He heard Asimov calling his name.
Bob froze. He didn’t want Asimov or Grace Hopper (especially Grace Hopper) to see him clutching the side of the ship like an overboard cabin boy. Wait a sec! He spied exactly what he was looking for. Now to….
“Look out!”
“Climb, Bob! Climb!”
Something smacked against the hull beside Bob. Foul-smelling ichor spattered his face. He recoiled, nearly falling, and, twisting, saw a tentacle as thick as his torso slithering back into the sea. As he gaped, another tentacle rose dripping from the waves. In the water, something large and gray moved just under the surface.
Falling had been a poor enough option before. Now it was out of the question. So was staying put. Yet Bob couldn’t make his limbs move. He watched in horror as the leathery, tulip-like pod at the end of the tentacle waved back and forth at eye level, like the swaying head of a cobra, drooling water, an eyeless predator looking for prey.
“For God’s sake, Bob!”
That awful pod lunged for him! Without thinking, Bob turned and ran up the cable. Behind him, the pod splatted against the hull. Grabbing an outstretched hand, Bob pulled himself over the rail and onto the deck, where a small crowd had gathered.
Absently, he wiped his cheek. His palm came away covered with black muck. He cursed and slung it away, over the rails.
Asimov started to laugh, a little nervously. “Bob, I didn’t know an old geezer like you could move that fast.”
“Stow it, Isaac,” Bob said, automatically, but then he began to laugh too. Hopper and the sailors laughed as well, and briefly they all shared the comradeship of danger evaded.
Then the tentacle slapped into the hull again, and Asimov, sobered, said, “I don’t suppose that thing can climb?”
“If it could, it would be here by now,” Hopper said. “It can’t reach as high as the rail.”
Bob thought of the smaller ships of an earlier day, those that rode lower in the water, and shuddered. Could the Mary Celeste’s crew have been plucked from their ship by just such a kraken? Never mind that: he’d made a discovery that the others should know about. “There’s an extra cable. Running amid the degaussing cables.” He pointed. “Do you see it?”
They did. “It’s like a creeper among larger vines,” Asimov said. “Not always visible. How far does it go?”
“It pierces the hull over here,” Bob said, grateful he’d spotted the source-location before scrambling for safety.
“Gr— I mean, Ensign Hopper?” Asimov was trying to sound like a sailor. “This cable could be our ‘unknown factor’ interacting with the Tesla current.”
Ensign Hopper looked over the rail. “Right below us is our ‘bonus’ control room, too. I’m afraid, gentlemen, we’ve simply come around full circle. We know there’s something going on, but we don’t know what or who is making it happen.”
“We know where the people responsible are operating from, at any rate,” Bob offered.
“But they’re not here. Maybe they disappeared into a bulkhead during the phase change,” Asimov said. “I’d bet my wallet that none of the swabbies left on board know anything. These guy aren’t physicists.”
The water had grown strangely quiet. Bob pointed it out to the others. “Look at this. The kraken’s left, without even a farewell.”
They all looked. Where the kraken had been, there was only a kraken-shaped blob of black ink. As they watched, it broke up, dissolved, and disappeared. The brute was definitely gone.
“What do you suppose…?” Bob felt a shadow fall over him. He looked up to see what had blocked the sun — and saw a glistening gray trunk arching snakelike over the bridge of the Eldridge.
Tapering, the trunk rose more than a hundred feet to an impossibly tiny head, flat and flared like the spade of a shovel. It was a plesiosaur, by God! Placidly, like a cow, the critter was chewing something that dangled from its slowly working jaw and, spaghetti-like, inched its way up. There was something familiar about that spaghetti — the tulip-shaped pod at the end. Aha! No wonder the other monster had sped away!
Bob was transfixed again, not by fear this time but awe. Like a rube goggling up at the Empire State Building, Bob looked up, up, up to the apex, the culmination of this strange marine food chain, and thought: What a journey of exploration this could be. The HMS Beagle — pah! Think of the wonders, undreamed of by Darwin, that the USS Eldridge could bring into port. Think of the knowledge that would flow from it. Think of the stories he’d be able to write.
“My God,” Bob murmured to himself. “Sprague de Camp, eat your heart out.”
Grace
The Sargasso Sea was a convergent zone in the restless Atlantic where warm water and cold came together and changed places, and the action of wind and wave gathered the seaweed and sculpted it into rough circles or long rows. The brownish sargassum, a mass of serrated leaves and little round berries, smelled rank and vegetal, like an exotic soup. Tiny transparent crabs crawled in its tangles.
“…and may God have mercy on their souls,” Grace concluded, and the coffins went crashing down through the crabs and seaweed. She smartly returned her hat to her head and, to the assembled crew, said: “Dismissed to stations.” They scattered to their tasks with gratifying alacrity.
There weren’t many of them left, but it was a good crew. For that matter, it was a good ship and a good command. Only the deaths — the futile and meaningless deaths — of so many trained men, of poor Kobinski and all the others, could dampen Grace’s keen appreciation of how fortunate she was to be here.
She made her rounds of the surviving crew, offering a word of praise here, drawing attention to some small deficiency there. The job was to keep the crew crisp and taut as a drumhead — and not a fractional bit tenser. She made sure everybody had work to do, to keep their minds off their strange predicament.
There had been far too many questions about where the ship was and how it had gotten there. She had indicated that their method of travel was top secret, which was true enough. The main secret was that she hadn’t a clue how it worked. That was something she needed to remedy.
Heinlein and Asimov were in the closet-sized “secret” control room, picking through the wiring. She left them for last.
Outside the door, she heard Asimov’s voice: “Plesiosaurs had a wide distribution throughout the world from the Late Triassic, some 190 million years ago, to the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago. So that narrows it down to a period of around about 125 million years.” From Asimov’s tone, Grace could tell that he was quite proud of this bit of useless knowledge.
“What’s out there is bigger than any plesiosaur in the fossil record,” Heinlein said impatiently.
“That’s a good point. The largest of the plesiosaurs was Elasmosaurus, which measured in at about 43 feet, about half of which was neck and head. Our friend out there has that beat by around 75 feet.”
“So I think we should consider the possibility that we’re on an alternate time line,” Heinlein said. “It’s not just that we’re unstuck in time. We are traveling between — ”
Grace entered. Asimov was sitting in a corner, back against the wall. Heinlein was smoking his pipe. Neither was looking at the circuits. “Well, you look busy,” she said coldly. “I guess you gentlemen must already be done with your analysis of the circuitry.”
Heinlein, at least, had the good grace to look embarrassed at being caught gold-bricking. Asimov did not. “We’ve determined that this stuff is all for monitoring.” He tapped the dials that continued their inexorable creep to the right, just slower than human patience could detect. The biggest needle had crept past three notches already — three notches, three jumps? There were a great many more notches on the dial. Hundreds. “The controls are somewhere else.”