by Allen Steele
Pete’s grin faded. “Over there, corner table. The guy with his back to the wall.” He lowered his voice. “Careful, Izzy. He doesn’t look it, but he’s one tough hombre.”
I dropped a silver piece on the bar, then picked up my ale and sauntered across the room, leaving my harpoon at the bar. There wasn’t enough room in the tavern for me to use it effectively; besides, the management frowned on customers killing each other. Starbuck spotted me before I was halfway there; although he didn’t stop talking to the sailor sitting across the table from him, his dark eyes regarded me steadily as I approached. His sun-darkened skin told me that he’d spent his life at sea, and the way his pea jacket bunched around his biceps was evidence that he’d never been a passenger. Other than that, he looked fairly ordinary…and it’s the ordinary ones who are often the most dangerous.
“Mr. Ishmael, isn’t it?”
“Just Ishmael. And you’re Mr. Starbuck?”
“Uh-huh…and don’t forget the mister.” He didn’t bother to introduce his companion, a muscle-bound pug who couldn’t have been anything else but another seaman. Without a word, the sailor stood up and walked away. Starbuck pointed to the vacated chair. “Have a seat.”
“I’d prefer not to.” A line I’d picked up from Bartleby. The scrivener may have been weird, but he was an expert at the art of passive aggression. “Met a friend of yours just a little while ago. Mr. Stubb.”
“Oh? And how is he?” As if he didn’t know already.
“Aside from the heart trouble he’s been having lately, just peachy.”
Starbuck’s eyes narrowed, but otherwise his expression remained stoical. “Stubb’s a good man. It would be a shame if anything happened to him. I might get upset.”
“Really?” I took a swig of ale and put the stein down on the table; I needed to keep my hands free, just in case he tried to start anything. Beneath his open jacket, I could see a big, bone-handled knife stuck in a scabbard on his belt. Starbuck’s right hand never strayed very far from it. “If you’d wanted to send me a message, maybe you should’ve asked someone else to deliver it.”
“A message?” Starbuck’s head cocked sideways just a fraction of an inch. “Now what sort of message could I possibly want to send you? We’ve only just met.”
“Perhaps a warning to stay away from your captain’s wife.”
“Mrs. Ahab?” A corner of his mouth ticked upward. “Pray tell, friend Ishmael…what possible interest could I have in the spouse of my commanding officer?”
“If not her, then the woman she’d like to find.” I gave it a moment to sink in, but all I could see was bewilderment. “Moby,” I added. “Moby Dick.”
Starbuck stared at me in disbelief, then suddenly burst out laughing. “Surely you jest! You think Moby Dick is…is a woman?”
Only one way to clear this up: lay my cards on the table, let Starbuck know what I was holding. “She does. That’s why she hired me…to find the lady with whom Mrs. Ahab believes her husband is having an affair. Moby is a name her husband has frequently mentioned, so…”
Starbuck laughed even more loudly, a hilarious roar that caught the attention of everyone in the room. “Oh, really,” he yelled, slapping his knee, “this is too much! I mean…my God, when one of my crewmen happened to spy her leaving your office early this morning in a rather furtive fashion, he believed that she might have been having a tryst with you!” He chuckled, shaking his head. “That’s why I dispatched Mr. Stubb to…shall we say, attend to you. The captain has always been wary of unmarried men taking an interest in his wife…and you, sir, have a reputation.”
“Oh, boy…”
“Yes. One error, compounded by another.” His grin disappeared. “But now it seems as if I’m down one crewman, on the very day that the Pequod is about to set sail again.”
“You’re leaving today?” Mrs. Ahab had told me the ship was leaving soon, but not that soon. I wondered if she even knew.
“The whales are running, Mr. Ishmael, and the Pequod is a whaling ship.” His gaze shifted to the harpoon I’d left leaning against the bar. “You’re good with that thing. I could use another harpooner.”
“Thanks, but I’ve got a job already.”
A malicious glint appeared in his eyes. “You misunderstand me, Mr. Ishmael. I’m not offering you a billet…I’m giving you one.” His gaze shifted past me. “Dough Boy…?”
I’d forgotten the sailor who’d been sitting at the table. I was about to look around to see if he was behind me when something crashed against the back of my head. The next instant, I was face-down on the unvarnished floor.
I wasn’t unconscious yet. Dough Boy’s boot made sure that I was. The moment before it connected with my ribs, though, I heard Starbuck say one more thing.
“Now you’ll get to meet Moby Dick,” he said. And then Dough Boy kicked me into oblivion.
The creak of oak boards. The mingled odors of salt and fish and sweat. The brown-tinted light of an oil lamp swaying from the rafters of a low ceiling. A narrow bunk that rocked beneath me. As soon as I woke up, I knew I was at sea.
That wasn’t my only surprise. I opened my eyes to find a tattooed face hovering above me. “Queequeg…what the hell are you doing here?”
“Iko iko.” My partner’s black eyes regarded me from beneath his beaverskin hat.
“You signed up? Why would you…?” My headache wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t put two and two together. “We’re on the Pequod, aren’t we? And you took a billet when you’d heard I’d been shanghaied. Right?”
“A whop bop-a-lu a whop bam boo.”
“Yeah, okay…the pay’s better, too.” I started to sit up, and the sharp pain from my ribs told me that I might be rushing things. Dough Boy had done a number on me. I was in the crew quarters aft of the main hold; there were no portholes below deck, so I couldn’t tell whether it was day or night. “Have you seen Ahab? Do you know who Moby—?”
A deck hatch swung open, and I heard booted feet descending the ladder. Queequeg stepped aside to make room for my visitor; a second later, Starbuck came into view. “Very good. You’re awake.” There was a copper mug in his right hand. “Like some coffee?”
I stared at him. “You abduct me, and then you offer me coffee. You’re a real piece of work, Starbuck.”
“It’s good coffee. Made it myself. And I told you…it’s Mister Starbuck to you.”
“It’s going to be Mister Dead Meat when I get through with you.”
“Uh-huh. You and what navy?” He slapped a hand on Queequeg’s shoulder. “Your pal here is the only friend you have aboard, Mr. Ishmael. There’s forty men on the Pequod, and they all take their orders from me. I’d think twice about making idle threats. The captain usually lets me give twenty lashes for insubordination…and you know, of course, that mutiny is punishable by hanging.”
Yeah, I knew. Old scars on my back were proof that I was no stranger to a bullwhip, and I’d once seen a sailor do the dead man’s jig from the end of a noose. So I accepted the mug from him and took a sip. Not bad coffee, for a creep. “I don’t get it. Why did you bring me along? If you’ve got Queequeg, you’re no longer short a harpooner. Hell, he’s better than I am.”
“He signed up after we brought you aboard. Someone on the dock must have recognized you when Dough Boy and I hauled you down from the Spouter Inn.” Starbuck grinned. “We knew that he’s your partner, of course…but you’re right, he also has a good rep as a harpooner, and we need all the spearchuckers we can get.”
Queequeg scowled at him. “Bang shang a lang,” he growled.
“What did he say?”
“Don’t call him a spearchucker. He doesn’t like that.” I didn’t give him an accurate translation; it was something Queequeg’s victims often heard just before he shrunk their heads. “So when are you going to tell me what’s going on here? Who the hell is Moby Dick, and why is he so important to Captain Ahab?”
“You can ask him yourself. He sent me down here to fetch you.�
� He stepped back, made a beckoning gesture with his hands. “C’mon now…time to get up.”
It wasn’t until we came up the ladder that I realized that night had fallen. A cold wind slapped at the mainsails; Orion was rising from the east, and when I looked to the port side, I spotted the Nantucket light house upon the western horizon. The Pequod was several miles off the Massachusetts coast, heading north. It must have set sail shortly before dusk; I’d been unconscious for quite a while.
A group of sailors were gathered on deck, eating beans and drinking mm. A guy with an eyepatch sat on a pickle barrel, playing an accordion. All the scene lacked was a talking parrot and some guy in a striped shirt singing “What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor?” Now I remembered why I left the Navy. Man, I hate sea chanteys.
Queequeg and I followed Starbuck to the aft cabin. The chief mate knocked twice on the door, then opened it and walked in. The captain’s quarters were larger than the crew accommodations, of course, but it was still a cold and uncomfortable little room that made the rudest hovel in New Bedford look like a luxury suite. Not that its occupant would probably mind. One look at Captain Ahab, and I knew that he was a hard-boiled egg no one would ever crack.
“Mister Starbuck? Is this our new crewman?” Ahab turned away from the window, the wooden peg of his left leg thumping against the deck. Cool grey eyes regarded from a leathery face framed by a white jaw beard. He reminded me of every bad teacher I’d ever had, the kind who’d break your fingers with a ruler for chewing tobacco in class.
“Yes, sir. Woke up just a few minutes ago.” Starbuck unnecessarily pushed me forward, as if I was prisoner being brought before the warden. “Name’s Ishmael.”
“Ishmael.” Ahab stamped closer to me until our faces were only a few inches apart. “Mister Starbuck tells me my wife hired you to check up on me. Is this true?”
“That’s pretty much the shape of things. She thinks you’re having an affair with a woman named Moby.”
“Does she now?” A smirk danced on his lips. He glanced over his shoulder at Starbuck. “Moby Dick is a woman…did you get that?”
“Sure did, Captain. I’m just as amused as you are.”
“Indeed.” Ahab turned away from me, hobbled over to his desk and sat down. “Moby Dick took my leg, Mr. Ishmael, but my wife would take all my money if she could. I suppose that’s why she hired you. If she could prove in court that I’m having an affair…”
“Hold on. She told me that you lost your leg when you fell off a topsail.”
“I know. That’s what I told her.” His eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “If I’d let her know the truth, I would’ve never heard the end of it. ‘You lost your leg to a whale? What kind of idiot loses his leg to a…?’”
“Moby Dick is a whale?”
“Of course it’s a whale. Have you ever heard a girl named Moby?” Ahab stared at me in disbelief. “The biggest sperm whale anyone has ever seen, and as white as an iceberg. Mean, too. My leg got caught in a harpoon line when we fought it a year ago, yanked it right off. Not that I’m going to tell this to my wife.” He sighed and made a talking motion with his hand. “Nag, nag, nag…”
“Might have saved us all a lot of trouble if you had.”
“Yeah, well…she wants a divorce that bad, I might just give it to her. When I catch Moby Dick, I’m gonna saw off its head, take it home, and drop it on the front lawn. ‘Here’s the lady I was having an affair with, bitch. Now gimme a divorce so I can have my life back.’”
“I take it that you’re going after Moby Dick for the sake of revenge.”
“Revenge is such a harsh word, Mr. Ishmael. I prefer to think of it as aggressive fishing. Anyway, I need another harpooner, and since you took out my second mate, you and your partner are going to replace him.”
“Diddy wah diddy,” Queequeg said.
“Diddy wah diddy?” Ahab scowled at him, then looked at Starbuck and me. “Can somebody tell me what ‘diddy wah diddy’ means?”
“He’s asking about bennies. Y’know…medical insurance, stock options, retirement plan…”
“Three bucks a week, a cup of rum every day, and a promise to keelhaul you if you ask me that again. But you can have my wife after I dump her, Ishmael. God knows I never slept with the skank.”
“So I’ve gathered.” No wonder he hadn’t ever been his wife’s monkey. He was too weird for sex. At least I had something to look forward to once we got home.
I didn’t know it then, though, but that was going to be a problem.
I’ll make a long story short. Ahab didn’t get the whale. The whale got him.
The Pequod spent the next week roaming the waters off Nova Scotia, watching for whale pods making their seasonal migration from the Arctic waters further north. We saw quite a few sperms and right whales, but the captain wasn’t interested in any cetacean that wasn’t an albino.
In the meantime, Ahab stomped around the poop deck, raving like a loon while everyone else hoisted up sails and battened down hatches and all that other sailor stuff. There was a coffin on the main deck. I don’t know why it was there, but Queequeg and I used it as a card table while we played poker and waited for this whole stupid trip to end.
Which it finally did, and not well. Seven days after the Pequod left New Bedford, the guy up in the crow’s nest caught sight of something big and white breaching the surface about a half-mile away. We chased it down, and sure enough, it was Moby Dick. When we were close enough, the captain ordered all the harpooners into the boats. As luck would have it, he picked me to be the bowsman for his boat.
Moby Dick was as big as Ahab said he’d be, and twice as mean. First, he took out two other whalers, crashing straight into them and sending everyone straight into the water. Then he came after my boat. I threw my harpoon, missed, and decided that was all for the day, but Ahab wasn’t giving up. When the whale got close enough, he began hacking at it with his harpoon. “From hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee…” Crazy, but he sure knew how to rant.
The whale had other plans. Moby Dick capsized my boat, and when that happened, Ahab got tangled in a harpoon line. Again. How anyone can let the same thing happen to him twice is beyond me, but the whale was still taking the captain for his own personal Nantucket sleigh ride when it charged the Pequod. Moby must have decided that he’d had enough of that damn ship, because he slammed into it hard enough to open a hole in its side.
So the Pequod went down, taking everyone with it. Funny thing about Queequeg; he never learned to swim. Nor did anyone else aboard, I guess. All that was left behind was that stupid coffin, which I clung to for the next couple of days, until another ship happened to pass close enough for its crew to spot me.
When I got back to New Bedford, I went to see my client and gave her the good news: she was now a rich widow. She paid my fee, and then she expressed her gratitude in a different way. Father Mappel was right; I could barely walk after I left her place.
After that, I visited a friend of mine, a customs inspector whose office was just down the hall. Herman is a writer, the starving variety. Who knows? Maybe he’ll find something useful to do with my story. There might even be a novel in there.
Naw. No one would ever believe it. I mean…a whale named Moby?
Probably the single most chilling event of my lifetime was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not even 9/11 comes close when you stop to consider the possible consequences if either Kennedy or Khrushchev had made a fatal error. I don’t remember it, of course—I was only four years old when it happened—but the more I’ve read about it, the more I’ve come to realize that, if things had happened just a little differently during that fateful week in 1962, I would have grown up in a post-nuclear holocaust world…if I’d survived at all.
One of the things that fascinates me the most about the idea of time travel is that, if it ever becomes possible for people to send themselves into the past, we could have chrononauts in our midst right now and probably n
ever know it. After all, a wise time traveler would have to be careful and keep his or her identity a closely guarded secret, for obvious reasons: there’s no government in the world who wouldn’t give anything to know what happens tomorrow. So we could have people from the future walking among us and never know it…unless they made a mistake.
And if they were discovered? This would raise a very disturbing question: why here, and why now? What is it about this particular place and time that draws the interest of someone from the future?
I don’t know about you, but…if I ever met a time traveler, I’d probably run like hell.
THE OBSERVATION POST
Now I’m old, but when I was young I did something which has weighed upon my conscience ever since. In all the years that followed, I’ve never told anyone about this. Not my late wife or my children or grandchildren, nor any of my friends, not even the priests to whom I’ve dutifully confessed for all other sins. My actions may have saved the world, but they took the form of betrayal…and worse.
A few months ago, I was diagnosed with an inoperable and terminal form of cancer. My doctor has informed me that, in all likelihood, I’ll be dead by the end of the year. Even so, I probably would have taken my secret to the grave, secure in the knowledge that no one would ever learn what I did nearly fifty years ago. That’s fine with me. I’m not a hero.
Just the other day, though, I saw someone on the street whom I haven’t seen since 1962. Just the mere fact that I spotted this individual has made me change my mind. Perhaps people should know what happened, if only to remind them how dangerous our times have become, and that our deeds will be remembered by later generations.
My name is Floyd Moore. I was 23 years old in 1962, an ensign in the U.S. Navy and a radioman aboard the Centurion. The Centurion wasn’t a vessel; it was a blimp, one of five N-class airships built during the fifties as submarine hunters and later modified to serve as an advance early warning system in the days before the undersea SOSUS network was established.