by John Brunner
A steamboat whistle in the dark, resounding, organ-rich.
Exactly at the instant when he was discharging, he realized what that noise implied: so loud, so close, so unbelievable.
The Nonpareil was still running!
“My love, I’ve disappointed you!”
For a long moment he didn’t register the words, being caught up by the terrible knowledge that some pilot, out of those aboard the Nonpareil, was working a miracle—or was it merely that he was more patient, or that the fog had temporarily blown aside, or…?
“Never!” he exclaimed and kissed her lips. “But listen! Hear that noise?”
She nodded fearfully, rising on one elbow as he parted from her.
“I don’t believe it,” he muttered. “But I’ve got to check it out.”
“What?”
“That whistle is the Nonpareil’s, and despite the fog she’s going to overtake!”
He struggled into his clothes again, cursing as he found them entangled with hers which he had spilled off the bed in the fury of their coupling. And added, “Dorcas, I love you terribly! But if we’re to be married—”
“If?”
A single cold word, like a wall between them.
“I mean, if when we’re married we’re to have a house like I want to give you, and servants, and a nurse to tend our children, and all the luxury I’ve dreamed of giving my wife—”
No! Wrong! Hastily backtracking again: “Isn’t it better to be married to the pilot of a winning boat?”
“I don’t care,” she said passionately. “I want you here beside me, in my bed! Win or lose, I want you!”
“And I love you for it,” he said, planting a final kiss on her forehead. “So I want to make you the bride of a winning pilot! Think of it as the best gift I can bring you at our wedding!”
That was the proper note. She smiled, and caught his hand and kissed the palm, and let him go before sinking back with a sigh of vast contentment.
Fernand was barely in time when he stole back into the long, mist-wreathed cabin. He was far from the only person on board to have realized what the sound of the Nonpareil’s whistle implied. Fortunately, before anyone appeared who might have observed him emerging from Dorcas’s stateroom, he was able to slip out of the rearmost exit as though doing no more than take a short cut.
But the fog was so dense, he could only hear, not see, those who had preceded him. He called out. Eli Gross and David Grant answered.
“Is that Mr. Lamenthe?”
“Yes!” He approached them; they loomed like ghosts in the dimness.
“I was making my last round before turning in,” Gross explained. “And what I heard—well, you heard it too! How do you account for it?”
The question was echoed by Joel Siskin: as one might have expected, Fernand reflected sourly, given his reportorial instincts. Here he came, stumbling and fumbling along the deck.
“Either there’s a genius aboard,” Fernand said positively as he listened to what could now clearly be heard, the plop-plop of the Nonpareil’s paddles at something less than dead slow, “or else one of her pilots has gone crazy!”
“Crazy!” a voice barked from somewhere beyond seeing. “Then I wish he’d bite you or Ketch!”
And Drew arrived to join them, still rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“I heard that!” Tyburn rumbled, and he too descended from the texas. “I was dropping off, and that noise woke me, and I thought, ‘The fog must have blown away!’ What do I find?” He made a gesture eloquent of disgust.
Now Motley and Wills appeared, dressing gowns over their nightwear, slippers on their feet. Stinking still of coal fumes and hot oil, Fonck and O’Dowd turned out also.
The former said in a low tone to Drew, “Cap’n, I’m worried about Walt. I think his burns are going septic. He’s running a fever and starting to talk nonsense. Any chance of routing out the Electric Doctor?”—this last with a fine touch of sarcasm.
“Quiet! Ask again in a minute!” Drew replied.
And they obeyed, as did the few passengers who were alert enough to react to the situation. Cherouen and Barber were not among them; judging by the state they had gone to bed in, they would sleep soundly until morning.
The fog remained just as thick. It would have salved the pride and conscience of Fernand, and Tyburn, and Drew as well, had it lifted while the Atchafalaya was still tied up. That was not to be. Instead, the cries from the Nonpareil’s leadsmen grew perfectly audible, and the plash-plop of those forty-three-foot wheels continued to become more distinct, yet the fog was as impervious as ever.
“For God’s sake!” Drew exploded suddenly. “If they can do it, why can’t we? Mr. Tyburn, back to the pilothouse! Fernand, you tell the mates to muster their leadsmen again! Get below on the double, Dutch!”
There was a long moment during which nobody moved to comply. Then, against his will, David laughed. Sensing Drew’s glare bent on him, he forced out by way of apology, “Double Dutch!”
Tyburn ignored that interruption. He said, “With all respect, Cap’n, I won’t attempt to back her off. The Nonpareil’s too close. We’d collide!”
Infinitely relieved, Fernand said firmly, “I have to agree with Mr. Tyburn, sir.”
“But—” Drew expostulated, and Tyburn cut him short.
“Cap’n, they already pressed their luck too far. They’ll be aground before this fog lifts! We’ll be in a better position to overtake as soon as that happens!”
And as though to prove him a prophet, there was a sudden interruption in the beat of the Nonpareil’s wheels; they had struck mud yet again. The leadsmen’s cries had reached fever pitch just before; now they turned to curses.
Drew heaved a vast sigh. Turning away, he said, “Yeah, I guess you have to be right. Nobody but a fool or a madman would have gone on running in this murk. Say, where’s Walt? I guess I should have a sight of the poor devil.”
“I’ll take you to him, sir,” Fonck answered, and led the way.
Nonetheless Joel, with Fernand, Tyburn and the other officers, remained on the afterdeck, staring with aching eyes into the fog.
And they were there to hear the Nonpareil pull free, and the leadsmen’s cries resume, and her wheels turn anew.
Suddenly, Tyburn said, “If I didn’t know it was impossible…”
“What?” Fernand snapped.
“Once, way back before the war,” Tyburn said after a further pause, “I heard the old Nonpareil pulling loose after she ran aground. I was on the Reuben Corner—a tub if ever there was one. But we thought we could overtake for once, and so we set about trying, but before we caught up, the Nonpareil was free and running clear again. That was at night, but not in fog.”
“And—?” The question came from David Grant, pushing between his senior colleagues.
“And,” Tyburn said with deliberation, “after a while you learn to tell a pilot’s style. That’s Parbury’s!”
“A blind man?” Joel burst out. “You’re saying a blind man is at the helm of the Nonpareil?”
“Listen and I’ll tell you a story,” Tyburn said, as the Nonpareil’s sound drew ever closer, and abreast, and then began to fade again—proof of his shrewd judgment in refusing to back the Atchafalaya for fear of collision.
Yet never was there any visual sign of her—no glimmer of fire baskets, no torches, no lanterns—only the gray wavering of the fog.
“What need would a blind man have of light?” said Tyburn, and retailed his story to the mix of officers and passengers who had by now gathered on the afterdeck.
“You got to figure you’re bringing one of the New Orleans passenger packets down past Helena, and it’s a dismal, drizzly night—not foggy, but kind of misty, and the crossing is particularly tangled, which you have to make above the town to meet your wharf boat. Also you have a miserly devil for a captain, and he’s hired the one pilot you would most like not to be partners with, for he has a reputation. When he’s exercised about anything, they say, he walks in hi
s sleep.
“So far this trip, however, you’ve been convinced it’s all foofaraw. This man stays in his bed for his due time, reports to keep his watch, behaves normally in all respects. So when the pilothouse door creeps open without a smidgin of light just as you’re on the verge of despair, and this character says, ‘I’ll take her, for I’ve seen this crossing since you made it last,’ you’re overjoyed.
“And all the more when he works into invisible marks and scrapes through in shoal water you’d have avoided like plague, takes her over a reef where you can feel the underside of the hull grinding, delivering her safe and sound into the proper course for Helena. So you say, ‘Well done! Amazing! I thought I knew how to steer a steamboat and you showed me I was mistaken! I’ll go rout out the texas tender and get him to fix us both some coffee!’
“And then, just as you’re coming back from the texas deck with hot coffee and maybe a slice of pie, comes by the watchman, who says, ‘Who’s at the wheel?’
“ ‘Why,’ you say, ‘I left it in the charge of Mr.—what’s his-name!’
“ ‘Then why,’ inquires the watchman, ‘is he tightrope-walking on the forward rail?’
“And that was so. Fast asleep, he had quit the pilot house and set about demonstrating his circus act, while this fine steamer went whistling down the middle of the channel at her own sweet will, en route to a collision with the wharf that would have scattered passengers and cargo for a mile each way. And yet the man I had the story from said, ‘If he could do such daisy piloting asleep, what couldn’t he have done if he were… dead?’”
Concluding somberly: “What use is eyesight, anyhow, in fog like this?”
There was a pause, silent save for the noise of the Nonpareil receding on a dead-slow bell and the cries of wild birds disturbed from their roosts. It was night now, full night, and the world would have preferred to be asleep, save for nocturnal predators.
And was not one of them the Nonpareil, thieving what had looked like certain victory from the Atchafalaya?
At last Fernand gave a harsh dry laugh.
“Drew told me that story while we were standing watch together back when I was a cub! I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now!”
Joel stepped forward, and the movement fixed all eyes on him. He said, “I heard it too, when I was first covering river news. It was told me by a pilot who felt that outsiders, like reporters, must not be party to the reality of the Mississippi.
“But now I’ve traveled this amazing river, I believe! I’d believe in ghosts and phantoms, and corpses rising from the mud, and haunted barrels and the rest of it! For I know what I’ve been witnessing, and nobody on earth will make me change my mind! On Mr. Tyburn’s say-so, I believe a blind pilot overtook us! For if not Parbury, then who?”
“Then nobody,” said a chill voice, and Drew stepped back into the limited circle of vision that the fog permitted.
They all shrank back as though he were one of the phantoms Joel had just been talking about.
“How’s Walt?” Wills asked, striving to break the tension.
“Oh—sick!” Drew said, and brushed the inquiry aside. “But he’s young and fit, and he’ll recover. Unlike my dear one who died yesterday…”
Embarrassed glances were exchanged. Drew having hidden away immediately he learned the news, none among them except Fernand had yet had a chance to express proper sympathy.
But the captain was in no mood for it anyway.
“No!” Drew continued, striding toward the rail from which, had the air been clear, one might have seen the Nonpareil fading into distance. “No, I have been fairly beaten, for who commands the temper of the air? And, lacking sight, he still can move when I’m in fetters—ain’t that so?”
The words he was uttering trembled on the verge of poetry; those listening expected him to launch into one of his favorite quotations.
Instead, of a sudden, he checked, as though aware that no quotation could match the event, and when he spoke again it was in a low, intensely personal tone.
“If it hadn’t been for the goddamned war, you know, Miles Parbury would have been the greatest pilot ever on the Mississippi! I recall him from way back. He felt the river. Didn’t look at it, didn’t talk about it, felt it. In his guts. In those days he used to stammer. Could scarcely put two sentences together. Stand him up by the wheel, though, and he uttered volumes! It was like reading poetry to watch him as he swung that old broad-beamed boat of his through a tight bend. He could go where no one else would dare. And so long as I live I’ll never forget the shock I had when I first set eyes on him after the war, and you told me—didn’t you, Ketch?—about the death of his son! That was the one subject he could talk about: his marriage, because he was so amazed any woman would take him with his speech defect, and that kid he sired. Who died at the age of ten.”
“I didn’t know you knew him!” Joel exclaimed. Tyburn rounded on him.
“Of course we all knew each other! We might not love each other, but we had to band together in the Pilots’ Guild and set up standards so we could become a respectable profession, and we did, and Parbury was one of the chief among us! And I’ll repeat what Hosea just told you: if it hadn’t been for the war, if it hadn’t been for the death of his son, if it hadn’t been for his wife taking sick and growing foul-tempered to try the patience of the saints, then Miles Parbury would have outdone us all. And maybe he’s proving it right now!”
“Could be he’s directing another pilot,” Drew said heavily. “But if anyone can manage without eyesight, he’s the one. And didn’t you hear how confidently she went by? You have the use of your eyes; can you walk around your own home with them shut?”
“Takes years to get accustomed,” Tyburn said.
“You—you seem almost pleased!” Joel burst out.
“If anyone’s to beat me, I’d rather it were Parbury,” said Drew, and added half-inaudibly, “Besides, I no longer have any special reason to arrive at St. Louis in a hurry…”
“Even after they tried to blow up your boat?”
The words escaped Joel before he could cancel them. All eyes fixed on him, full of amazement and horror. He was forced to continue, licking dry lips.
Out poured the whole confused story, including Josephine’s vision of a dangerous brown stick, and the disguised log with explosive hidden in it, and Whitworth’s contempt for Fernand, and in fact more detail than Joel would have liked, so that in the upshot he told the tale more fully than to Barber.
Afterward there was a drab silence.
“Why, the devil!” Motley finally roared. His hands groped in the air as though feeling for Whitworth’s throat. “He deserves hanging—no! No, hanging would be too good for him!”
But the others were waiting on Drew. Who said at last, “Mr. Siskin, are you accusing Parbury of being involved in this?”
Surprised, Joel was nonetheless able to say promptly, “Not at all. Nor do I have proof that anybody was, apart from Whitworth. But I do feel that Mr. Parbury is an honorable man, whereas Woodley, and Gordon…”
He let the words tail away.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?” Drew demanded.
“I wanted to. With all my heart! But you preferred to be alone with your grief, and I was not prepared to interrupt.” Joel shrugged. “So I told Mr. Barber instead, and satisfied him there was no more danger.” By way of proof he produced his pocket safe.
“Let me add, sir”—and here came inspiration!—“that I shall forever regret never having had the chance to meet Mrs. Susannah Drew. To have earned your affection in the way she did, she must have been a very remarkable lady.”
That was the proper—no, the perfect note. Among the tangled strands of the captain’s beard appeared a smile. He said, “Mr. Siskin, I’m sorry too. Because it wasn’t legal, we were never able to become, as I’d have wished, husband and wife, and I was thus denied the chance to be a family man. Into the life of everyone enters a meed of sorro
w. But I will honor her memory, as in his valiant deed Miles Parbury is honoring his lost son. Cast off, Mr. Tyburn! And we’ll try whether a sighted pilot can match a blind one in this fog, although I have to tread like Wenceslas’s page in the footprints of a better man!”
Recovered from his mishap with the spilled ink, Gaston reveled in the mood of frustration and despondency engendered by the fog. His pen flew over the pages, setting down line after melancholy line of simple yet grandiose music. As yet he was merely making sketches. Full orchestration—no, once more he was getting ahead of himself—a choral arrangement with solemn organ accompaniment would have to wait.
But this was fine stuff he was marshaling: here a brief quotation from a hymn tune; there a snatch from an anthem he had heard on his only visit to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris; elsewhere phrases from a richly sonorous, if primitive, melody sung by a bone-weary Negro on the New Orleans waterfront; while eventually he planned to work toward a triumphant section dealing with the resurrection, using a march of the kind beloved by the Garde Républicaine in Napoleonic days. And behind it all, on the subconscious level, awareness of the river ran like a susurrus, forecasting that one day this raw material could be reworked into his long-dreamed-of masterwork.
Therefore he was extremely dismayed when he heard the steamer’s engines come to life again and felt the deck shift under him as she freed herself from the reluctant grip of mud.
Especially since his pen, newly filled, dropped a great blot, obliging him to make yet another fair copy.
Now battle was truly joined between the boats.
Yonder in the murk they could be heard: their audience was freed but workless slaves who had set up in cabins on squatted land; hiders left over from the war, fearful of returning to their old communities, scraping a living by hunting and truck farming; city folk—as cities went in this part of the world—at Cape Girardeau, Hamburg, and even Jackson, who had turned out to witness the great spectacle, thought themselves cheated of it, and now realized they had been doubly deceived; and others who lay abed because their lives were ruled by the sun rather than by clocks, who stirred, half-waking in the night, prompted to ancient dreams of giant lizards bellowing to one another across trackless swamp.