by John Brunner
Struggling against the current, however, the steamer was making poor headway. Moreover the gap in the mist was increasing. There would be plenty more chances! Seeing his companions rush to reload, afraid he might be too late to help fire this extra gun, Caesar once more addressed the dead tree.
And suddenly, horribly, there was a sound like the crackle of wildfire in dry underbrush and all his expectations fell apart.
He knew, while it was happening, what was going on. But his mind so totally revolted against accepting it as real that he could only later reconstruct the sequence of events.
Which he did, waking and in nightmare, for years after.
Most of the shots fired from the steamer went whistling to waste. But one did harm enough to outweigh the rest.
The horse to which the limber of number four gun had been left harnessed was a nervous chestnut filly, still considerably gun-shy, commandeered on the way here to replace a well-trained gray.
The lucky shot hit the chestnut in her flank.
Private Hall was taken by surprise when she reared up screaming, and her fore hooves cut open the heads of two men who rushed to catch her. They fell bloody while she fled across the campsite. Dropping his axe, Caesar was about to help restrain her when he realized with preternatural clarity what impended.
The fire which had been lighted with such difficulty flamed in the horse’s path. She was bound to shy from it.
She did.
The limber tipped. One of its doors was unlatched. Out spilled the powder charges it contained.
Caesar tumbled forward on his face, and there was thunder.
So unexpected and so violent was the explosion, Parbury came close to swerving the Nonpareil out of the channel. He was following a line perilously close to its far side.
The cannon shot had done little harm, though its impact on an iron plate had made everybody’s ears ring. And the crackle of rifle-fire which, a moment later, answered Carradine’s order had been reassuringly purposive.
But this—! Why, it was as loud as though a boiler had blown up!
“What in tarnation was that?” he barked. Such had been the force of the blast, its updraught had sucked in strands of fog opaque enough to blot out what just now had been a clear view.
From the men on deck came ragged cheers.
Lowering his glasses in frustration, Carradine said, “Only one thing it could have been. A ball must have struck one of the limbers. Maybe hit the store of friction tubes. At all events it set off a load of powder… Well, Captain!” He briskened. “Luck is on our side today, it seems. We need expect no further trouble from that source. Let’s make haste to Vicksburg.”
But Parbury’s hand was already on the rope that would sound the bell for half speed.
Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “I defer to you in military matters, sir. Now you trust me in a matter of navigation. I’ll run as long as I can. I shan’t tie up unless the fog obliges me. But I must put out men with poles to fend off floating logs. And if the fog grows any thicker I must send out leadsmen in the yawl.”
That emerged beautifully, free from any trace of stammer. He concluded, “Do I have permission?”
The last with irony he meant to be, and was, scathing.
Caesar’s nose was full of smoke and his ears of screaming, and some of the screams were not human. His feet were trapped under a soft heavy object; also he was aware of wetness, mud as foul as dung, and an overriding sense of shock.
When at last he was able to open his eyes he saw scattered on the ground near him several bright brown rods, like a forgotten game of jackstraws.
With vast effort he worked out what they were, and simultaneously realized that the steamboat was chugging on her way unhindered, her engine noise slower but not less regular. The mist reduced her to a grayish hulk devoid of detail.
Here on dry ground, though, he could see all too clearly. The explosion had cut through the soldiers like a scythe across a patch of wheat. By number one gun lay Captain Folbert, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, motionless. By number three he saw Sergeant Tennice doubled over clutching at a wound in his belly. There a horse was streaming with blood from a hundred cuts and one vast gash; there a man was rocking back and forth and moaning as he tried in vain to staunch the leak from where his right leg had been…
And what pinioned Caesar’s feet was a torso, armless and headless: a dead weight.
He cried out for rage and nausea and dragged free and scrambled upright. Stupidly he shook his fist at the steamer—and checked in mid-gesture as it dawned on him that even though one limber had blown up, the rest survived.
Also the steamer was not, as he had at first thought, going away; she still had to breast and round the point. So for another few minutes she would be drawing nearer, a larger and easier target.
While right here before him were…
Caesar stooped and caught up the brown rods, giving silent thanks. It was not the sort of blessing preachers usually taught their flocks to pray for, he reflected grimly, but in the circumstances it would do.
They were the friction tubes which fired the guns.
Glancing around, debating what chance he had of getting off even one shot single-handed, he was startled to hear a thin voice calling him.
“Number three, soldier—number three! It’s charged with powder! Wad and load! Don’t waste time trying to fuze a shell—use solid ball!”
It was Tennice, somehow mastering his pain long enough to utter comprehensible instructions… but the final word terminated in a groan and he slumped forward, face whiter than paper.
He was right anyway. Behind its dead horse the limber of number three gun had slanted and spilled, but that made it all the handier. Caesar snatched up a wad, and a twelve-pound ball, and cast about for a ramrod. Telling himself not to be overhasty, to remember all the drills he had been led through, he completed the task of loading and took station behind the gun to try and lay it.
And to his incredulous relief found he need not alter the alignment, only the elevation, for the steamer was coming up broadside to where he stood.
He made three wild guesses about whether to aim high or low, thrust a friction tube into the vent, stepped to the side and jerked the lanyard. The gun boomed.
Looking again at the shadowy bulk of the steamer, he was at first convinced he must have missed, and was wondering whether a second try would be worthwhile when he detected an alteration in the vessel’s noise. Instead of a rhythmical thumping, she was emitting a sort of crunch-and-grind.
For a long moment he stared, mouth ajar in disbelief; then with abrupt frantic energy he set about swabbing the barrel.
“You do any damage?” Tennice whispered.
“I guess so, Sergeant,” Caesar said. “I guess somehow…”
And thrust a fresh bag of powder down the hot muzzle.
“You ran aground!” Carradine gasped. The shock had sent him sprawling on the floor of the pilothouse.
It was a forgivable assumption. For a moment Parbury had made the same mistake. But a heartbeat later he could feel what had happened almost as though he had taken a wound in his own flesh.
A cannonball had struck the larboard paddlebox and broken a bucket as it rose. Turning over top center it had twisted down and back so that the buckets following jammed against the halves of it and in their turn broke. Also damage had occurred in the engine room in consequence, but he had no time to waste on figuring out its precise nature, any more than he had breath to answer Carradine.
Quickly but without haste he put in hand the necessary actions: stop larboard engine, turn rudder to compensate, back starboard engine… and even as he gave the orders knew they were not enough. The Nonpareil had been standing too far to the east of the channel and the verge staff at her bow was indexing, like a compass being swung, the degrees of her progress toward a stern-first encounter with the nearest shoal.
“Man, what are you doing?” Carradine raged.
“What I can!”
Parbury snapped back, and the colonel had the tact at last to leave him to his own problems. Once more he scanned the shore with his field glasses as the whim of the wind parted the mist.
From overhead came shouted oaths, and one of the men on the roof called, “Colonel, do you see what I see?”
At that moment the Nonpareil did go aground.
It was a gentle impact. The starboard after portion of her hull slid up the soft gradient of a sandbar so yielding that it did not even warp her rudder, merely absorbed it. But she was carrying a thousand tons on a draught of less than eight feet, and when she groaned to rest she was securely stuck, bows-on to the headland from which the deadly shot had flown.
As unprepared for this as for that, Carradine at least managed not to fall, though his dignity suffered. As soon as he could he rushed out, ordering his men to fire at any fair target.
Parbury was more concerned with the report from his chief engineer. Hiram Burge had worked with him for a long while; they were used to one another, and it took few words to fill out the picture. By jamming the buckets, the cannonball had sprung a crack in the larboard pitman—the tapered wooden bar linking the engine-piston to the paddlewheel crank—and it must be strapped with a metal band.
There came a crackle of shots from the foredeck. Loudly and obscenely Mears and Locket commented that the men below were wasting powder. One of them called to Parbury—he recognized Mears, for this was one of the few soldiers he had spoken with during the voyage—“Captain, do you have a field glass?”
He handed up his own, and they took turns.
Just as Burge was departing Carradine came back, demanding how long it would take to repair and refloat the vessel. Captain and engineer looked at one another.
“Two hours,” said Burge.
“Make it one!” Parbury countered, and Burge flinched, but after a moment shrugged and made to leave.
“No better than that?” said Carradine in dismay.
“No!” Burge spat tobacco juice into the boxful of sawdust which served as a cuspidor. “That’s taking it for granted you stop ‘em shooting their tarnation guns at us!”
Carradine sighed resignedly and turned away.
Again from the roof: “Colonel!” A shriller voice—Locket’s. “Colonel, seems like there ain’t but one man on his feet over there—”
Crash.
The verge staff flew in splinters and bales of cotton joined scraps of dislodged armor plate in creating a chaos of men crying at the tops of their voices, some in agony, some trying to issue orders. The blow had come out of fog. Once more the breeze was drawing its curtain across the river.
Loud from the pilothouse roof, in the tone of someone not prepared to let a minor interruption distract him:
“—and that’s a gawdamn’ nigger!”
Mears chimed in. “Yeah! An’ what chance do we got of knockin’ down a black man in fog at twilight?”
Carradine said harshly, “One man on his feet? Just the one, and him black? And you’re worried about him?”
Leaning over the edge of the roof, Mears gazed into the colonel’s upturned face.
“Given what he just done, sah, I would surely feel less worried if this here steamboat were on the move stead of stuck like a peg to pitch hoss-shoes at.”
A crack from his companion’s rifle, and a curse. “Din’ get him. Tho’t I had him spotted clear, but… Save breath an’ look over yo’ sights!”
Caesar had launched his second shot into mist, trusting to what his ears told him: that the steamer’s two-hundred-foot length was no longer being driven upstream. He was almost too deafened by the report to catch what followed, but sound carried clearly across the water and he detected screams and moans. Chuckling, he set about a third firing.
And was hit in the leg.
At first he didn’t understand what had happened. He thought he had tripped. But the fog was not yet so thick as to make him stumble.
Then pain came, and wetness mingled with it. Blood was streaming from a hole the size of his thumbnail in the front of his thigh. And there was another behind. The ball had passed straight through without, miraculously, touching bone.
For a while he was so distraught by agony he could do no more than shut his eyes and sway back and forth. He realized after a little that he was cursing, and he should rather have been praying.
No! Neither was right. He ought to be staunching that blood!
Feverishly he sought something to make a bandage, and found part of someone’s coat. From it he contrived to rip a piece of cloth long enough to bind his leg.
Whereupon he felt master of his fate again. Those damned rebels weren’t going to get the better of Caesar, proudly called Predulac, who was carrying away from the plantation more than its owners would enjoy after the Union’s victory. They would be denied even the right to use its name… so everybody kept promising.
But his exhilaration was brief. He had lost enough blood to weaken him. With abrupt and fearful clarity he knew he must seize this chance to shoot at the steamer, for there would not be another. He gathered all his forces and began to recite aloud the ritual of the gun drill, as though he were not only himself but Tennice also.
He had dropped the bag of powder he had been about to load. It was incredible how much heavier it had grown in these past few minutes, while as for the twelve-pound ball…
Somehow, though, he got it wadded and rammed, and then staggered around the gun, fumbling for the necessary friction tube… in his pocket, he thought… but the other pocket… and here was one and there it was ready in the vent, and…
It was like being very drunk indeed. Sick-giddy drunk. He detested the sensation from the uttermost depths of his being.
With swimming gaze he looked up and found that fog now hid the steamer altogether. But he had sunk his total resources into loading the gun. He must at least fire it. He tugged the lanyard. At the shock of the explosion his injury betrayed him and he collapsed sidelong on the wet ground.
When he raised his head for the last time before he slumped unconscious, he saw that the fog—like his uniform, and his dead comrades’—was dyed red.
Men with crowbars and mallets forced clear the splintered boarding of the paddlebox. Others with hatchets smashed the broken buckets into fragments and dropped them overside. On the main and boiler decks resounded the cries of those injured by the latest shot.
At least there had not yet been another. Carradine reported that Mears was cautiously prepared to revise his former opinion. Perhaps he had hit the black artilleryman after all.
But Parbury was concerned only to get his beloved vessel under way again.
Fortunately the frame of the wheel was not so badly out of round as to jam, and there were enough spare buckets aboard to replace the damaged ones. As soon as that had been attended to, backwash could be used to erode the bar. That would take time and patience but little skill; even towboat pilots understood the trick of it.
What was going to take longest was making a strap for the pitman, but Burge’s portable forge had been set up and a deckhand was frantically pumping its bellows, while Burge himself was donning the cowhide gauntlets he always wore for any job that involved hot metal.
Parbury saw with relief that, satisfied with the temperature of the coals, he was signaling for bar-iron to be laid on them. So, if within the next hour the fog did not grow impenetrable…
He glanced anxiously upward to see whether it yet veiled the tops of the chimneys, which a whim had led him to have cut in the shape of coronets, and his heart sank like a leadsman’s plumb.
The towering chimneys that reared up ahead of the pilothouse were identical tubes of sheet iron supported by cross-bracing. Each served four boilers, whose furnaces enjoyed a forced draft created by venting spent steam into the base of the chimneys… though now, of course, the fires were being damped down and the relief valves on the boilers set to their lowest. If steam were not regularly bled off there was the danger that a badly packed
joint might spring a leak, or even that a boiler might explode. The boats which ran this river were very fragile.
This second Nonpareil was no exception, for all her speed, her elegance, her ability to carry enormous cargoes on negligible draft, and her tacked-on armor plate. Struck like a skittle by a bowling ball, her larboard chimney broke from its base and fell slantways with a sullen boom and a great crunching of the upperworks. The portion of the deck where Burge was working canted at a sudden crazy angle, opening a gap to the hold. Through it the coals from the forge tumbled in a searing cascade. They fell on wood, and bales of cotton, and stacks of rations that included fat bacon and other greasy meat, and—and…
And boxes of ammunition piled all anyhow.
During the first few seconds before the flames roared up some of the deckhands rushed to try and smother the fire. They found themselves driven back by soldiers. Screaming and yelling, green recruits jumped overboard, abandoning their injured comrades, hoping to make good their own escape in the shallows by the stern. Carradine struggled to delay them, yelling orders that could not outdo the crackle of burning.
Half-choked with fumes, yet still refusing to believe in the doom of his darling, Parbury turned to see what shred of hope remained. If the powder could be dumped before the blaze ignited it—
Too late. It smote him with a red-hot fist.
THE SHOCK OF INDIVIDUAL DISASTER
28TH APRIL 1865
“The cumulative figures of steamboat losses were not generally available, and the data on the comparative risks of stagecoach, sloop and steamboat, even if accurately determined and widely published, would not have materially affected the issue. What aroused public opinion and moved legislative bodies was less the cold calculation of total losses and relative risks than the shock of individual disasters which did not occur at an exotic distance, but frequently at one’s very doorstep. Many were inclined to accept the view of the mid-century observer who declared: ‘The history of steam navigation on the Western rivers is a history of wholesale murder and unintentional suicide.’”