by Tom DeMarco
Claymore bent low to lift the boy onto the deck. The uniform as it came out of the water was white, not blue.
“He’s not one of ours, Kelly.”
“He was Chinese. So I thought…”
“They have Chinese too.”
“He’s just a boy, Loren.”
“We said no prisoners.”
“Well, he’s mine. You can’t throw him back. If you want to throw someone back you have to get one of your own.” She gave one hand to Claymore. He lifted her effortlessly from the water.
When his own turn came, Loren was struck again by the strength of the little man; he fairly popped out of the water in Claymore’s grip. Loren sat up. Beside him, Kelly rolled herself protectively onto the boy in white uniform. The boy was coughing up water.
“Keep him coughing,” Loren said mechanically. He looked up at Jared Williams. “If he starts to throw up, be sure to turn his head to the side so he doesn’t aspirate it.”
“We’re on top of it, Loren.”
“Get Doctor Bolen to Columbia, Jared. Danny’s been wounded.”
“He’s over there now. Ted called for him. Danny’s OK. They’ve got him stabilized.”
Loren turned back to Kelly. It took him a moment to realize what was happening. She was crying, sobbing, still lying partly on top of the sailor. Jared’s voice from above: “Kelly. Come on, Kelly.”
The young boy looked up at her, uncomprehending. Her tears were dripping down onto his face. Loren lifted himself up into a kneeling position above her. He put his hand onto her neck. It was clammily cold. She was shivering. Loren lifted himself and then Kelly into a standing position. “Someone get her below. And get her wet clothes off.” He looked around at the assembled group. There was a woman on the helm, but everyone else was male. Loren put one arm around her waist and led her himself, down the companion way.
He peeled off her jumpsuit. Kelly’s teeth were chattering. Her skin was bluish in color, and she was still shaking and sobbing. Loren lifted her onto the quarterbunk. There was a thick cotton blanket folded at its foot. He spread it over her. Kelly squirmed around under the blanket. After a moment she handed her wet underwear out to him. She said, “I’m OK,” barely comprehensible for her chattering teeth. He could hear Claymore heating water for her in the galley.
Loren stood beside the bunk, wondering what more needed to be done. For Kelly, or for the fleet or for Baracoa or for anyone else. The thought of Baracoa spurred him to action. There was a communications console just beside the chart table. Loren picked up the microphone marked “fleet light-wave” and called for Rondolet. In a moment, Melissa Blake was on. “Let me speak to Candace, please. This is Loren.”
A click and a pause, then: “Candace here.”
“I’m turning off the radio jammers now. Would you raise Baracoa for me and give them the news.”
“I will. Thank you Loren.”
He put the microphone back on its hook. He found a switch marked “AM conventional.” Loren switched it on. He was only dimly aware of Jared dabbing at his cheek with a sterile pad. There was a cacophony of the jammer’s interference on the console speaker, then, abruptly, silence interrupted only by the faint normal static of AM transmission. After a moment, he heard Candace’s voice:
“Celestine to Baracoa.”
“Candy, are you all right? Are you all right?” It was Chandler.
“We’re all OK, boss. A few minor casualties, not too bad.”
“Oh, thank god.”
“We’re all OK, Chandler.”
“We are,” he said. “We’re all of us OK, thanks to you and well, thanks to all of you. A job well done. Yes. A splendid job, splendidly done. Please tell everyone.”
“I will.”
Loren slumped back, exhausted, on the banquette under Kelly’s bunk. There was a ragged hole in his cheek. Jared had stepped into the galley to prepare a dressing for it. A rustling sound in the blanket from above. He was aware of Kelly’s hand from behind running through his hair. It moved around to his left ear to pull gently on the lobe. He could feel that she was still shivering.
A look ahead into Volume II: Airship Nation
THE ULTIMATE KEEL
The battle of the Bahama Channel was never very far from Loren’s mind. Again and again he would feel the crash of Columbia’s bows into the helpless topsides of the white yawl, hear the cracking of timbers overhead as her rigging fell. He could sense the pounding of his heart as he leapt over the deck with a machete in his hand, hear the raucous sound of his own voice. Sometimes he would wake up in the midst of a battle dream full of crackling blue beams, gas-masked villains and blood. His mouth would be dry with fear, his pulse racing. And half of him would wish it would never happen again, while the other half was hoping it would never end. He was hooked. He had fought for his life and for his land and won. And now everything else paled by comparison.
The business of the rest of his life, he now knew, would be fighting. The adventure of Fort Belvoir had confirmed that if any confirmation had been necessary. His path was set from that point on. He would defend this island and the community as long as he lived.
Back in the States, his adversaries, Rupert Paule and the shadowy Reverend Gallant, Loren suspected, were discouraged but not defeated. He thought there would be another attack sometime in the not too distant future. This time, he knew, they would come from the south. That didn’t mean he could relax his guard in the Channel and along the coast to the west, but it did mean he had to shift his emphasis. The enemy fleet would pass well offshore to the east of Puerto Rico, perhaps even carrying on all the way around outside of the Windward Islands, and then make their attack with the trades directly behind them, approaching Cuba from the south or the southwest, depending on the season. He had evaluated that plan again and again from the enemy’s point of view, testing it against the thinking of Kelly and Candace and the Proctor. None of them had been able to come up with a better card for Paule to play. So they had to assume that is just what he planned to do.
All of the defenses against approach from the south involved slipping behind the attacking fleet, and then coming down on it with the wind. But that was a maneuver that had to be carried out with great precision. And from the moment the attack was signaled, everything would depend on being able to outsail the opposition. It would be foolhardy to expect Paule to try again in tired old boats like the McMillan yawls. This time he would come in something faster and a lot more handy, probably multi-hulls. And against such boats, the Baracoa fleet would be seriously outclassed. Of course, eventually, Paule would be able to bring some steam powered ships into play. But Baracoa was working on that angle too. It would take a year or so, but they would soon have something to counter a steam threat from the north. Only in the interim did they have to worry about being outsailed. Paule had instant access to all the expensive toys that American yachtsmen had accumulated over the years, while Loren had only those vessels the group had arrived in plus a few catamarans from Guantanamo. The Revolutionary Republic of Cuba, unfortunately, had not been a great center of yachting.
What could he do to increase the advantage for the Baracoa fleet? How could he give his vessels better sailforms, lower drag, better hullspeed or a higher pointing angle? If they could sail even five degrees closer to the wind than the opposing fleet, he knew, that would be a huge advantage. A huge advantage.
From years of training as a physicist, he began to sketch a model, part physical and part mathematical, of the factors that affected a sail’s ability to pull when trimmed close to the wind. Within an hour he had reconstructed the equations from memory of the Bernouli Effect, the acceleration of the wind around the leading edge of a sail and its resultant force drawing the boat forward. He made a simple approximation of the resistance of the keel that kept the boat from sliding downwind. Each of his equations involved one use of differential calculus, a derivative with respect to time, and this caused his mind to wander back into the realm of t-prime, the elevate
d state of time brought on by the Layton Effect.
He divided time into its two components and re-did the equations. Since the boat and the sea it sailed through were governed by the same t-prime, the difference washed out and he was left with essentially the same results again. But suppose that weren’t true? Suppose t-prime could take on one value at the sail and another at the keel? He seemed to recall that there was something they had been grappling with during the previous spring in Ithaca that might have an application now to the problem of making their boats sail higher, even faster. Underneath his bed, he found the battered shoulder bag he had carried on the flight from Ithaca to Ft. Lauderdale. He hadn’t even thought of that bag for more than half a year. In preparation for their departure on that long-ago May evening, Homer had insisted that Loren bring along the laboratory daybook. Who knew, he had argued, that they wouldn’t find a few minutes one day by the pool to think about some aspect of the problems they were working on, and have need of the records they had been keeping in the daybook? Loren found the book now in the bottom of the shoulder bag.
Sitting on his bunk in the cottage he shared with Edward, Loren leafed through the dated entries in the book. At last he came to the Sunday afternoon of his presentation to the group about t-prime. The six now-familiar equations were laid out neatly in his handwriting. These were the equations that had enabled change to the very fabric of time in this world. He stared at them, thinking through again their significance. It was still stunning, how wrong they had been before in the way they thought about time. The old view seemed so simplistic and naive, now that they knew. Nothing was simple about time. It was baroque, convoluted, Peculiar, in the special sense that Homer had given to that word. Yet it was no more surprising than the baroqueness earlier generations of physicists had discovered in the inner workings of energy or gravity or light.
But all that had to do with Physics, the pure science. What Loren was interested in now was a gimmick to make boats sail faster, some way to turn the equations again to their advantage. He took the daybook and set out in search of Edward. He found him in the workshop.
“Look at this, Ed. Something from your past.” Loren laid the book down, open to the t-prime equations. He placed it directly on top of the telephone network diagrams that Edward had been going over with D.D. Pease. “I’m not interrupting, am I?”
“Goodness, no. Pease and I were just working on re-establishing the modern world. Nothing serious, mind you. Only that. We’re going to have phones working throughout the village within the next week.”
“Oh, good. Ed, do look at this equation for a minute and tell me if I’m off on a goose hunt…”
“A wild goose chase.”
“Uh huh. You see, there is an additional stable value of t-prime, beyond the one we have elevated ourselves to. There was the old original value, the one that I called t-prime-zero: that was the way the world was before we got involved. And then there is a t-prime-one: that is the reduced time flow that we have now, with time proceeding at something like a twentieth of a percent slower rate.”
“Yes, I remember.” Edward just looked distracted.
“But then, the equation predicts that there is a second stable state, considerably slower than the others. I’ll call that t-prime-two. It would slow time down to about one ten thousandth of what it is now.”
“Right.”
“Notice it would be too slow to propagate. I mean it would take thousands of years to inject itself onto the earth’s magnetic field. So it could only have local impact, just in the immediate surroundings of the Effector.
“Oh good. I just couldn’t bear to have the whole world slowed down by a factor of ten thousand. Think how it would set back our phone project.”
“Uh huh. But now suppose we built ourselves a t-prime-two Effector and attached it to the keel of a sailboat. When we turned it on, time would be slowed enormously in the direction of the beam. If we were to align the beam perpendicular to the keel, we would have a boat that was extremely stable in its plane. It simply could not heel over. And it couldn’t slip downwind. I mean it would be slipping, but ever so slowly, because time would be so sluggish in that direction. Don’t you see? It would be the ultimate keel. And it wouldn’t depend at all on water resistance. The boat could move directly forward or backward, but not sideways. And it couldn’t tilt. It would be locked in its plane.”
“A little inconvenient when it comes time to turn,” said Pease.
“We switch it off. And then when we’re established on the new course, we turn it on again. Think of the advantage it would give us to be able to sail without side-slip and without heeling. We could sail rings around whatever they sent down against us.”
“Cute,” said Edward.
“Cute?! This is more than cute. This is important, Ed. I think you guys ought to drop what you’re doing and work with me on this.”
Barodin shrugged, and then gave Loren an evil little grin. “Pease and I are reasonable men, Loren. We’re so impressed with the promise of your ultimate keel that we’re going to let you clear off one whole workbench, that one right over there under the window, to give yourself a place to build your invention. No, don’t thank us. The workbench is yours. Just pile all the cases on the floor and push the cat off and unload those light radios that are waiting to be tuned. And all you have to do is to keep as quiet as a little mouse as you go about your work, so as not to interrupt the Alexander Graham Bell project.”
“Edward! Aren’t you going to help me?”
“Of course we are, Loren. We’ve already put you on the list. You’ve got a number. What’s his number, D.D.?”
“One-eighty-six. He comes just after the new coil for the girls’ dorm water heater.”
“There you are. Number one-eighty-six. We’ll be all yours in just a month or two.”
Loren found an empty bench and set to work, determined to be “quiet as a mouse,” and not disturb whatever trivial project Barodin and Pease were working on. He would be the ideal tenant laborer. And if they took no note of what he was doing, they would soon have to confront what they had missed. Loren was about to make history. When Baracoa’s boats sailed solidly up to windward with his marvelous keels, he would take all the credit, every bit. So he didn’t say a word to them, just went directly to his bench and started working.
After a few minutes of trying to ignore the furious electric energy he was giving off, Edward and D.D. Pease tossed it in. Edward spoke up in a raised voice: “Well, this has been some productive afternoon, Pease. Who would think we could have finished one hundred and eighty-five projects in so little time? But there’s project number one-eighty-five done and right as rain. Pile it up with the others. What’s next?”
“Let’s see. Oh, yes. There’s project number one-eighty-six. Some sort of a keel we’re going to help Martine with.”
“Oh, I remember that one. Not just a keel, but the ultimate keel. The poor kid is probably sitting over there at his workbench, just waiting for us to pitch in and help.”
“Right,” said Loren. “Pair of dreamers. You guys will be lucky if I let you in on this at all. I’m inclined to keep it for myself.” His unsteady hands spilled hot solder down the edge of the circuit board. “Shit.”
“Let me give you a hand there, young fellow.” Edward nudged him aside and moved in. “Ah, a t-prime-two Effector, if I’m not mistaken, Pease. But with a little twist, this one. It’s got a beefed up input circuit, as though our young apprentice envisions applying a much higher voltage to drive it.”
“Exactly.” Loren let Edward clean up the spilled solder and re-solder the junction. “The second state is not where we predicted it would be. We were miles off. In the second stable state, time doesn’t flow like molasses; it almost doesn’t flow at all. It’s slowed down to less than ten to the minus tenth.”
Edward whistled.
“English only spoken here,” Pease objected. “What, pray tell, is ten to the minus tenth?”
“One te
n billionth. Time is slowed to less than a ten billionth of its normal flow. That means a second as perceived inside the beam is equivalent to more than three hundred years, viewed from the outside.”
Barodin was disbelieving. “How could we have been off by so much?”
“Edward, it’s fascinating. Dr. Chan helped me to understand. There are coins of time, just like light or gravity. Think what that means!” He continued to explain as Edward completed the circuit, peppering Loren with questions along the way. In the midst of his discourse, Loren suddenly remembered that they still had no way to supply the voltage required. “We’re going to need something over nine hundred volts to drive this thing. So we can’t use any of our regular power supplies.”
“At nine hundred volts,” Pease observed, “I hope you mean for it to draw next to no current. Otherwise our ultimate keel is going to be a pig for power.”
“A few micro-amps. Maybe less.”
“In that case, we can just charge up a capacitor and let the Effector drain it off. That will give us a few shots, anyway, to test the thing out. For the final units, we can rig a battery powered source with a voltage multiplier.” Pease began laying out a capacitor source on a circuit breadboard. “How much control do you need?”
