“I should have thought of this before,” said Sullivan. “Kootie, do you remember how Alice’s coronation ceremony got wrecked?”
The boy’s brown eyes blinked up at him. “The food at the banquet came to life,” he said, “and it didn’t want to be eaten.”
“Right, the leg of mutton was talking and laughing and sitting in the White Queen’s chair, and the pudding yelled at Alice when she cut it, and—and the White Queen dissolved in the soup tureen, remember? The bottles even came to life, and took plates for wings and forks for legs. And Queen Alice was knocked right out of the Looking-Glass world.” He punched the button that had a downward-pointing arrow on it. “We’ve got to find the after steering compartment.”
The little booth shook, and then with a hydraulic whine the deck outside started to move upward; before his vision was cut off by this ascending fourth wall, Sullivan heard the sirenlike laugh again, closer, and he saw Bradshaw shift heavily around to face the way they had come.
The bare bulb in the shelved, inlaid elevator ceiling made the faces of Kootie and Elizalde look jaundiced and oily, and Sullivan knew he must look the same to them.
Elizalde was shaking. “Goddamn you, Pete, what’s in this after steering compartment?”
“The degaussing machinery,” said Sullivan, trying to speak with conviction. “They’d have had to install it when the Queen Mary was a troopship during the war, to keep her hull from attracting magnetic mines; and there’s no way they’d have gone to the trouble of tearing it out, afterward. And the after steering room is the electrical spine of any ship—there’d have been a diesel engine there to run a sort of power-steering pump, so they could steer the ship from down there if the bridge was blown away. It’s the backup bridge, in effect, and I don’t suppose they’re using the real one for anything at all now, with tourists dropping snow cones all over everything. There’ll be live power down below still.” It’s certainly possible, he thought.
“So what?” Elizalde was leaning against the back of the car, her sunken eyes watching the riveted steel of the elevator shaft rising beyond the frail bars of the gate, and she spoke quietly in the confined space. “What the hell good is this old anti-mine stuff going to do us? Jesus, Pete, tell me you know what you’re doing here!”
“How did this apparatus keep the ship from attracting magnetic mines?” asked Kootie.
Sullivan looked down at the boy. “The mines had a specific magnetic polarity,” he said. “Once that was known, it was easy enough to forcibly reverse the ship’s own natural magnetic field by passing a current, through a set of cables around the hull.”
“But it’s turned off now?”
“Sure, it’ll be disconnected, but it’ll still be there.”
“And you think there’ll still be power there too. So you’re planning to reconnect it and crank up a big magnetic field; and,” it was Kootie’s little-boy cadences that went on, “you’re gonna wake up every dinner aboard.”
“It’ll draw ‘em out,” Sullivan agreed. From the walls, he thought, from the closets in the old staterooms, from the deck planks weathered by three decades of sunny summer cruises and North Atlantic storms. “And none of ’em will want to be eaten. It’ll be a mass exorcism.” Once drawn out, he thought, they’ll dissolve away in this alien Long Beach air. He remembered Bradshaw’s explanation of the L.A. CIGAR traps, and he hoped the dim old ghosts might somehow understand that this was…rescue? Liberation? Finishing the job of dying; say.
A breeze on his ankles made Sullivan look down past Kootie, and he saw that an edge of the elevator shaft had appeared down by their feet; the gap below it rode up until he could see another deck, dimly lit by electric lights somewhere. The elevator floor clanged against the painted steel deck, and he pulled the accordion gate aside. The bulkheads of the silent old corridors were ribbed and riveted, painted gray below belt-height and yellowed white above.
“This has got to be as close to water level as you can get,” he said, instinctively speaking quietly down here so close to the sanctum sanctorum of the vast old liner. “It’ll be right behind us, directly over the rudder.”
“Get these cuffs off us,” said Kootie.
“Oh, yeah.” Sullivan took out his comb, broke off another narrow tooth, and quickly opened the handcuff that was still un Kootie’s right wrist; then he did the same for Elizalde.
“Where did you learn that?” Elizalde asked as the cuffs clanked to the floor and she massaged her freed wrist.
Sullivan held up his hands, palms out, and wiggled the fingers at her. “If you hadn’t glued that plaster finger back on, I’d be missing one right now.” He started down the corridor toward the stern. “Come on.”
Ancient bunks, with brown blankets still tumbled on them, were bolted on metal trays to the steel bulkheads down here, and as he led Elizalde and Kootie past them Sullivan shuddered at the thought of coming back this way if he got the field up and at maximum intensity.
“That’s serious electrical conduit,” said Kootie, pointing at the ceiling.
Sullivan looked up, and saw that the boy was right. “Follow it,” he said.
A few steps farther down the hall the conduit pipes curved into the amidships bulkhead over a dogged-shut oval door, and Sullivan punched back the eight dog clips around the door’s perimeter; the door rattled in the bulkhead frame, and Sullivan realized that the rubber seal had rotted away. He prayed that he wasn’t the first person to open this door since the ship was docked here in Long Beach in 1967.
But there were lights burning inside the twenty-foot-square room beyond the door when he pulled it open; and they were new fluorescent tubes, bolted up alongside the very old lights, which were hung on C-shaped metal straps so that the recoil of the big wartime guns on the top deck wouldn’t break the filaments.
A diesel engine the size of a car motor sat on a skid supported by two I-beams laid down near the left bulkhead, with two banked rows of square batteries on shelves behind it; and Sullivan saw a new battery charger bolted to the bulkhead over them.
“They’re live!” he said, his shoulders slumping with relief. “See? This must be the ship’s backup power supply now, in case the AC from ashore goes funny. UPS for their computers, uninterrupted power supply so they don’t lose their data.”
“Groovy,” said Elizalde. “Hook it up and let’s get out of here.”
“Right.” Sullivan looked around and identified the reduction-gear box and the steering pump and the after steering wheel to his left, and so the three-foot-by-four-foot box on the right-hand bulkhead had to be the degaussing panel. He walked past it and began unlooping heavy coils of emergency power cable from the rack riveted to the bulkhead.
Sullivan was remembering another exorcism he had helped perform, at the Moab Nuclear Power Station in Utah in 1989.
The Public Utilities Commission had claimed that it would be cheaper to produce power elsewhere than to spend the millions needed to bring the reactor up to current safety standards—but the real reason had been that the site had become clogged with ghosts attracted to the high voltage. The things had clustered around the big outdoor transformers, and some had got solid enough to fiddle with the valves and switches and steal the employees cars.
The power line from the degaussing panel had been cut, just beyond the breaker, disconnecting the panel from the rest of the ship; but a post stuck out above the hack-sawed conduit, and Sullivan pulled the dusty canvas cover off the emergency power three-phase plug on the end of the post.