Sir Tanar lay in his hammock, twitching feebly, his eyelids fluttering. Conundrum stood at his side, filled with an unreasoning concern. He didn’t quite understand why he should be worried about this human, but he couldn’t help the way he felt. Even as he stroked the Thorn Knight’s brow and tried to comfort him, deep down inside he felt repulsed by the sight of the ungainly, sprawling, pale-skinned human. It was quite mystifying.
To take his mind off his conflicting emotions, Conundrum watched the professor, who was at that moment standing before the how porthole, a blue glowwormglobe resting in the palm of his outstretched hand. At first, Conundrum wasn’t sure what the professor was looking at, but as he gazed closer, his eyes met with a startling, fascinating, and thoroughly gruesome sight.
They were inside the galley.
When the Indestructible rammed the galley, her iron-shod bow had punched completely through the galley’s wooden hull and become lodged in the hole. Sir Tanar’s cabin was located in the bow of the Indestructible, so the light from the professor’s glowwormglobe shining through the forward porthole actually illuminated the interior of the pirate ship’s hold. The murky water, filled now with freshly-stirred mud from the sea floor, seemed nearly as thick and opaque as tarbean tea, and things floated in it, things difficult to identify because they were hovering, without gravity pressing them down into their accustomed shapes. What appeared at first to be a shred of fog proved in fact to he a bolt of diaphanous silk, partially unrolled, stolen from the-gods-only-knew-where. Personal items littered the scene-brushes, curry combs, leather flasks crushed flat by the weight of the water, a cracked mirror, a hunk of half-eaten meat with teeth marks plainly visible'.
But what filled Conundrum with horror were the bodies, six at least. They were all minotaurs, but a sickening feeling washed over Conundrum when he looked at their bestial faces. In each case, the mouth hung open, and the tongue, mottled gray, dangled out the side. The eyes, too, were open, and seemed to be staring at something very far away. Their ears, their big bovine ears, struck him as the most pathetic. Soft, keen, intelligent, they swayed in the gentle currents and eddies still swirling through the hold, as though they yet listened for the order to abandon ship.
Conundrum turned away, trying to blank the vision from his mind. He ground his teeth and clawed at his curly red beard in frustration. All he ever wanted to do was solve puzzles. He wasn’t a warrior or a sailor. The sight of the drowned pirates filled him with cold loathing, and disgust, and pity-yes, pity-even for an enemy, even for a monster like a minotaur.
Doctor Bothy stuck his head into the room. “How’s the patient?” he asked.
Conundrum composed himself and looked at Sir Tanar. The Thorn Knight had regained consciousness. He sat up and glared about, feeling the back of his head and counting the lumps.
“Feeling better?” the doctor asked with a smile. Behind him stood Sir Grumdish, cheeks flushed and beaming happily. “I could give you another shot if you are still nervous.”
“No!” Sir Tanar shouted, then winced. “That won’t be necessary,” he finished in muted tones, but his eyes flashed with hate.
“Good, the commodore wants everyone on the bridge.”
The officers and crew of the MNS Indestructible drew together around the commodore. Their trembling white beards and drawn faces turned to him in the dim blue light. He’d ordered all but one glowwormglobe covered in order to darken the bridge. This allowed them to see, through the bridge porthole, the professor’s light shining from the bow porthole inside the sunken galley. It revealed to them the true gravity of their situation.
They were strangely silent-quiet as no gnome should be. Usually, given a situation calling for ingenuity and daring, they would have all been talking at once as rapidly as their tongues could wag, proposing, discussing, arguing, counter-arguing, counter-proposing, revising, and discarding a dozen ideas and theories all at the same time. But they needed to he able to get their hands on the problem, so to speak, and this was something quite beyond anyone’s grasp. For the problem literally lay outside their ship, and that was the one place none of them could go, not even wearing the professor’s diving suit. The steel head of the ram could not be withdrawn from the heavy beam into which it had embedded itself. The Indestructible and the pirate galley were bound together, irreversibly it seemed.
The commodore had called them all together to discuss their options, but when it seemed no one had anything to say, no theories to offer or experiments to try, he turned to Chief Portlost. “Chief,” he said, “how long would it take to reverse the engine?”
“Well, if we were in dry dock and I had a full crew of engineers,” he pondered, tapping his front teeth with a pencil, “I should say a month at least. Of course, it would require dismantling the ship.”
“That doesn’t sound practical, given our present situation,” the commodore said.
“Yes, I agree,” the chief replied. “You must admit, this is certainly a remarkable and unforeseen occurrence. You would have thought we would have included a reverse gear in the design from the beginning, wouldn’t you? This will require months, simply months of investigation. There’ll be interviews, and committees, and commissions, and possibly even a task force. We’ll produce a study of the events, with speculation and conclusions. It should run at least ten thousand pages. That is, if we live, of course.”
“The good thing is,” Snork offered, “we’ll know better with the next ship design.”
Everyone agreed that this was indeed an excellent point. “Should we call the next prototype the Class D?” the commodore asked.
“That would be the logical progression,” Chief Portlost answered. The mood among the crew began to lighten somewhat, now that they had something positive to think about-the design of the next ship. Several spontaneous discussions broke out, and one argument.
But Sir Tanar silenced all debates when he cried, still a little hysterically, “There isn’t going to be another ship, you… you… you… gnomes! You’re all going to die here. We’re trapped! Trapped like rats!”
He glared wildly around at the small, brown faces turned toward him, then stepped back when he saw Doctor Bothy edging toward him, reflex hammer in hand.
“Speak for yourself.” The commodore pshawed. “You don’t understand, do you? Humans never do. You humans look at us, and you see a funny little people, a race of preposterous inventors. Sometimes you find our inventions useful, like the gnomeflinger, and sometimes they seem ridiculous, like the gnomeflinger. You’re always ready to take our successes and profit by them, but you are also always ready to disparage our mishaps, not knowing that the mishap is at least as important as the success, if not more so. For only from the mishap do we learn.” He turned back to the crew. “Now,” he said, his lips setting into a grim line. “We know what can’t be done. Tell me what can be done.”
“We can escape in the ascending kettles,” Conundrum offered, reminding them of his invention.
“Possibly, and I had already thought of that,” the commodore said. “But I am not yet ready to abandon the Indestructible. She’s not a perfect ship, but she is mine. And besides, even if we did escape, that would only leave us lost in the middle of the Blood Sea.”
“What about the ascending and descending flowpellars?” Chief Portlost asked. “We might use them to wiggle free.”
“They’re pinned in the retracted position by the galley’s hull,” Snork answered.
“But we might still wiggle free,” Chief Portlost countered, “by repeatedly flooding and emptying the aft ballast tank.”