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 Means to an End --- Chapter 05
by Nathaniel Perkins
"Are you a reporter?" he asks me, handing me my glass.
I swirl the liquid around for a moment, fascinated by the near clinging viscosity.
"No. I enjoy keeping a journal, though. And I wanted to capture as much of this trip as possible. It is my first time sailing in a ship this large."
He sits down opposite me and offers me a casual cheers with his glass before taking a sip. I follow suit. It is strong stuff, the sort of thing that makes you think it does not matter how long they leave the roast out at dinner, nothing living is going to survive the onslaught of this relentless brew. We pass a contemplative evening in the insular safety of level two. Faint strains of the jazz band drift down from above. On reflection, the night air is unseasonably warm, and it appears that a great many of the passengers have taken it as an opportunity for a round of evening dances versus a sign of troubled times. We remain locked away, like a mouse in a hole who knows the owl is circling. The sun will have to be in the sky before I peek my head out of the warren this night. I retire to my own quarters before he offers a stupefying second glass.
My dreams that night are a swirl of purple and red and falling glass mountains. I am a field mouse with rabbit like legs dashing hither and yon through jumbles of white bone, the ribcages of whales dead because the sea has moved away and left them to rot on a burnt sienna floor of mud cracked stone. An owl the size of a mansion drifts on swells of heated air above, its raucous call sparking primitive terror in the base of my spine pumping my hopping legs to action. I bounce sharply to the side at the keening of a particularly dreadful call and one again find myself face down on the deck of my compartment.
The morning sun is blazing through the porthole. It strikes me as odd, but I can not place why in the stumbling stupor of my morning shuffle. A terrific wreck delivers itself for a morning depilatory, signs of bags beginning to form under my eyes. I give myself a good rousing scrub and pull on something that I do not think I have worn yet, and trip my way down level two toward the commissary. A cup of coffee clears the last vestiges of mothballs, scotch, and owls from my mind. I reengage with my surroundings, gain a table, and retrieve my notebook from my pocket.
There is a torpor to those breakfasters that is either highlighted by my own downtrodden state or up a notch from the usual zombie-like shuffle to and fro during meal times. I watch three separate pairs of people idly crash into one another, losing trays, cups, biscuits, everything. The mumble of a few apologies, and each party returns to the server tables to begin the process anew. The crewman set to clean the mess left by the casual collisions dives into his work with an intensity, as if the fate of the world depends on removing every speck of jam from the wooden deck floor. Perhaps this is a break in routine for him, perhaps commissary guard duty is as boring as it sounds and he bides his time like a cynic at a dog race, waiting for a mix-up and a tumble of legs and bodies. It occurs to me that I have never thought of the crew as guarding the passengers before. Guarding from what or from whom? Ourselves, or something else. Keeping us in our place? Another cargo to deliver, only this one with the capacity to move about the ship and cause trouble like an unhappy collision of coffee and biscuit tin?
Smith interrupts my dark reverie before it goes any further.
"Mind if I join this morning?" he asks. He seems more awake than I, but I can see traces of a rough night around the corners of his eyes.
"By all means," I reply. "Some stable company would be welcome this morning." I point with my jam knife out into the parse herd of hung-over socialites. "This lot keeps crashing about to the tune of an off-key slow waltz. I think I should requisition a cattle prod for mornings in here."
"I have been thinking about what we spoke of last night," Smith says, his voice turning grim. "I think we should find the engineer or the first mate. They would have the strongest care for the ship itself beyond the captain."
"Why not just go directly to the captain?" I ask.
"Channels. We want to keep the officers happy. Don’t want to be one of those uppity passengers so unaware of their surroundings that they don’t follow the rules. First mates don’t like to be cut out and engineers have a neurotic interest in anything that might harm his precious boat."
"Ok then, the engineer or the first mate. Where can we find them?" I look about as if expecting the senior officer to be standing by the sausage links waving a fork in my direction.
"Officer’s country. I know where to go, but you’ll want to come along. You have a way of words about you that might convince them that we haven’t been hitting the scotch early."
We pass the rest of the breakfast commenting on our fellow passengers and making ruinous bets on the likelihood of future collisions. Cattle in Kansas, banks in Georgia, investments in Mexico…there is no fictitious asset safe from our absurd gambling. It is refreshing to be so liberated from the immediacy of the ship, caught up in an imaginative bout of losing a textile company to the dexterity of the Fat Man who keeps returning for more sausages, of gaining a corner on the electric market when Miss Wide-brimmed Hat blind-sides the Clean Man, forcing his departure from the field of play to correct an invisible stain.
The game runs its course as does breakfast, and we leave it for another day. Smith leads me out the fore entrance of the commissary and up two decks. There are more crewmen about than passengers here, and I can feel eyes on us wondering what inane drivel the passengers have cooked up now. It is quite easy to move around when no one wants to be the one to deal with you. As soon as it is apparent that we are looking for someone who isn’t me, a light goes off in the eyes of each sailor we pass and they quickly step away for fear that their sudden luck will shift and they will be stuck explaining some trivial bit to some trivial dolt.
Smith knows his way around the ship, and, I notice, knows how to move around within the ship. Here I am, clanging and bumping off of every imaginable crenellation, while he drifts effortlessly between portal and passageway. After a few minutes we come to a door flanked by two shipmen, each eyeing us with thinly veiled apathy. Smith speaks up.
"A word with the XO, sailor," he addresses the guard on the right. There is a sharpening to his voice that produces an interesting effect in the stance of each man. They stiffen a bit, as if coming to attention while not moving at all. The guard on the right starts to turn toward the door automatically, catches himself as if to belatedly ask what business it is of ours, catches himself again an iota later and raps on the bulkhead once before cracking the door.
"Sir, if you have a moment."
"What is it, sailor." A commanding voice calls out from within.
"Uh. Two, " he glances back at us and then once more addresses the crack in the door. "Gentlemen to see you sir."
There is a bit of noise from inside, perhaps grumbling or grumping about something. It could be that the officer is just as stiff and sore this morning as the majority of his passengers. The guard motions us in, and just like that we are in front of the first mate of the Centurion. I have no idea what his name is, suddenly I worry that we will be chucked out for wasting his time with a crazy story.
We stand there a moment, each side taking in the other. The first mate gives me a brief once over and then focuses his attention on Smith. Again, there is that slight arrest to his stance, and his attention becomes sharper and more focused.
"How may I be of assistance this morning, gentlemen?" He says with a polite smile. He is about my age, clean shaven in a crisp white uniform. A few loose stray hairs near his cap indicate that he has only just put it on for our arrival. Officers bars on his shoulder and a small batch of shiny bars over his heart complete the ensemble. Smith trods on my foot in the awkward two second silence I have just let pass.
"We have a serious concern that we wanted to bring to your attention." I blurt out.
The First Officer switches his gaze back to me. "Concerns should be addressed to your stewards, sir. They are better able to answer day to day issues for our passengers."
"This concerns the, uh, fate of the ship. Sir." I add the honorific belatedly. My mind is spinning about madly trying to figure a way to ask the man what we really want to ask. Do you have any idea where you are? I nearly laugh out loud in a fit of frustration. The expression on the First Mate flickers a bit. I press on,
"Sir, the iceberg last night, and, well, the night sky, frankly." I say. The First Mate definitely has our attention now. "There is some concern among a few of the passengers that there may be a rather disconcerting issue at hand. A very few at the moment. We wanted to make sure the command staff was aware of our concerns." I pause a bit and into the silence say, "We heard the navigator is sauced to the gills."
That snaps the silence from the other end. The First Mate takes a breath, glances at the closed door, looks back at us and came to a decision.
"Please. Be seated." He pauses for a bit while we make ourselves comfortable. "Before I continue, when you say ‘a very few’, how many passengers, exactly, are we discussing?"
"Well," I glance at Smith before turning back to the officer. "Just us for the moment, sir."
"I would ask, then, that you keep it that way. This is a delicate situation. I had hoped that our passengers would be so caught up in their social twittery that they would not notice anything amiss. The crew has been instructed to carry-on. You two are the first of the passengers to come forward with any inkling of trouble. How did you come to believe…what, rather, do you believe…" he sighs and looks into his hands a moment.
"We are somewhere else, aren’t we sir?" I voice the question that we all are dancing around. "Somewhere that is not the Atlantic Ocean, where the Milky Way is twisted about, and there isn’t a recognizable constellation in the night sky."
"I fear to think what will happen if some pair of hideous moons rise over the horizon." The First Mate mutters, looking out his porthole at the day. "Did you notice the sun this morning?"
"It has been bright the last two days, yes." I reply.
Smith breaks in. "It rose in the west this morning. Nearly set my mind to screaming. Be hard for many to miss that come tomorrow, unless you can get them all to drink the night away."
Something clicks into place in my mind, that nagging feeling from when I had woke and the sun hit me. My cabin is on the port of the ship. Our course is, or was, generally northeasterly, which would place the sun at sunrise on the other side of the ship. I had remarked on this when I first boarded to the man helping me with my baggage. He said I was lucky. Most of the port side cabins were taken up by those that wished to sleep away the mornings and drink away the nights, they fill up fast. My mind spins away from the alien otherness of a sun rising in the west. Smith is right, the whole ship would know in a day. Something that monumental can not be hidden away.
"What will we do?" I ask. Apparently I have pitched my hand in with that of the First Mate. He looks relieved that we do not appear ready to run to the end of the ship clanging bells and waving signs.
"The Captain, myself, and my officers will do whatever we can. For now, the Captain says push through. Perhaps this is something like a curtain or a corridor we need to pass through. With luck we will pop out the other end as if nothing had happened. If not…well, let’s see what develops in the next few days. The ship has plenty of supplies. What concerns me more is the reaction of the passengers. I don’t think the majority of them will handle it as well as you two seem to be."
"Too right," I say. "I feel like screaming and banging my head against a bulkhead. If that constitutes calm. You’d best guard the lifeboats, the ship’s stores, and get marines or something to keep the women safe."
"No Marines aboard this vessel," this from Smith, "You are thinking of MPs. Not a bad set of ideas, though. Sir, maybe get your boys out and about. When this thing hits, I think it is going to spread fast."
"Agreed." The First Mate blows out his breath and gives us another once over. "Gentlemen, thank you for coming to me with this. Give me your cabin assignments so I can track you down later. I think I may need your help with the passengers. And if you find anyone else making the same connections, please take them aside and win them over. We’ll probably need to quell a passenger mutiny before this is over."
"Thank you for seeing us, Sir" I say, standing.
"Sir," Smith says with a nod to the First Mate.
"Sir, uh…gentlemen. Good day." The First Mate stands hastily. We give our assignments and names, the guard opens the door at the officers call and we leave. The walk back to level two is silent, each of us locked away with his own newly hatched demons. Laying down brick and mortar on the sand foundations in our minds, hoping against hope no wolves would come to blow a wind against us.
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