by John Brunner
Gone, all his hopes and dreams, along with the reporter he had intended to enlist as an ally, who had quit the boat and made the wiser choice, and joined the winner.
So what the hell? He, Matthew Rust, was satisfied fate had condemned him to be a loser. Such insight was often denied to men much older than himself.
He did not even need to draw a breath; there was enough in his lungs when the crisis broke. And he learned what was meant by the phrase “making sacrifice.”
For he screamed, “Macrae!”
The name stopped Gordon in mid-movement, and a second later Steeples had snatched the iron bar from him, and a second later still Matthew felt himself rudely thrust aside as Woodley stormed in, brandishing the pistol he had talked about as a means of quieting Whitworth.
“What the hell is going on?” he barked.
And looked at Gordon, whose face was more like a beast’s than a man’s. Corkran said, “He was about to murder Caesar!”
“But something Matthew said prevented him,” said Roy.
If only Joel might have come rushing in on Woodley’s heels…
But the chance was lost, for good and all. Matthew said wearily, “His name’s not Gordon. It’s Macrae. He wore the tartan of the Clan Macrae at Mardi Gras and almost killed someone who insulted it. He’s the swindler who sold a forest that didn’t belong to him, for making matches, and cheated Mr. Moyne and lots of others.”
Dry-mouthed, terrified out of his wits by having so many eyes fixed on him—especially “Gordon’s,” which were full of hate—he finished, “I didn’t know until I bought a book about Scotland, thinking to ingratiate myself, and that was when I realized he’s a liar and a fraud!”
“Why, ye—!” Gordon burst out, and would have torn Matthew limb from limb but that the captain thrust the muzzle of his gun into his ribs.
Woodley was very calm. This crisis had concentrated his entire attention. Someone had once said, “The prospect of being hanged in the morning…” Something like that. But after the night’s false hope of victory, he was resolved he would never again allow anybody to override his judgment or command.
Even though it might mean sacrificing his proud title.
He said coldly to Matthew, “That’s a serious charge, and you need evidence.”
Pale, lips trembling, Matthew gazed at him in disbelief. He had been so sure that when he broached his secret, it would cause a great scandal; that was how he had planned to extort severance pay from Gordon. And it had struck the financier a body blow… hadn’t it?
He faltered, “It says in my book—”
“Och! I ken yon wee buik!” Gordon interrupted. “Fakit by twa Polish brithers tae please a Sassenach king! Fu’ o’ falsities frae first tae last! An’ wi’ a title in the Latin, no’ the honest Gaelic!”
Having thus cavalierly dismissed Matthew’s treasure, he rounded on Woodley, shedding his accent in an eyeblink. “Pay no heed to him. He’s out of his mind half the time anyhow. Greensickness, in spite of all my efforts to amend it. Just listen to me!”
“I’m disinclined!” Woodley said sharply, though he put up the gun. “Seeing you were set to brain one of my engineers!”
“For that he would not agree to our only sane course!” Gordon’s bluster was returning as fast as his burr was vanishing. “I came here to ask how long it will take us to break free! And what answer did I get?”
Corkran made to speak; he was cut short.
“Too long!” Gordon roared. “It could leave the Atchafalaya with an unbeatable lead! Unless you’re prepared to break those seals and use our higher pressure! Don’t waste time telling me how the job’s best done! I’ve kept eyes and ears open, and I know you have to set the wheels to churning and let the current they create wash away the mud. But power—power—power is the key, and turning at this sluggish rate the wheels will leave us here all day!”
Glaring, he stared from face to face in the group surrounding him and finished, “I proved she’ll take two hundred pounds, and that’s the answer!”
There was a pause. Then Caesar made for the guards again.
“Where are you going?” Woodley snapped.
“I’ll have none of it! Two hundred pounds will open her up like a hog in a slaughterhouse. I said so before you came in. That’s why Gordon or whatever his name is took after me—to shut me up. And if he doesn’t know what I know, don’t believe him! It’s too dangerous!”
“Stop him!” Gordon shouted. “He could start a panic!”
As if by magic Woodley’s gun reappeared. Lent confidence by it, he gestured for Caesar to return.
Limping, furious, terrified, the black man obeyed, driven by conditioning that went back clear to the days before he could talk, when the overseer with his whip and pistol strutted from hut to hut in the slaves’ quarters and took his pick of pretty girls and boys.
“There’s still a chance!” Woodley declared. “And Mr. Gordon hit on it! Back to your posts! Stand by for higher pressure! Mr. Corkran”—with abrupt formality—“you may break the seals on the safety valves. I’ll answer to the steamboat inspectorate.”
“I want that on record!” Corkran countered.
“My boy’s there!” Gordon rapped, pointing at Matthew. “He’ll write it down, I’ll witness it!”
“And what’s the word of a swindler worth?” Corkran said after a moment’s pause.
Gordon purpled and made to rush at him; Woodley clicked the hammer of his pistol so that a full chamber came under it.
“Do as you’re told!” he said between clenched teeth. “Or you’ll never work this river again! There are laws about disobedience to a captain!”
Waiting only long enough to see his orders being put into effect, he urged Gordon out on deck, where they encountered Whitworth, wearing an uncharacteristic grin.
“Judging by the way she’s burning coal,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper, tilting his head in the direction of the Atchafalaya, “she could blow any minute! And then who’s going to have the last laugh, hm?”
Gordon first, then Woodley, scowled him down, and he took a step back, surprised. Then he caught sight of the captain’s gun as he holstered it. Mouth working, shaping curses, he turned away.
Further talk would anyhow have been pointless. By now the firemen were loading the furnaces as rapidly as muscle and bone could stand. Tossed into the maw of the fire doors, black coal was transformed almost quicker than the eye could follow into brilliant red, then yellow, and then white. The doctor pulsed as hard as it could go. The great wheels started to revolve so fast, they were like potter’s hands shaping soft clay as they carved away the sand reef. The water they hurled against the obstacle washed loose the dull inert mass even as it tended to drive the Nonpareil astern; the river muddied either side, a puny human counterpart of what nature did every winter, shifting what might one day have been land, committing it to the current, perhaps creating the nucleus of another reef a hundred or five hundred miles below.
But the hull shivered at the pounding it received. In the bar, glasses shook against each other; in the staterooms, ewers knocked against toothmugs; in the kitchens, pans against pots, making a vibration to set teeth on edge. In the pilothouse, the judder was so terrific, Barfoot had to yell for help, and Hogan and Trumbull, weary though they were, took turns with Smith and Tacy at the helm.
While in the hold Hiram Burge was for the first time since he became a carpenter instead of an engineer—happy. He could see the effects; fate had spared him the dull vision of most old men. He could touch a hog chain and shout for men to tighten it; he could lay his hand on a bulwark and order someone to secure a bolt.
Envying, nonetheless, the real engineers…
Who would, nonetheless, have traded places with just about anybody at this time.
The shovels clanked and scraped as fuel was moved from the piles in reserve to the piles before the furnaces to the furnaces themselves; the iron frames around the iron doors, set in the high brick arches tha
t also held the boilers, glowed with a dull and sunset red; now and then a thermal shock made something crack and snap—let it be, they prayed, no more than a skim of mortar breaking, not a brick itself or worse yet a rivet in one of those huge iron drums above the fire.
The pistons swept the full ten feet of their stroke with cams set to afford maximum expansion, just as though the Nonpareil were hurtling up a straight reach at her highest speed instead of being landlocked by a cruel mishap; whenever the faintest shriek of metal on bare metal was discerned—and the engineers could tell that cry as a mother fast asleep may tell the complaint of her own baby—oil came sluicing down on the bright sliding rods to ease their pain. Here, there, again elsewhere, the thin shrill whistle of escaping steam demanded that they run and tighten joints, bind unions with wire, strap weakened pipes…
But she was moving, wasn’t she?
She moved! She moved! She moved!
And the Atchafalaya was in view five miles ahead, and nothing had burst!
“You dirty black coward!” Steeples rasped.
Clenching his fists in impotent fury, Caesar tried to frame necessary words. He knew, as though in his own bones, that there was no way the slender piping, the thin-walled boilers of the Nonpareil could take such pressure without damage. He had inspected every inch of her steam system; he had been running a constant list of potential faults in his head, attending to them one by one as time allowed. But there were places unreachable during a voyage, and among them was the most vulnerable of all: the interior of a boiler. Let a flue rupture where it joined the boiler end; let a single rivet pop loose; let the doctor pump fail to pour in enough cool water… There were half a dozen dangers there alone, apart from those elsewhere: a split elbow, a ruptured union, a lump of dirt that eluded the mud drum because the water was in such a turmoil…!
He cast an agonized glance at the gauges, trembling around two hundred. Then he thought about white men, the bosses, obsessed with greed and glory: the other engineers contemptuous of him as a nigger despite their grudging compliments, whose companionship had seemed so real yet proved so transitory; Gordon denounced just now as a swindler by poor Matthew, who was cowering in a corner because he was afraid to go anywhere else… Did no one else realize Matthew had saved his life? Certainly Woodley couldn’t, for he was prepared to go on backing the judgment of a fraud and liar, to invoke the law when he was defying reason—
Safely, of course, behind the shelter of his gun.
The Nonpareil was back in the channel. The bell rang for full ahead. The engineers responded automatically, except Caesar. He fled from the engineroom, thrusting Woodley aside, and at the risk of drowning—or worse—jumped overboard.
In the blessed moment between full astern and full ahead he was able to swim clear, while Woodley, shouting at the top of his voice, took a shot at him. Startled passengers, who had been cheering, broke off in alarm. But Caesar had swum to freedom before. It was like living part of his life over again.
Nothing of him was to be seen save a little of his head, as hard to hit as any bobbing scrap of drift. And then the great wheels started up anew and their wash swept him toward the land, and he was able to writhe into concealment among stunted brush. By then the range was too great for any pistol.
Soaking, shivering despite the warmth of morning, he lay on his belly and gasped for breath and thought of another steamer called Nonpareil and wished with all his heart and soul that on this point he might find another Sergeant Tennice and another battery of cannon.
So tremendous was the excitement as the Nonpareil pulled free, with her chimneys barking like a double-barreled gun, that even Josephine and Auberon were caught up in it. Decorously he escorted her on deck, like any brother squiring his sister to view an interesting spectacle.
But between them lay the shadow of terror.
Daylight made Auberon again aware of the consequences of his determination to pack his short life as full of sensation and experience as might be, and caused him to wonder: what next? Am I trapped like Faustus, doomed by lust for knowledge? Doomed by lust?
While as the poison gradually left her system, though it would endure a long time yet in her hair and nails, Josephine was beginning to feel less and less certain about what she had so readily accepted as a magic powerful enough to guarantee her victory over Eulalie.
Yesterday, had she really decided to throw in her lot with the colored people? Had she really made that promise to Caesar and been spurned?
To elude such miserable ideas, she concentrated on her surroundings. How wrong it seemed to think of squalid matters on this clear and lovely morning, in countryside such as she had never seen before! The trees, the landscape, the very water looked different. What few houses were visible were in unfamiliar styles. Birds she did not recognize were flapping and calling. So few days, a scant thousand miles or so, and a transformation of the world…
She was growing uneasy. Beneath their feet the planking vibrated to a thrilling hum. A chance gust brought the stink and fumes back from chimney-top level and made those on deck cough and reach for handkerchiefs. She wanted to think about her family connection with Auberon; she had it in mind to make demands. He was unlikely to survive more than five years—she had seen enough TB cases to be sure of that. His family might pressure him into marriage regardless of what misery it would bring his bride, but they had a daughter and another son, and the name could be carried on… As penalty for his use of her, she had thought of insisting that he make a will, an unalterable will, to secure her his share of the Moyne inheritance.
Only—
Did these people truly not know how unlucky it was to sail with a corpse on board? And there was one stiffening on the cabin table under its gaudy shroud! No charm could outweigh the impact of such a curse! The mere fact that he had been struck down at his own helm…! Oh, one would expect the white officers to be ignorant, but she had thought the black fireman and deckhands would mutiny, rather than continue before Parbury’s remains had been consigned to the fishes!
How much longer did this boat have to live?
“What’s wrong?” Auberon inquired solicitously as she put her hand to her forehead and began to sway, her other fingers clamping painfully on his arm. And she remembered: no, not squiring his sister—merely displaying ordinary courtesy to a helpful nurse. Well, that was something, at least.
But all such thoughts were being snatched from her. A terrible dark cloud had arisen in her mind, reeking of doom, calamity, disaster. Images of a charnel house flooded her brain: ghastly grinning corpses pitched all anyhow, like some engraving of plague victims she had seen as a child. But this was no mere memory. That picture would have been in dull gray-black on yellowing paper. This was in color and in detail, not only offering sight but sound as well, and stink, and actual touch!
“Josephine!”
But she flinched from his attempt to support her, for his hands had the clamminess of flayed meat, and the chimney fumes were the stench of hell, and she knew with preternatural clarity that her Lord had brought her here to be made a sacrifice far, far from home, because she had wanted her powers for her own sake, not in his service, and she had doubted he could reach over such distances, and here he was, great and terrible, speaking with the sound of gongs and thunder while the blood rushed in her ears and created the chanting of his devotees at Congo Square. She could feel the weight of bram-bram sonnettes on her wrists and ankles, and they isolated her hands and feet from the rest of her, so she lost all sensation. The numbness crept upward. In a little while it would reach her heart and then she would be dead.
She whimpered, driving the heels of her hands into her eyes, and could not shut out the horror that assailed her. Meantime the Nonpareil rushed forward, beating the best of her former speed by a wide margin, topping—in the view of those who ought to know—the magic mark of twenty miles per hour.
Caesar had dived overboard by then, from the landward side, invisible. The first either she or Auberon kne
w about his escape was when they heard Woodley shout.
By then it was too late.
“She won’t take it!” Barfoot exclaimed, in the pilothouse. “Where’s Woodley?”
“Christ knows!” answered Hogan savagely, but reached for the engineroom speaking tube.
“Shooting at that nigger engineer! He went overside!” Trumbull reported.
“Knows something we don’t?” Hogan rasped, and then added to the tube: “Mr. Corkran! Have you taken leave of your senses? What the hell pressure are you up to?… Holy Mary mother of God! Two hundred?”
He spared a hand from the juddering wheel to cross himself.
“Get it down! Get it down fast! Back to normal working or I’ll go the same way as the black engineer, I swear it! You must be crazy, all of you! And I don’t care how many pistols Woodley has!”
To celebrate their breaking loose, Tacy had ordered the texas tender to come up and take an order for coffee; they all stood in need of it, especially Hogan and Trumbull. Unnoticed, he was waiting by the door, and heard and understood the fateful words, and incontinently spun on his heel and ran clattering back down the steps.
“What the devil…?” Smith said under his breath, and then exchanged glances with his colleagues. “Oh my God,” he said after a pause. “He’ll start a panic!”
But even that was not entirely necessary. Fear had begun to hover over the Nonpareil like a miasma from a fever swamp, triggered by Caesar’s frantic flight. In this moment of her greatest triumph, when she was running faster upstream than any steamer had ever managed on the Mississippi, those on board lost their belief in her and started to cast about for means to get away. The officers were not immune. Woodley interrupted his cursing of Caesar and looked anxiously toward the pilothouse, as though seeking inspiration from on high. Gordon seemed not to notice, save to spot Matthew—fearfully peering from the engineroom—and brandish a fist at him, mouthing oaths. Matthew vanished like a scared rabbit into its burrow. In a little he began to cry.