LITTLE PEOPLE! Page 6

  We left the drydock (it’s up North somewhere—that’ll do!) and headed east and south. We were in ballast, carrying only two hundred big cases of farm machinery in the two dry cargo holds. Farm machinery with steel-jacketed noses and percussion caps. Nice chunky crates of tractors with rifle barrels. We followed the coastline pretty much, but stayed far off, out of the southbound steamer lanes. This wasn’t long after the beginning of the war, when all hands ashore and afloat were excited about neutrality zones, so we wanted to keep our noses clean. However, we weren’t too worried. We weren’t the only gray-painted, unidentified hulk at sea by any means, and anyway, we had the skipper.

  We dropped down to about 33° and headed due east. It was early fall—the hurricane season—but the weather was fine and mellow. We kept the morning sun a point off the starboard bow, and in the evening we tore up the base of the shadow we threw ahead. The black gang talked of an unheard-of sixty-three revolutions per minute from the engine, when she hadn’t done better than fifty-seven in the last twelve years. Every time I shot the sun or a star on my watch, the ship stood still and waited for me to get it, and I navigated as if I had a radio beam in my pocket. It didn’t seem like the old Dawnlight any more, with her rotten gear and her chewing-gum calking. It was a pleasure to work her. Even Cajun Joe’s sea bread stopped giving me heartburn.

  Yes, it was too good to be true, so in the long run it didn’t turn out to be true. After we reached longitude 30° everything about that ship went haywire. Nothing was really wrong, only—well, there was the matter of the sextants, for instance. Four of them—mine, and the first’s, and the second’s, but worst of all, the Old Man’s ancient binocular-type monster. They all went just a little bit off—enough to throw us eight or ten degrees off course. You see, after we passed 30, we changed course a shade north to head us up toward Gibraltar, and no sooner had we done that than clouds popped up from nowhere and the weather got really thick.

  Nights we sailed in a black soup, and days we sailed in a white one, and the compass was the only thing that would even admit where we might be. Things got screwy. The revolution counter said we were making a wobbly seven point two knots. The patent log claimed an even six. But it wasn’t until the third day of fog, about five bells on my morning watch, that we really found out that we were being led astray. About the sextants, I mean.

  There was a hole in the clouds, high on the starboard beam; I saw it coming up, figured it would show the sun, and whistled up the Old Man and the mate. I was right; it was a small hole, and as the three of us lined up on the wing of the bridge with our sextants, the second came bumbling sleepily up with his. Old Johnny Weiss was at the wheel, steadying the lubberline onto the compass card the only way an old shell-back trained in sail can steer a ship.

  “Watch the clock, Johnny,” I said and got the image of that cloud hole on my mirror.

  “Hi,” he said, which was the nearest any of us came to “Aye-aye, sir,” on that scow.

  We froze there, the four of us, each sextant steady as a rock, waiting for the gleam. It came, and the Old Man said “Hup!” and we fixed our arcs.

  We got the time from Johnny—the old clock in the wheelhouse was chronometer enough for us—and we broke out our tables. Our four sights came out close enough. Position, 31° 17’ N, 33° 9’ 40” W—which landed us about four hundred miles due east of the Madeiras. We found that if we split the difference between the distance run given by the deck and engine logs, we’d reach that position by dead reckoning. It looked good—too good. The Dawnlight was balky steering, what with her outmoded hydraulic telemotor and her screw-type steering engine. She’d never performed that way.

  As soon as I was alone in the chart house I went over my figures. Everything was jake, but—the primary mirror on my sextant was askew. Slipped down a bit in its frame. Why, a thing like that could prove us a hundred and fifty miles off course! It had never happened before—it was a new sextant, and I took care of it. Now how in—

  I slipped down to the Old Man’s office and went in. He and the mate were bent over the desk. They straightened as I came in.

  “Cap’n, I—”

  “Vot reading dit you get on your sun gun?” he asked me before I could finish my speech. I told him. He scratched his head and looked at the mate.

  The mate said: “Yeah, me, too.” He was a Boston Irishman named Toole; four foot eleven in his shoes. He was wanted for four very elaborate murders. He collected seventeenth-century miniatures. “I got the same thing, only my sextant’s on the bum. That couldn’t be right. Look—the eyepiece on the ’scope is off center.”

  “Look now here,” the Old Man took down his behemoth, and showed me a gradation plate sliding around loosely over its pulled rivets. “Yust py accident I gat the same.”

  “My gosh! That’s what I came down to tell you, Skipper. Look at this.” I showed him the loose mirror on my instrument.

  Just then Harry, the second mate, edged into the room. He always edged through doors on the mistaken assumption that he was thinner fore and aft than he was across the beam. It was hard to tell. Harry saw everything and said nothing, and if he was as innocent as he hugely looked, he would not have been aboard the Dawnlight. He said: “Cap, m’ readin’ on that sight was off. My sextant—”

  “—has gone gebrochen. Don’t tell me dis, too.”

  “Why . . . yeh. Yeh.”

  “Four sextants go exactly the same amount off at the same time for four different reasons,” said Toole, examining a bent arc track on Harry’s sun gun. The captain sighed.

  No one said anything for a minute, and we hardly noticed it when the captain’s deck lamp winked off. The engine room speaking tube shrieked and I answered it because I was nearest. I heard:

  “Skipper?”

  “Third mate.”

  “Tell the Old Man that No. 2 generator just threw its armature. Cracked the casing all to hell.”

  “What’s the matter with No. 1?”

  “Damfino. Fused solid two hours go. And no spares for anything, and no cable to wind a new armature.”

  “O.K.” I turned and told the skipper.

  He almost laughed. “I vas yust going to say dot ve’d haf to take a radio bearing on Gibraltor and Feisal. Heh. Didn’t y’u tell me, ’Airy, dot dere vas no acid for the batteries on the radio?”

  “I did.”

  “Heh.” The skipper drummed for a moment on his desk, looking at me without seeing me. Then he saw me. “Vot de dirty hell are y’u duing down here ven y’u’re on vatch? Gat up dere!”

  I got—there were times when you couldn’t play around with the old boy.

  ###

  Up on the deck the weather looked the same. The sea was slick and the air was warm, and I had to fumble around to locate the bridge ladder. Johnny was steering steadily, easily, a couple of spokes each way every couple of minutes. He was the only man aboard that had the feel of that crazy ship, with her warped keel and her scored and twisted propeller. He looked up at me as I stepped into the wheelhouse and grunted.

  “What’s up, Johnny?”

  “Reckon you know where we are, huh?”

  “I reckon.”

  No sense in getting the crew talking. Sailors gossip like a bridge club, and for the same reason—grouped people with the same basic interests. I’ve seen three quarters of a crew packed up and ready to leave because some wiseacre started the rumor that a ship was going to be sold for scrap at the next port.

  Johnny grunted, and I went into the chart room to monkey with that slipped glass in my sextant. The way the weather looked, I’d never have a chance to use it again, but then you can’t tell about an African coastwise fog. What had made Johnny so quizzical? The more I tried to think of something else, the more that bothered me. About ten minutes later, working on the theory that the last word said before a long pause is the one that sticks, I went back into the wheelhouse and asked: “Why do you want to know?”

  “Oh, nothin’.” He spat, and the tobacco ju
ice rang a knell on the cuspidor. “Just thinkin’.”

  “Come on—give.”

  “Waal—seems to me we been steerin’ east b’ nor’east about two days—right?”

  “So?”

  “Youse guys was so busy peekin’ through yer sextants at the Big Light that you didn’t see it was in the wrong place.”

  “The sun? In the wrong place?”

  “Yep. Steerin’ east b’ nor’east this time o’ year, hereabouts, seems to me the sun’d show about broad on the bow at ten thirty in th’ mornin’.”

  “Well?”

  “So it shows up high an’ dead abeam. Don’t seem right, somehow.”

  He was right. I went and sat down on the pilot’s stool. Radio dead, sextants haywire; all we have is the compass and good old Bowditch’s dead-reckoning tables. And now—the compass?

  “Johnny, are you sure you were on course when we took that sight?”

  His silence was eloquent. Old Johnny Weiss could steer anything with a rudder unless it had a steering oar, and then he was better than most. If we had a radio, we could check the compass. We had no radio. If we could get a sun sight, we wouldn’t need the radio. We couldn’t get a sun sight. We were lost—lost as hell. We were steering a rock-steady compass course on a ship that was pounding the miles away under her counter as she had never done before, and she was heading bravely into nowhere.

  An ordinary seaman popped in. “Lost the patent log, sir!”

  Before I could say, “Oh, well, it didn’t work, anyway,” the engine-room tube piped up.

  “Well?” I said into it, in the tone that means “Now what?”

  It was the third engineer again. “Is the skipper up there?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “A lot of things happen,” wailed the third. “Why do they all have to happen to me?”

  “You don’t know, shipmate, you don’t know! What’s up?”

  “The rev-counter arm worked loose and fell into the crank pit. The I.P. piston grabbed it and hauled counter and all in. Goddlemighty, what goes on here? We jinxed?”

  “Seems as though,” I said, and whistled down the captain’s tube to report the latest.

  Everything depended on our getting a sun sight now. We might have calculated our speed at least from the revolution readings, a tide chart and propslip table. The admiralty charts don’t give a damn about this particular section of sea water. Why should they? There’s supposed to be a deep around the Madeiras somewhere, but then again there’s flat sand aplenty off Africa. Even the skipper’s luck wouldn’t pull us out of this. I had a feeling. Damn it, we couldn’t even hail a ship, if we met one. It would be bound to turn out a q-ship or a sub-chaser, tickled to death to pinch our cargo. Farm machinery. Phooey!

  The saloon messman came up carrying clean sheets for the chart-room cot. I knew what that meant. The bridge was going to be the skipper’s little home until we got out of this—if we did. I was dead beat. Things like this couldn’t happen—they couldn’t!

  ###

  We had a council of war that night, right after I came on watch, the captain and I. Nothing had happened all day; the sun came out only once, on the twelve to four, and ducked in again so quickly that Harry couldn’t get to his sextant. He did set the pelorus on it, but the ship rolled violently because of some freak current just as he sighted, and the altitude he got was all off. There’d been nothing else—Oh, yes; we’d lost three heaving lines over the side, trying to gauge our speed with a chip. The darnedest thing about it was that everything else was going as well as it possibly could.

  The cook had found nine crates of really fancy canned goods in the linen locker—Lord knows how long they’d been there. It was just as if they’d been dropped out of nowhere. The engines ran without a hitch. The low-pressure cylinder lost its wheeze, and in the washrooms we got hot water when we wanted it instead of cold water or steam. Even the mattresses seemed softer. Only we just didn’t know where we were.

  The Old Man put his hand on my shoulder and startled me, coming up behind me in the darkness that way. I was standing out on the wing of the bridge.

  “Vot’s de matter; vorried about de veather?” he asked me. He was funny that way, keeping us on our toes with his furies and his—what was it?—kindnesses.

  “Well, yes, Cap’n, I don’t like the looks of this.”

  He put his elbows on the coaming. “I tell y’u boy, ve ain’t got nodding to fret about.”

  “Oh, I guess not, but I don’t go for this hide-’n’-go-seek business.” I could feel him regarding me carefully out of the corners of his eyes.

  “I vant to tell y’u something. If I said dis to de mate, or Harry, or vun of de black gang, dey vould say: ‘I t’ink de ol’ squarehead is suckin’ vind. He must be gettin’ old.’ But I tell y’u.”

  I was flattered.

  “Dis is a old ship but she is good. I am going to be sorry to turn her over to sumvun else.”

  “What are you talking about, Skipper? You’re not quitting when we get back?”

  “No; before dat. Dass all I vorry about, y’u see. Dis vill be de first command I lost half a trip out. I vass master of thirty-two ships, but I alvays left dem in der home port. It von’t be like dat now.”

  I was more than a little taken aback. I’d never seen the stringy old gun runner sentimental about his ship before. This was the first time I’d ever heard him mention it in printable terms. But what was all this about losing his command?

  “What’s the matter, Cap’n—think we’ll go to camp?” That was a Dawnlight idiom and meant being picked up by a warship of some kind.

  “No boy—nodding like dat. Dey can’t touch us. Nobody can touch us now. Ah—hear dat?”

  He pointed far out to port. The night was very still, with hardly a sound but the continual seethe of millions of bursting bubbles slithering past the ship’s side. But far out in the fog was an insistent splashing—that heavy smacking splash that every seaman knows.

  “Porpoise,” I said.

  The skipper tugged at my elbow and led me through the wheelhouse to the other wing. “Listen.”

  There it was again, on the starboard side. “Must be quite a few of ’em,” I said laconically, a little annoyed that he should change the subject that way.

  “Dere is plenty, but dey are not porpoises.”

  “Blackfish?”

  “Dey is not fish, too. Dey is somet’ing y’u have seen in books. Dey is vimmin with tails on.”

  “What?”

  “O.K., I vas kidding. Call me ven y’u are relieved.”

  In the green glow from the starboard running light I saw him hand me a piercing gaze; then he shambled back to the chart-room. A little bit short of breath, I went into the wheelhouse and lit a cigarette.

  The cuspidor rang out, and I waited for Johnny to speak.

  “The skipper ain’t nuts,” he said casually.

  “Somebody is,” I returned. “You heard him, then.”

  “Listen—if the skipper told me the devil himself was firing on the twelve to four, then the devil it would be.” Johnny was fiercely loyal under that armor of easy talk. “I’ve heard them ‘porpoises’ of yours for three days now. Porpoises don’t follow a ship two hundred yards off. They’ll jump the bow wave fer a few minutes an’ then high tail, or they’ll cross yer bow an’ play away. These is different. I’ve gone five degrees off to port an’ then to starboard to see if I could draw ’em. Nope; they keep their distance,” Johnny curled some shag under his lip.

  “Aw, that’s . . . that’s screwy, Johnny.”

  He shrugged. “You’ve shipped with the Old Man before. He sees more than most of us.” And that’s all he’d say.

  It was about two days later that we began to load. Yeah, that’s what I said. We didn’t dock, and we didn’t discharge our farm machinery. We took on—whatever it was our cargo turned out to be. It was on the four to eight evening when the white fog was just getting muddy in the dusk. I was dead asleep when the
ship sat down on her tail, stuck her bow up and heeled over. The engines stopped, and I got up from the corner of my room where the impact had flung me.

  She lay still on her side, and hell was breaking loose. Toole had apparently fallen up against the fire-alarm button, and the lookout forward was panicky and ringing a swing symphony on the bell. A broken steam line was roaring bloody murder, and so was the second mate. The whistle, at least, was quiet—it had fallen with a crash from the “Pat Finnegan” pipe.

  I leaned against the wall and crouched into a pair of pants and staggered out on deck. I couldn’t see a blasted thing. If the fog had been thick before, it was twenty times as thick now.

  Someone ran into me, and we both went skittering into the scuppers. It was the mate on his way down to the captain’s room. Why the Old Man wasn’t on the bridge, I couldn’t savvy, unless it had to do with that peculiar attitude of resignation about his imagined loss of command.

  “What the hell?” I wanted to know.

  Toole said: “Who is that—third mate? Oh. I don’t know. We’ve hit something. We’re right up on top of it. Ain’t rocks; didn’t hear any plates go. Isn’t sand; no sand bank this size could stay this far from land.”

  “Where’s the skipper?”

  “In his room, far as I know. C’mon, let’s roll him out.”