It did not seem so to John but he sat on a stool and got his breathing in order again.
When he saw Stan later the young man said, surprised, “Twist? Stretched legs? I never felt any such,” and John understood that the shiftings and unsteadiness of both time and space were the province of an observer. But the truncated chimney, now being hastily restored by Stan and others in a full sweat, spoke of how real the waverings of time could be.
They cut across once more, skirting a big bar of aluminum that gleamed dully and could snatch the hull from an induction ship in a passing instant. This took the Natchez near the shore where John had left his skiff. With Mr. Preston’s binoculars he searched the blue-green brush but could find no trace of it.
“Somebody stole it,” he said, outraged.
“Or else ate it,” the pilot said, smiling.
“I didn’t grow that skiff, it’s not alive. I sawed and hammered it into being.”
“Maybe time ate it,” was all the pilot would say.
The shore seemed watery and indeterminate, a blue-green emulsion. As they beat their way upstream his respect for the pilot grew. No prominence would stick to its shape long enough for John to make up his mind what form it truly was. Hills dissolved as if they were butter mountains left on a dining room table during a warm Sunday afternoon.
Yet Mr. Preston somehow knew to make the Natchez waltz to starboard at some precise spot, else—he explained—the ship would have a grave misunderstanding with a snag that would rip them stem to stern in the time it took a man to yawn. The murky waste of water and slumbering metal laid traps for timeboaters of all keel depths.
Mr. Preston made her shave the head of an island where a small temporal vortex had just broken from the misty skin of the river, trimming it so close that trees banged and brushed the stern, nearly taking off a curious passenger—who hurriedly disembarked at their first stop, leaving his bag. He babbled something about haunted visions of headless women he had seen in the air. The crew guffawed and made faces. John joined them.
The vagaries of induction ships were of terrifying legend. Most folk who lived near the river—and many, indeed most, chose not to—reported seeing ships that winked into existence at a wharf, offloaded people and bags in a spilling hurry, and slipped away with motors whining, to vanish moments later by first narrowing, then becoming a door-thin wedge which sometimes rose up into the air before thinning into nothingness.
People who tried to keep pace with a ship felt a pressure like a massive unseen hand upon them. They tired, especially going upstream. Thus most lived within less than a day’s walk of where they had been born. By straining effort a strong man or woman could take foot or horse into a distant town to find a price for a fresh crop, say, or purchase goods. Most preferred to let the induction ships ply their trade up and down, hauling bales of finespun, say, and returning with store-bought wonders ordered from a gaudy catalog.
Some, though, booked passage on the ships, as much for the ride as for the destination. The Natchez’s main rooms were well appointed with opulent armchairs and stuffed davenports, the doorways garnished with bone-white wooden filigree of fanciful patterns and famous scenes of time-distortion. There was a technicolor symbolical mural of great pilots in the main lounge, and in first-class cabins a porcelain doorknob and a genuine full-wall image sheet which gave an artistic view when caressed. The public rooms featured curving ceilings touched up with elegant gilt, and rainshower-style chandeliers of glittering glass-drops. Day passengers could get down to shirt-sleeves and use a long row of bowls in the barber shop, which also boasted public towels, stiff public combs and fragrant public soap.
All this impressed John mightily. He had never, not even in the pilot’s own house, seen such opulence and finery. Passengers boarding from the small, straggling, shabby hamlets along shore echoed his wide-eyed reverence. Three days of cruising brought a certain bemused certitude to him, though, so that he gazed at these scruffy travelers in their baggy clothes with the same elevated scorn as the older crew.
Not that he inhabited the same celestial sphere as the pilot himself. Mr. Preston’s face wore lines earned by watching the immemorial clashes of differing temporal potentials. His speech veered from elegant, educated downriver cadences, to slurred, folk-wise vernacular. Pilots boated in eternity, and they knew it.
John was along for his passingly useful knowledge, not his skill. So when the induction coils froze up he hustled below on sharply barked command of the Cap’n, just as did Stan and the rest. Mr. Preston stayed aloft, of course.
The vast engine room was a frenzy of shouted orders and shoving bodies. The power that drove them uptime came separately from the huge copper armature, which spun, when working properly, between mammoth black iron magnets.
Normally, running into the river’s past would suck great gouts of energy from the whirling metal. But in cross-cutting the river, snaking through reefs and bromium upwellings, the pilot would sometimes end up running at crosscurrent to the normal, and they would move for a while upstream, as far as the normal water current was concerned, but downstream and thus downtime, as the temporal contortions saw it.
There was no general sign of this, though John thought he glimpsed far out in the river a huge, ghostly ship that flickered into being for a mere shaved second. It had great fat towers belching grimy smoke, portholes brimming with violet light. A craft hovered in the air like a gargantuan insect, vanes churning the mist above, as if it were a swollen predator mosquito about to attack a metal whale.
Then—ssstttpp!—wind had whistled where the vision had floated, and a cry from below announced an all-hands.
Stan showed him the coated pipes and cables, already crusted a hand deep in hard, milk-white ice. Boilers nearby radiated intense heat into the room, but the time-coursing inside the pipes and cables sucked energy from them so quickly that the ice did not melt.
John and all other crew members fell to chipping and prying and hammering at the ice. It was solid stuff. A chunk fell off into John’s hand and he momentarily saw the surface of a pipe that led directly into the interior of the induction motors. Though normally shiny copper, now the pipe was eerily black.
He stuck his nose in close to see and heard the crack of air itself freezing to the metal.
“Hey, get back!” a crewwoman shouted, yanking him away just as the entire gap he had opened snapped shut abruptly—air whooshing into the vacuum created, then freezing instantly itself, in turn sucking in more air.
Another man was not so fortunate, and froze three fingers rock-solid in a momentary crevice in the pipe ice. His cries scarcely turned a head as they all labored to break off and heat away the fast-growing white burden.
A cable sagged under its accumulating weight and snapped free. The high whine of electrical power waned when it did, and John felt real fear.
He had heard the tales of induction ships frozen full up this way, the infinite cold of inverse time sucking heat, life, air and self from them. The victim ships were found, temporally displaced years and miles from their presumed location, perpetual ivory icebergs adrift on the seemingly placid river.
John hacked and pried and at last sledge-hammered the ice. The frost groaned and shrugged and creaked as it swelled, like some living thing moaning with growing pains.
Across the engine room he heard another cry as a woman got her ankle caught by the snatching ice. Gales shrieked in to replace the condensing air. Voices of the crew rose in panic.