There was a monstrous ripping sound, the chaos of age-old timbers and metal plates crumbling and snapping, then the Mary Newton came to rest solidly locked in the island of derelicts.
Nick drew a deep breath. “Whew! That’s better! I half expected we’d get buried under this junk pile.”
“This region must extend for miles,” Harley remarked, turning slowly and seeing nothing but lofty, lopsided masts, and here and there a diagonal funnel. “What do you make of it, Dawlish? Is this the shipping of this plane—all that remains of it—or did it come from elsewhere?”
“If by ‘elsewhere’ you mean the outer world, sir, then I think it came from there,” Dawlish answered. “It seems that in this plane there is a kind of common whirlpool into which unmanned vessels are drawn. The Mary Newton was evidently an exception and had steered clear of it, until the storm drove her into it. Or maybe the storms themselves are the motive force which finally drives every ship to this graveyard.”
“Well, I—” Nick began to say, and then he gave a start. He just could not go on speaking because he was too astounded, so he gripped Dawlish’s arm and pointed.
Dawlish saw what he meant: so did the others. In this utterly deserted land a bright light was shining some distance away! Even more extraordinary, it was swinging hack and forth and coming nearer.
“Some—somebody else alive!” Betty gasped, clinging to Dawlish. “Gosh, I know I shouldn’t be scared, but I am!”
Dawlish was silent, watching. Occasionally, as it advanced, the light made jumps as though the person holding it leapt from one hulk to another. Then came the sounds of his progress, the ring of his boots on metal—and at last he himself took on outline in the pearly glow. He came nearer still, and at last was only a few feet away on the neighboring vessel, a hurricane lamp swinging in his hand. He held it high and peered forward.
“Well I’m scuttled!” He exclaimed in amazement, his voice rusty as though he had had little need to use it. “Living people!”
He seemed to consider it a quite impossible revelation. So, whilst he gazed and muttered to himself, the party on the Mary Newton studied him. He was attired in a tattered seaman’s uniform, apparently that of a captain, and possessed a great mane of unkempt gray hair and a flowing beard and moustache. In physique he was not particularly big, but his shoulders were massive. His eyes, lighted diagonally by the oil lamp, had a fixed, staring quality as though he had been suddenly awakened from a deep sleep.
“Who are you?” Nick called out.
“English!” the apparition yelled. “Sweet oil of Judah, he speaks English!”
He lunged forward suddenly, leaping to the Mary Newton. Then he grabbed the hands of the party each in turn and began a fandango, the oil lamp bobbing on the curved wire about his wrist.
“Cap Bronson isn’t alone any more!” he kept chanting. “He’s got company! That’ll drown out the nasty noises.”
“Eh?” Betty asked, surprised.
Captain Bronson suddenly stopped dancing and put a finger to his bearded mouth with exaggerated caution.
“You’ll wake ’em,” he said, peering about him. “The ones who sleep—down there.” He sank his voice and turned one finger downwards dramatically, indicating some subterranean region.
“Crazy as a bed bug,” Nick murmured, as Dawlish stood beside him.
“Let’s get something straight,” Harley said brusquely. “Are you Captain Bronson?”
“Right!” Bronson yelled, with a wild flourish. “Cap Bronson!”
“From where? Have you a ship around here?”
“A ship, he says!” Cap Bronson looked around hint with a wild glint in his eyes. “A ship! Sweet oil of Judah, I’ve thousands of ’em! Pick what I like, take what I like. I’m the ruler, don’t you see?”
“No,” Lucy said politely.
“A woman,” Bronson whispered, staring at her. “And another one here!” He looked at Betty. “I’d forgotten what they looked like. All I have had has been a picture of my wife and kid. She must be twenty-two now. Hell! That’s what it’s been! Hell! Twenty-two years of it! No, twenty! Madge was two when it happened— Noises!” Bronson screamed, wheeling around him and looking nowhere in particular. “Noises, noises! And the fish! They come out and look at me, blast their mainbraces!”
Dawlish took Nick’s arm and led him on one side. In somewhat embarrassed silence Betty, Lucy, and Harley watched Bronson go into another of his capering dances, the lamp swinging up and down.
“The man’s half crazy,” Dawlish murmured. “If he is speaking the truth he’s had twenty years in this ghastly plane, and that’s enough to break any one person. Solitary confinement would be a summer vacation by comparison. If we handle him carefully he may be useful. He must know a thing or two about the environment, having been here so long. What is more, he is a seaman and can perhaps steer us back to the shore we’ve lost. We certainly can’t do it ourselves.”
“Right enough,” Nick agreed. “And he must have access to food and water to have survived— Okay, let’s see what we can do.”
Dawlish moved forward again and spoke quietly, causing Bronson to pause in the midst of his jig.
“If you have a moment, Captain Bronson, I’d like a word with you.”
“If I have a moment!” Bronson bellowed with laughter. “I’ve been dry-docked here for twenty years and he asks me if I have a moment—! Laugh, blast you!” he commanded, seeing the serious faces.
“I’m Horace Dawlish,” Dawlish said. “The leader of this party. We’re stranded, same as you are—and we don’t know how we got here.”
Bronson was silent. He had quieted for the moment, but his eyes were constantly darting about as he listened. By degrees Dawlish gave the whole story, finishing with a negative shrug of his shoulders.
“So there it is, Captain. We’re completely lost. We wondered if you could perhaps guide this vessel of ours back to the shore from which it was snatched?”
“That,” Bronson answered, stroking his magnificent beard, “takes a lot of consideration. How do we drive this thing? We don’t have the women behind the stern pushing, do we?”
He burst into apoplectic laughter at this, but Dawlish remained perfectly calm.
“We might rig up sails,” he answered. “If we can move this vessel from the jammed ships around us it is seaworthy enough to make the trip back. Don’t you see, Captain? If we can only return to our lost shore we stand a chance of getting through to our own world again. And that would include you!”
“Back—back home?” Bronson hesitated, looking vague. “But that just isn’t possible. I’ve been here twenty years and—”
“There’s a scientific answer to all this,” Dawlish insisted. “If any man can get you back home again, I can. But not until you behave like a mariner and get us on the move.”
Bronson was silent for a while, then his flourishing began again.
“Right!” he yelled. “Right it is! I’ll do it! I’m the best seaman that ever was, and what do I get for it? Noises! Fish come and look at me and we’ll dine first,” he finished, without any pause to change the subject.
“Gladly,” Dawlish smiled. “We haven’t had a meal for some time, nor have we slept. We’re pretty well exhausted.”
“This way, all of you! Follow the lamp—the only bright thing in a dark world.”
Bronson scrambled to the side of the ship and leapt outwards with superlative ease to the next wreck. Dawlish followed him and then caught the two girls as they landed. Nick and Harley followed quickly afterwards. Thereafter the party kept in the rear of the half crazy old seaman as he led the way across the hulks that formed this forgotten cesspool of shipping. Bronson sang as he went, with a force sufficient to awaken the dead.
It was during the seemingly interminable journey from ship to ship that Dawlish noticed something in the gray light, and he stopped suddenly. He pointed to a nearby vessel lying on her side, most of her falling to pieces.
“The København!” he exclaimed. “One of the most famous of missing ships! Now we do know we’re in the land to which ships and people have disappeared.”
“Course you are!” Bronson had caught the words and came back to look at the København’s prow. “You’ll find ’em all here—the Cyclops, Saint Augustine, Pride of Alaska—all the ships that ever disappeared from maritime records without trace or explanation. Like mine did. I was skipper of the Baltimore Belle. If you know your records you’ll remember it was sailing for the States, then something happened—I dunno what. We just went on sailing but didn’t get anywhere, and finished up here.”
This was the most rational statement Bronson had made so far. Perhaps the presence of other living beings was having a steadying influence upon him.
“And your crew died?” Betty asked.
“Of thirst. We sailed for maybe three months and I was the only one who stuck it out. Some jumped overboard, some died horribly from lack of food and water. I was about dying, too, when a storm sprang up—sweet oil of Judah, I was being flung into this mass of craft before I realized it. But I’d come back to life. The rain slaked my thirst, and once I got this far I found water and food, particularly on some of the other vessels. I was alive—and I’m still alive after twenty years. Understand?”
“It’s a miracle,” Harley said. “Twenty ears in this solitude is enough to drive anybody—” He was about to say “mad,” but Dawlish stopped such a tactless blunder by cutting in.
“How did you know we’d arrived, Captain? Were you on the watch?”
“I heard you. You couldn’t drive that ship of yours into this mass of hulks without making a din, could you? I knew something had happened—but I didn’t expect people. But come on! We’re wasting time!”
So, presently, Captain Bronson’s abode was reached. It was a heeled-over ship, about a mile from the Mary Newton. The party followed the mariner across a listing deck to a companionway. Once they had descended it they found the entire interior of the ship had been taken to pieces, leaving one huge chamber as large as a ballroom. In this, obviously taken from the other ships nearby, was every conceivable type of furniture and most of it good, though ancient. In fact, the quarters of Captain Bronson were the last word in comfort. Even the floor had costly rugs, evidently taken from staterooms and lounges.
“Sit down, sit down,” Bronson invited, waving his hand, and the five obeyed, glancing about them in the glow of the six oil lamps fixed at different positions on the walls.
“You’ve evidently plenty of oil,” Nick remarked, as Bronson busied himself in the distance, preparing a meal.
“All the oil I need. Much of it crude stuff taken from the dozens of engine rooms in this island. Last me another twenty years if I need it. I’ve everything I need, even to this galley I’m working on now. Arranged everything myself. Not bad, eh?”
“I don’t know whether to laugh at him or sympathize,” Betty murmured, seated next to Dawlish.
“Don’t do either. In a case like his one chance word on the wrong side might turn him vicious—”
“Whispers!” Bronson yelled, glaring. “That’s what I don’t like! Whispering voices! Nasty noises! I hear ’em nearly all the time—’cept just here. Always quiet here.”
Nick gave Dawlish a glance. “Say, do you suppose he’s talking about the voices we heard?”
“Hardly the same ones, but possibly something similar,” Dawlish answered—then when Bronson brought forward six plates on which lay splendidly cooked fish, it seemed the moment to ask a question.
“Tell me, Captain, what kind of noises?” Dawlish’s manner was entirely easy.
“Nasty ones! They hurt! Honkings, grindings, whistles— Like being in the middle of traffic! Drives me crazy to hear it. That’s why I’m here, so I don’t hear it.”
“And the voices?” Dawlish questioned.
“All kinds. Men’s voices—and women’s.” Bronson’s look became far away for a moment. “I used to listen. I used to think I might hear my wife, or my daughter. I even thought I was dead and listening to the living. Now I know differently. Those voices are in me, and I’m probably crazy.”
“Those voices actually exist,” Dawlish said deliberately. “We have heard them too—all of us, but they’ll be different from the ones you heard. Do you know what you really heard?”
“I’ve told you! Voices!”
“The voices of people in London,” Dawlish explained. “And the ‘nasty noises’ as you call them probably belong to traffic. At a rough guess I’d say that around here we are approximately in the center of London, superimposed upon it.”
“Superimposed?” Bronson was mentally wrestling, his brows knitted. “How d’you mean?”
“A matter of dimensions, Captain. Let’s eat while I tell you.”
“Right!” Bronson swung away to the galley with its oil cooker and returned with two freshly baked loaves and a percolator full of coffee. Yet another journey he made to bring cups, saucers, and condiments, then he had everything set out on the big central table.
“Plenty of supplies,” he said, seeing the surprised looks. “Most of it in air-tight bins. Flour, coffee, cocoa, beans, tea, everything. I can bake my own bread, can’t I? Start eating if you don’t want to slight me. Now what’s this about dimensions?”
Over the meal, quite the nicest the party had had in this strange plane, Dawlish made the facts clear. Or at least as nearly as he could with Bronson’s intense stare pinning him.
“You’re a madman, sir!” Bronson declared finally, slamming his fist on the table. “How could a ship or a car move into somewhere else without there being a reason? What do you take me for?”
“It’s the only logical explanation,” Harley Brand snapped. “If you’d any blasted sense you’d realize it!”
Bronson sprang to his feet, his eyes blazing. “Insult me at my own table, eh?” he shouted. “First a pack of lies about voices and noises, and now you slang me because I don’t believe you— You’re all up to no good! You’re like the fish that are always popping up and looking at me. They’d laugh in my face too, if they could. Why? Because I’m trapped here! Trapped and damned!”
“We’re all in the same predicament,” Dawlish said.
“Get out!” Bronson ordered. “All of you! And quick!”
Nobody moved, realizing how absurd the situation was. No man would order away his guests just because of a comment of which he did not approve. Captain Bronson was plainly very abnormal in his outlook.
“All right,” he snapped, as the party remained at the meal. He swung away to the wall and before anybody had grasped his intention he had taken down a ready-oiled and loaded rifle. Carefully he put it to his shoulder.
“Just a moment,” Dawlish said quietly, rising. “Aren’t you being just a little foolish, Captain? We can show you the way to get back to your wife and daughter. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Bronson hesitated, a sympathetic chord struck; then his face hardened again. “You’re probably lying about that, same as everything else. Why should I trust you? Why should I trust anything when a filthy twist of fate threw me into this hell-hole for twenty years? I can only speak at all because I’ve talked to myself so long. You hear? To keep me alive!”
“Why?” Dawlish asked. “There can only be one reason why you have kept yourself alive—and that’s because you believe you will one day find your wife and daughter again. Right?”
Bronson put away his rifle, his mood reversed.
“Right! Yes, I know—you think you can help me find them. All right, I’d be a fool to prevent you. Forget what I did just now: I’m out of touch with my fellow men—and things.”
He sat down again at the table and for a moment held his head in his hands. Then he suddenly grasped the percolator.
“Coffee?” he asked, and started to pour it.
Dawlish, who felt he was beginning to get the hang of the man’s peculiar temperament, ventured another
question.
“Would it be too personal to ask your age, Captain?”
“Blast it, no. I’m seventy, I suppose.”
“Not a bit of it,” Nick laughed. “About fifty, I’d say.”
“I said seventy!” Bronson shouted. “I was fifty when I was wrecked, so I must be seventy now. I haven’t forgotten how to add up!”
Dawlish mused for a moment, then said: “Captain, you expect when you find your daughter to discover she is twenty-two, don’t you? And your wife twenty years older than when you last saw her?”
“If they’re not dead,” Bronson sighed.
“You will probably discover,” Dawlish finished, “that your wife is hardly a day older and that your daughter is still two years of age.”
Not only Bronson, but Nick, Betty, Lucy, and Harley all looked astonished at this pronouncement.
“That’s absurd!” Betty protested.
“No.” Dawlish shook his head. “I’ve been convinced of something ever since we came into this plane, and that is that we are timeless. If not that, then our rate of. metabolism is exceptionally slow compared to that of the normal world. I base my theory on the fact that the voices we have heard all exist at the period when we stepped out of the normal world—just before midnight on the thirtieth of June. Then there was that announcer saying that midnight had yet to come.”
“But we keep living day by day and night by night,” Harley objected. “That’s time, isn’t it? We use up energy and need food to restore it. All that must happen in a period of time.”
“Time, of all scientific definitions, is the vaguest,” Dawlish replied. “It is purely a method of measurement to prevent chaos. But it is more than probable that in a fourth dimension, such as we are in now, Time undergoes a vast alteration and bears no relation to the Time we know. We are existing in a kind of suspended space wherein we grow no older though we seem to live and move normally. Outside this plane Time is more or less a continuous Now, that Now being the instant when we left it.”
The Time Trap Page 6
