched to the receiving-ship with a squad of other recruits, and on the way smiled triumphantly into the face of a mulatto policeman, who glared at him. He had signed his name on a piece of paper, and the act had changed his status. From a hunted fugitive and habitual criminal he had become a defender of his country’s honor—a potential hero.

  On board the receiving-ship he was given an outfit of clothes and bedding; but before he had learned more than the correct way to lash his hammock and tie his silk neckerchief he was detailed for sea duty, and with a draft of men went to Key West in a navy-yard tug; for war was on, and the fleet blockading Havana needed men.

  At Key West he was appointed fireman on a torpedo-boat, where his work—which he soon learned—was to keep up steam in a tubular boiler. But he learned nothing of the rest of the boat, her business, or the reason of her construction. Seasickness prevented any assertion of curiosity at first, and later the febrile symptoms which the examining surgeon had noted developed in him until he could think of nothing else. There being no doctor aboard to diagnose his case, he was jeered by his fellows, and kept at work until he dropped; then he took to his hammock. Shooting pains darted through him, centering in his head, while his throat was dry and his thirst tormenting.

  Life on a torpedo-boat engaged in despatch duty and rushing through a Gulf Stream sea at thirty knots is torture to a healthy, nervous system. It sent this sick man into speedy delirium. He could eat very little, but he drank all the water that was given him. Moaning and muttering, tossing about in his hammock, never asleep, but sometimes unconscious, at other times raving, and occasionally lucid, he presented a problem which demanded solution. His emaciated face, flushed at first, had taken on a peculiar bronzed appearance, and there were some who declared that it was Yellow Jack. But nothing could be done until they reached the fleet and could interview a cruiser with a surgeon.

  The sick man solved the problem. He scrambled out of his hammock at daylight in the morning and dressed himself in his blue uniform, carefully tying his black neckerchief in the regulation knot. Then, muttering the while, he gained the deck.

  The boat was charging along at full speed, throwing aside a bow wave nearly as high as herself. Three miles astern, just discernible in the half-light, was a pursuing ram-bowed gunboat, spitting shot and shell; and forward near the conning-tower were two blue-coated, brass-buttoned officers, watching the pursuer through binoculars.

  The crazed brain of the sick man took cognizance of nothing but the blue coats and brass buttons. He did not look for locust clubs and silver shields. These were policemen—his deadliest enemies; but he would escape them this time.

  With a yell he went overboard, and, being no swimmer, would have drowned had not one of the blue-coated officers flung a lifebuoy. He came to the surface somewhat saner, and seized the white ring, which supported him, while the torpedo-boat rushed on. She could not stop for one man in time of war, with a heavily armed enemy so near.

  A twenty-knot gunboat cannot chase a thirty-knot torpedo-boat very long without losing her below the horizon; but this pursuit lasted ten minutes from the time the sick man went overboard before the gunboat ceased firing and slackened speed. The quarry was five miles away, out of Spanish range, and the floating man directly under her bow. He was seen and taken on board, with Spanish profanity sounding in his unregarding ears.

  He lay on the deck, a bedraggled heap, gibbering and shivering, while a surgeon, with cotton in his nostrils and smelling-salts in his hand, diagnosed his case. Then the gunboat headed north and dropped anchor in the bight of a small, crescent-shaped sand-key of the Florida Reef. For the diagnosis was such as to suggest prompt action. Two brave men bundled him into the dinghy, lowered it, pulled ashore, and laid him on the sand.

  Returning, they stripped and threw away their clothing, sank the boat with a buoy on the painter, took a swim, and climbed aboard to be further disinfected. Then the gunboat lifted her anchor and steamed eastward, her officers watching through glasses a small, low torpedo-boat, far to the southeast—too far to be reached by gun fire—which was steering a parallel course, and presumably watching the gunboat.

  An idiot, a lunatic, with bloodshot eyes glaring from a yellow face, raved, rolled, and staggered bareheaded under the sun about the sandy crescent until sundown, then fell prostrate and unconscious into the water on the beach, luckily turning over so that his nostrils were not immersed. The tide went down, leaving him damp and still on the sands. In about an hour a sigh, followed by a deep, gasping breath, escaped him; another long inhalation succeeded, and another; then came steady, healthy breathing and childlike sleep, with perspiration oozing from every pore. He had passed a crisis.

  About midnight the cloudy sky cleared and the tropic stars came out, while the tide climbed the beach again, and lapped at the sleeping man’s feet; but he did not waken, even when the Spanish gunboat stole slowly into the bay from the sea and dropped anchor with a loud rattling of chain in the hawse-pipe. A boat was lowered, and a single man sculled it ashore; then lifting out a small cask and bag, he placed them high on the sands and looked around.

  Spying the sleeping man, half immersed now, he approached and felt of the damp clothing and equally damp face. Not noticing that he breathed softly, the man crossed himself, then moved quickly and nervously toward his boat, muttering, “Muerto, muerto!” Pushing out, he sculled rapidly toward the anchored craft, and disposed of the boat and his clothing as had been done before; then he swam to the gangway and climbed aboard.

  Shortly after, the sleeping man, roused by the chil
l of the water, crawled aimlessly up the sand and slept again—safe beyond the tide-line. In three hours he sat up and rubbed his eyes, half awake, but sane.

  Strange sights and sounds puzzled him. He knew nothing of this starlit beach and stretch of sparkling water—nothing of that long black craft at anchor, with the longer beam of white light reaching over the sea from her pilot-house. He could only surmise that she was a war-vessel from the ram-bow—a feature of the government model which had impressed him at Key West—and from the noise she was making. She quivered in a maze of flickering red flashes, and the rattling din of her rapid-fire and machine guns transcended in volume all the roadside blastings he had heard in his wanderings. Dazed and astonished, he rose to his feet, but, too weak to stand, sat down again and looked.

  Half a mile seaward, where the beam of light ended, a small craft, low down between two crested waves, was speeding toward the gunboat in the face of her fire. The water about her was lashed into turmoil by the hail of projectiles; but she kept on, at locomotive speed, until within a thousand feet of the gunboat, when she turned sharply to starboard, doubled on her track, and raced off to sea, still covered by the searchlight and followed by shot and shell while the gunners could see her.

  When the gun fire ceased, a hissing of steam could be heard in the distance, and a triumphant Spanish yell answered. The small enemy had been struck, and the gunboat slipped her cable and followed.

  The tired brain could not cope with the problem, and again the man slept, to awaken at sunrise with ravenous hunger and thirst, and a memory of what seemed to be horrible dreams—vague recollections of painful experiences—torturing labor with aching muscles and blistered hands; harsh words and ridicule from strong, bearded men; and running through and between, the shadowy figures of blue-coated, brass-buttoned men, continually ordering him on, and threatening arrest. The spectacle of the night was as dream-like as the rest; for he remembered nothing of the gunboat which had rescued and marooned him.

  His face had lost its yellowish-bronze color, but was pale and emaciated as ever, while his sunken eyes held the soft light which always comes of extreme physical suffering. He was too weak to remain on his feet, but in the effort to do so he spied the cask and bag higher up on the beach and crawled to them. Prying a plug from the bunghole with his knife, he found water, sweet and delicious, which he drank by rolling the cask carefully and burying his lips in the overflow. Evidently some one in authority on the gunboat had decreed that he should not die of hunger or thirst, for the bag contained hard bread.

  Stronger after a meal, he climbed the highest sand-dune and studied the situation. An outcropping of coral formed the backbone of the thin crescent which held him, and which was about half a mile between the points. To the south, opening out from the bay, was a clear stretch of sea, green in the sunlight, deep blue in the shadows of the clouds, and on the horizon were a few sails and smoke columns. West and east were other sandy islets and coral reefs, and to the north a continuous line of larger islands which might be inhabited, but gave no indication of it.

  Out in the bay, bobbing to the heave of the slight ground-swell, were the three white buoys left by the Spaniards to mark the sunken boats and slipped cable; and far away on the beach, just within the western point, was something long and round, which rolled in the gentle surf and glistened in the sunlight. He knew nothing of buoys, but they relieved his loneliness; they were signs of human beings, who must have placed him there with the bread and water, and who might come for him.

  “Wonder if I got pinched again, and this is some new kind of a choky,” he mused. “Been blamed sick and silly, and must ha’ lost the job and got jailed again. Just my luck! S’pose the jug was crowded and they run me out here. Wish they’d left me a hat. Wonder how long I’m in for this time.”

  He descended to the beach and found that repeated wettings of his hair relieved him from the headache that the sun’s heat was bringing on; and satisfied that the strong hand of local law had again closed over him, he resigned himself to the situation, resenting only the absence of a shade-tree or a hat. “Much better ’n the calaboose in El Paso,” he muttered, “or the brickyard in Chicago.”

  As he lolled on the sand, the glistening thing over at the western point again caught his eye. After a moment’s scrutiny he rose and limped toward it, following the concave of the beach, and often pausing to rest and bathe his head. It was a long journey for him, and the tide, at half-ebb when he started, was rising again when he came abreast of the object and sat down to look at it. It was of metal, long and round, rolling nearly submerged, and held by the alternate surf and undertow parallel with the beach, about twenty feet out.

  He waded in, grasped it by a T-shaped projection in the middle, and headed it toward the shore. Then he launched it forward with all his strength—not much, but enough to lift a bluntly pointed end out of water as it grounded and exposed a small, four-bladed steel wheel, shaped something like a windmill. He examined this, but could not understand it, as it whirled freely either way and seemed to have no internal connection. The strange cylinder was about sixteen feet long and about eighteen inches in diameter.

  “Boat o’ some kind,” he muttered; “but what kind? That screw’s too small to make it go. Let’s see the other end.”

  He launched it with difficulty, and noticed that when floating end on to the surf it ceased to roll and kept the T-shaped projection uppermost, proving that it was ballasted. Swinging it, he grounded the other end, which was radically different in appearance. It was long and finely pointed, with four steel blades or vanes, two horizontal and two vertical—like the double tails of an ideal fish—and in hollowed parts of these vanes were hung a pair of unmistakable propellers, one behind the other, and of opposite pitch and motion.

  “One works on the shaft, t’ other on a sleeve,” he mused, as he turned them. “A roundhouse wiper could see that. Bevel-gearin’ inside, I guess. It’s a boat, sure enough, and this reverse action must be to keep her from rolling.”

  On each of the four vanes he found a small blade, showing by its connection that it possessed range of action, yet immovable as the vane itself, as though held firmly by inner leverage. Those on the horizontal vanes were tilted upward. Just abaft the T-shaped projection—which, fastened firmly to the hull, told him nothing of its purpose—were numerous brass posts buried flush with the surface, in each of which was a square hole, as though intended to be turned with a key or crank. Some were marked with radiating lines and numbers, and they evidently controlled the inner mechanism, part of which he could see—little brass cog-wheels, worms, and levers—through a fore-and-aft slot near the keyholes.

  Rising from the forward end of this slot, and lying close to the metal hull in front of it, was a strong lever of brass, L-shaped, connected internally, and indicating to his trained mechanical mind that its only sphere of action was to lift up and sink back into the slot. He fingered it, but did not yet try to move it. A little to the left of this lever was a small blade of steel, curved to fit the convex hull—which it hugged closely—and hinged at its forward edge. This, too, must have a purpose—an internal connection—and he did not disturb it until he had learned more.

  To the right of the brass lever was an oblong hatch about eight inches long, flush with the hull, and held in place by screws. Three seams, with lines of screws, encircled the round hull, showing that it was constructed in four sections; and these screws, with those in the hatch, were strong and numerous—placed there to stay.

  Fatigued from his exertion, he moistened his hair, sat down, and watched the incoming tide swing the craft round parallel with the beach. As the submerged bow raised to a level with the stern, he noticed that the small blades on the horizontal vanes dropped from their upward slant to a straight line with the vanes.

  “Rudders,” he said, “horizontal rudders. Can’t be anything else.” With his chin in his hand and his wrinkled brow creased with deeper corrugations, he put his mind through a process of indu
ctive reasoning.

  “Horizontal rudders,” he mused, “must be to keep her from diving, or to make her dive. They work automatically, and I s’pose the vertical rudders are the same. There’s nothing outside to turn ’em with. That boat isn’t made to ride in—no way to get into her—and she isn’t big enough, anyhow. And as you can’t get into her, that brass lever must be what starts and stops her. Wonder what the steel blade’s for. ’T isn’t a handy shape for a lever—to be handled with fingers—too sharp; but it has work to do, or it wouldn’t be there. That section o’ railroad iron on top must be to hang the boat by—a traveler—when she’s out o’ water.

  “And the fan-wheel on the nose—what’s that for? If it’s a speed or distance indicator, the dial’s inside, out o’ sight. There’s no exhaust, so the motive power can’t be steam. Clockwork or electricity, maybe. Mighty fine workmanship all through! That square door is fitted in for keeps, and she must ha’ cost a heap. Now, as she has horizontal rudders, she’s intended to steer up and down; and as there’s no way to get into her or to stay on her, and as she can’t be started from the inside or steered from the outside, I take it she’s a model o’ one o’ those submarine boats I’ve heard of—some fellow’s invention that’s got away from him. Guess I’ll try that lever and see what happens. I’ll bury the propellers, though; no engine ought to race.”

  He pushed the craft into deeper water, pointed it shoreward, and cautiously lifted the curved blade to a perpendicular position, as high as it would go. Nothing happened. He lowered it, raised it again—it worked very easily—then, leaving it upright, he threw the long brass lever back into the slot. A slight humming came from within, the propellers revolved slowly, and the craft moved ahead until the bow grounded. Then he followed and lifted the lever out of the slot to its first position, shutting off the power.

  Delighted with his success, he backed it out farther than before and again threw back the brass lever, this time with the curved blade down flat on the hull. With the sinking of the lever into the slot the mechanism within gave forth a rushing sound, the propellers at the stern threw up a mound of foam, and the craft shot past him, dived until it glanced on the sandy bottom, then slid a third of its length out of water on the beach and stopped, the propellers still churning, and the small wheel on the nose still spinning with the motion given it by the water.