The Gray Ship

by Russell Moran

  Okay, thought Jack. Time to get back to work.

  ***

  He began examining his two prior time journeys. Jack noted that, in his prior travels, one to the defunct golf course in 1929 and the other to Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was able to go back by finding the exact spot he came through. In the golf course trip, he walked in the opposite direction, but over the same spot. In the Pearl Harbor incident, he stepped on the same wooden plank in the same direction. These observations checked out with the other time travelers he had interviewed for his book. The key, obviously, is to find the spot, no matter how you cross it.

  But the California had a problem. He talked extensively with Ivan Campbell, the ship's navigator, as well as the quartermaster of the watch and the OOD at the time of the Daylight Event. Because their last navigational fix was done by dead reckoning, simply plotting course and speed and making an educated guess of your position, they could have been anywhere within 10 square miles of where they hit the time portal. To get back to it the ship would have to steam in a dizzying monotonous back and forth pattern for God know how long. His new found navigational knowledge told him that wind, current and sea conditions could have a big impact on how straight they travelled.

  He also had another concern, a big one. All of the people he interviewed had crossed a land based portal. This was his own experience as well. His extensive research revealed nothing about time travel through a portal in the ocean, nor had he ever heard anything about a large ship with 630 people slipping through the same portal.

  But they were stuck with that fact.

  There are no signs that say, "Time Portal – Please Enter Here."

  Chapter 24

  After lunch in the wardroom Father Rick asked Ashley if he could speak with her in her office. "Of course," said Ashley. If there is one person on the ship her door is always open to it's Father Rick.

  "What's up Father? I hope you're going to tell me somebody slipped us all one big mickey, and we've all had the same strange dream."

  "I wish I could, Captain."

  "I want to talk to you about the crew. I'm concerned that morale is starting to stretch thin. It's been a few days since we crossed the time portal. At first it was an interesting diversion for everyone on the ship. Some may have even enjoyed the excitement of it. But I've been getting vibrations that people want out of this, or at least they want you to try to get the ship back home. As you decided, very few secrets about time travel have been kept from the crew. Jack Thurber has made us all amateur experts in travelling through time. Every crew member knows one thing. They've heard about the idea of getting back to the time we came from by finding the exact location of the portal. Captain, if I've heard it once I've heard it a hundred times in the last two days, 'When are we going to start looking for the portal?' "

  Chapter 25

  After Father Rick left, Ashley was alone with her thoughts. With all of the feverish activity of the last few days, she seldom had time to just think. Or was it that she kept busy because she didn't want to think? A thought kept intruding, not a fully formed thought, not fully formed perhaps because it was so difficult to deal with. It was like a dark weather front on the horizon. You can't ignore it, you know it means trouble; you just wish it would go away.

  Pretty soon my crew is going to expect me to commit treason, Ashley thought. Word was out, as Father Rick just reminded her, that the way to go back was to find the place you came in. She never asked Jack Thurber to keep it secret. Under their strange circumstances secrecy can be a morale killer. Every person on the ship had the same question, "When are we going to try to go back?"

  Before the Daylight Event, everyone aboard knew that they would return home after their deployment to the Persian Gulf. Return home to husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, friends and lovers. As Father Rick reminded Ashley, people can only operate for a short time with no hope for a future. He had just told her that the crew was getting obsessed with the idea of going back.

  This is the storm cloud she worried about, and she knew the storm could be rough. Ashley decided to stop forcing the trouble out of her head.

  So here's my problem, Ashley thought. This is an American warship, the property of the United States Government. We take our orders from the government, ultimately from the Commander in Chief, Abraham Lincoln. After he speaks to Gideon Wells, Lincoln will want the California to join the fight, either in direct battle support or as the lead ship in the blockade of the South. But my crew wants to go back to where we came from. They want to go home. I can't fight the Civil War and go back to where we came from. It's one or the other."

  I risk mutiny or commit treason. Nice choice.

  Chapter 26

  It was 1850 hours and the mess hall was crowded. The crew's mess was open 24 hours a day to accommodate crew members coming off watch. For those who had a regular workday, the mess hall followed the traffic pattern of any food service facility.

  Suddenly there was a loud sound in the corner of the hall, a sound of plates crashing to the deck. This sound is not uncommon at sea, where a sudden wave can reduce a well-stacked rack of dinnerware to a pile of rubble. But the sea was calm, which made the sound that much more startling. First Class Petty Officer William Jordan was lying face down in the smashup of plates. Petty Officer Emilio Lopez, a hospital corpsman, was eating nearby. Instinctively Lopez rushed to the man's aid and immediately saw that Jordan showed symptoms of a heart attack.

  Lopez yelled for people to clear the area while he administered CPR using a defibrillator that he grabbed from a nearby bulkhead. The medical department had been called, and Lt. John Ambrose, one of the ship's two physicians, was on the scene within two minutes. Lopez's CPR had stabilized the man, who was immediately carried to the medical department on a gurney. Jordan took fast breaths and sweated profusely. Commander Joseph Perino, the ship's medical officer, arrived within moments. Jordan's pulse rate was extremely high and his breathing became shallow. Perino ordered an emergency tracheotomy and a breathing tube. He also injected nitroglycerin to help with the man's pain. Perino could see that this was more than a mild heart attack.

  People in the medical department often joked that the most important medical equipment on the ship was the helicopter pad on the stern. In normal circumstances Perino would have ordered a helicopter Medivac to a shore hospital, or, if at sea, to the nearest aircraft carrier, which is equipped with a larger hospital unit. But these weren't normal times. The last place Perino wanted to send this man was a hospital ashore.

  All physicians are familiar with the history of medical progress. Perino didn't have to do research to know that the state of medical technology in 1861 was primitive by modern standards. He knew the statistics. Of the 620,000 casualties in the Civil War, over half were from disease. Most of the disease was spread by unknowing battlefield doctors and nurses, spreading infection from patient to patient. A doctor would amputate a leg, then go to the next victim and treat the man's wounds without even washing his hands.

  The accepted theory of disease propagation in the mid-nineteenth century was the miasma theory, the belief that disease spread through the air by vapors released by rotting matter or fetid water. A person would breathe in a bad vapor and disease would result.

  It would be many years before germ theory, the idea that infection can be spread by microorganisms, was accepted by the medical profession. In the decade after the Civil War, an English surgeon named Joseph Lister, working from the microbiological theories of Louis Pasteur, would develop the concept of a sterile operating environment. Until then, hospitals were not much better than battlefield medical tents. Civil societies created hospitals as places where people would go to get better, to have their wounds treated or their diseases cured. The sad irony was that, in mid-nineteenth-century America, a hospital was the most dangerous place to be if you needed medical help. No, thought Perino, the best place for this poor guy is this warship.

  Perino then had a disturbing tho
ught. That goes for the rest of us, too.

  Chapter 27

  "Captain I'd like to talk about the Butterfly Effect," Father Rick said. Ashley, Father Rick and Lt. Jack Thurber were in the captain's office for a scheduled meeting. Ashley thought of these two men as her Time Travel Brain Trust, friends and guides to help her cope with their new reality.

  "The Butterfly Effect," said Ashley, "yes, I've heard of it. It's a theory that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a disturbance in the atmosphere, and even though it's a tiny disturbance, it can result in a hurricane in another part of the world."

  "You summarize it perfectly Captain. Would you agree Jack?"

  "Yes," Jack said. "I once wrote an article about the Butterfly Effect for the Washington Post." Is there anything this guy hasn't written about? Ashley thought. "While doing time travel research for my book, I figured I'd derive an article from a chapter. The Butterfly Effect is a scientific theory hatched by an American mathematician and meteorologist named Edward Lorenz. He was an expert on chaos theory. Captain Patterson summarized it well: a little flap of the wings here, a big storm over there. It's become a metaphor for small actions having huge results."

  "Let's talk about the Butterfly Effect and the USS California," said Father Rick. "We all saw the reaction of Gideon Wells when I summarized the history of the Civil War. The man was very upset about the casualty numbers I gave him. When I said that the war would last four years I thought the poor guy would faint. I think it's pretty safe to say that he wants the California as part of his arsenal. He wants to use our modern weapons to intercede in the war and bring it to a fast conclusion. My guess is that we'll be part of the naval blockade of the South, or the Battle of Bull Run about three months from now. So tell me if I'm wrong. Gideon Wells wants to use this ship to change history."

  "I totally agree, Father," said Ashley. "From the bits of conversation I picked up between him and Admiral Farragut, they were all but picking out targets. Yes, Wells didn't like the history that he heard, and he wants to change it. And the California is a big part of his plan."

  Father Rick didn't want to put words in the mouth of his good friend and commanding officer. He asked her simply, "Is that okay with you?" Jack listened intently to this conversation.

  "Yes, it's okay for two reasons," said Ashley. "First, from my perspective as a military officer, I follow orders. The California is a US Navy ship, and Wells is the Secretary of the Navy. That's the easy part. But second, I have to say this. Gideon Wells wasn't the only one in the room who felt emotional after you read those horrifying casualty numbers. I kept wondering, how we can we prevent this.”

  "Captain, may I offer a contrarian view?" asked Rick.

  "Father, I may be your commanding officer, but you're my pastor and my friend. Please tell us what's on your mind."

  "Well," Father Rick said, "I want to talk about Iowa."

  "Iowa?" said Ashley and Jack simultaneously.

  "Yes, Iowa. As I may have mentioned, I have a distant ancestor, Randolph Sampson, who fought in the Civil War on the Union side. He called Pennsylvania his home. I've tracked down my ancestral history and discovered that he had befriended a man from Iowa who was a wealthy landowner. They met at Appomattox, shortly after the South surrendered. According to correspondence between the two, the man had fallen from a carriage and sprained his ankle badly. Grandpa Randolph, according to the letter of thanks, carried the man on his shoulder to a doctor's office some distance away. A few months later, as their friendship grew, the man offered Grandpa Randolph 100 acres of land for a cheap price. Grandpa Randolph was a farmer by trade, and he jumped at it. That was the beginning of many generations of Sampsons in Iowa, but most particularly, Peter and Margaret Sampson, my parents."

  "I can never forget the story of how they met. It was May 19, 1958, a rainy day in Dubuque. My mother, a schoolteacher, was driving home when she had a flat tire. It happened right in front of Sampson's Automotive Supplies. As she stood there looking at the flat tire, a young man came running out with a jack, followed by a clerk carrying a tire. 'Do you get a lot of business this way?' said my mother. She and the young proprietor of Sampson's Automotive Supplies had a good laugh. He refused to accept payment, in exchange for her buying him a cup of coffee at the corner luncheonette. So they met, fell in love, got married and three years later brought into the world a future priest named Richard Sampson."

  "There's a butterfly in this story somewhere, yes?" Ashley chided the chaplain.

  "There certainly is Captain. A guy falls off a carriage in 1865, and in so doing sets up a series of events. Ninety three years later, those events lead directly to my parents meeting on May 19, 1958, and on November 9, 1961, to the birth of your humble priest. Compare that guy falling off his cart to a butterfly flapping its wings."

  Father Rick continued. "Now suppose we slipped through a wormhole and wound up at Appomattox in 1865. Suppose a strong young sailor named Jack Thurber was there at the scene. He sees the horse rear, runs up to the carriage, and prevents the man from falling and spraining his ankle. Grandpa Randolph would be a bystander, looking on. He would later return to his small farm in western Pennsylvania, and would never even visit Iowa. In 1958, there would be no Peter Sampson to save the damsel with the flat tire. And of all the things that happened in Dubuque, Iowa on November 9, 1961, the birth of Richard Sampson would not be one of them."

  Oh shit, thought Ashley, I can see where this is going.

  "That," said Father Rick "is why I wanted to talk about butterflies today."

  "Lieutenant Jack," said Ashley, "Any thoughts on this?"

  Jack looked at Ashley and said, "The uncomfortable thing about logic, Captain, is that you can't resist it. You don't have to understand the Butterfly Effect to get the point that Father Rick makes. When I had those two incidents of slipping through a time portal, I did nothing to change what was going on when I got there. I just slipped into the past and slipped back. But Father Rick paints a picture that's pretty clear. A small change in the past can revoke history as we know it."

  "Here's my serious concern," said Father Rick. "In the story I just told, I changed everything by just inserting a hypothetical correction – the guy never sprained his ankle. What we're talking about in our present circumstances goes much further than changing a fact or two. We intervene in the Civil War, and in so doing we change history. If everyone on this ship tracked their ancestry like I did, would they be able to predict with certainty that they are really here. Each of the little serendipities of life point us in different directions as well as our ancestors. Can we say that the lineage of everyone on this ship will remain exactly the same, even though we change the entire course of history?"

  Father Rick continued. "So we intercede in the Civil War, after which we try to find our way back to 2013 by locating the wormhole. It's been six generations from 1861 to 2013. Every generation begins with the same simple story: boy meets girl. We'll feel the bumping and the night will turn to day. Will any of us exist after it happens?"

  Ashley stood up and walked over to a port hole. She loved the ocean and never tired of looking at it. The ocean was her home, and when she looked at her home, it calmed her. She didn't have to think or analyze anything. The sea gave her answers. If ever she needed some answers it was now.

  "I'm not a philosopher or a theologian," Ashley said, "I'm just a grunt line officer serving her country. But I do have faith in God." She looked at her friend Father Rick, who just closed his eyes and nodded in agreement. "I've heard more Rick Sampson sermons than I can remember when you talked about God's plan for us, how the joy of life comes from surrendering to His loving grace. Something inside me, and I can't explain it, says that God's plan goes beyond a sprained ankle or a flat tire. Something inside me says that our existence isn't as haphazard as a butterfly flapping its wings. I believe that God put us here. It's our job not to blow it."

  Ashley continued, her voice rising slightly. "We're going to intervene in the Civil War,
probably at the Battle of Bull Run. We're going to kick ass, scare the living shit out of the Confederacy, bring an early end to the horror, and save a few hundred thousand lives. Then we're going to find a way home, and we'll all be there when it happens. If I'm wrong, Father, you won't be around to say 'I told you so.' "

  "The meeting's over gentlemen. Thank you both for your thoughtful input. God bless you."

  God bless all of us, she thought.

  Chapter 28

  Gideon Wells' carriage rattled along the oval drive to the front entrance of the White House, as the President's residence was commonly known. It would be decades before the White House became the official name of the building. The circular drive leading up to the front entrance provided little security. As the years went by, presidential safety concerns would rearrange the entrance, replacing the long drive with a large and defensible lawn. There had been heavy rain recently and the path to the front door was its usual mess of potholes and ruts. One of the White House staff ran to the carriage and opened the door for Wells. His assistant climbed out the opposite door. Wells strode through the entrance, his shoes making a loud clapping sound on the stone floor. His assistant carried two large suitcases laden with items that Wells had been given on the California.

  An aide escorted Wells into the President's office. He had suggested that Admiral Farragut be part of the meeting, but Lincoln let it be known that he wanted to meet with Wells alone. Lincoln stood to greet his old friend. Lincoln, as many a biographer would later note, did not try to be imposing, preferring instead to let a man be his own and speak freely. But at 6 feet 4 inches tall, Abraham Lincoln simply was imposing, whether he intended to be or not.

  "So Mr. Secretary, people have been telling me that you've taken to strong drink," Lincoln joked.

  Wells laughed. "Mr. President, after I tell you my story you may want to indulge yourself as well." Lincoln was intensely curious about the contents of the large suitcases, but he decided to let Wells tell the story in his own fashion.