“She can get in this lifeboat.” Mister Jewish answered the groom’s question. “But you’ll have to wait and see if there’s room in one of the later boats.”
“But we were just married!” the girl wailed.
‘I’m sorry.”
“We’re inseparable!” the groom pointed out.
“Only women and children in this boat. Sorry.”
“You don’t understand.” Dr. Quotabusta came up to Mister Jewish. “They really are inseparable.”
“I don’t care if they’re glued together!” Mister Jewish was losing patience.
“They are! They literally are!”
The ship was listing now, probably from the weight of the passengers crowding against the railing. The two officers were still arguing as the pressure of the crowd forced me farther down the deck to where the orchestra was seated. They weren’t playing at the moment. The conductor was berating the trombone player.
“You were an octave too high!” he insisted. “Now try it again and see if you can’t get it right this time!"
The trombone player puffed out his cheeks and blew a mournful solo: “Ma-ny brave souls are a-sleep in the deep, so be-ware . . . Be-e-e-e-wa-a-are . .
“In times of crisis it’s important to keep the passengers’ morale up,” I heard one officer remark to another.
Suddenly Chief Engineer Gorilla barrelled past me on the run, his bald head glistening, his hairless torso naked to the waist and shining with a mixture of oil and sweat. He braked to a halt in front of Mister Jewish and Dr. Quotabusta. A moment later the three of them came charging back the way he had come.
I followed. Shoving their way through the panic-stricken throng, they raced down the stairways to E Deck and through the passageway between the entrances to the inside cabins. Gorilla stopped in front of an open door and pointed.
I peered over their shoulders. There was a large double bed up against the wall facing the door. Somehow it had collapsed. Two people were pinned in the wreckage.
The woman wore a nightgown which was pushed up over her hips. The man was naked. They were, as the saying goes, in flagrante delicto. Which, if you flunked Latin as I did, means they were caught in the act.
“Get us out of here!” the man yelled.
Gorilla ignored him. He was down on his hands and knees in the doorway, pointing out a wire to Mister Jewish. The wire was very thin, almost invisible. One end was lost under the wreckage of the bed. The wire led out of the cabin and down the passageway, following the baseboard. Crawling, Gorilla started to trace it, Mister Jewish and Dr. Quotabusta trailing behind him.
“Hey!” the woman called. “You can’t leave us like this! Suppose the ship sinks?”
“The ship won’t sink,” Gorilla called back.
“But we’re trapped!" she yelled. “What should we do?”
Gorilla was gone, so I answered for him. “Enjoy,” I suggested. “Enjoy!”
I trotted down the passageway and caught up with the three officers. Gorilla was on his feet now. He was pointing to a small metal box high up on the wall. The wire led right up to it.
Gorilla and Quotabusta boosted Mister Jewish up to the box. He removed the metal cover. Inside was a maze of filaments and transistors. The wire from the stateroom was attached to a terminal buried in the maze. Mister Jewish tore it loose.
“Pretty damn ingenious!” Mister Jewish observed sourly as he climbed down.
“Yeah.” Gorilla agreed. “I had a look at that bed before. The slats were sawed almost through. Set up so the bed would collapse as soon as any strain was put on it. And lover-boy in there put on the strain,” he added.
“Is that what activated the alarm?” Dr. Quotabusta asked.
“Right. There was a pushbutton rigged under one of the slats. When the bed broke, the slat hit it. The wire ran straight from there to this relay-box.”
“But this relay-box would only ring a bell alarm in the wheelhouse and the Captain’s cabin,” Mister Jewish said. “The Captain would have to trigger the ‘Abandon Ship’ siren himself. I know he’s pretty stupid, but I can’t believe he’s that stupid.”
“He’s not,” Gorilla told him. “That’s how I discovered this in the first place. The Skipper didn’t push the panic button. As a matter of fact, he called me in the engine room and accused me of doing it. So I checked the whoosher. And I found that somebody had crossed the wires so it would go off together with the simple alarm bells.”
“Thereby turning a minor emergency into a major panic,” Mister Jewish summed up.
“Why would anybody do a thing like that?” Dr. Quotabusta wondered.
“A practical joke, maybe.” Gorilla answered him.
“That’s a pretty outlandish practical joke. And who would know the ship’s circuitry well enough to pull it off?” Mister Jewish answered his own question. “Only a member of the crew,” he realized.
“I’d hate to be in his shoes if the Skipper ever catches him!” Gorilla shuddered. “Which reminds me, where is the Captain? When I tried to find him to tell him what happened, he’d vanished.”
I could have told them where Captain Maldemerde was, but I didn’t. Letting them know that the Captain had deserted his ship would only have added to their resentment of him. And that wouldn’t have been wise. Not with the race still to be run.
The false alarm put us another four hours behind schedule, making a rough total of sixteen hours we’d lost. Most of the four hours was spent in convincing the passengers and crew that the ship wasn’t foundering. Even with Mister Jewish making calming announcements over the loudspeaker repeatedly, it wasn’t easy to quell the panic. And it was a hell of a job rounding up the lifeboats and getting the passengers in them back on board.
As I watched one of the lifeboats being raised, I noticed Knute Summerknut standing at the rail. As usual, ‘The Grand Old Man of Nudism’ was stark naked. His grandson Erik was in the lifeboat, and as it was hoisted to just below the level of the deck, the kid reached up, grabbed the old man’s penis, and pulled himself aboard. I winced, but the old Dane didn’t seem to mind.
A couple of minutes later, Blaze Buxbocks emerged from the lifeboat. She was wearing a white terrycloth robe—th-th-th-that’s all folks! Her lightly freckled face glistened with sea spray, and her red hair was in wild disarray. Otherwise she seemed unmarred by the experience.
“The insurgency caught me in the shower.” She greeted me With the explanation.
“I’m glad you’re all right.”
“I’m fine. Only I’m so incited. Aren’t you incited?”
I took a good look at her. Yeah. I was incited!
“Why don’t we have a drink in your cabin and calm down,” I suggested, doing my best not to leer.
“All right. Only give me a few minutes to titty myself up. I’m breastless.”
Not so you’d notice, she wasn’t! Not by a long shot!
“Fifteen minutes,” I told her.
Blaze nodded and shouldered her way through the crowd to the stairway leading up to her Stateroom. I headed for my own cabin. I wanted to pick up a bottle of Scotch before I joined her.
En route, I ran into a minor riot in one of the below-deck corridors. There were at least twenty angry females babbling and shouting there. In the center of the mob was Chief Purser Yenta. He was obnviously trying to cool the situation. Just as obviously, he wasn’t having much success.
“Mr. Victor! This is awful!” he greeted me.
“What’s the trouble?”
“While these ladies were on deck abandoning ship, someone rifled their staterooms.”
“And stole their jewelry,” I guessed.
“No sir. Their jewelry wasn’t touched. Neither was anything else of monetary value. Only one thing was taken from each of them—the same thing!”