In the meantime, it was good to be aboard a fast, state-of-the-art ship. The Eldridge was a Cannon-class destroyer escort, 1,230 tons, with the new gm twin-shaft diesel-electric drive. Twenty-one knots, easy. Bob had inspected the Eldridge’s armament — the big three-inchers jutting proudly upward, the forty-millimeters in their metal pillboxes barnacled to the hull. He wanted to go below, to see the torpedo tubes with the new triple mounting. “Classified,” he was told. As if the whole damn cruise weren’t classified!
The Eldridge would make a fine command. It would carry 200 men at full complement. One commander, one brain, one will — and 200 bodies to effect that will.
“Mind your head, sir.”
They went down yet another empty corridor.
For this “unofficial” maiden cruise, which would be entered in no logbook, the ship carried far fewer than its normal complement of crew. Below decks felt like a house freshly built and furnished, then deserted. It was a weird atmosphere — spooky, even.
As a boy in Kansas City, Bob had been drawn to the sea and its mysteries. He’d read the tale of the brigantine Mary Celeste, discovered east of the Azores in 1872 with its galley fires still burning, its mess table laid for dinner, its crew and passengers nowhere to be seen. As he’d gotten older, he’d figured there was probably more to the story than the mystery, and he’d become more interested in the discipline of the Navy, in the structure of a command, in the intricacies of making hundreds of sailors function as a single effective force against the sea and against a common enemy. A few people overboard was a minor mystery, but a single powerful ship, functioning cleanly in peace and efficiently in battle, was a major triumph of human society.
His current surroundings had a certain Mary Celeste quality about them. But the ambience was not that of a vanished crew, but of a crew that had not yet filled its cabins. The wonder was not of what had happened, but of what was yet to come. Courage, cowardice, the essential business of men discovering the mettle of which they were made.
“Mind your head, sir.”
“Belay that, son.” This was not Bob’s first experience inside a ship, after all.
“Ensign Hopper? Here they are, ma’am.”
Bob and Asimov stepped over the threshold of a tiny room — what was it, a supply closet? — and, by entering, made it even tinier. Kobinski wisely waited outside. Hopper turned, hands on hips — she was one handsome woman, Bob realized anew — and smiled coldly. Lovely teeth, he thought.
“Are you gentlemen responsible for this?”
She gestured toward the wall of instruments behind her, an ungainly, patched-together, floor-to-ceiling mess of vacuum tubes, wires, capacitors, resistors, switches, gauges. Bob could see the blobby joins where components had been hastily soldered together and welded to the bulkhead.
“I’ve never seen this equipment before,” Asimov said. “Is it part of the experiment?”
“It is not. I noticed it just now as I was tracking wires around the ship, double-checking connections. It isn’t standard issue for a Cannon-class destroyer, I know that.”
Bob peered at the jungle of tubes and wires. “Whatever it is, it’s up and running. See those needles? They’re tracking toward the right, very slowly.”
Asimov shouldered alongside. “Hmm, so they are. What are they registering?”
“Dunno. No markings — just calibration lines.”
Hopper’s eyes were bright and hard as a hawk’s. “Two possibilities. One, the higher-ups have added some new wrinkles to your experiment without consulting us. Or two, the Tesla-coil project isn’t the only experiment the Navy is conducting aboard this ship.”
Asimov was visibly distressed. So much so that he forgot for the moment his overwhelming preoccupation with his own comfort. “But this will interfere with our experiment! How can we tell — ”
The lights flickered. There was a distant percussive noise, like a transformer blowing. The vibrations in the deck became jarringly intrusive — no longer the normal low-level trembling of the engines, but a rapid, foot-numbing pulsation. There was an acrid odor, like burning wires.
All the needles on the mysterious gauges twitched to the right.
“Holy cow,” Bob said. It wasn’t what he had intended to say.
“Someone has switched on the Tesla coils!” Hopper slammed her hand against the bulkhead.
There was a brief, terrible shriek.
Kobinski burst open the door. “What,” the sailor asked, his voice breaking, “the fuck was that?”
“It sounded like voices,” Asimov said.
Bob nodded. “Dozens of voices.”
“Cut off,” Grace Hopper said, “in mid-scream.”
They turned as one and ran down the passageway. Bob was just behind Kobinski, the other two lagging after. He plunged through a hatchway, misjudged the height, and banged his head.
“Damn!” Bob staggered and clutched his temple.
Asimov and Hopper rounded the corner, almost colliding with him. Bob straightened.
Kobinski was nowhere to be seen.
Nor could he hear the sound of running feet.
Hopper was the first to speak. “Where did he go?”
Bob looked right and left, hoping to see a swinging door, a vibrating ladder, anything that might explain the sailor’s disappearance. Nothing. Involuntarily, he thought of the Mary Celeste, the ladle in the galley swinging to and fro above the bubbling stew pot. He felt an abrupt nausea, and was suddenly unsure of his footing. He tried to brace himself, failed, and looked down.
Where his feet met the deck, the steel plating was turning misty, uncertain, translucent. Bob’s feet were sinking into the deck.
Grace
Grace saw Heinlein begin to slip into the mist and shouted “Grab him!” She seized an elbow and Asimov flung his arms around Heinlein’s chest and they both pulled. With a hissing sound, Heinlein came free of the grey ooze. All three staggered backward.
Grace stooped to probe with a pencil the gray-green indeterminacy where Heinlein had begun to sink into the floor. She was careful to keep her fingers out of it.
“Bob, are you all right?” Are you all right?” Asimov shouted. He was a milksop, Grace thought. A city boy. A civilian.
Heinlein shouted something back. Grace wasn’t listening. All her attention was on the gray-green mist. At first, it had the viscosity of molasses, but in just seconds, it solidified. When she tried to draw back the pencil, it wouldn’t budge. She twisted it, trying to leverage it out and it snapped off level with the deck. She stood up thoughtfully.
Asimov was practically in hysterics, and Heinlein was little better. She had to wonder why the Navy had saddled her with these two clowns.
When she had volunteered for this assignment, Grace had known that the proposal submitted by Heinlein and the others was a load of codswallop, gussied up with wishful thinking. But she’d wanted some experience at sea, and it was her only chance. These civilians had been described as “creative thinkers.” What that meant, she’d eventually discovered, was that they wrote for the pulp science fiction magazines.