by John Brunner
Contemptuously Whitworth said, “I guess a few of the firemen might catch it.”
“Would the boat sink?”
“Oh, sure! What the hell else would you expect?” Aware of his temporary ascendancy, Whitworth was determined to enjoy it. “Take Drew with her—and his nigger pilot, with luck!”
The Nonpareil was being obliged to creep around the towboat like Parbury fumbling across a strange room. This was no way for the challenger in the greatest steamer race of the century to be acting!
Almost choking, Gordon forced out, “Then do it, damn you! And I’ll be glad to my dying day that it was you, not me, who thought of it.”
“You’ll feel differently when you collect your winnings,” Whitworth said serenely. Drunk on power, he turned away and began to work out how he could convincingly strand himself on a Memphis coal flat.
“Ah, Captain!” Cherouen exclaimed as he came on Drew, staff tucked under his arm, at the stern rail of the Atchafalaya’s hurricane deck. “How are we doing today?”
Unhurriedly Drew completed his current business, which was to bite off a fresh chaw.
“Thus far,” he said at length, “we are comfortably ahead of the best time for the distance, which is our own. Will that suffice?”
“And she continues to run well?”
“Dr. Cherouen,” Drew said meditatively, “I don’t know too much about the practice of medicine, but I did hear tell that by listening to the noises a body makes, you can figure out whether the lungs and belly are working right.”
“That’s what a stethoscope is used for,” Cherouen said stiffly.
“That’s the term. Matter of fact…” Drew turned with one elbow on the rail and looked directly at his interlocutor. “Matter of fact, it was this here Dr. Larzenac who told me the way of it. Showed me, too, to pass the time when we were just about in this stretch here. The second full day of the run is always kind of monotonous. Time hangs heavy.”
The first gob of juice was ready; he aimed carefully to leeward and let go, then resumed.
“Said it was one of his countrymen that invented the gadget. A Dr.—Lannic, would it be?”
“Laënnec,” Cherouen said reluctantly. “René Laënnec.”
“That’s right. And I thought then what I’m thinking right now.”
“Which is—?”
“Which is how odd it is for a doctor to have to ask me whether my boat continues to run well!” Drew straightened, eyes flashing. “You ought to realize, sir, that I not only hear but feel the very vibration of the engines, which is the heartbeat of the vessel. The least cry from the wheels, the faintest irregularity, will alarm me, awake or asleep, as a mother can sleep through the racket of a thunderstorm yet waken to the whimper of her child!”
“I wouldn’t doubt that for an instant,” Cherouen said, as though amazed to be challenged so brusquely after what he had intended to be a friendly opening. “A stethoscope, after all, is a means to magnify just that faint irregularity”—he stressed the word to emphasize that he was echoing it—“which a trained observer would already have identified within his own organism.”
“You mean to imply that someone who pays as much attention as I do to the operation of a steamer might equally learn to attend to malfunctions in his breathing or digestion?”
“I do indeed and would argue beyond it. Have you ever been subjected to a sphygmomanometer? Did your precious Dr. Larzenac possess one? Did he keep his hand in by measuring the blood pressure of your crew?”
Drew was for once taken aback and let it show. Cherouen smiled.
“I suspected as much. This is a simple enough device, as easy to comprehend as the—well, the steam-pressure gauges which I saw when you called me to help your engineer. I propose to inspect his burn again this morning, by the way, and change his dressings, though I admit that until I have all my equipment set up I can’t do half what I would wish to.”
“A pressure gauge for people?” Drew hazarded.
“Why, yes. An example of the way in which medicine is making true progress. One binds a cuff around a limb—the upper arm is convenient—and, after inflating it with a simple air pump, reads off the pressure of the blood in inches of mercury, and this is informative, since there is a limit to the elasticity of veins and arteries, just as there is to the rigidity of the pipes and tubing in your steam engine.”
“Ah, Captain!”
The call came from Fernand. Freshly shaved, spotlessly clad, he was approaching along the deck, ignoring passengers who would have liked to question him.
“What are you doing here?” Drew growled. “You need another hour’s rest before you take the wheel again! Else you’ll be a candidate for this new medical device I was just hearing about! Did I understand it correctly?”—glancing at Cherouen. “You run yourself too hard, high pressure builds up, and you get the counterpart of a boiler explosion?”
“Very good!” Cherouen said with the slightest possible hint of patronization. “Except the burst is most likely to occur in that most precious and most fragile of our organs—to wit, the brain. Where it may lead to paralysis and death!”
Fernand, not understanding, blinked at each of them in turn.
“To sum it up, young man,” Drew said heavily, “don’t overdo things or you’ll wear yourself out before your time! But to be honest, Doctor, right now I have no special worries concerning my protégé. Nor need you have, despite your views about African blood! I never had a better pilot under me than Fernand here, and I only wish he would rest more and spend less time fretting. I’ll make a guess about what’s roused you, and it’s not your fiancée!”
Fernand gave a grin. “Captain, you must have read my mind! No, I’m at ease about Dorcas. I shall join her directly, but she’s talking with my mother, and they get on fine, so that’s one of the married man’s worst problems taken care of. I only wanted to know what we shall do at Cairo when we have to put off passengers.”
Cherouen started. “I understand we set out without any commitment to ports other than St. Louis!”
“I just talked with Mr. Motley,” Fernand said. “For the chance of being aboard a racing boat, several people said they would come along anyway. Grant is making out a list of those who changed their minds and want to be transferred for Louisville.”
Drew chuckled.
“Tell him to cable his list from Memphis to Cairo, attention of the master of the Luke S. Thrale. Won’t cost him more’n an hour or two to cross us south of Island Number 1. And he’s expecting some such message.”
Fernand gave an exaggerated shrug and turned to Cherouen.
“I did hear you had doubts about coming with us, particularly when the Nonpareil got away first. I suspect you don’t anymore! Excuse me!”
And he spun on his heel and strode away.
“You had doubts about me too,” Cherouen said after a pause.
“I didn’t say that,” Drew growled. “If I had, would I have invited you to attend my sister-in-law?”
“Oh, I’m used to it,” Cherouen said, unable to resist the impulse to preen a little; he was conscious of gaining a kind of victory over Drew. Especially since he had committed the error of admitting how much he depended on his nurse, who was aboard the rival boat, he had been looking for a chance to mend his fences in this fashion. “During the war, particularly, my ideas were often overruled by bigoted officers still stuck in the mud of fifty years ago… By the way, has there been news of the lady?”
“Not yet,” Drew admitted gruffly. “But I hope to find a cable at Memphis or even Helena.”
“I trust the news will be excellent. If not, you know you may rely on me to bring to bear the best of modern scientific aids. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time for an eye-opener.”
He sketched a bow and made for the cabin.
On his own, Drew pondered dismally whether he was ever likely to learn to make accurate judgments about people. He had decided to dislike Cherouen; yet here he was talking calmly an
d reasonably, displaying a level of knowledge comparable to, say, a skilled engineer’s. And all his working life Drew had been used to the fact that in any steamer’s engineroom one might find a foul-mouthed unqualified unpopular shabby dirty man capable of improvising in an emergency and saving the day. Draw out someone like that on any subject but his own, and one could easily get a false impression…
Yet a suspicion lingered. For all this smart talk about a human body being like a steam engine, a vein was not a copper pipe. A belly was not a furnace. A heart was no mere pump, and the brain not a pilothouse!
To fix a fault aboard a steamer, you took mallets and crowbars and wrenches and bar-stock iron and fired up a forge and chopped away spoiled parts and hammered and nailed and brazed new ones into position. Even if the body did emit signals that could be converted into a height of mercury, like reading the approach of a storm off a barometer, the analogy did not automatically follow. A chart of the Mississippi was not the river itself, nor could any number of years of study substitute for direct experience. How could Fernand have learned in his clerkly role what he now comprehended about steamer operation?
Even Motley, on Fernand’s testimony, had overlooked what Drew had assumed the rest of his officers would take for granted: that he must be a step ahead and thinking about precautions that might aid them in the race…
Yet why should they? Why would any of them do so when none of the Atchafalayas had raced before? When he himself had never stood to win or lose a bet on any boat he was commanding?
When, moreover, he himself had been haunted night-long by the suspicion that things were going altogether too well?
This inability to guess what people around him would think or feel was Drew’s longest-standing fault, and he knew it by now—or should. Had he not experienced a powerful lesson when he was driven into partnership with Barber, at first hating him, then growing to be grateful against his will and ultimately realizing that within his own narrow world the man had a code of honor—not everybody’s, but at least consistent upon its own terms?
Even so…
Suddenly Drew chuckled, struck by a recollected passage from William Cowper. He recited it to himself, well pleased:
“I would not enter on my list of friends
(Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.”
Yes, that would categorize Barber very nicely.
And—speak of the devil! Here came not the man himself, but his bodyguard Jones, stiffly smart in his livery despite the intense heat. Drew sighed.
“Morning, Captain! Mr. Barber’s compliments, and could you have a word with him?”
For a second Drew was tempted to say that if Barber wanted to talk to him, he could come in person. He thought better of it. He was no longer the person he had been when the last Atchafalaya was condemned. He was learning how to unbend.
And compromised.
Taking out his watch, he consulted it before answering. “Very well, provided it’s only for a moment. I want to make my rounds and get up to the pilothouse.”
Barber, plumply cheerful at the morning’s news, beamed at Drew on his appearance in the cabin. He had breakfasted well, as ever, and now had returned to a position near the bar. He proposed buying the captain a drink, knowing it would be refused; that formality disposed of, he said, “Several of us would like to know whether—so long as we keep the lead—we shall make any special attempt to break further records on this trip.”
“So you can make more bets?” Drew said after a pause.
Barber inclined his head.
“No, sir!” was Drew’s retort. “It’s enough to be well ahead of our previous time over the whole distance. The longer we run, the greater the risk of mishap. Simply to cut the time from Greenville to Helena, or Memphis to Cairo, set by fresh boats which were in the short local trades, would be pointless. Of course, I’m not saying we shan’t do it! Right now the Atchafalaya is running as sweetly as she ever did. I was telling Dr. Cherouen so a while back.”
All the time he was talking, he was acutely aware that everybody in the cabin was straining to catch his words.
“But I’d be a fool, and a bad commander, if I overstrained her now!” he concluded.
“I told my friends that would be your view, and I’m glad to have it confirmed,” Barber said. “There’s no use in tempting fate. The way I understand it, today’s run is mostly along the portion of the river where bends succeed bends, and sheer superiority in speed is as nothing compared with skillful piloting. Am I correct?”
“You are perfectly correct!”
“Then you’ve set my mind at ease, and I thank you. Are you sure you won’t…?”—with a wave at the bar.
“I have too much at stake, remember,” Drew said dryly, and with a touch of his cap to the passengers marched away.
But he had told Barber less than the whole truth.
He did indeed hope to shave every record for the rest of the trip. It merely galled him to think that gamblers would make unearned money from his efforts, and those of his pilots and engineers… come to that, his firemen.
Nothing as trivial as money was involved. What concerned him was the fate of Susannah. He had expected news at Greenville, perhaps even at Vicksburg. There had been none, and he trusted his agents in both those cities.
If nothing was to hand at Helena, he must send a cable of his own, requiring a reply at Memphis, copied to Cairo.
He wanted to hurry, if only to give himself insufficient time to disbelieve again in Cherouen’s ability.
“It’s no damn good!” Hogan muttered under his breath at the next change of watch aboard the Nonpareil. “Chain wagon or not, it’s no damn good!”
Both Trumbull and—more violently—Parbury, who was now almost shaking with fatigue, reacted as though they had been given an electric shock.
“What the hell do you mean?” demanded the latter.
“I mean we’re running fine so long as we’re running heavy! But every ounce of coal we burn, we lighten her, and… Oh, hell! You’ve felt it! You can feel it through the soles of your boots!”
After a pause Trumbull said, “I guess I have to agree. I wish I needn’t. But—”
Parbury was on his feet abruptly, towering over them. “But we coaled-up at Greenville!” he exclaimed.
The pilots exchanged glances. Hogan said at length, “I know, sir. But we already burned away so much of our edge. We got to be heavy in a good long reach. Then we can surely overtake.”
One could almost hear Parbury’s brain at work as he mentally surveyed the river, not in any fashion that a mapmaker could have understood. He said, “Past Napoleon—”
“Oh, sure!” Hogan cut in. “There’s a plenty of ‘em! All with bends between where we lose ground!”
“Are you giving up?” Parbury demanded.
“No! Course not! Only—”
Trumbull cut in. “If we ran heavier beyond Napoleon, we could take advantage of such reaches as there are.”
The idea was clear in an instant. There was no doubt in any of their minds that along a dead-straight course the Nonpareil was faster than the Atchafalaya.
Probably Drew would not dispute it, either. But it was a question of entering a long reach close enough behind the other boat to prove the point.
“It makes sense to me!” Parbury rasped. “Next town we pass that has a telegraph office, send the necessary message!”
“Surely Mr. Woodley—” Trumbull said, as a matter of form.
“The hell with him, and Gordon too! You’re right, damn it! If we’re no further behind by the time we reach Napoleon, the extra weight will see us quicker in the bends!”
He concluded in a chilly, bitter tone: “That is, if we don’t lose as much time in the coaling as we hope to gain.”
The pilots exchanged glances, Hogan’s as much as to say, “Sounds like he’s clutching at a straw!”
And Trumbull’s: “Aren’t we all? And can you think of any better idea?”
It was settled.
“Fernand!” Dorcas jumped to her feet in high excitement.
“At last!”
“Sit down!” Fernand exclaimed, and eased her back into her chair with maximal solicitude. Overnight, news reports had made their way upriver faster than the racing boats, and one paper had been sent aboard at Greenville; from it he had learned that the Nonpareil’s first setback was due to the need to send ashore “a lady in an interesting condition,” and he had absolutely no wish to find the same happening to the Atchafalaya.
Given the circumstances under which he had first met Dorcas, it was a very reasonable kind of apprehension…
“Forgive her,” Eulalie smiled. “But, as I’ve learned, she is very devoted to you, Fernand.”
“Even so, she must take great care of herself!” he declared, and glanced around for fear of being overheard. As before, however, the two women were well away from everybody else.
“Don’t worry,” Eulalie said. “You may rely on me for that.”
“Thank you. Thank you very much.” Fernand wiped his forehead with his kerchief; the weather was dreadfully hot. “In fact,” he added, remembering his purpose, “I do have to make haste up to the pilothouse. But I came to assure you that if you don’t mind eating somewhat later than usual, I can keep my promise to join you.”
“Oh, wonderful!” Dorcas exclaimed. “Is yours a very difficult task today? Hereabouts the river winds, but it is very wide, isn’t it?”
Delighted by such a perceptive question—and not a little by the chance to impress by talking shop—Fernand said, “Oh, that may be how it looks to the untrained eye, but I assure you it’s not so simple! Where the river’s wide, it’s also shallow. Where it’s shallow it flows sluggishly—which helps a boat making upstream, naturally, but also allows the deposit of silt.”
Dorcas looked at him uncertainly.
“The fine grains of earth and dust which the river picks up in its higher reaches,” Fernand amplified. “Tiny in themselves, but when you multiply them by countless millions, they create bars and reefs and eventually towheads, that’s to say bars with trees starting to grow on them. If sufficient time passes without a major flood, the tree roots bind the new soil and make it resistant to the water; then the next flood has to find a fresh channel. Which is why from season to season we always have to feel our course carefully. Last year’s channel may be silted up; last year’s headland may be this year’s cutoff.”