by John Brunner
“Banking everything on Smith and Tacy, is that it?” Parbury countered. “Well, Drew can hire their match at any port along the river! Not that I see why he should. He’s proving himself the champion, and. Ketch and Lamenthe are in there with him. Don’t argue!”—raising one black-gloved hand as he sensed opposition from Woodley. “Barfoot did take over, and I still want to know how much you’re paying him and what with!”
Woodley said sullenly, “It was none of my doing. Hogan came off watch when he wasn’t authorized and left the boat in Barfoot’s charge. I never talked terms with him!”
“You planned to! And if he’s a responsible member of the Guild, as I believe him to be, he won’t have touched that wheel for less than a hundred bucks! Ain’t I right?”
“But we agreed beforehand—”
“Back when we were expecting to be in the lead! And we aren’t, and there’s Tom and Joe waiting to come aboard, and once they hear what’s happened with Zeke, there won’t be any nonsense about ‘looking at the river’—they’ll expect to serve their turn and be paid commensurate!”
“Come now,” Gordon offered bluffly. “In principle we did agree to hiring pilots along the way, and we took the question of paying them for granted.”
Parbury inclined his blind gaze in the financier’s direction. “That’s so. But whereas you may conjure money out of nowhere, most of us have to earn it. Or win it!”
He rose stiffly to his feet.
“I sorely hoped we’d pass the Atchafalaya above Ashport. But that’s not the only straight reach we have today! Between now and sundown we must overtake! I leave it to you exactly when, but I expect it!”
He seized his cane and marched out.
When they were alone, Woodley said to Gordon in a low, fierce tone, “God, but I was a fool to listen to you! If the Atchafalaya does blow up, someone’s bound to connect it with the explosive missing from Whitworth’s bag! There’s no way of preventing that getting around, thanks to Crossall!”
“Tae the de’il wi’ him an’ Whitworth!” Gordon retorted. “Forswear yirsel’, mon—it’ll nae be the furrst time! Ah ne’er spak’ a bluidy wurrd anent sich goings-on, an’ nae mair did ye!”
“What?”
Gordon mastered himself with immense effort. “Lie, man—lie in your teeth! It was all Whitworth’s idea, and nor you nor I was consulted!”
There had been no news about Susannah!
The fact haunted Drew as he wandered about the Atchafalaya, verifying that what Fernand had done in the five-mile straight had not caused detectable damage. It was sheer good fortune (and echoes of his temporary belief in charms resonated in his head) but it was true.
And to think that a pupil of his had come up with a notion his teacher could never have conceived!
Risky? Well—yes, hideously so! But if the next generation was to build on the experience of the past, what else should one ask for?
Better that than some pious fool mumbling over his prayerbook… as Jacob had mumbled over his records of wins and losses at the gaming tables.
Drew started. How long was it since he had thought about that? When obliged to visit the asylum, he had barely paid attention to the charts and tables, so carefully compiled, which in the grip of syphilis Jacob believed held the secret of forever winning. Then, Jacob’s children had been too young to accompany him or their mother and see the straits their father was reduced to.
It was as well…
Oh, how could Susannah have married such a hollow person, bedded with him, borne him children?
But in those days, a sniggering demonic voice reminded him, you too thought he was a great man!
True, alas! True!
In that instant he could have wished his life as simple as Cherouen’s, for the doctor was so convinced of his power to heal, he cared not a whit for the damage he was doing to himself by drinking all day and half the night. Relying, perhaps, on the effect of his electrical machines when the strain grew too great?
Or, indeed, as Barber’s—and that was a first! Until this moment he had never thought of Barber as leading an enviable existence. At best he had thought of it as easier than his own, but one might have said the same about, for example, Edouard Marocain, who so completely comprehended the virtues and vices of his customers, who reigned over a private empire whose subjects he knew personally and individually—
Wait! Was that why Fernand had adapted so superbly to the enclosed world of a steamboat?
It could well be.
And if that were so, then…
I have a son.
The idea had long hovered at the edge of Drew’s mind. Only now, when he was reflecting on the brilliant coup Fernand had brought off, did it come sharply into focus. The invitation Fernand had extended, that he be not only best man at his wedding but also godfather to their firstborn, had awoken just those dormant emotions that he felt when with Susannah and her children.
Susannah, who was sick and nigh to death!
Confusion threatened. He resolved once more to cable from the next available port; it must be Hickman, this afternoon. There was a telegraph office there, and even—now—a railroad depot.
He was roused from his brown study by the sound of the Atchafalaya’s whistle saluting an oncoming steamer. She was, he knew the moment he set eyes on her, the Bella Brawle: 190 feet, sternwheeler, in short trades between Cairo and Vicksburg.
And cursed his knowledge. What would he not have given to be on the path of discovery again, like Fernand now? When all was stale—
So what must Parbury be feeling, whose son had been stolen by disease and who had never had the chance to make good his loss save by creating what he believed to be the finest steamer on the river?
Except she was being denied the chance to prove it.
Then he was being assailed by passengers who wanted to compliment him on eluding this morning’s challenge. As best he could, Drew made conversation, all the time thinking how readily, had he been Parbury, he would have swapped this victory for possession of a son as smart as Fernand.
It was no longer reassuring for Parbury to stand on the foredeck of the Nonpareil and feel the spray.
The sun’s heat burned his face. The water drops solaced that. They could do nothing to salve the hatred in his soul for the pilot who had cheated him today. A man smutched by the taint of slavery, whose ancestors would have been—had the war not happened—kin to those the Parburys might have bought and set to work on their farm!
Except the Mississippi had washed the land away…
He drew a rasping breath and admitted to himself that owning slaves and a plantation had never been chief among his ambitions. What was making him so bitter was Dorcas.
Who, so they told him, was both colored and deceitful.
A chance combination of words fell into place, and he touched the bandage across his eyes.
Had she thought about the colors of the bandanna Whitworth had described—a man he had never taken a liking to? Or had she been so simple and unaffected that she thought only about how grateful silk might be on raw skin?
There was little sensation left where his flesh had been beset by flame; his fingertips said so when he dared explore that portion of his face, and he took the fact as a parable of his condition.
Never mind that, then! How could Dorcas have known? She had never touched him there.
What right did he have to read into her actions more than she intended? At his age he was already separated from all females save one—and not his wife.
The “she” in his life was the Nonpareil.
Conceivably—here he hesitated—conceivably he had betrayed her, then. By not devoting his whole attention to her, he had been guilty of unfaithfulness.
Dorcas? She was none of his creation; she was a servant, and slaves had been abolished, so he had no control over what she did with her life or her emotions. She might feel a certain kindness for him, but if she chose to marry one of her own kind, especially one who was prov
ing his skill with every mile of this race…
Here the confusion in Parbury’s mind became total.
Hungry he was for the touch of smooth young skin, warm against his own.
Yet his self was committed elsewhere, irrevocably. Into the Nonpareil he had poured his heart, his soul, his power to love. He could never have loved Dorcas, and in this moment of near-defeat he recognized the fact.
His son he could have loved. And in a complex, wordless way this boat had become his son, his wife, his mistress.
Nothing mattered more to him in all the world than that she triumph.
All that fine hot Sunday the Atchafalaya led and the Nonpareil strove vainly to catch up. Noon saw the champion at risk again, for above Point Pleasant there was a seven-mile reach marred only by a few sandbars, while after the horseshoe bend at New Madrid another such would carry them southerly to the famous Island 10, whose Confederate batteries the Union ironclad Carondelet had defied in one of the war’s outstanding feats. So little was left of it now, one might imagine that the terrible pounding it had later taken from mortar-boats had smashed it down to water-level. But no effort of puny humanity could match the power and patience of the river.
In both these reaches the Nonpareil gained ground, and each time it was not enough. As soon as she entered a bend, she was obliged to slow far more than the Atchafalaya, having burned enough coal to make her overlight again. During his next watch Barfoot’s lack of experience in handling her betrayed him, and he ran her ignominiously aground, which cost still more precious time.
But lightness could not be the sole reason for her failure to come ahead strong. In the first reach she gained ten minutes, and lost five in the New Madrid horseshoe; in the second she gained only five, though it was the longer, and lost them again rounding Island 10.
She was being held back. A steam leak? It seemed likely! Jubilant, those aboard the Atchafalaya waved madly at the watchers who, here as everywhere, had mustered to witness what might be the last of the great river races.
Those who launched boats did so at their peril; Drew was not inclined to slow for lesser craft again. Blast after blast on the steam whistle sent up huge white plumes into the clear air, and, given due warning, they made way.
At Hickman, Kentucky, the entire population seemed to have turned out, but when the Atchafalaya thundered past in midafternoon, they were rewarded with little more than a glimpse of her. She was racing at her maximum, packing eighteen and even nineteen miles into each hour. Whereas the Nonpareil…
It was possible to calculate the pursuing boat’s velocity by noting, with field glasses, when her smoke altered direction for bends or known hazards. In the pilothouse with Tyburn, Drew did exactly that.
And was astonished. The Nonpareil, theoretically capable of twenty miles per hour, was making more like sixteen!
“If you ask me,” the captain said softly as he announced this fact, “Fernand did more damage with that trick of his than we could have guessed.”
“More than just a broken rudder rope,” Tyburn agreed with a nod. “We’re gaining on her now, that’s for sure. But if it’s so, won’t they argue to cancel all bets?”
“Let ‘em try,” Drew returned grimly. He had the satisfaction of knowing he had done what he could to get a message to Susannah: cast a note overboard wrapped in oilcloth and tied to a chunk of wood, along with enough money to cover the telegraph fee, and seen it picked up by a man in a rowboat who shouted his promise to take care of the matter. He went on: “I’ll lay they weren’t talking in such terms when they tried to cheat by starting ahead of us, then trapped us in their wake when we might have overtaken. Far as I’m concerned, the first one away had a chance to make the rules, and if they chose not to play it fair, that’s their lookout!”
He added after a pause, “But I’d dearly love to know what’s holding her back!”
What Fernand had done hadn’t helped. But that was not the root cause of the Nonpareil’s trouble.
Earlier, Caesar had striven to sleep on regardless of the singing around him, until the far noisier band drowned it out. Opening his eyes in annoyance, he discovered Josephine nearby. When the song was over she said to him, “Come to me in New Orleans and I’ll make you another bag, better than the one before.”
And that was when the problems began. A messenger came to summon him back to work. Despite stinging eyes, foul mouth, and grumbling belly, Caesar judged it best to obey.
She called after him, “It’s time for me to make myself known!”
He had no chance to wonder about that. As soon as he arrived in the engineroom, it was plain what had gone wrong. Two joints at once were starting to leak, one on either side, and neither was more urgent than the other. Cursing, because his old wound was paining him and his bad teeth kept issuing little twinges of warning, Caesar grabbed a wrench and set about tackling the nearer, with Roy’s help, while Corkran and the other man who had been sent for dealt with the other.
“What’s she look like, Caesar?” Roy grunted.
“Looks like we ought to open her right up and braze a collar on the pipe.”
“Right, or she may split lengthwise.” Roy wiped his sweating forehead; he was so grimy now, as were the other white engineers, a casual glance would not have told them from their colored helpers. “But we aren’t going to be allowed to. We just got to slack and pack again.”
“Even binding it with wire would help,” Caesar offered after a moment’s reflection.
“Yeah, that’s sound. Then we can run some solder over it, at least. Tighten it as much as you can. I’ll speak to Peter.”
Aching with fatigue, deafened by the noise, dehydrated by the heat, Caesar was nonetheless comparatively happy as he leaned his weight on the wrench. To have been asked for his opinion, rather than just given an order: it was a breakthrough.
Not that he had ever used the trick he had just proposed. At the sugar mill, or driving his crane, he had always had the time to stop and make repairs.
Shortly Roy was back, grimacing.
“Peter says we don’t get a chance to cut steam to either wheel before the New Madrid bend, and that’s a starboard one. Then we got the best part of ten miles before we can slow in the Island Ten bend, on the larboard.”
“I guess we better pray,” Caesar said, and to his surprise Roy gave a laugh—short and dry, but a laugh.
“Yeah, or otherwise Parbury will visit us with wrath from on high! But we got to warn the pilot anyhow, to take it easy less’n he wants us boiled alive!”
Two days and twenty-one hours into the race, the Atchafalaya had covered a thousand miles.
The Nonpareil was falling behind: the gap widened to thirty minutes again, thirty-five, forty… Despondency reigned, though Woodley and Gordon preserved an air of optimism.
And considered whether they should share their secret with Parbury, and concluded not. Were he to discover what they had empowered Whitworth to do, he would take them to small pieces with his bare hands, blind or no.
Besides, if anybody made the matter public…
They thought of Joel; they thought of Anthony, and Auberon and Josephine; they shivered in the hot air as they wondered how well Whitworth could hold his tongue.
During the bone-shaking ride which occupied most of this baking-hot Sunday Joel’s thoughts harked back constantly to his first meeting with Gordon. How right he had been to vaunt the comfort of steamboats!
But also how right those people had been who spoke of the American obsession with speed. This railroad journey was going to bring him and Whitworth to Cairo a good three hours ahead of even the Atchafalaya, and he was prepared to believe that had it been only three minutes there would still have been a plethora of customers.
Whitworth, in expansive mood, talked a lot about the great drought of 1860, which was when the railroads first began to bite at the cherry of southwestern trade, because the steamers were often unable to complete a scheduled run thanks to the low water level. It had be
en obvious from the start that he had no special attachment to the river which had given him most of his livelihood; indeed, he dropped hints about a far more profitable job selling some new invention from back east.
Explosives?
But there was never any chance of probing the subject. The moment they overheard talk about the steamer race, their seat neighbors had joined in: drummers, men on the move in search of work, a couple of preachers, someone who claimed merely to be looking over the lay of the land but whose shabby-genteel manner suggested he might be one of those all-too-common phenomena in the younger states of the nation, a black sheep expelled by a wealthy but excessively respectable eastern family.
Slower or faster, there was no doubt which type of transportation held the imagination of the public. Two of the drummers had even placed bets: luckily for them, in favor of the Atchafalaya.
Or were they so lucky? They began to doubt it when Whitworth spoke slightingly of her as too old and certain to be overstressed before reaching St. Louis. Why, it wouldn’t in the least surprise him, he declared, were she to burst a boiler trying to outrun the newer vessel!
“I know Drew for a penny pincher!” he concluded. “And remember, his last boat was condemned!”
What manner of man could be guilty of such infamy as to blow up a steamer? Joel listened in bafflement. Who had the soulless greed to abet the plan? Or was it entirely his?
Reflection indicated that it might be. The more he observed his unexpected traveling companion, the more he realized he was a very strange person: nervy, high-strung, constantly on the border of outright agitation. When he wasn’t actually smoking, he generally was chewing on an unlit panatela. Thinking to lower the man’s defenses, Joel again produced the whiskey he had brought. But Whitworth declined, preferring coffee, of which he drank all he could obtain, or, failing that, one of the syrup-and-soda drinks vended during the train’s brief stops by salesmen prosperous enough to own ice-making machines.