“Yes, you’ve guessed it.”
“Directly above one of the boilers,” she finished, staring at Hastings now.
“We crossed the damned Equator in a ship built to go from Southampton to New York,” Dolman said. “The tropics, Hastings. Do you know what it’s like to watch men dying of the heat? Suffocating to death? No fresh air, just the stench of people getting sick and sweating and some of them dying. Temperatures over a hundred and ten degrees-and that’s on the upper decks. Down where we were, it was a damned oven, Hastings. I say we put you in that trunk and we heat it up until you feel your blood boiling. You should have had to watch men like young Elliot Parsons die. I had to, Hastings, and I’ll never forget it!”
“There was no way I could have known-” Hastings pleaded. “We were just trying to do our best to fight the war.”
“Until now,” Dolman said, “I didn’t know who made the decisions about how we were going to be loaded in there. There wasn’t any escape for us then, and there shouldn’t be any for you now.”
“You aren’t going to kill me! Not for something that happened so long ago! Not for a simple miscalculation!”
“What do you want from him?” Sarah asked.
“Withdraw from the Congressional race,” Ada said.
“What?”
“And resign from office,” Robert added.
“You’ll never get away with this!”
“People get away with things like this all the time. You’ve been getting away with murder for over fifty years.”
“It wasn’t murder, I tell you! We didn’t know.”
Sarah frowned. “But you must have known.”
“What?”
“The voyage Elliot Parsons sailed on-it wasn’t the first voyage to cross the Equator.” She looked at Hastings. “You didn’t miscalculate. You accepted the fact that some men might die on the voyage.”
There was a long silence, broken only when Robert said, “Bravo, Sarah.”
“We can prove all of this, Hastings,” Ada said. “Retire as a State Senator, or lose an election in shame.”
“Do you think anyone is going to care about what happened then?”
“Put him in the trunk again!” Dolman said. “He’ll have just as much room to move around as we did. Let’s see him win an election from there.”
“No-no! I won’t run for office. I swear I won’t. Just let me out of here!”
“Don’t trust him!” Dolman said.
“There’s another alternative,” Robert said, opening a drawer in a built-in desk.
“What?” Hastings asked, apprehensively.
Robert didn’t answer right away, but when he turned around, he held a syringe.
“What’s in there?” Hastings asked.
“Oh, you’ll just have to trust me,” Robert said, “maybe it will give you a fever-something that will make your blood boil, as Captain Dolman says-or maybe it will just help you to sleep.”
When State Senator Archer Hastings awakened, he was hot, unbearably hot, and thirsty. He was still on the ship, he realized hazily. The damned ship. And, he realized with alarm, he was not in his bed, but in an enclosed space-the trunk. He pushed against the lid-it flew open.
Shaking, he crawled out of it, onto the bed. He was still hot, miserably hot, and the terror of the trunk would not leave him.
He reached for the phone next to his bed, and said thickly, “Help. Send a doctor in to help me. I’m ill.”
Not much later, a doctor did arrive. He stepped into the room and said, “Are you chilled?”
“Chilled? Are you mad? I’m burning up!”
“So am I,” the physician said, and turned down the thermostat. “Open the portholes and you’ll be fine.”
“Those damned people!” Hastings exclaimed.
“Which people?” the doctor said, in the tone of one who has encountered a lunatic.
“Mrs. Ada Milington-is she still aboard?”
“Oh no. I’m the last of Ada’s party still on the ship. She said you’d had a bit too much to drink last night and asked me to make sure you got off the ship all right. She was in a rush.”
“I’ll bet she was.”
“She asked me to give you a message. She said for you to remember that you have an open invitation to a pool party.”
Hastings frowned. “Where’s she off to? I need to talk to her.”
“Oh, I believe she’s well on her way to Glacier Bay by now-one of the Alaskan cruise lines. She said something about her grandchildren getting married at sea. Quite eccentric, Ada,” the doctor mused, as he was taking his leave. “Yes eccentric-but I’d take her seriously, if I were you, sir.” He paused before closing the door. “Shall I ask the hotel to send someone to help you with that trunk?”
“No! I don’t want the damned thing.”
The doctor shrugged and left.
Hastings brooded for a moment, considered the odds of convincing anyone that he had been kidnapped by Ada Milington. He would retire, he decided. There was a sense of relief that came with that decision.
All the same, he continued to feel confined. He hurried to a porthole, opened it and took a deep breath.
For Archer Hastings, it offered no comfort.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although Archer Hastings and all other characters in “Miscalculation” are entirely fictional, the Queen Mary statistics in this story are real. Under the control of Allied military personnel, the ship made an enormous contribution to the war effort. However, conditions were extremely crowded, and soldiers did die during voyages into the tropics-most often in the cabin class pool area above the boilers. This story is dedicated to memory of those young men.
Two Bits
On the hot July day on which he reached his majority, Andrew Masters came into a handsome fortune, yet at three o’clock that very afternoon he was focusing his attention on a twentyfive-cent piece. His contemplation of this infinitesimal portion of his wealth took place beneath a large, shady tree near Jefferson Road, just outside the western Pennsylvania town whose oil fields had made his father rich. His father had not owned the oil, but in his youth he had developed a special pump that oilmen needed. In the early 1870s, during the Pennsylvania oil boom that followed the war years, the oilmen had bought a great many pumps, bailers, cables, and other equipment from Mr. Masters, so that his oil tool and supply company became one of the largest in the country. With a shrewd eye for a good investment, his riches increased.
His charming manners and unflagging industry made him appealing to a handsome woman who came from an excellent and well-to-do family. Her family did not approve of the match; they were horrified when the young couple defied them by eloping. While Andrew’s maternal grandparents had sworn never to allow his mother to inherit a cent, they had softened their hearts upon Andrew’s birth-hence the fortune their first grandson now found at his disposal.
Yet it was upon twenty-five cents and not his several millions that young Andrew meditated now. He had spent the last few hours beneath the tree, knowing that he was not delaying any family festivities; there would be no cake or candles, no champagne or caviar. In the Masters family, this date had not been celebrated as Andrew’s birthday since the day Andrew turned seven. For more than a dozen years, the first day of July had been commemorated only as “The Day We Lost Little Charlie.”
Andrew himself thought of it in this way, and was as silent and stiff with remembered grief as were his parents. The manner in which his younger brother Charlie was taken from the family was destined to make this day infamous to all who remembered the events of fourteen years ago, and if there were fewer and fewer persons who recalled it, the Masterses would never be numbered among those who had forgotten.