This continued for most of the trip. St. Michael looked like a carbon copy of Southport, the passengers and vehicles as bizarre—and numerous—and there seemed to be a lot of customs men in different uniforms dashing about, totally ignoring some vehicles while processing others.
The trip back was equally strange. The newsstand contained some books and magazines that were odd to say the least, and papers with strange names and stranger headlines.
This time there were even Indians aboard, speaking odd tongues. Some looked straight out of The Last of the Mohicans, complete with wild haircut, others dressed from little to heavy, despite the fact that it was July and very warm and humid.
And, just before we were to make the red and green channel markers and turn into Southport, I saw the girl die for the first time.
She was dressed in red tee shirt, yellow shorts, and sandals; she had long brown hair, was rather short and stocky, and wore oversized granny glasses.
I wasn’t paying much attention, really, just watching her looking over the side at the wake, when, before I could even cry out, she suddenly climbed up on the rail and plunged in, very near the stern.
I screamed, and heard her body hit the water and then heard her howl of terror as she dropped close enough so that the propwash caught her, sucked her under, and cut her to pieces.
Several people on the afterdeck looked at me quizzically, but only one or two seemed to realize that a woman had just died.
There was little I could do, but I ran back to Hanley, breathless.
He just nodded sadly.
“Take it easy, man,” he said gently. “She’s dead, and there’s no use going back for the body. Believe me, we know. It won’t be there.”
I was shocked, badly upset. “How do you know that?” I snapped.
“Because we did it every time the last four times she killed herself and we never found the body then, either,” he replied sadly.
I had my mouth open, ready to retort, to say something, but he got up, put on his officer’s hat and coat, and said, “Excuse me. I have to supervise the unloading,” and walked out.
As soon as I got off the ship it was like some sort of dreamy fog had lifted from me. Everything looked suddenly bright and clear, and the people and vehicles looked normal. I made my way to the small ferry terminal building.
When they’d loaded and the ship was gone again, I waited for McNeil to return to his office. It looked much the same really, but a few things seemed different. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there was something odd—like the paneling had been rosewood before, and was now walnut. Small things, but nagging ones.
McNeil came back after seeing the ship clear. It ran almost constantly, according to the schedule.
I glanced out the window as he approached and noticed uniformed customs men checking out the debarked vehicles. They seemed to have different uniforms than I’d remembered.
Then the ticket agent entered the office and I got another shock. He had a beard.
No, it was the same man, all right. No question about it. But the man I’d talked to less than nine hours before had been clean-shaven.
I turned to where the navigation atlas lay, just where I’d put it, still open to the Southport page.
It showed a ferry line from Southport to a rather substantial St. Clement’s Island now. But nothing to Nova Scotia.
I turned to the bearded McNeil, who was watching me with mild amusement in his eyes.
“What the hell is going on here?” I demanded.
He went over and sat down in his swivel chair. “Want the job?” he asked. “It’s yours if you do.”
I couldn’t believe his attitude. “I want an explanation, damn it!” I fumed.
He chuckled. “I told you I’d give you one if you wanted. Now, you’ll have to bear with me, since I’m only repeating what the Company tells me, and I’m not sure I have it all clear myself.”
I sat down in the other chair. “Go ahead,” I told him.
He sighed. “Well, let’s start off by saying that there’s been a Bluewater corporation ferry on this run since the mid-1800s—steam packet at first, of course. The Orcas is the eleventh ship in the service, put on a year and a half ago.”
He reached over, grabbed a cigarette, lit it, and continued.
“Well, anyway, it was a normal operation until about 1910 or so. That’s when they started noticing that their counts were off, that there seemed to be more passengers than the manifests called for, different freight, and all that. As it continued, the crews started noticing more and more of the kind of stuff you saw, and things got crazy for them, too. Southport was a big fishing and lobstering town then—nobody does that any more, the whole economy’s the ferry.
“Well, anyway, one time this crewman goes crazy, says the woman in his house isn’t his wife. A few days later another comes home to find that he has four kids—and he was only married a week before. And so on.”
I felt my skin starting to crawl slightly.
“So, they send some big shots up. The men are absolutely nuts, but they believe what they claim. Soon everybody who works the ship is spooked, and this can’t be dismissed. The experts go for a ride and can’t find anything wrong, but now two of the crewmen claim that it is their wife, or their kid, or somesuch. Got to be a pain, though, getting crewmen. We finally had to center on loners—people without family, friends, or close personal ties. It kept getting worse each trip. Had a hell of a time keeping men for a while, and that’s why it’s so hard to recruit new ones.”
“You mean the trip drives them crazy?” I asked unbelievingly.
He chuckled. “Oh, no. You’re sane. It’s the rest of ’em. That’s the problem. And it gets worse and worse each season. But the trip’s extremely profitable. So we try to match the crew to the ship and hope they’ll accept it. If they do it’s one of the best damned ferry jobs there is.”
“But what causes it?” I managed. “I mean—I saw people dressed outlandishly. I saw other people walk through each other! I even saw a girl commit suicide, and nobody seemed to notice!”
McNeil’s face turned grim. “So that’s happened again. Too bad. Maybe someday there’ll be some chance to save her.”
“Look,” I said, exasperated. “There must be some explanation for all this. There has to be!”
The ticket agent shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette.
“Well, some of the company experts studied it. They say nobody can tell for sure, but the best explanation is that there are a lot of different worlds—different Earths, you might say—all existing one on top of the other, but you can’t see any one except the one you’re in. Don’t ask me how that’s possible or how they came up with it, it just is, that’s all. Well, they say that in some worlds folks don’t exist at all, and in others they are different places or doing different things—like getting married to somebody else or somesuch. In some, Canada’s still British, in some she’s a republic, in others she’s a fragmented batch of countries, and in one or two she’s part of the U.S. Each one of these places has a different history.”
“And this one boat serves them all?” I responded, not accepting a word of that cazy story. “How is that possible?”
McNeil shrugged again. “Who knows? Hell, I don’t even understand why that little light goes on in here when I flip the switch. Do most people? I just sell tickets and lower the ramp. I’ll tell you the Company’s version, that’s all. They say that there’s a crack—maybe one of many, maybe the only one. The ship’s route just happens to parallel that crack, and this allows you to go between the worlds. Not one ship, of course—twenty or more, one for each world. But, as long as they keep the same schedule, they overlap—and can cross into one or more of the others. If you’re on the ship in all those worlds, then you cross, too. Anyone coexisting with the ship in multiple worlds can see and hear not only the one he’s in but the ones nearest him, too. People perception’s a little harder the farther removed the world you’re in
is from theirs.”
“And you believe this?” I asked him, still disbelieving.
“Who knows? Got to believe something or you’ll go nuts,” he replied pragmatically. “Look, did you get to St. Michael this trip?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Looked pretty much like this place.”
He pointed to the navigation atlas. “Try and find it. You won’t. Take a drive up through New Brunswick and around to the other side. It doesn’t exist. In this world, the Orcas goes from here to St. Clement’s Island and back again. I understand from some of the crew that sometimes Southport doesn’t exist, sometimes the Island doesn’t, and so forth. And there are so many countries involved I don’t even count.”
I shook my head, refusing to accept all this. And yet, it made a crazy kind of sense. These people didn’t see each other because they were in different worlds. The girl committed suicide five times because she did it in five different worlds—or was it five different girls? It also explained the outlandish dress, the strange mixture of vehicles, people, accents.
“But how come the crew sees people from many worlds and the passengers don’t?” I asked him.
McNeil sighed. “That’s the other problem. We have to find people who would be up here, working on the Orcas, in every world we service. More people’s lives parallel than you’d think. The passengers—well, they generally don’t exist on a particular run except once. The very few who do still don’t take the trip in every world we service. I guess once or twice it’s happened that we’ve had a passenger cross over, but, if so, we’ve never heard of it.”
“And how come I’m here in so many worlds?” I asked him.
McNeil smiled. “You were recruited, of course. The Corporation has a tremendous, intensive recruiting effort involving ferry lines and crewmembers. When they spot one, like you, in just the right circumstance in all worlds, they recruit you—all of you. An even worse job than you’d think, since every season one or two new Bluewater Corporations put identical ferries on this run, or shift routes and overlap with ours. Then we have to make sure the present crew can serve them, too, by recruiting your twin on those worlds.”
Suddenly I reached over, grabbed his beard, and yanked.
“Ouch! Damn it!” he cried and shoved my hand away.
“I—I’m sorry—I—” I stammered.
He shook his head and grinned. “That’s all right, son. You’re about the seventh person to do that to me in the last five years. I guess there are a lot of varieties of me, too.”
I thought about all that traffic. “Do others know of this?” I asked him. “I mean, is there some sort of hidden commerce between the worlds on this ferry?”
He grinned. “I’m not supposed to answer that one,” he said carefully. “But, what the hell. Yes, I think—no, I know there is. After all, the shift of people and ships is constant. You move one notch each trip if all of you take the voyage. Sometimes up, sometimes down. If that’s true, and if they can recruit a crew that fits the requirements, why not truck drivers? A hell of a lot of truck traffic through here year ’round, you know. No reduced winter service. And some of the rigs are really kinda strange-looking.” He sighed. “I only know this—in a couple of hours I’ll start selling fares again, and I’ll sell a half dozen or so to St. Michael—and there is no St. Michael. It isn’t even listed on my schedule or maps. I doubt if the Corporation’s actually the trader, more the middleman in the deal. But they sure as hell don’t make their millions off fares alone.”
It was odd the way I was accepting it. Somehow, it seemed to make sense, crazy as it was.
“What’s to keep me from using this knowledge somehow?” I asked him. “Maybe bring my own team of experts up?”
“Feel free,” McNeil answered. “Unless they overlap they’ll get a nice, normal ferry ride. And if you can make a profit, go ahead, as long as it doesn’t interfere with Bluewater’s cash flow. The Orcas cost the company over twenty-four million reals and they want it back.”
“Twenty-four million what?” I shot back.
“Reals,” he replied, taking a bill from his wallet. I looked at it. It was printed in red, and had a picture of someone very ugly labeled “Prince Juan XVI” and an official seal from the “Bank of New Lisboa.” I handed it back.
“What country are we in?” I asked uneasily.
“Portugal,” he replied casually. “Portuguese America, actually, although only nominally. So many of us Yankees have come in you don’t even have to speak Portuguese any more. They even print the local bills in Anglish, now.”
Yes, that’s what he said. Anglish.
“It’s the best ferryboat job in the world, though,” McNeil continued. “For someone without ties, that is. You’ll meet more different kinds of people from more cultures than you can ever imagine. Three runs on, three off—in as many as twenty-four different variations of these towns, all unique. And a month off in winter to see a little of a different world each time. Never mind whether you buy the explanation—you’ve seen the results, you know what I say is true. Want the job?”
“I’ll give it a try,” I told him, fascinated. I wasn’t sure if I did buy the explanation, but I certainly had something strange and fascinating here.
“Okay, there’s twenty reals advance,” McNeil said, handing me a purple bill from the cash box. “Get some dinner if you didn’t eat on the ship and get a good night’s sleep at the motel—the Company owns it so there’s no charge—and be ready to go aboard at four tomorrow afternoon.”
I got up to leave.
“Oh, and Mr. Dalton,” he added, and I turned to face him.
“Yes?”
“If, while on shore, you fall for a pretty lass, decide to settle down, then do it—but don’t go back on that ship again! Quit. If you don’t she’s going to be greeted by a stranger, and you might never find her again.”
“I’ll remember,” I assured him.
THE JOB WAS EVERYTHING McNeil promised and more. The scenery was spectacular, the people an ever-changing, fascinating group. Even the crew changed slightly—a little shorter sometimes, a little fatter or thinner, beards and mustaches came and went with astonishing rapidity, and accents varied enormously. It didn’t matter; you soon adjusted to it as a matter of course, and all shipboard experiences were in common, anyway.
It was like a tight family after a while, really. And there were women in the crew, too, ranging from their twenties to their early fifties, not only in food and bar service but as deckhands and the like as well. Occasionally this was a little unsettling, since, in two or three cases out of 116, they were men in one world, women in another. You got used to even that. It was probably more unsettling for them; they were distinct people, and they didn’t change sex. The personalities and personal histories tended to parallel, regardless, though, with only a few minor differences.
And the passengers! Some were really amazing. Even seasons were different for some of them, which explained the clothing variations. Certainly what constituted fashion and moral behavior was wildly different, as different as what they ate and the places they came from.
And yet, oddly, people were people. They laughed, and cried, and ate and drank and told jokes—some rather strange, I’ll admit—and snapped pictures and all the other things people did. They came from places where the Vikings settled Nova Scotia (called Vinland, naturally), where Nova Scotia was French, or Spanish, or Portuguese, or very, very English. Even one in which Nova Scotia had been settled by Lord Baltimore and called Avalon.
Maine was as wild or wilder. There were two Indian nations running it, the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Portugal, and lots of variations, some of which I never have gotten straight. There was also a temporal difference sometimes—some people were rather futuristic, with gadgets I couldn’t even understand. One truck I loaded was powered by some sort of solar power and carried a cargo of food service robots. Some others were behind—still mainly horses, or oldtime cars and trucks. I am not certain even now if they were
running at different speeds from us or whether some inventions had simply been made in some worlds and not in others.
And, McNeil was right. Every new summer season added at least one more. The boat was occasionally so crowded to our crew eyes that we had trouble making our way from one end of the ship to the other. Watching staterooms unload was also wild—it looked occasionally like the circus clown act, where 50 clowns get out of a Volkswagen.
And there was some sort of trade between the worlds. It was quickly clear that Bluewater Corporation was behind most of it, and that this was what made the line so profitable.
And, just once, there was a horrible, searing pain that hit the entire crew, and a modern world we didn’t meet any more after that, and a particular variation of the crew we never saw again. And the last newspapers from that world had told of a coming war.
There was also a small crew turnover, of course. Some went on vacation and never returned, some returned but would not reboard the ship. The Company was understanding, and it usually meant some extra work for a few weeks until they found someone new and could arrange for them to come on.
THE STARS WERE FADING a little now, and I shined the spot over to the red marker for the Captain. He acknowledged seeing it, and made his turn in, the lights of Southport coming into view and masking the stars a bit.
I went through the motions mechanically, raising the bow when the Captain hit the mark, letting go the bow lines, checking the clearances, and the like. I was thinking about the girl.
We knew that people’s lives in the main did parallel from world to world. Seven times now she’d come aboard, seven times she’d looked at the white wake, and seven times she’d jumped to her death.
Maybe it was the temporal dislocation, maybe she just reached the same point at different stages, but she was always there and she always jumped.
The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century Page 18
