Secret sea;

by White, Robb, 1909-1990

  Mike turned slowly and, in a low voice, began to curse the thin man. He raised his fist and shook it at the blank wall of cloud. Then he stopped and looked at Pete. "Are those pulses or whatever you called 'em coming right out of those clouds, right now?"

  Pete nodded.

  "Isn't there some way you can cut 'em off?"

  "If I had a high-frequency resnatron tube putting out about 50,000 watts, I could give him a headache. Only it takes seven eight-wheel trucks just to carry it around."

  "Then what are we going to do?"

  Pete shrugged and slowly stood up. "We might as well eat something."

  "Why don't we heave to and both of us cook?" Mike asked.

  "Why?"

  Mike grinned a little shyly. "I feel sort of funny. All those pulses coming and going and I can't see 'em."

  "They haven't bothered you so far." 144

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  "I didn't know about 'em, Mac." "All right, you do the cooking. They can't get down in the galley."

  As Mike banged around in the galley, Pete watched the dim sunlight fading out while the darkness of night seemed to seep down through the clouds toward the sea. The wind had shifted more than ninety degrees and was falling so that soon, Pete thought with part of his mind, they ought to shake out those reefs and get along.

  Then, almost imperceptibly, it became dark. Pete was startled when Mike turned on the lights in the cabin and the skylights glowed yellow ahead of him. "Mike!" Pete yelled. Mike came to the companionway. "Pull the shades on the skylights, will you?" "What for?"

  "So Weber can't see us. It's clearing fast." "What difference does it make? He can see us with the gizmo anyway." "Pull 'em," Pete said shortly. Mike came slowly up the ladder. "Listen, bub," he said slowly, "you're not in the Navy now, see?"

  Pete looked steadily in the boy's direction. "Mike, pull the shades on the skylights," he said quietly. "During chow we'll discuss the Navy angle."

  "Have it your own way, Mac. But don't start throwing your weight around."

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  "I'll try not to," Pete said.

  The little flare-up worried Pete. Coming on top of the radar, it seemed even worse than it was. Pete hoped that he was no arbitrary martinet who gave orders just to see people jump; but he knew from bitter experience what it was like to be in a sloppy ship where there was no discipline.

  Mike came on deck with two plates of food and, in silence, put them down and went below for the coffee. When he came back, he and Pete both ate in silence for a long time; each waiting for the other to begin it.

  At last Pete put down his plate. "Mike," he said.

  "Go ahead," Mike said.

  "Let's get squared away."

  Mike put his plate down. To Pete it looked as though he had slammed it down. "Suits me right down to the ground, Mac," Mike said, his voice belligerent. "As long as you don't start throwing out your chest and pushing me around, we're all squared away."

  "Good," Pete said quietly. "But this is a ship, and there can only be one master in a ship. Do you want to be the captain or do you want me to be?"

  "Don't hand me any of that old Navy bushwa," Mike said. "This is nothing but an old wooden tub, and it doesn't need a captain."

  "It's going to have one," Pete said. "We're not

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  Sunday-sailing around the harbor. We're up against a vicious, smart joe who wouldn't hesitate to kill us both any longer than he hesitated to slap you in the puss with a pistol. We're starting a dangerous journey, Mike, where a split second may decide whether somebody gets hurt or not. That means that one of us has got to obey the other one."

  **I don't take orders from nobody," Mike said surlily.

  Pete clamped his jaw for a moment and then said, his voice still controlled and quiet, "All right. Then do you think you're the man to give the orders aboard this ship?"

  Pete saw Mike's head turn toward him. **Do you mean you'd let me be captain around here?"

  "One of us has got to be captain. No matter what you think she is, this is still a ship."

  Mike put sugar in a coffee cup and then, holding his thumb down in the cup to measure with, he slowly poured coffee in the darkness. Pete watched the blur of his hand as he stirred the sugar slowly, the spoon clanking on the metal rim of the cup.

  "Okay," he said at last, "have it your way, ^Captain.' "

  His voice was unpleasant, sneering. Pete shook his head. "I don't want it that way, Mike," he said.

  Mike stood up, the cup in his hand. "Don't get

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  me to crying, bub," he said. Before Pete could answer, he went down the ladder and Pete heard the cabin door shut.

  Pete slowly poured out a cup of coffee and sat on the wheelbox drinking it. Now, he thought, I've got two problems on my hands. And I can't handle either one of them. Behind me is the radar. Below is Mike.

  Two problems? Pete asked himself. No. Three. There's Johnny lying in a narrow white bed, and he can wiggle his right thumb.

  For a long time Pete sat there feeling as though he were at the bottom of one of those "pile-ons" they used to play in school. The pile, pressing down on him, grew heavier and heavier. Weber, and Mike, and Johnny. The radar, the reform school, the hospital. The Santa Ybel, a .45 automatic, a cathode-ray tube. Johnny and Mike and Weber.

  Pete at last shook his head as though to clear his brain. One thing at a time, he thought. Let's tackle one thing first. Which one? He couldn't do a thing about Johnny. Mike? He could do nothing more there. It was up to the kid now. The radar?

  Pete looked up at the sails of his ship, gray and ghostly in the dark. Invisible pulses of radio energy were striking them, striking the masts, the hull, the cabin structure. And bouncing back like

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  tattletales to the black sloop. He couldn't stop the evil, invisible things.

  And slowly, as his mind drifted, Pete began to remember one night in the Pacific. On Eniwetok Island he had gone ashore and found an old friend of his, Lieutenant "Fish" Fishburne, who was in charge of radar.

  Down in Fishburne's Quonset hut the light was dim and eerie and the place was filled with the hum of motors. Across from Fish's desk there was a six-foot transparent disk standing on edge and lit by an indirect glow. In the center of the disk there was a tiny miniature of Eniwetok atoll, from which radiated lines to the outer edge of the disk. A man, stripped to the waist, was sitting behind the disk playing with pieces of colored chalk.

  Pete and Fish had been chatting in whispers for nearly an hour when suddenly a quiet voice said, "Bogy, sir."

  Fish moved fast. Bending over the big radar scope, he looked at the faint, dim green blotch on the outer rim. For a moment he watched it as the green search line went slowly around and around the cathode tube. Then he picked up a telephone.

  "Captain Cruise? Argus. Enemy planes at 3 50, distance eighty-six miles," Fish reported.

  Dimly through the earth above the Quonset Pete heard the air-raid sirens wailing over the island. Fish moved to a high stool in front of the

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  radar scope and everyone in the hut stopped talking.

  The man behind the plastic disk adjusted his headphones and picked up a piece of red chalk. On the outer rim of the disk he began to write rapidly, the red numerals glowing. He wrote backward so that those in front of the disk could read it.

  Pete was a little startled when Fish said calmly, "Looks like a couple of dozen. Boring straight in."

  The green blotch was moving slowly in toward the center of the dimly lit face of the scope. Pete could feel that even Fishburne was growing tense.

  Then an operator said, **Isn't that phantom, sir?"

  Fish leaned over the scope for a few seconds. "Right you are, Cassidy. Good work!"

  "What is it?" Pete whispered.

  "It's a trick they try to play on us. See the big green blotch? That's
phantom. Here, actually, are the planes," Fish said, pointing to a dimmer green spot in the center of the big blotch of green. "They drop streamers of aluminum foil out of the planes and it registers on the scope as a big cloud. Then they try to sneak in by getting in front of it while we are distracted by the phantom. The stuff is held up by parachutes or paper balloons. But it doesn't work; that is, if you got a heads-up operator like Cassidy. Cassidy can

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  work the planes right through a cloud of phan-

  tom."

  A voice from a loudspeaker said quietly, "All batteries on target."

  And then Pete heard and felt the AA start. There was the sound, so familiar to him, the "pom, pom, pom," but under the ground it sounded soft and far away.

  In a little while the sentry stuck his head in and said, "They've hit three of 'em, Mr. Fish-burne."

  Then there was silence, except for the steady pom, pom, pom of the guns, and Fish studied the scope.

  "They'll be dropping us some little presents in a minute. See, they're right over the island."

  Pete watched the now bright green blotch moving in fast toward the little picture of the atoll on the disk, the man behind it writing backwards as fast as he could.

  "They got two more!" the sentry said, and went out again.

  "Those bombs are probably on the way down now," Fish said. "Ever hear 'em, Pete? Close up? Sound like a dog lapping mush out of a bowl."

  "I've heard 'em," Pete said.

  Then there was the sohd ca-rump, ca-rump, ca-rump of the bombs.

  "Blast!" Fish said. "They sound like they're

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  right on top of my tent. Hope they don't bust my shaving mirror."

  The sentry stuck his head in. "The Marines are murderin' 'em!" he said, his voice excited. "They're f alHng all over the place."

  Pete went out through the blackout screen and stood pressed against the earth beside the sentry. Plumes of ugly yellow fire were tumbling from the sky while hard bright bursts of AA lit up everything. . . .

  Phantom, Pete thought, sitting on the wheel-box of the Indra and steering her west as the storm died. Phantom.

  And then Pete remembered one morning in a ship chandler's in Miami. He wanted some cheap canvas to make an awning for the cockpit so that the man operating the air pump wouldn't bake in the sun.

  The clerk had said, "Canvas? Mister, that's scarcer than nylon. But if you just want to make an awning I've got something here that ought to do pretty well temporarily." He pointed to some three-foot cylinders wrapped in brown paper. "Aluminum foil. "We bought a lot of it surplus. Don't know what the Army used it for, but if you put it on a framework, it ought to make a good awning. And it's cheap."

  And in the after lazaret there was now on the Indra a roll of aluminum foil.

  Phantom.

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  Pete hesitated a moment and then rang the buzzer for Mike. The boy came up the ladder slowly and stood in silence in the cockpit.

  "Mike, will you please take the wheel for a little while?" Pete asked, trying to keep his voice quiet and completely impersonal.

  Mike stood for a moment silently and then he said, "Sure." Then there was a long pause and he added in a low voice, "Skipper."

  Pete grinned in the darkness. Suddenly he felt happier than he had for a long time. But he didn't want to push Mike and so he said, "I think I've got a way to stop that radar, Mike."

  "Yeah? How?"

  "Phantom," Pete said.

  "Phantom? What's that, something to haunt a house?"

  "Something to haunt a radar," Pete said.

  Dinghy Adrift

  At was now night, and the only Hght showing from the Indra since Mike had pulled the curtains across the skylights in the cabin was the dim yellow glow from the compass binnacle. This could hardly be seen outside the cockpit. As Mike took over the wheel,

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  Pete went forward along the pitching deck and unlashed the long spinnaker boom. Balancing it somewhat like a tightrope walker, he brought it aft and put it down athwartships of the cockpit, the boom sticking out past the ship at both ends.

  "Our only chance, Mike," Pete said as he tied the boom so it wouldn't slide overboard, "is to produce on "Weber's radar screen another *pip.' Then we hide behind it and—silently steal away. During the war the Japs tried it, and we called it 'phantom.' And we called the stuflF we used Vin-dow.' I don't know what the British called theirs."

  "Pips. Phantoms," Mike said. "Sounds like pig Latin to me."

  Pete laughed as he went below to get a coil of light rope. Topside again, he rigged shrouds to one end of the boom and moved it out of the way. Then he went forward, unlashed the small dinghy, and brought it back into the cockpit. As he put it down, he patted the smooth plywood bow with his hand. "If this doesn't work we're out one darn good little boat," Pete said.

  With Mike helping him, the wheel in beckets, Pete stepped the long boom down through the forward thwart of the dinghy and secured it there with the shrouds he had made. In the darkness the dinghy looked a little like one of the tiny racing-class boats with a very tall mast.

  "I don't think she'll carry that much mast," Mike said, looking at it dubiously.

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  "I don't either." Pete went forward and robbed the fourteen-foot tender of a small anchor. "With the rope he made a bridle so that the anchor would hang down in the water several feet below the dinghy and directly under the mast. "That ought to lower her center of gravity enough."

  "Won't it slow her down?"

  "The slower the better, Mike. We're going to try to sneak out from under that pip, so we don't want it following us."

  "Okay, Einstein," Mike said. "I still don't get it."

  "You will." Pete then began putting lengths of rope down from the shrouds to the bottom of the dinghy. Since the mast was to carry no sail, Pete ran a rope from the top of the mast to the stern, then he laced lengths of rope between this and the dinghy seats, too. When he at last finished, Mike inspected the work in the darkness and said, "Looks like a bird cage to me."

  "It's going to look worse," Pete said as he went below.

  He brought up the roll of aluminum foil and some shears. Unrolling it the length of the cockpit, Pete sat down and began cutting out long, thin strips.

  "Paper dolls?" Mike asked from the wheel.

  Pete flipped his lower lip with two fingers and made a noise like "jibberty, jibberty, jibberty."

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  "Slow down at the next corner and I'll get off," Mike said.

  Pete chuckled. "Now," he said when he had a pile of the strips, "get her steadied down so she'll sail no hands."

  "When I'm on the wheel, Mac, I keep my ship trimmed up," Mike said indignantly.

  "I'd forgotten," Pete said. He went over then, started the engine, and when it was running smoothly at slow throttle, he eased it into gear.

  Pete then began unlaying the ropes he had tied to the dinghy and slipping the aluminum strips in between the lays. As soon as he turned loose, the new rope laid up again, clamping the strips tightly. When strips were in all the ropes as high as the cockpit coaming, Pete stopped.

  "Now come the crucial minutes," he said. "As I build up the area of these strips, you've got to reduce the area of the sail."

  "Tell me something, Mac," Mike said. "Do you know what you're doing?"

  "I wish I knew," Pete said. "All I know is that little millionth-of-a-second radio pulses are hitting us like a man shooting an endless stream of invisible bird shot at us. When they hit, they bounce right back to Weber and produce a flickering green line.

  "Now Weber's been looking at that line for a long time. He knows how bright and how big it is. If we throw all this tinfoil in front of those

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  radio pulses without, at the same time, reducing the area they can hit, that Hne is going to get brighter and bigger and Weber is going
to sit up straight and say, *Ah, dirty work at the crossroads.' "

  "The boy's a genius," Mike said as he got up and stood by the main halyard.

  Pete rapidly inserted the strips into the rest of the ropes as Mike slowly, and at the word, lowered the mainsail. He then lowered the foresail, and when Pete put in the last strip, Mike let the jib down with a run.

  As Mike took sail off her slowly, Pete kept touching the throttle so that there was no change in the Indra's speed. He had also kept an eye on the compass and had shifted the beckets to keep the Indra on a straight course.

  When Mike jumped down into the cockpit again, Pete put the pelorus on top of the compass and tied a penlight flashlight in the stern of the dinghy. At last he stood up and looked aft into the inky darkness.

  "Well, here goes all or nothing," Pete said. "Let's get her over the side."

  The little dinghy with the spinnaker boom sticking up straight and tall out of her was un-wieldly, and they had a hard time getting it down into the rough water. For a little while, to see how she was going to float, they kept the painter secured and towed the dinghy along, the alumi-

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  num strips fluttering metallically in the wind and faintly glistening even in the darkness.

  "That certainly does look like one big piece of foolishness," Mike declared.

  "If you're right, we're sunk," Pete said. "Well, I think she'll take it without capsizing." Lying down and reaching, he turned the penlight on. "Let her go," he said.

  Mike pulled the painter through the ringbolt and the dinghy, completely free, swung slowly around until her bow was into the wind. The penlight made a tiny bright spot which appeared and disappeared as the waves ran before the wind.

  Pete went back to the pelorus on the compass. "There's his pip," he said. "And all we've got to do is to keep the dinghy exactly between us and him so that the pip we make won't appear through the stronger pip made by that foil. Got a pencil?"

  Mike got a notebook and pencil out of the chart case. "Shoot," he said.