Chapter 25
After Father Rick left, Ashley was alone with her thoughts. With all of the feverish activity of the last few days, she seldom had time to just think. Or was it that she kept busy because she didn’t want to think? A thought kept intruding, not a fully formed thought, not fully formed perhaps because it was so difficult to deal with. It was like a dark weather front on the horizon. You can’t ignore it, you know it means trouble; you just wish it would go away.
Pretty soon my crew is going to expect me to commit treason, Ashley thought. Word was out, as Father Rick just reminded her, that the way to go back was to find the place you came in. She never asked Jack Thurber to keep it secret. Under their strange circumstances secrecy can be a morale killer. Every person on the ship had the same question, “When are we going to try to go back?”
Before the Daylight Event, everyone aboard knew that they would return home after their deployment to the Persian Gulf. Return home to husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, friends and lovers. As Father Rick reminded Ashley, people can only operate for a short time with no hope for a future. He had just told her that the crew was getting obsessed with the idea of going back.
This is the storm cloud she worried about, and she knew the storm could be rough. Ashley decided to stop forcing the trouble out of her head.
So here’s my problem, Ashley thought. This is an American warship, the property of the United States Government. We take our orders from the government, ultimately from the Commander in Chief, Abraham Lincoln. After he speaks to Gideon Wells, Lincoln will want the California to join the fight, either in direct battle support or as the lead ship in the blockade of the South. But my crew wants to go back to where we came from. They want to go home. I can’t fight the Civil War and go back to where we came from. It’s one or the other.”
I risk mutiny or commit treason. Nice choice.
Chapter 26
It was 1850 hours and the mess hall was crowded. The crew’s mess was open 24 hours a day to accommodate crew members coming off watch. For those who had a regular workday, the mess hall followed the traffic pattern of any food service facility.
Suddenly there was a loud sound in the corner of the hall, a sound of plates crashing to the deck. This sound is not uncommon at sea, where a sudden wave can reduce a well-stacked rack of dinnerware to a pile of rubble. But the sea was calm, which made the sound that much more startling. First Class Petty Officer William Jordan was lying face down in the smashup of plates. Petty Officer Emilio Lopez, a hospital corpsman, was eating nearby. Instinctively Lopez rushed to the man’s aid and immediately saw that Jordan showed symptoms of a heart attack.
Lopez yelled for people to clear the area while he administered CPR using a defibrillator that he grabbed from a nearby bulkhead. The medical department had been called, and Lt. John Ambrose, one of the ship’s two physicians, was on the scene within two minutes. Lopez’s CPR had stabilized the man, who was immediately carried to the medical department on a gurney. Jordan took fast breaths and sweated profusely. Commander Joseph Perino, the ship’s medical officer, arrived within moments. Jordan’s pulse rate was extremely high and his breathing became shallow. Perino ordered an emergency tracheotomy and a breathing tube. He also injected nitroglycerin to help with the man’s pain. Perino could see that this was more than a mild heart attack.
People in the medical department often joked that the most important medical equipment on the ship was the helicopter pad on the stern. In normal circumstances Perino would have ordered a helicopter Medivac to a shore hospital, or, if at sea, to the nearest aircraft carrier, which is equipped with a larger hospital unit. But these weren’t normal times. The last place Perino wanted to send this man was a hospital ashore.
All physicians are familiar with the history of medical progress. Perino didn’t have to do research to know that the state of medical technology in 1861 was primitive by modern standards. He knew the statistics. Of the 620,000 casualties in the Civil War, over half were from disease. Most of the disease was spread by unknowing battlefield doctors and nurses, spreading infection from patient to patient. A doctor would amputate a leg, then go to the next victim and treat the man’s wounds without even washing his hands.
The accepted theory of disease propagation in the mid-nineteenth century was the miasma theory, the belief that disease spread through the air by vapors released by rotting matter or fetid water. A person would breathe in a bad vapor and disease would result.
It would be many years before germ theory, the idea that infection can be spread by microorganisms, was accepted by the medical profession. In the decade after the Civil War, an English surgeon named Joseph Lister, working from the microbiological theories of Louis Pasteur, would develop the concept of a sterile operating environment. Until then, hospitals were not much better than battlefield medical tents. Civil societies created hospitals as places where people would go to get better, to have their wounds treated or their diseases cured. The sad irony was that, in mid-nineteenth-century America, a hospital was the most dangerous place to be if you needed medical help. No, thought Perino, the best place for this poor guy is this warship.
Perino then had a disturbing thought. That goes for the rest of us, too.
Chapter 27
“Captain I’d like to talk about the Butterfly Effect,” Father Rick said. Ashley, Father Rick and Lt. Jack Thurber were in the captain’s office for a scheduled meeting. Ashley thought of these two men as her Time Travel Brain Trust, friends and guides to help her cope with their new reality.
“The Butterfly Effect,” said Ashley, “yes, I’ve heard of it. It’s a theory that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a disturbance in the atmosphere, and even though it’s a tiny disturbance, it can result in a hurricane in another part of the world.”
“You summarize it perfectly Captain. Would you agree Jack?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “I once wrote an article about the Butterfly Effect for the Washington Post.” Is there anything this guy hasn’t written about? Ashley thought. “While doing time travel research for my book, I figured I’d derive an article from a chapter. The Butterfly Effect is a scientific theory hatched by an American mathematician and meteorologist named Edward Lorenz. He was an expert on chaos theory. Captain Patterson summarized it welclass="underline" a little flap of the wings here, a big storm over there. It’s become a metaphor for small actions having huge results.”
“Let’s talk about the Butterfly Effect and the USS California,” said Father Rick. “We all saw the reaction of Gideon Wells when I summarized the history of the Civil War. The man was very upset about the casualty numbers I gave him. When I said that the war would last four years I thought the poor guy would faint. I think it’s pretty safe to say that he wants the California as part of his arsenal. He wants to use our modern weapons to intercede in the war and bring it to a fast conclusion. My guess is that we’ll be part of the naval blockade of the South, or the Battle of Bull Run about three months from now. So tell me if I’m wrong. Gideon Wells wants to use this ship to change history.”
“I totally agree, Father,” said Ashley. “From the bits of conversation I picked up between him and Admiral Farragut, they were all but picking out targets. Yes, Wells didn’t like the history that he heard, and he wants to change it. And the California is a big part of his plan.”
Father Rick didn’t want to put words in the mouth of his good friend and commanding officer. He asked her simply, “Is that okay with you?” Jack listened intently to this conversation.