“What’s up, Johnny?”
“Reckon you know where we are, huh?”
“I reckon.”
No sense in getting the crew talking. Sailors gossip like a bridge club, and for the same reason—grouped people with the same basic interests. I’ve seen three-quarters of a crew packed up and ready to leave because some wiseacre started the rumor that a ship was to be sold for scrap at the next port.
Johnny grunted, and I went into the chart room to monkey with that slipped glass in my sextant. The way the weather looked, I’d never have a chance to use it again, but then you can’t tell about an African coastwise fog. What had made Johnny so quizzical? The more I tried to think of something else, the more that bothered me. About ten minutes later, working on the theory that the last word said before a long pause is the one that sticks, I went back into the wheelhouse and asked:
“Why do you want to know?”
“Oh, nothin’.” He spat, and the tobacco juice rang a knell on the cuspidor. “Jest thinkin’.”
“Come on—give.”
“Waal—seems to me we been steering east b’ nor’east about two days—right?”
“So?”
“Youse guys was so busy peekin’ through yer sextants at the Big Light that you didn’t see it was in the wrong place.”
“The sun? In the wrong place?”
“Yep. Steerin’ east b’ nor’east this time o’ year, hereabouts, seems to me the sun’d show about broad on the bow at ten thirty in th’ mornin’.”
“Well?”
“So it shows up high an’ dead abeam. Don’t seem right, somehow.”
He was right. I went and sat down on the pilot’s stool. Radio dead, sextants haywire; all we have is the compass and good old Bowditch’s dead-reckoning tables. And now—the compass?
“Johnny, are you sure you were on course when we took that sight?”
His silence was eloquent. Old Johnny Weiss could steer anything with a rudder unless it had a steering oar, and then he was better than most. If we had a radio, we could check the compass. We had no radio. If we could get a sun sight, we wouldn’t need the radio. We couldn’t get a sun sight. We were lost—lost as hell. We were steering a rock-steady compass course on a ship that was pounding the miles away under her counter as she had never done before, and she was heading bravely into nowhere.
An ordinary seaman popped in. “Lost the patent log, sir!”
Before I could say, “Oh, well, it didn’t work, anyway,” the engine room tube piped up.
“Well?” I said into it, in the tone that means “Now what?”
It was the third engineer again. “Is the skipper up there?”
“No. What is it?”
“A lot of things happen,” wailed the third. “Why do they all have to happen to me?”
“You don’t know, shipmate, you don’t know! What’s up?”
“The rev-counter arm worked loose and fell into the crank pit. The I.P. piston grabbed it and hauled counter and all in. Goddlemighty, what goes on here? We jinxed?”
“Seems as though,” I said, and whistled down the captain’s tube to report the latest.
Everything depended on our getting a sun sight now. We might have calculated our speed at least from the revolution readings, a tide chart and propslip table. The admiralty charts don’t give a damn about this particular section of sea water. Why should they? There’s supposed to be a deep around the Madeiras somewhere, but then again there’s flat sand aplenty off Africa. Even the skipper’s luck wouldn’t pull us out of this. I had a feeling. Damn it, we couldn’t even hail a ship, if we met one. It would be bound to turn out a q-ship or a sub-chaser, tickled to death to pinch our cargo. Farm machinery. Phooey!
The saloon messman came up carrying clean sheets for the chart-room cot. I knew what that meant. The bridge was going to be the skipper’s little home until we got out of this—if we did. I was dead beat. Things like this couldn’t happen—they couldn’t!
We had a council of war that night, right after I came on watch, the captain and I. Nothing had happened all day; the sun came out only once, on the twelve to four, and ducked in again so quickly that Harry couldn’t get to his sextant. He did set the pelorus on it, but the ship rolled violently because of some freak current just as he sighted, and the altitude he got was all off. There’d been nothing else—Oh yes; we’d lost three heaving lines over the side, trying to gauge our speed with a chip. The darnedest thing about it was that everything else was going as well as it possibly could.
The cook had found nine crates of really fancy canned goods in the linen locker—Lord knows how long they’d been there. It was just as if they’d been dropped out of nowhere. The engines ran without a hitch. The low-pressure cylinder lost its wheeze, and in the washrooms we got hot water when we wanted it instead of cold water or steam. Even the mattresses seemed softer. Only we just didn’t know where we were.
The Old Man put his hand on my shoulder and startled me, coming up behind me in the darkness that way. I was standing out on the wing of the bridge.
“Vot’s de matter; vorried about de veather?” he asked me. He was funny that way, keeping us on our toes with his furies and his—what was it?—kindnesses.
“Well, yes, cap’n. I don’t like the looks of this.”
He put his elbows on the coaming. “I tell y’u boy, ve ain’t got nodding to fret about.”
“Oh, I guess not, but I don’t go for this hide-’n’-go-seek business.” I could feel him regarding me carefully out of the corners of his eyes.
“I vant to tell y’u something. If I said dis to de mate, or Harry, or vun of de black gang, dey vould say: ‘I t’ink de ol’ squarehead is suckin’ vind. He must be gettin’ old.’ But I tell y’u.”
I was flattered.
“Dis is a old ship, but she is good. I am going to be sorry to turn her over to sumvun else.”
“What are you talking about, skipper? You’re not quitting when we get back?”
“No; before dat. Dass all I vorry about, y’u see. Dis vill be de first command I lost half a trip out. I vass master of thirty-two ships, but I alvays left dem in der home port. It von’t be like dat now.”
I was more than a little taken aback. I’d never seen the stringy old gun runner sentimental about his ship before. This was the first time I’d ever heard him mention it in printable terms. But what was all this about losing his command?
“What’s the matter, cap’n—think we’ll go to camp?” That was a Dawnlight idiom and meant being picked up by a warship of some kind.
“No boy—nodding like dat. Dey can’t touch us. Nobody can touch us now. Ah—hear dat?”
He pointed far out to port. The night was very still, with hardly a sound but the continual seethe of millions of bursting bubbles slithering past the ship’s side. But far out in the fog was an insistent splashing—that heavy smacking splash that every seaman knows.
“Porpoise,” I said.
The skipper tugged at my elbow and led me through the wheelhouse to the other wing. “Listen.”
There it was again, on the starboard side. “Must be quite a few of ’em,” I said laconically, a little annoyed that he should change the subject that way.
“Dere is plenty, but dey are not porpoises.”
“Blackfish?”
“Dey is not fish, too. Dey is somet’ing y’u have seen in books. Dey is vimmin with tails on.”
“What?”
“O.K., I vas kidding. Call me ven y’u are relieved.”
In the green glow from the starboard running light I saw him hand me a piercing gaze; then he shambled back to the chart room. A little bit short of breath, I went into the wheelhouse and lit a cigarette.
The cuspidor rang out, and I waited for Johnny to speak.
“The skipper ain’t nuts,” he said casually.
“Somebody is,” I returned. “You heard him, then.”
“Listen—if the skipper told me the devil himself was firing on the
twelve to four, then the devil it would be.” Johnny was fiercely loyal under that armor of easy talk. “I’ve heard them ‘porpoises’ of yours for three days now. Porpoises don’t follow a ship two hundred yards off. They’ll jump the bow wave fer a few minutes an’ then high-tail, or they’ll cross yer bow an’ play away. These is different. I’ve gone five degrees off to port an’ then to starboard to see if I could draw ’em. Nope; they keep their distance.” Johnny curled some shag under his lip.
“Aw, that’s … that’s screwy, Johnny.”
He shrugged. “You’ve shipped with the Old Man before. He sees more than most of us.” And that’s all he’d say.
It was about two days later that we began to load. Yeah, that’s what I said. We didn’t dock, and we didn’t discharge our farm machinery. We took on—whatever it was our cargo turned out to be. It was on the four to eight in the evening when the white fog was just getting muddy in the dusk. I was dead asleep when the ship sat down on her tail, stuck her bow up and heeled over. The engines stopped, and I got up from the corner of my room where the impact had flung me.
She lay still on her side, and hell was breaking loose. Toole had apparently fallen up against the fire-alarm button, and the lookout forward was panicky and ringing a swing symphony on the bell. A broken steam line was roaring bloody murder, and so was the second mate. The whistle, at least, was quiet—it had fallen with a crash from the “Pat Finnegan” pipe.
I leaned against the wall and crouched into a pair of pants and staggered out on deck. I couldn’t see a blasted thing. If the fog had been thick before, it was twenty times as thick now.
Someone ran into me, and we both went skittering into the scuppers. It was the mate on his way down to the captain’s room. Why the Old Man wasn’t on the bridge, I couldn’t savvy, unless it had to do with that peculiar attitude of resignation about his imagined loss of command.
“What the hell?” I wanted to know.
Toole said: “Who is that—third mate? Oh. I don’t know. We’ve hit something. We’re right up on top of it. Ain’t rocks; didn’t hear any plates go. Isn’t sand; no sand bank this size could stay this far from land.”
“Where’s the skipper?”
“In his room, far as I know. C’mon, let’s roll him out.”
We groped our way to the alleyway door and into the midship house. Light was streaming from the skipper’s room, and as we approached the door we heard the rare, drawn-out chuckle. I’ll never forget the shock of seeing this best of captains, a man who had never dented a bilge plate in his life, sprawled back in his tilted swivel chair with his feet on a tilted desk, chuckling into a tilted bottle of Scotch.
Toole squawked: “Cap’n! We’ve struck something!”
The skipper giggled. He had a terrific load on. I leaned past Toole and shook him. “Skipper! We’ve struck!”
He looked at us blearily. “Heh. Sid-down, boyss, de trip iss over. Ve have not struck. Ve is yust finished. Heh!”
“Clear the boats,” Toole said aside to me.
The skipper heard him. “Vait!” he said furiously, and lurched to his feet. “I am still in command here! Don’t lower no boats. Ve are not in distress, y’u hear? Heh! Ve are loading. I know all about it. Go an’ see for y’uselfs, so y’u don’t belief me!”
Toole stared at the captain for a moment. I stood by. If Toole decided the Old Man was nuts, he’d take over. If not, then the squarehead was still running the show. Suddenly Toole leaned over and cut the master switch on the alarm system. It had a separate little battery circuit of its own, and was the only thing electrical aboard that still operated. The silence was deafening as the alarm bells throughout the ship stilled, and we could hear a bumble of voices from back aft as the crew milled about. They were a steady bunch; there would be no panic. Toole beckoned me out of the room and left. Once we were outside he said:
“What do you think?”
“I think he’s—I dunno, Toole. He’s a seaman first and a human being afterward. If he says we’re not in distress, it’s likely true. Course, he’s drunk.”
Toole snorted. “He thinks better when he’s drunk. Come on, let’s look around.”
We dropped down the ladder. The ship lay still. She was careened, probably with her starboard side under water and the starboard rail awash.
Toole said: “Let’s go to port. Maybe we can see what it is we’ve hit.”
We had to go on all fours to get up there, so steeply was the deck canted. It did us no good; there was nothing to be seen anywhere but fog.
Toole clung with one arm to the chain rail and puffed, “Can’t see a thing down there, can you?”
I hung over the edge. “Can’t even see the water line.”
“Let’s go down to the starboard side. She must be awash there.”
She was. I stepped ankle deep into sea water before I knew where I was. The sea was dead calm, and the fog was a solid thing; and something was holding the ship heeled over. I tell you, it was a nasty feeling. If only we knew what was under us! And then—we saw the ship being loaded.
May I never see another sight like that one. As if to tease and torture us, the fog swirled silently away from the ship’s side, leaving a little dim island of visibility for us to peer into. We could see fifty or sixty feet of deck, and the chain rails fore and aft dipping into the sea at our feet; and we could see a round patch of still water with its edges wetting the curtain of fog. And on that patch of water were footprints. We both saw them at the same time and froze, speechless. Coming toward us over the water they were—dozens of them. The water was like a resilient, glossy sheet of paving, and the impression of dozens—hundreds—of feet ran across it to the ship. But there was nothing making the footprints. Just—footprints. Oh, my God!
There were big splay ones and big slow ones, and little swift ones and plodding ones. Once something long and invisible crept with many legs up to the ship, and once little pointed feet, high-arched, tripped soundlessly over the chains and something fell sprawling a yard from where we stood. There was no splash, but just the indentation in the water of a tiny, perfect body that rolled and squirmed back onto its feet and ran over to the deck and disappeared. I suddenly felt that I was in the midst of a milling crowd of—of people. Nothing touched me, and yet, all around me was the pressure of scores of beings who jostled each other and pushed and shoved, in their eagerness to get aboard. It was ghastly. There was no menace in it, nor anything to fear except that here was a thing that could not be understood.
The fog closed down suddenly, and for a long moment we stood there, feeling the pressure of that mob of “passengers”; and then I reached out and found the mate’s arm and tugged him toward the midship house. We crawled up the canted ladder and stood by the glow from the lamp in the captain’s room.
“It’s a lot of goddam nonsense,” I said weakly.
“H-m-m.”
I didn’t know whether or not Toole agreed with me.
The skipper’s voice came loosely from the porthole. “Heh! I cert’n’y t’ank y’u for de Scotch, I du. Vat a deal, vat a deal!” And he burst out into a horrible sound that might have been laughter, in his cracked and grating voice. I stared in. He was nodding and grinning at the forward bulkhead, toasting it with a pony of fire water.
“He’s seein’ things,” said the mate abruptly.
“Maybe all the rest of us are blind,” I said; and the mate’s dazed expression made me wonder, too, why I had said that. Without another word he went above to take over the bridge, while I went aft to quiet the crew.
We lay there for fourteen hours, and all the while that invisible invasion continued. There was nothing any of us could do. And crazy things began happening. Any one of them might have happened to any of us once in a while, but—well, judge for yourself, now.
When I came on watch that night there was nothing to do but stand by, since we were hove to, and I set Johnny to polishing brass. He got his polish and his rag and got to work. I mooned at the fog fro
m the wheelhouse window, and in about ten minutes I heard Johnny cuss and throw rag and can over the side.
“What gives, Johnny?”
“Ain’t no use doin’ this job. Must be the fog.” He pointed to the binnacle cover. “The tarnish smells the polish and fades off all around me rag. On’y where I rub it comes in stronger.”
It was true. All the places he had rubbed were black-green, and around those spots the battered brass gleamed brilliantly! I told John to go have himself a cup of coffee and settled down on the stool to smoke.
No cigarettes in the right pocket of my dungarees. None in the left. I knew I’d put a pack there. “Damn!” I muttered. Now where the—what was I looking for? Cigarettes? But I had a pack of cigarettes in my hand! Was I getting old or something? I tried to shrug it off. I must have had them there all the time, only—well, things like that don’t happen to me! I’m not absent-minded. I pulled out a smoke and stuck it in my chops, fumbling for a match. Now where—I did some more cussing. No matches. What good is a fag to a guy without a—I gagged suddenly on too much smoke. Why was I looking for a match? My cigarette was lit!
When a sailor starts to get the jitters he usually begins to think about the girl he left behind him. It was just my luck to be tied up with one I didn’t want to think about. I simply went into a daze while I finished that haunted cigarette. After a while Johnny came back carrying a cup of coffee for me.
Now I like my coffee black. Wet a spoon in it and dip it in the sugar barrel, and that’s enough sugar for me. Johnny handed me the cup, and I took the saucer off the rim. The coffee was creamed—on a ship that means evaporated milk—and sweet as a soft caramel.
“Damn it, Johnny, you know how I like my coffee. What’s the idea of this?”
“What?”
I showed him. When he saw the pale liquid he recoiled as if there had been a snake curled up on the saucer instead of a cup. “S’help me, third, I didn’t put a drop of milk in that cup! Nor sugar, neither!”
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