“And you’re sitting here gabbing?”
“Well, I’ve always been more of the thinker than a man of action,” Asimov said.
“Mr. Asimov, how would you like to spend the rest of the war in the brig?”
“I’m a civilian! You have no authority over me.”
Grace kept her voice low and even. She had once heard a sailor complain about “getting shrieked at by a squeaky little bitch” after being criticized by a wave lieutenant. Since then, she had been careful to avoid sounding shrill, no matter how angry she got. “You’re on my ship, Mr. Asimov, a military ship in an emergency situation. There’s a war on. I am this ship’s only commissioned officer, and I will do what I need to do to make sure my orders are obeyed.” She studied him as if he were something particularly unpleasant that she had found on the sole of her shoe. “You are a fool, Mr. Asimov. Don’t compound it with insubordination.”
Asimov glanced at Heinlein, obviously hoping for support, but Heinlein was standing very straight, his eyes on Grace. He knew how to take a chewing out; she gave him credit for that.
“We were sorting out the possibilities,” Asimov said defensively.
“Here are some possibilities,” Grace said, her voice icy. “You can obey your orders. You can figure out how to keep us from losing any more men in a phase-shift jump. Or you can spend the rest of the war in the brig. You’re far more expendable than a working crew member.”
“We’re on it now, Ensign Hopper,” Heinlein said. “Give us half an hour, and we’ll have some answers for you.”
“See that you do.”
She left.
Back on deck, the Southern boy she had put in charge of the guns said, “We seen half a dozen of those god-damned sea serpents, beg your pardon, ma’am. They was all headed away from us, so we saved us our ammunition.”
“Good thinking, sailor.”
“Looks like we’re in for a storm, ma’am. I smell rain.” The sky was dark with storm clouds, and the air was hot and muggy. Grace heard the rumble of distant thunder.
It seemed that everywhere they jumped to, a thunderstorm was brewing. Relevant? She filed it away. “Carry on, sailor,” she said, and continued on her rounds.
When next she encountered Asimov and Heinlein, they were busily tracing wires on the bridge. They looked up when she entered.
“Making headway?” she asked.
“Yes, we are, Ensign Hopper,” Asimov said. “It’s our guess that the phase shifts occur when the Tesla coil causes the ship to vibrate at its resonant frequency.”
“You’re guessing?”
“Extrapolation is a very powerful tool,” Asimov said. “Have you ever studied physics, Ensign Hopper? Do you know what the implications are of the ship vibrating in this way?”
“I have some idea.” Grace reached for a pencil and a scrap of paper. “At the ship’s resonant frequency, we’d get a standing wave. The effect would be strongest at the vibrational anti-nodes.” She made a quick sketch, talking while she drew. “When we jump, we all have to stay close to the nodes, the points of least vibration. The anti-nodes are the most dangerous places to be. The bridge was an anti-node, and so was the spot where we found the unfortunate sailor in the deck. Here’s a start.” She had drawn a rough plan of the ship, with X’s at the spots where people had sunk into decks and bulkheads. Asimov was staring at the drawing with a surprised look on his face. “But this is just an effect. It doesn’t tell us anything about where we are. What else do we have?”
Now it was Heinlein’s turn: “All right, ma’am. You remember that the original plan was to use Tesla coils to create clutter echoes, thus making the ship invisible to radar — only someone made changes to the plan. But suppose those changes were only changes in magnitude? The Tesla coils, after all, merely increase the frequency and magnitude of an alternating current. Suppose the current thus generated was then increased further by another Tesla coil — a Tesla coil the size of a destroyer?
“Once the first Tesla coil was switched on — presumably by the captain, now deceased — the already high-voltage, high-frequency current would feed into the giant ‘Tesla-plus’ coil” (this was Asimov’s ridiculous coinage) “and be oomphed even further.”
“Which would explain the massive electrical discharges surrounding each ‘jump’,” Isaac interjected.
“Are you suggesting,” Grace asked, “that if we managed to reverse the Tesla-plus current, the ship might well jump backward — past plesiosaurs and pirates — back to the Philadelphia Navy Yard? How?”
“Well,” Asimov said reluctantly, “the Tesla-plus current has to be regulated somehow, but we’ve checked the bridge, the commander’s cabin, the radio room, the engine room, everywhere you’d expect to find such a control. Maybe we could — ” The shriek of an alarm drowned out his voice. Without hesitation, Grace raced for the deck.
Quetzalcóatl
Quetzalcóatl came walking across the water, with the storm to his back. His temper was as dark as the storm itself. He had sensed the green fire from a thousand miles away, and transported himself here in a rage. This was his world! He had warned the others not to interfere with it. How dare they?
Steam rose up where his feet touched the sea and, because he was drawing power from the sunshine, the air was black around him. Virtual particles scintillated in the blackness like the fractured thoughts of a mad god. So terrifying was his aspect that even his beloved plesiosaurs fled from him.
But contrary to his expectations, the source of the green fire was no sleek silver ship from Hy-Atlantis, but a primitive iron behemoth, and its occupants were not of the Evolved People at all but simple anthropoids — humans.
Humans, moreover, from a world where he had once played at creating societies. He remembered well, though it had been long ago, the stone cities and ball courts, the feathered cloaks and tame ocelots, the stepped pyramids he had found thronged with human sacrifices winding slowly toward a peak where the priests waited with obsidian knives, and which he had left cleansed and wholesome. These people had once belonged to him: They had no business here.
Then — outrageous! — the ship’s guns began to fire. The fools. Had they no idea how fragile the local ecosystems were?
He had nursed the organisms here through a hundred extinction events, guiding them through the labyrinthine passages of time into forms more graceful and lovely than nature had ever produced on its own.
The intruders must die.
The trick was to do it with a minimum of fuss. He sank down to the floor of the ocean. That would stop them firing any more chemical-powered shells, at least. Then he would plan.
The warm waters closed about him. Ammonites and belemnites jetted swiftly past. Schools of jewel-like teleost fish grazed among the clam reefs.
There were volcanic vents not five miles down. But if he tapped their energies, it would destroy all this beauty. Unthinkable. Better to set up a time gradient and spur the seaweed to hypertrophic growth. That way the ship would be overgrown, engulfed, and dragged under. Or he could….
A distant ammonite caught his eye. Quetzalcóatl swam over to where it rested in the shelter of a rudist clam the size and shape of an oil barrel. When he reached a hand toward it, the timid creature pulled its tentacles into its shell.