by Fritz Leiber
There were emergency lamps in the engine room, and a sweating corps straining over the motors. The chief engineer was not so worried as frankly bewildered.
“Oddest thing I ever saw, sir,” I heard him tell the Old Man. “It’s not just concussion damage, or a short. It’s as if the whole electrical unit had been picked up and—and twisted out of shape, somehow.”
“That’s the way it felt,” grunted the skipper. “The ship seemed to writhe and wriggle like an eel.”
“Yes, sir. The bus bars are a solid lump. And the wiring—”
The chief shook his head.
“But you can fix it?”
“I think so, sir. Yes, I’m sure we can.”
“Very good. Carry on!” The Old Man turned quietly to the rest of us. “You heard the chief, lads. Now you know as much as we do. Let’s all go to our stations, and let these men work.”
So we did, and that was that. Sometime later, the lights flickered on again. After another long, hopeful wait we heard the tentative hum of the diesels, followed by the throb of a turning shaft. Then the skipper’s voice over the com system: “All hands, attention. All clear. We’re taking her up.”
It was broad daylight when, after making certain no enemy craft were in the vicinity, the Grampus surfaced. We were under a blanket of radio silence, of course, but in the hope of sighting a friendly vessel, the skipper told me to get my flags and come along topside with him.
That fresh air sure smelled good, and the sun felt good, too. But we’d lost the other ships in our convoy—if you’d call it that. The horizon was clear as far as the eye could reach. Not a dot on the water.
No, there was one dot. The Old Man spotted it before any of us leveled his binoculars on the dancing black fleck and grunted thoughtfully.
“A man—on a raft, or a spar. A survivor, perhaps. I imagine one of the ships didn’t get off as lightly as we did.” He sighed. “Bring her about, mister. We’ll pick him up.”
The second saluted and ducked below. A few minutes later, we hove within hailing distance of the derelict.
Now, here’s where the wacky part of my story comes in. You’d think that survivor should have been tickled pink to see us, wouldn’t you? Would have waved and yelled at us?
But not this lunkhead! For the longest time, he didn’t even seem to see us. Or if he did, he tried to let on like he didn’t. He wouldn’t answer our calls, though we must have been within hearing range.
“Deaf?” wondered the skipper aloud.
“Possibly, sir,” said the second. “But he must see us. He could at least call for help.”
“Deaf and dumb?” offered the skipper.
“Or,” I suggested, “just plain dumb, sir?” Because at this moment the man definitely saw us. He rose from his awkward kneeling posture, but instead of waving his arms, or part of the tattered rags in which he was clad, the damn fool loosed a hoarse cry of alarm, leaped off his rickety old raft, and started flailing away from us as fast as his skinny arms would carry him.
The Old Man grunted understanding. “Oh, now I see! An enemy. Very good! Fetch him aboard, lads!”
So we did. But we had to knock him unconscious to do it. Two of the seamen went into the briny after him. Catching him was like wrestling a barracuda. He kicked and bit and clawed, and almost scratched one of Bill Ovens’s eyes out. That made Bill a bit peevish, so while his comrade grappled with the guy, face to face, Bill slipped up aft and let him have it behind the ear.
And the Grampus had picked up a passenger.
* * * *
Some time later, when I was telling Walt about the fracas, the Old Man buzzed me.
“Levine? Would you step forward, please?”
I found him waiting for me before the compartment in which our passenger had been locked. He took his pipe from his mouth and stared at me thoughtfully.
“Levine, you’re Jewish, aren’t you?”
“Why, yes, sir.”
“Orthodox?”
I said, “No, sir. My mother and dad are, but I—”
“No matter,” he said. “Listen!”
He nodded toward the door. From within came sounds—the voice of our passenger talking to himself in a high, thin, rising-and-falling whine. Syllables emerged from the patter, and made sense. A word here and there, a phrase.
“Why,” I said, “that’s Hebrew!”
“That’s what I thought,” said the Old Man. “Can you speak it?”
“I can understand it,” I said. “Most of it, anyway. I speak Yiddish better.”
“Good!” grunted the skipper. “Come in here.”
He ushered me before him into the compartment. For the first time I got a real look at our unwilling guest. He was a queer-looking duck. Lean and hot and angry-looking, with great smoldering eyes that made you want to crawl when he turned them on you. Not with fear or disgust. With something else. I don’t know just what it was. A sort of—well awe, maybe. That’s the closest I can come to it. A feeling that if you didn’t watch your step, something pretty terrible was going to happen to you.
He had coal-black hair to match his eyes, and wore a straggly beard that accentuated rather than minimized the acid-bitter thinness of his lips. His high cheekbones had a consumptive flush, and his nostrils were pinched.
He looked like someone I’d seen once, somewhere, but couldn’t remember who it was, or where, or when.
His chanting wail stopped abruptly when we entered, and he cringed, frightened but defiant. Like a trapped animal, I thought.
The skipper said, “Speak to him, Jake.”
I said, “Hyah, pal!”
“In Hebrew.”
“Oh!” I said, and took a whack at it. It was heavy going, because I’d forgotten a lot. I said, “Greetings! My name is Levine, Jacob Levine. Can you understand what I am saying?”
Could he! His sultry eyes lighted, and he burst into a torrent of words.
“What is he saying?” asked the skipper.
“Too much,” I complained, “and too fast,” I said in Hebrew. “You must speak more slowly.”
He cut his motors a few hundred thousand r.p.m., and at a more moderate tempo I began to catch his drift. He was, he declared, a humble man, and we were the mighty ones whom he feared. He was too meek and miserable a mortal to be the victim of our wrath. He kissed our feet and begged that he be freed. If we loosed him, he would sing our praise forever.
“Well?” asked the Old Man.
“Sweet talk,” I said. “He’s scared stiff.”
“What’s his name?”
I passed along the query, and got a tongueful of polysyllables that would have sunk a freighter. It was one of those old-fashioned family-tree monickers-so-and-so, son of so-and-so, son of somebody else, ad infinitum. When I tried to pass it along to the Old Man, he shrugged.
“Tell him we’ll call him Johnny for short. Where did he come from? Was he on one of the evacuation ships?”
No, he had been on a merchantman.
Had his ship been sunk in last night’s raid?
Raid? He had seen no raid, neither last night nor any night. He was a humble man, unworthy of our attentions. He wished but to be freed…
Then where had he come from? What was his ship, and where had it sailed from? Whither bound?
I relayed his answer to the Old Man. “His ship was the Warrior King, Tarshish, bound out of Joppa with a cargo of salt, wine and linens.”
“Joppa?” frowned the skipper. “That would be Jaffa, near Jerusalem. But Tarshish? Perhaps he means Tarsus, in Turkey? But that’s not a seaport. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. How long has he been floating around on that raft?”
“Three days,” I learned from our passenger.
“Then he wasn’t shipwrecked
last night. Is your wireless working, Sparks?”
“To tell you the truth, sir, I don’t know. Everything’s happened so fast, and we’ve been under silence—”
“Yes, of course. Well, get it working and contact Lamaca for an index report on the—what was it?—Warrior King. If the registry is Allied or neutral, I suppose this old fellow is harmless.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Right away, sir.”
“Oh, and before you go, tell our friend he’s in no danger. That we’re not going to eat him.” The Old Man chuckled.
I translated the message. The results were—well, astonishing, to say the least! Old whiskers loosed a little bleat of gratitude, then hopped up from his squat and hurled himself at the Old Man’s feet, bowing and slobbering as if the skipper were on a pedestal or something.
The Old Man backed away, startled and embarrassed.
“I say, old chap! You needn’t be so blasted…look out! Careful, there! Oh, damn it! Damn it all!”
He glared fretfully at his right hand, bleeding from a long and nasty gash. Retreating from Johnny, he’d snagged it on a bolthead and ripped it open from forefinger to wrist. He clamped a handkerchief to the cut, swearing magnificently.
“Lock him in again, Sparks. I’ve got to take this to the medico. Carry on!” And he left.
I said to Johnny savagely, “Now, see? You caused that!”
I expected a torrent of apologies and denials, but I was wrong. Johnny just stood there, his lips ashen, his eyes bleak and haunted. He whispered mournfully, “Yes… I know. I know…”
Well, I went to the radio room and warmed up the tubes. Then confidently, because a quick examination indicated everything to be shipshape, I twisted the verniers to see who was saying what on which cycles.
Nothing happened.
I got my tools and went trouble-shooting. I found one loose connection and a condenser that didn’t test right. I fixed these, and tried again.
Nothing happened.
I tried the transmitter. It seemed to work. I rigged up a playback and crosschecked. Nothing wrong there. So I got out my blueprints and went over the whole set from aerial to ground, making any minor adjustments that seemed necessary. Then I tried once more.
And drew a blank.
I went to the skipper. I said, “I don’t understand it, sir. If I were getting nothing at all, it would prove there’s something wrong with the set. But I am picking up static, so the receivers operating. But I can’t pick up any broadcasts, long or short wave.”
The Old Man was mighty nice about it. “Don’t worry about it, Sparks,” he said. “It’s probably something rather unusual, connected with our crash dive. Just keep working on it.”
“But I can’t raise Larnaca, sir.”
“No matter. We’ll be there in the morning. We’ll make inquiries when we get there. By the way, you’ll mess with me tonight.”
I gulped. “Me, sir?”
The Old Man smiled. “Yes. I’m having Johnny as my guest, and I want you to act as interpreter. Will you?”
“Yes, sir!” I said.
“Johnny’s on his way here now. I asked the second to go and fetch him. We’ll—Good Lord, what’s that?”
“That” was a series of thudding bumps just outside, followed by a sharp, agonized cry, then moans. We were out the door in a flash. The second lay groaning at the bottom of the companionway, his left leg doubled queerly under him. Johnny, standing over him, was wringing his hands and wailing frantic self-recriminations.
“It was my fault. I did it. I did it.”
“Langdon!” cried the Old Man. “What happened?”
From between teeth clenched with pain came the answer. “I don’t—know, sir. I must have slipped on the last step. It’s my leg, sir.”
“Did that man shove you?” I cried angrily.
“No. Of course not. It was just an accident.”
But Johnny’s stricken moaning did not cease. “It was my fault,” he cried over and over. “I did it. I…”
* * * *
From now on, I can’t explain the rest of my story. All I can do is tell it, and let you write your own ticket. It’s strange. It’s mad. It’s impossible. But…
We arrived at Cyprus in the morning. And I put it that way deliberately. The skipper had said we would reach Larnaca in the morning, but we didn’t. We reached the spot where Larnaca should have been. And it wasn’t there! That doesn’t make sense? It didn’t make sense to us, either. It was a fine, bright, sunny morning. When we eased into the rounded harbor that should have been jammed with refugee ships, should have been aglitter with all the panoply and bustle of a British naval base, we stared incredulously at a narrow strip of beach rimmed by a few dilapidated fishing shacks.
Four of us were topside—the skipper, the third, Johnny and myself. When we stared into that yawning, desolate basin, the third cried uncomprehendingly. “But—there’s something wrong. I can’t have made a mistake, sir!”
The Old Man took the sextant from the third’s hands. He shot the blazing sun with painstaking care. Then he stood for a long moment, gnawing his lips, his eyes gray and distant. Finally, “Mr. Graves?” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“You will change our course, please. We are going to the mainland.”
“Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”
The mate vanished below, obviously relieved that he had been spared a dressing-down. I said hesitantly, “Are we very far from Larnaca, sir?”
The Old Man said in a curious, strained voice. “I don’t know, Sparks. Possibly you can tell me. Which is the farther—a million miles, or a million years?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir.”
“No,” he said slowly. “Nor I.”
“But you said something about the mainland?”
“Yes. We’re going to land our passenger back where he belongs. That much, if nothing else.”
“How long will it take, sir? A couple of hours?”
“I wish to God it would,” said the Old Man tightly, “but I fear not. When did we pick up Johnny?”
“Why, yesterday morning, sir.”
“Exactly,” sighed the skipper. “So it will take us two days to reach the mainland.”
To tell the truth, I thought the Old Man had slipped his moorings. The Lebanse mainland is not more than five hours from the island of Cyprus. But the skipper was right! It took us two full, nerve-wracking days to reach a coast we should have made easily before sundown.
First the motors conked out. Then, when the chief got them turning again, the electrical system went haywire. Generators spitting and sparking like firecrackers, for no apparent reason. When that was repaired, one of the bulkheads started oozing suspicious drops, and we had to heave to and jury-rig patches before the leak got worse.
Those were the major difficulties. There were more minor ones than I can enumerate. Working on the damaged motors, one of the engineering crew lost half a finger. One of the oilers came down with a fever—a malarial fever, for Pete’s sake, smack in the middle of an inland sea! Then something whipped up for mess by Auld Rory must have come from a tainted tin, for on the second morning half the crew turned green and started upchucking all over the place.
Oh, it was a sweet voyage! Bad luck seemed to have taken over the Grampus in a big way.
Somehow, my private luck held, except for the fact that our passenger, finally recovered from his initial fear, had turned into a human question box. From morning to night he pounded my ear with questions. What was this vessel upon which we traveled, he wanted to know, this wondrous vessel which rode at will on or below the waters?
It was a submarine, I told him.
A submarine? And what was a submarine?
The Grampus, I told him. Th
e Grampus was a submarine. Now go sit in the corner and croon lullabies, Pop!
Aie, what marvels! The Grampus was a submarine. So be it! But what was a grampus?
I knew the answer to that one, too, having looked it up in an encyclopedia when I was assigned to the ship.
“A grampus,” I said, “is a type of dolphin, sometimes known as the killer whale because of its fighting habits and deadliness. Not a bad name for this crate, Pop. We’ve done a bit of killing already, and we’ll do more, as soon as we get patched up for another crack at the Nazis.”
He said solemnly, “You make war upon the evil ones?”
“You can say that again,” I told him grimly. “They think they’ve got us licked, but we’ve just begun to fight. Our day is coming—and soon.”
He wanted to know what we fought with, then, and I got a chance to show him, because this quiz program went on during one of the blowtorch-and-hammer sessions, and the Old Man had decided to let the gun crew fire a few trial bursts while we were hove to, just to keep their hands in. With his permission, I took old Johnny topside to watch.
He stared, with sagging jaw, as they stripped the gun and loaded it. And when it fired, belching a gout of flame amidst a roar of thunder, he practically went out of his head. He cut for the rail, and if I hadn’t clutched his tattered nightgown, he’d have been back in the drink again, only without a raft.
Anyhow, that quenched his curiosity. He was glad to get back to his own quarters and stay there. Which gave me an opportunity to work some more on my incomprehensibly mute receiver.
I was going over my circuits for the ’teenth time when the skipper wandered in and stood there watching quietly. At last he said, “No luck, eh, Sparks?”
“Skipper,” I said flatly, “there’s no luck aboard this ship any more. Here or elsewhere.”
“I know what you mean, Jake,” he nodded. “It’s almost as if we were hoo-dooed, isn’t it? Jinxed?”