It was a Trawler, one of the few remaining ocean-plundering ships that every government on earth had outlawed. That its commander and crew should have taken the almost unthinkable risk of venturing into New England waters, where it could be attacked and sunk a few minutes after an alert went out, was either a tribute to a courage beyond the call of duty—if a criminal enterprise could be thought of as imposing a duty—or a testimonial to human madness.
Trawlers could navigate both rough and calm waters with twice a helioliner’s speed, which just possibly might have accounted for the taking of so great a risk. But Blakemore didn’t think so, for the ship would have been unable to vanish below the horizon, or slip into some nearby, cliff-walled cove in time to escape an attack from the air, unless its instruments were more sensitive than seemed likely and could pick up the vibrations from ascending astrojets a few seconds after they left the ground. Still—there were men who took long-odd risks.
Blakemore shut his eyes and for an instant was back in the Bahamas again, standing in the blazing tropical sunlight watching the Trawlers put out to sea with their flexisteel nets raised to deck-level and looking, in the glare, like gleaming shrouds completely encircling the ships.
And “Rusty” Symons was saying to him again, with an almost pleading look in his eyes: “Kid, why go back? What can that university do for you? It’s just a big pile of stone that will start crumbling soon, like everything else in the north. Ecology, hell. The only hope we have left is in the sea. Why don’t you join the fleet? I don’t care what you say. It’s the only sensible thing—the only brave thing to do.”
“It’s not brave to take anything more out of the sea—or sensible either,” he could hear himself protesting. “The sea has to be left alone now—for three or four generations at least. It may provide some hope eventually but not enough. You won’t get big catches again—of fish or crustaceans or any other kind of underwater life that’s edible for a century and a half.
“The Trawlers are doing it for profit, to cash in on human misery. They don’t realize it yet, but there’s a drawback to that. Without ecology there will soon be no human misery left to take advantage of.”
“Rusty” Symons was crowding eighty and had long ago given up all thought of joining the Trawler fleet. But most of the day and probably at night the sea remained his first and last love and he could seldom take his eyes from it.
Nothing had changed much since the far-off days of the old man’s youth, for in the West Indies the flow of time moved counter-clockwise to time everywhere else.
There were still cathedral bells and masses and hooded monks and if you weren’t careful a Voodoo curse could still be placed on you. Or so “Rusty” had always believed.
Blakemore opened his eyes, perhaps because a mind’s gaze vision dating back seventeen years could not be recaptured for long where the northern bleakness which “Rusty” had warned him against was making Trawlers in northern waters seem remote and unreal. Or perhaps it was simply because Faran was tugging at his arm.
“They must be out of their minds,” Faran muttered. “They’ll be attacked any minute now. How can they hope to avoid it? If that ship is blasted out of the water I’m afraid to think of what could happen to us. We’re dangerously close to it.”
The ship was a beautiful sight. Blakemore hadn’t seen its like for so long that for a moment he could only stare, sharing Faran’s alarm in some deep crevice of his mind, but consciously hardly at all. The flexisteel nets were spread out like a fan now at the Trawler’s stern, and it was moving so smoothly over the water that it seemed to be gliding past the lighthouse on a frozen plain. Even the waves that broke over its bow looked like splinters of ice glistening the sunlight, hurled high into the air by the sharp, cutting edge of the Trawler’s keel.
Blakemore heard the boom of the astrojets breaking the sound barrier before he saw them. But they came swiftly into view, six almost evenly spaced dots far to the north, glittering star-bright against a low-hanging cloud.
They did not remain distant for long. There may or may not have been a rushing back and forth on the decks of the Trawler, with half or more of the ship’s crew crowding the rails, for Blakemore could only make out a flurry of movement at the stern. But it seemed unlikely that the sight of six astrojets hovering directly overhead could have failed to create that kind of panic.
There wasn’t much time for panic to arise, however, for the bomb loads began dropping before the jets had encircled the ship more than once.
There was a sudden, incandescent burst of flame and a thick column of black smoke billowed skyward.
For the barest instant two-thirds of the Trawler’s shattered and blazing hull came into view above the smoke, suspended in the air like a gigantic boulder hurled from the crater of an erupting volcano.
Then it fell back into the sea and the smoke became so dense that even the lighthouse was blotted out. The jets remained visible, however. They had become separated for an instant but now they were drawing together again in a tight formation high above the smoke.
The instant that formation was achieved they swept lower and headed directly for the beach, looking not unlike a wedge of flying geese.
The fact that, having already broken the sound barrier, they made no sound at all made their swift approach seem even more frightening, somehow, than it would have been otherwise, or what can strike a greater terror to the heart than death on soundless wings?
Gilda Faran pointed and then screamed, gripping her father’s arm so violently that he was almost thrown off balance.
“Dad, they’ll bomb us too! They must think we’re—”
“I know,” Faran said, in a voice so calm that Blakemore’s admiration for him soared. “They think we’ve been stationed here with a pickup apparatus, to signal a warning to the Trawler if jets should take off. It’s probably the end. We have to face it. I love you, child, more than I’ve ever told you.”
“We’ve still a chance,” Blakemore said, his voice considerably less calm. “Just stay where you are. Stand very still.”
The jets were within two hundred feet of the beach and continuing to descend. But Blakemore did not even look up at them until he reached the surf line. He dropped to his knees and waited until the distance had shortened to close to a hundred feet before he began to signal with his arms.
He used the simplest of wig-wagging codes, repeating the three-word message again and again. “I’m Dan Blakemore. I’m Dan Blakemore. I’m Dan Blakemore.” Then, dropping a word, “Dan Blakemore. Dan Blakemore.” Finally: “Blakemore, Blakemore, Blakemore. I’m Dan Blakemore.”
For a moment he was sure that the message had been missed, for the jets continued on. They swept lower and were hovering directly overhead before an answering message came.
It came in dots and dashes, punched out upon the air.
“Sorry, Blakemore. Our mistake. We didn’t like what we had to do. But trawling must be stopped. Good luck with the wheat.”
The amplification was so intense that every click of the transmitting instrument made Blakemore’s ears ring. He could not have wig-wagged back a reply, even if he had wanted to, for the jets had swept across the sea wall and were dwindling to dots again high in the sky before he could get to his feet. But he would not have wanted to, because what he had seen had enraged and sickened him.
Cheery good wishes were a mockery, when an act of coldly calculated ruthlessness had sent a hundred men to their graves without giving them a chance to surrender. Two hundred perhaps, for the Trawlers were heavily manned. Trawling was a criminal enterprise, but it was one thing to yield to no man in your hatred of it, and quite another to exact so terrible a penalty.
Something surfaced in Blakemore’s mind that he would have preferred to keep hidden, even from himself—the knowledge that he did not like the age he was living in as much as Mason and the others could have wished. But unle
ss a man could escape from his age entirely he had to find some way of coming to terms with it, for it was integrated with the most vital aspects of himself. Could a man perform a major surgical operation on himself, slice off much of his childhood, many of his closest friends—it was useless to pretend that some of them were not at odds with what he believed—and hope to survive? He seriously doubted it.
The pall of smoke that still obscured most of the sea between the lighthouse and the beach was beginning to thin out now. Through the dissolving haze, Blakemore could make out floating masses of wreckage. Something that looked not unlike a gigantic eel was drifting slowly toward the beach. Serpentine and seemingly in writhing motion, it caught and held the sunlight.
But Blakemore knew that it couldn’t be an eel, or any other kind of marine animal.
It had to be some part of the blasted Trawler, perhaps the thermonuclear reactor that had once enabled it to take on a kind of life on the sea’s surface that exceeded in its speed of motion the fastest-darting monster of the deep.
Why it had not sunk twenty fathoms deep Blakemore did not know. Possibly the blast had made it as porous as a sponge, elongating it to an unheard of length and stripping away its destructive, radioactive potential. Possibly, far beneath the waves, that destructiveness was spreading in all directions now, destroying even the few marine creatures that had escaped the Trawler’s nets.
It was ironic to reject how small a thing such additional contamination had become. In the depths of the Atlantic there were—how many such sunken pockets of radio-active blight, since the first atomic submarine had vanished off Bermuda’s cliffs? Twenty thousand surely, and as long as Trawlers remained on the high seas there would be many more.
For many centuries the skulls of drowned sailors had been buffeted by the tides, with a phosphorescent gleaming in what had once been their eyes. But that phosphorescence had been brought about by plankton alone. It had been a natural thing, inseparable from the sea, and not a horror engineered by man.
Blakemore did not like the direction his thoughts were taking and he stopped looking directly seaward and stared down the long beach toward the breakwater.
The beach was no longer deserted. Roger Tyson was coming toward them across the sand a few feet above the surf line, moving so swiftly he seemed almost to be running.
That did not surprise Blakemore at all. A Trawler could hardly have been blasted to fragments so close to the dark shape into which he had vanished without drawing him forth again in concern, unless imprisoning Malador had given him more trouble than Faran had been convinced it would.
Apparently Gilda had been looking in the same direction, for she was running to meet him before Blakemore could turn. Her bare feet made a swishing sound as she descended the beach, her hair whipped by the wind, and ran parallel with the breakers as she continued on, gesturing toward the lighthouse and the floating wreckage, as if she were not sure that Tyson had grasped the full extent of the disaster which had overtaken the Trawler. Blakemore doubted that he had, unless he had emerged upon the beach in time to see the jets and the Trawler before it had been blown apart.
In the moment the distance between them had shortened to a few feet and then, quite suddenly, she was in his arms. That didn’t surprise Blakemore either, although up to that moment he had entertained a few doubts as to how important he had become to her and she to him.
She remained clinging to him for only an instant, her arms moving back and forth across his bare shoulders. Then they both turned and walked a little more slowly than he had moved when alone diagonally across the beach toward where Blakemore and Faran were standing.
They were both still a little out of breath, but that did not prevent Tyson from speaking the moment he reached Faran’s side.
“Gilda told me that Trawler was blasted by six jets in a matter of seconds,” he said. “I didn’t see it, just heard the bombs going off. When I descended to the beach the sea looked the way it does now. There can’t be any survivors. There never has been when there’s just one ship and that many jets.”
“If Dan hadn’t signaled to them from the beach it would have been just as bad right here,” Faran told him. “Six jets—and no survivors. We’d have been—I might as well say it—vaporized.”
“But why? I can’t see the reason for that. They must have known—”
“How could they have known we weren’t lookouts stationed here to transmit a warning?” Faran said. “Just one look at the size of my time-traveling arrangement from the air would have convinced them that the Trawler’s presence in these waters had been made a little less than suicidal by some new technological safeguard. It’s a wonder they didn’t blast it to fragments before they attacked the ship.”
“Yes, I didn’t think of that,” Tyson said, his expression grim. “With me inside of it. Oh, brother! I guess I owe Blakemore just as great a debt.”
He turned to Blakemore, extending a hand so huge and muscular that it would have given most wrestlers an unfair advantage. Though Blakemore had seen it close up once before and taken the risk of clasping it, he was a little reluctant to do so now, for there was in Tyson’s eyes a dangerous depth of gratefulness.
There were handshakes that could be bone-crushing, and though he had enough tensile strength in his own fingers to withstand that kind of pressure under ordinary circumstances he was far from sure of it now.
Fortunately Tyson’s fingers exerted no more than a firm, steady pressure, and he seemed content to let just a “Thanks, Blakemore,” take care of the rest of it.
“No, Dad and I have dropped all formality,” Gilda said. “He’s ‘Dan’ now and always will be.”
“I see. Well, that’s fine. Thanks, Dan.”
“He’s quite a personage,” Gilda said. “He just wigwagged his name eight or ten times, and the jets took notice. It should still be that way with Dad.”
“It was once and it will be again,” Tyson assured her. “But I don’t think your father attaches much importance to that, one way or the other.”
“I’m afraid that’s so,” Faran said. “Most men have enough vanity in them to make that kind of a disclaimer sound like mock modesty. But it happens to be true. I’ve more than my share of vanity, I’m sure. But practically all of it runs in other directions.”
“Roger,” Gilda said. “We’re still alive and that’s the only thing that matters now. We’ve got to put that—that horror out of our minds.”
She nodded toward the wreckage-strewn sea between the lighthouse and the beach, where the curtain of smoke had almost vanished. There were still fifteen or twenty masses of wreckage that had remained floating, most of them drifting slowly shoreward. Two of the larger fragments had been tossed up on the beach close to the breakwater and another was awash in the crashing surf, where it had settled deep into the sand.
There was a sight that Blakemore had dreaded but that they had been mercifully spared—a reddening of the water where the wreckage had just begun to thin out and there was still a faint swirling which resembled a waterspout in reverse.
“There’s nothing we can do now—no survivors in need of help,” Gilda said. She was staring at Tyson’s face and Blakemore thought he knew why there was so much concern in her voice. Tyson had tightened his lips and looked more than just troubled. It was as if he had suddenly recalled something that he would have preferred to forget.
“We’ll all have to do that,” Tyson said. “It’s over and done with. There’s nothing you can’t put out of your mind if you make an effort and have no choice. It wasn’t that, Gilda. I was thinking of something else.”
Tyson’s wind-ruffled hair—it was medium-blond with a slightly reddish cast—was cut fairly short. But it descended slantwise over his brow in a one-sided bang, and coiled around his right ear, almost hiding it. With a flick of his palm he brushed it back, exposing a darkly swelling bruise, low down on his temple.
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“Malador put up a struggle,” he said. “A pretty savage one. The paralysis wore off just as I was sliding the panel open. He turned on me and knocked me down. I got up before he could come at me again, grabbed him by the shoulders and hurled him into the compartment. Then I managed to get it shut before he could keep it from closing. But he tried. He thrust his arm straight out and tried to slow the panel’s momentum. I’d given it a terrific slam.
“I had to grab hold of his arm and bend it back, inch by inch. If he’d kept it wedged in the opening the panel might have closed anyway. But I would have gone reeling backwards with just his arm, severed at the elbow. Both our arms could have been cut off while I was struggling with him, because, once the panel has been set in motion, it’s like trying to hold back a moving steel blade. But all it did was go about an eighth of an inch into my flesh before he gave up, whipped his arm back and the panel glided shut.”
Tyson held up his arm and for the first time Blakemore saw that there was a dark stain on it an inch below his elbow on the underside, where the blood had started to congeal.
Gilda swayed a little and Faran said something under his breath that Blakemore failed to catch. It could have been a grunt of admiration and approval, or just the reverse, for it was the kind of risk that only a very reckless man would have taken.
It would have made more sense, Blakemore told himself, if Tyson had let the man come out and then grappled with him again, or gone into the compartment after him. But why even that, when he still had the weapon and could have used it a second time?
“The weapon—” Blakemore said. “Couldn’t you have just stood back and trained it on him again?”
Tyson shook his head. “I didn’t have it,” he said. “Malador snatched it away from me when I gripped him by the shoulders and hurled him into the compartment. I think he knew he couldn’t have kept a tight hold on it, because right at that moment I was getting the upper hand. He snatched it so quickly it took me by surprise. But I would have gotten it back again if he hadn’t tossed it from him as far as he could, while he still had the chance.”
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 54