by Ted Bell
“Hell’s bells, Ben, discovered who? This poor devil on the floor? Is he dead?”
“No, not him, the stowaways, sir, if you can credit it.”
“Stowaways! You mean—” the captain sputtered, blowing out a fine spray of Barbado rum, and stopped in midsentence as if the rest of the grog had gone down the wrong pipe. He put his handkerchief to his mouth and waved to Ben to continue. “Spit it out, man, spit it out! Stowaways, you say?”
Ben swiped his own kerchief across his rum-spattered jowly cheeks. “Beggin’ yer pardon, Cap, it’s you as is spittin’ it out—”
“Blast it all, Ben, get on with it! Stowaways?”
“Aye, Captain. Three of ’em. Bleedin’ stowaways all, smellin’ o’ pig, too! Don’t know how they managed to avoid discovery all this time we been at sea. I figure it was them as let the pigs out in the first place. I wouldn’t want to be bunking in with all those pigs myself! But I put the porkers back inside and locked ’em all up together, stowaways and pigs alike, nice and cosy. One of the three, a mere boy he is, asked for a word with you, sir. Said he was here ’cause of a letter from you, Captain! Ha! Touched in the head, I’m afraid, sir, less of course the boy can walk on water like our blessed Lord, sir.” Ben sat back, happy to get off such a good one, even if the captain seldom acknowledged his rapier wit and sense of life’s absurdities.
“A boy, you say, Ben! A boy! How old?” McIver asked, a ripple of excitement running down his spine. It had to be young Nick! Why, who else could it be?
“No more’n twelve if he’s a day, sir,” Ben said chuckling. “And here’s the humorous part, Cap’n, guess what flag he’s claiming to sail under? Says his name’s Nicholas McIver! Don’t that top it all?” Ben held his sides, shaking with mirth. Things had gotten so queer on this old barky, you just had to laugh.
“Damn it all, Ben! Half-dead sailors drownin’ here on me floor and wild porkers terrorizing the sickbay! Stowaways in the pig locker!” the captain cried, still sputtering rum as he got to his feet. He leveled a hard look at his old companion.
“Ben, for all honesty, man, why didn’t you tell me all this immediately?”
“Because, Captain,” Ben replied, casually draining his mug and returning the look with an easy smile, “you said you was to be disturbed only if something unusual happened.”
CHAPTER XXI
A Bump in the Night
· 6 June 1939 ·
ABOARD THOR, AT SEA
Racing with the moon, my dear girl!” Hobbes exclaimed above the impossibly thunderous roar of Thor’s twin engines. They were cutting a huge swath across the glassy sea, and twin plumes of foaming white water were thrown to either side of the knife-edged bow. “Quite the thing, isn’t it? Glorious!”
He was right, too. The silvery moon, when it wasn’t half hidden behind a few wandering clouds, was racing alongside the burnished luster of the dark mahogany hull, a watery, shimmering reflection of the moon above, speeding along beside them over the gleaming sea.
“Faster, Hobbes! Faster!” Kate shouted above the din, the cat Horatio cradled in her arms and her little nose pressed against the portside window. “See, no matter how fast we go, that old moon goes just as fast!” She turned to look at Hobbes and he saw her eyes shining with exhilaration in the greenish glow of the instruments. Thor’s tremendous power often had this effect on first-time passengers, Hobbes observed with a certain satisfaction. He’d designed the big launch with military objectives in mind, but few things were more fun than racing her across a flat, starlit sea.
“Can’t we ever beat that old moon, Hobbesie?”
“Can’t beat physics, my dear girl,” the commander said, lighting up one of the fat Montecristo cigars he always allowed himself on these crossings. “Not without your brother’s time machine at any rate.” He laughed at his own little joke and ruffled her curly red hair. “We’ll leave that duty to Lord Hawke, I suppose.” He eased the throttles forward, and the boat surged ahead.
“I’ll bet we could beat Stormy Petrel, though,” Kate said. “She never ever goes this fast! Even when the mean old Nazis were tugging us along behind their submarine.”
Hobbes glanced over at the greenish dial of Thor’s knot-meter. Pushing thirty knots, he saw. “Is this speed frightening you, Kate?” he asked, easing back on the throttles. He felt a keen responsibility for the child’s safety in the wake of Gunner’s departure to the past. “I don’t want to scare you, you know.”
“Oh, Hobbes, don’t be so silly!” Kate said. “I never get scared too often. Besides, you could never scare me. You’re the very best nanny in the whole world!”
“Nanny?” asked one of Britain’s most heavily decorated naval commanders.
“Oh, yes! And, ever such a funny one, too!”
Funny? Hobbes had never in his life been described as being even remotely funny. Or a nanny, either. But, somehow, he found himself oddly grateful that this small person could consider him so. He’d grown rather attached to her already.
“Why, thank you, dear” was all he could manage. “I seldom think of myself that way, you know. An occasionally amusing naval person, perhaps. A funny nanny, almost never!” he said, smiling, and the little girl giggled.
He was enjoying himself enormously, after all. He’d forgotten how much joy could be found in the company of children. Most especially one as full of Mrs. Barker’s beans as Kate McIver. “Pass me that chart, dear.”
Ninety miles across, roughly. Thor could manage the crossing to Portsmouth in just over three hours if the weather held. He looked at the faint glow of his wristwatch in the darkness. They had about two hours to go. His contact, an elderly fisherman named John Cory, was waiting in a darkened dory just off the harbor mouth. He’d be expecting Hobbes to arrive with his weekly intelligence packet at the stroke of midnight. Hobbes leaned forward to gaze at the sky above the raked windscreen. Clear enough. They’d make it, if he poured on a little more coal.
“Hold on to your hat, my dear!” he shouted to Kate, and firewalled the twin throttles. Thor’s powerful twelve-cylinder Allison engines roared, and her huge eight-bladed bronze propellers bit, and launched her forward, throwing tremendous cascades of white water to either side of her bow.
“Oh my goodness!” Kate exclaimed, looking astern at the churning wake as Thor leapt forward in the water. “Look, Hobbes! We’ll beat that silly old moon yet!”
Hobbes settled back into the deep leather cushion of the captain’s chair. A nice, uneventful crossing was in order tonight, he thought. Yes, he’d had quite enough excitement for one day, thank you.
The “departure” of the three time travelers for one thing. Kate had been able to talk of little else while Thor made ready to slip out of the lagoon. In the glow of the instruments, Kate’s eyes had been still wide with the memory of the time machine’s breathtaking magical powers. No one had known quite what to expect when the two halves were rejoined, of course, neither the ones leaving nor the ones to be left behind.
“One final thing,” Lord Hawke had solemnly announced, in the last seconds before departure. “It is important that I ask each of you here tonight to swear on your sacred honor that you will reveal to no one the existence of this machine. It can be a powerful force for good, but as Hobbes has explained, there is also great danger in tampering with so vital a force of nature as time. It is now up to those of us here gathered to protect this great secret in order that we may also protect the precious flow of history.”
Hawke looked at each one in turn, studying their faces in the flickering candlelight. “Do you each so swear?”
“I so swear,” each had replied, and solemnly bowed their heads.
After a final check to ensure the proper time and destination numerals had been entered into each half of the machine, Lord Hawke had said, with a surprising good humor and nonchalance, “Well, Hobbes, I suppose we’ll be popping off, now! If you please, Nicholas?” And he held out his hemisphere to Nick.
Nick held his Locu
s up to Lord Hawke’s Tempus and felt an instant vibration in his half of the machine, running up his arm and suffusing his entire body. He noticed that the metal surface became extremely cold, almost too cold to hold on to, burning his fingers. He felt a tugging sensation coming from Lord Hawke’s half, much like the feeling of a powerful magnet, as if the two hemispheres couldn’t bear to be apart. He held on and, hesitating just for a moment, touched his half to the other.
Time and space rejoined went through Nick’s mind and he took a deep breath. He knew the two halves had to be screwed tightly together in order to function. What he didn’t know is what would happen once that was accomplished.
“Rotate your half counterclockwise, Nick!” Lord Hawke said, his eyes alight and a look of keen anticipation on his face.
Nick, his hand shaking ever so slightly, did so, and felt the machine lock securely. The vibration stopped instantly, replaced by a gentle pulsing, a warming of the metal surface, and the tiniest sound from within the reformed globe, what sounded like a faint shimmering of tiny bells, and then he felt that his whole being was shimmering as well. Each individual cell seemed to be lighting up and humming within him, a warm feeling, not unpleasant at all, but he had cried out, “What’s happening, Hobbes?” and heard Hobbes shouted reply, “It’s called ‘ionization,’ Nicholas!” and then Hobbes wasn’t there anymore, he was someplace else. And Nick McIver?
He’d been ionized. “Are they gone, Hobbes?” Kate had asked, her face still buried against Hobbes’s waistcoat, not daring to look.
“Oh, yes, dear Katie, they are well and truly gone!” he had replied, somewhat overcome with emotion himself. It was hard to come to grips with what he’d just seen.
“What was that light when they left, Hobbes?” Kate asked now, her face still bathed in the eerie glow of Thor’s interior. “I could see it, even with my eyes closed hiding behind your back! Like when you lie on the beach and stare at the sun with your eyes closed! And that noise, like a million tiny bells at once—”
“Yes, wasn’t it magnificent?”
“What was it?”
“Difficult to describe, Katie. It was as if, well, one moment they were all three standing there, as solid as the chair you’re sitting in, hands joined around the machine, and the very next instant they were all three alight, as if every living atom of their beings had become the tiniest of fireflies, millions of them, don’t you know, but forming the general shape of their bodies, glowing as pure and brilliantly as stars for a moment, and then they began winking, winking one-by-one until, finally, they had all winked out! Every single one! And it was just you and me, alone in the room!”
“Christmas! Wasn’t it something, Hobbes!” Kate exclaimed, giddy with the memory.
“Oh, it was something all right, Katie,” Hobbes agreed. Suddenly, he sat forward and peered through the windscreen. He thought he’d seen something out there in the darkness, but he couldn’t be sure. A looming black shape on the horizon and then it was gone. Impossible, of course. Nothing would be just sitting out here in the dark without running lights to make itself seen. Hobbes shook his head to clear the cobwebs.
As often happened on these crossings on clear nights, the powerful thrumming of the engines below his feet and the cozy glow of the instruments sometimes lulled him into a semi-hypnotic state. This wasn’t reckless, he told himself, at this time of night the channel was usually devoid of traffic. Normally, he enjoyed a relaxing few hours, puffing on his big cigars. But tonight, with his dear little passenger, he knew he couldn’t allow himself to be anything less than completely alert. He tossed his half-smoked Cuban out the window.
“All strapped in, Kate?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, Horatio and I are perfectly—” She never finished the sentence.
At that moment, the mightly Thor struck something in the water. She struck it hard. Hard enough to stagger the big yacht, and send a shudder through her from stem to stern.
Kate, strapped in, didn’t move, but Horatio flew from her arms and bounced squalling off the windscreen, and the commander was thrown forward from his seat, up against the helm, and then fell to his knees.
“Oh my goodness!” Kate said shakily. “What happened, Hobbes?”
“We appear to have hit something, dear,” Hobbes said, getting quickly to his feet and rubbing his bruised shoulder with one hand, pulling the two throttles back with the other. The big boat slowed and settled immediately. Hobbes leaned forward, peering through the windscreen. “Though I can’t imagine what it might be! Nothing at all out here. It’s open water. Still, it’s the oddest thing, though, I thought I saw something, just before we—”
“Are we going to sink, Hobbes?” Kate asked, fear creeping steadily into her voice. “I—I’m not the best of swimmers, you know, and that water looks awfully dark out there. And deep. If we do sink, Hobbesie, will you—”
“Of course we’re not going to sink, my dear. That was just a bump in the road. We’d have to hit something a lot harder than that to put a hole in a big boat like this. Can’t fathom what it was, however. Very odd, indeed.” Hobbes put both engines in neutral and bent down beneath the wheel to open a locker.
Although he had no idea what they could possibly have hit out here in the open channel, whatever it had been was sizable. He listened carefully for the sound of incoming sea, and was grateful to hear nothing. His groping hands finally found the two items he’d been looking for in the locker and he handed one of them up to Kate.
“Still, I’d like you to put this on while I go forward and inspect the hull.”
“What is it, Hobbesie?” Kate asked nervously. “Why does it have this little whistle attached?”
“It’s a life vest, dear. You use the whistle to … to—oh never mind. Here, I’ll show you how to fasten it and then I want you to stay right here with Horatio while I go forward, all right? Nothing to worry about, I promise. I’ll go up on the bow and make sure all is well. Sit tight, won’t you, dear?” He switched on his flashlight and made his way to the rear of the darkened pilothouse. “Shan’t be a moment, I promise.”
“But why do I need a life vest if we’re not sinking?” she asked as he stepped out into the cool night air. Certainly a reasonable question but he didn’t have time to answer it. Whatever they’d hit, they’d hit it hard, and he needed to reassure himself that Kate would not be needing her life vest.
As soon as he left the cozy warmth of the pilothouse and stepped out onto the aft deck, he knew for sure that his lovely evening sail was not going to go exactly as planned. He swung the flashlight’s beam over the deck and paused for a moment, looking up into the night sky.
The moon was gone, for one thing. And the air was cold and wet, he could feel it damp on his cheek. The temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees in the hour or so since they’d left Greybeard Island astern. And what the devil had they hit, he kept asking himself, following the little pool of light he shone on the deck and making his way carefully forward along the starboard side of his yacht. What was out there? The teak decks were a bit slippery in the damp air.
Inside the the pilothouse, he could see Kate still in her seat, stroking her big white cat and tooting on her whistle. Seeing him smiling at her through the window, she looked up and waved her small hand.
Certainly not a good night for naval adventures, he thought, waving back at her. Not a good night at all. He followed the pool of light forward, beginning to worry that he’d made a grave error in deciding to bring the child along.
He’d designed a fixture on the bow, where one could mount either a fifty-caliber machine gun or the powerful searchlight that was mounted there tonight. Hobbes threw a switch at the base that illuminated the thing, snapping and crackling, and suddenly the whole foredeck was bathed in strong white light. He swung the big light to and fro. No structural damage on deck that he could see, which was not surprising. Whatever they’d hit, they’d hit it quite low and head-on or just to starboard. He tilted the big light down at
the most forward part of the bow, where the long pulpit extended beyond the bow, out over the water.
Kneeling between the twin anchor rodes out on the pulpit, the commander craned his upper body out over the starboard side, flashlight in one hand and the other hand clinging to the lifeline.
He was shocked at what he saw.
A huge ugly gash, running the entire length of the starboard bow, just above the waterline! Carefully, he played the light from one end of the laceration to the other. It didn’t appear deep, thankfully. But fresh wood was exposed, and some kind of black paint marred the beautiful mahogany finish of his beloved boat. Still, the hull appeared intact, he saw to his relief. Whatever they’d hit, they’d struck it a glancing blow. He scratched at the black smear and some of the stuff came away on his finger. It wasn’t paint exactly, but some kind of strange substance, and very odd indeed.
Curious, most curious. He rubbed the black, gummy stuff between his fingers. He’d never seen anything quite like it. What could that have come from? He squinted his eyes, looking out across the dark water. Floating out there, somewhere, was something that could cause an unwary vessel terrible damage. An old buoy or floating marker that had broken loose from its moorings? Not big enough. He stood at the starboard rail and swept his light over the water, thinking of the strange shadowy shape he’d seen just before the collision.
Nothing but the black empty sea, now.
Hobbes extinguished the powerful searchlight and turned back toward the pilothouse where little Kate sat waiting. Looking up, he was startled by what he saw. A halo of soft greenish white light now surrounded each window of the cabin. And that meant only one thing: Fog was rolling in.
A bad one. A pea-souper. As he ducked back inside, Kate piped him aboard with two toots of her life vest whistle and gave him a brave little smile.