The Golden Gate, page 35
Mick stared ahead, both hands gripping the motor lifeboat’s wheel. “Can’t see much but straight ahead, Mr. Shepard. Port side has to be your territory.”
“Turn the boat. I saw something.”
“Saw what?”
“A red light. A flare maybe.”
“Where away?”
“Left and behind us. Eight o’clock.”
“Coming to port, aye.”
“Well? Do it!”
Mick adjusted the big, horizontal wheel minutely. “Mr. Shepard, I did my master chiefin’ in the engine room, not on the bridge. I’m not the helmsman Captain Ahab was. And I don’t want us endin’ up where he did.”
“Mick, please.”
Mick said, “Long as I keep the bow into the swells, she can ride a twelve-foot sea. But if I’m careless, and a big wave takes us abeam, she’ll roll on her back like a mutt with fleas.”
Ben clasped his hands. “Mick, I know Kate’s alive out there. I can feel her. I’m begging you, turn the boat. Turn the boat now!”
Mick sighed, then adjusted the wheel. “This boat’s designed to go straight. She doesn’t turn fast no matter how much we want her to.” Mick pushed the starboard throttle forward and throttled back the port engine. “She’ll turn tighter if I steer with the throttles and the rudders.”
The heaving boat began to pivot around its center, and for an instant the deck tilted beneath Ben’s feet. Then the MLB leveled.
Mick whispered, “Atta girl.”
Boom!
The boat heeled onto its port side. Ben’s viewpoint went in an instant from upright to prone, his shoulder struck the bridge rail, and then he was somersaulting in slow motion under shockingly frigid water. He tried to gasp in a breath and got a throat full of sea water.
Submerged, Ben thrashed and spit blindly for what felt like minutes.
Then, as though a great hand had hoisted him, he was out of the water, gulping air, tumbling.
He struck something solid and found that he lay facedown, straddling the fly bridge’s port rail. He rolled back inside the bridge’s confines, fell onto the fly bridge’s deck, and sat, coughing, with his back against the bulkhead.
Mick sat opposite him, gasping.
“Mick. We capsized?”
Mick pointed at his throat and nodded. Then he coughed and said, “Wave took us abeam. Boat jerked us back up like a couple puppets by the heavy weather harnesses when she righted.”
“How long were we under?”
“Book says she rights in six to twelve seconds. Felt longer to me.” Mick pulled himself back into the starboard coxswain’s chair.
“Are we sinking?”
Mick peered at the instrument panel, frowned, then pressed his palm to the panel. “I can feel the dewatering pumps running. But they’re electric. The diesels are dead.”
“Why wouldn’t they be dead?”
Mick shook his head. “They’re designed to run upside down for at least thirty seconds.” He frowned deeper. “The rudders can do a little to keep her bow into the swells. But without maneuvering power, you and I’ll be takin’ another cold shower momentarily. And I don’t know how many rollovers Textron built into her. Ever seen a diesel up close?”
“I’ve worked on combines since I was five.”
Mick faced the boat’s bow and grasped the wheel with both hands. “Go make Kansas proud, Mr. Shepard. And be quick.”
* * *
Ben felt his way down the ladder from the fly bridge, slipping on its rain-slicked rungs, unclipping and reattaching his harness as he went. In one moment he expected to be swept away. In the next he expected to be pinned beneath the capsized boat and drowned.
When he staggered into the survivor’s compartment and secured the hatch behind him, he realized that the electrical system may have been intact, but the interior lights were off. He groped his way deeper and deeper through the boat’s dark, unfamiliar interior spaces, guided only by the handheld spotlight’s beam.
The engine room resembled more an engine crypt, a tiny pit, at or beneath the waterline, in the boat’s stern. The engine room was accessed through a tiny, angled hatch that led back and down from the survivor’s compartment. While the boat’s dewatering pumps may have done their jobs admirably by Mick’s standards, Ben found himself ankle-deep in sloshing seawater. Head bent and crouching, Ben used one hand to steady himself against one of the tiny, pitching compartment’s bulkheads while he aimed the spotlight with the other.
He examined the two diesels. Volvos. He shifted his right foot, and slipped on something on the deck, invisible beneath the water. He bent, fished the object from the cold brine, examined it by the spotlight’s beam, and breathed, “Aha!”
* * *
When Ben finally clambered back up the exterior ladder to the fly bridge, he clipped his heavy weather harness’s line to its D-ring as Mick yelled over his shoulder. “Well?”
“I slipped on a wrench down in the engine compartment. There was a toolbox sliding loose on the deck. Either the box wasn’t secured, or it broke loose and spilled when we capsized. It probably knocked an alternator wire loose. I disconnected everything, tried to blow things dry, reconnected them, then reset the breakers. Not rocket science.”
“Good. We don’t have time for rocket science. That’s on me. I was workin’ on the port engine when you phoned and I didn’t police up my mess before I came to see you.”
Ben pointed to the controls. “Well?”
Mick pressed the diesels’ starters.
Rrrrr.
Rrrr.
Mick whispered, “Come on! Come on!”
On the third try both diesels coughed, then sputtered, then rumbled to life. As the engines idled, Mick clapped Ben’s shoulder. “Close enough to rocket science, Mr. Shepard.”
Ben shouted, “Any other damage?”
Mick frowned as he eyed the magnetic compass forward of the starboard steering station, and oriented the boat toward the heading where Ben had reported the light.
Mick said, “The diesels are balky, but for the moment we’ve got engine power. We’ve got lights. We can maneuver. I expect we can even make coffee. But whatever we do now, we may have to do it on our own. Textron don’t guarantee the third party electronics. Radio’s gone. So’s the FLIR and the rest of it. So’s my phone. What about your phone?”
Ben dug inside his rubberized coverall, then through the soaked pockets of his clothing underneath, until he retrieved his C-phone. The screen lit at his touch, and he pumped his fist. But after a few seconds he frowned into the screen’s light. “No service. No phone, no text, no internet. The internal apps and widgets work fine. We can take selfies all night.”
Mick nodded. “Get to the gunwale and look sharp, then. Let’s rescue some people and take their pictures.”
* * *
“There!” Ben’s heart skipped and he pointed. In the distance a tiny light flickered. It shone, then disappeared, then reappeared, as it rose and fell with the furious swells.
When Mick brought the boat close enough, Ben fumbled down the ladder to the deck, and then to the starboard side recovery well, a notch as long as a human body, cut down into the boat’s deck rail. When kneeling in the recovery well, a rescuer on deck was barely two feet above the waves, and could reach down and pull in a person floating in the water alongside the boat.
Ben saw three persons out there in the waves. Just tiny, bobbing heads, really. One, the source of the flickering light, floated face-up, wearing one of the red survival suits that Ben had seen, so many lifetimes before, amid people wearing tuxedos and gowns and listening to chamber music. A feeble strobe light winked from the suit’s shoulder.
The other two inert people in the water looked unprotected against the sea.
When the distance to the three of them closed to ten yards, Ben realized that the person in the suit was Jack Boyle, and that Jack clung to the other two with an arm around each as he floated. One of the others was dark-headed. That had to be Manuel Colibri.
The third person was Kate. She lolled, her skin luminous white in the night, her eyes closed, and her head laid back against her father’s chest.
Ben grasped the safety line that secured him to the boat, then leaned out and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Kate!”
He could scarcely hear his own voice above the storm. There was no response.
Ben gathered up a life ring, secured it by a line to a D-ring in the hull, and frisbeed it, two handed. It landed two feet from Kate. He thrust both fists in the air. “Yeah!”
It was the most accurate throw he had made in his life. “Kate! Kate, grab it!”
The three heads bobbed in the waves, motionless, unresponsive, unconscious at best. The waves slapped the life ring away from them.
Ben shook his head as tears welled in his eyes. As the corners of his mouth turned down, his lip quivered. Tears poured out and mingled with the cold rain that coursed down his cheeks.
After all this. After all he had done, he had done too little. Again. “No. No.”
He peered down into the heaving, dark water. He narrowed his eyes as he hated the water like it was an evil, living thing.
His heart pounded and a cold mass seemed to swell in his stomach. “Not this time.” Ben drew a breath, held it, and jumped.
FIFTY-SIX
Ben stood, shivering, exhausted, drained of emotion, in Marine 1’s survivor’s compartment. He wore dry coveralls that he had found packed in plastic, along with blankets, in the forward compartment’s locker, and he leaned against the survivor’s compartment rear bulkhead as he waited for the coffeemaker secured there to brew cocoa.
The deck beneath his bare feet scarcely pitched. The storm had moved east, and the sea upon which the motor lifeboat now drifted was rapidly smoothing to glass in the darkness.
A few feet from Ben, down in the MLB-47’s engine room, Mick labored to restore its still-balky diesels.
Ben turned and knelt alongside Manuel Colibri, who lay face up on the compartment’s deck, swaddled in blankets. He was comatose, though his pulse, respiration, and even body core temperature measured near normal. Ben’s quick physical exam of Colibri had demonstrated that he was, however, anything but normal. It had taken a few minutes of shock and disbelief before all the clues he and Kate had tracked down fit together. Then Ben understood just who—or what—Manny Colibri was. So there was no telling what his vitals should have been.
Alongside Manny Jack Boyle sprawled, eyes closed. Jack was covered by his own set of blankets. Ben knelt again and pressed two fingers against Jack’s throat. The pulse Ben felt in Jack’s carotid artery was strong, and his body temperature continued to feel normal to the touch. With the exception of possible frost bite in his exposed fingertips, and bumps, bruises, and exhaustion, Jack seemed stable.
Ben stood, blinked and drew a breath. Then he knelt alongside Kate. Her body lay face-up atop one blanket on the deck, wrapped in two more. Her cheeks were as pure alabaster as they had appeared to him the first moment that he saw her. Her eyes were closed.
It had taken Ben untold minutes to thrash through the waves to the three of them, then to drag them back to, and then secure them, one by one, with lines alongside the pick-up port.
And then precious minutes longer to wrestle first Kate, then Colibri, then Jack in his survival suit, up to the deck’s relative safety.
Ben’s own numb fingers had trembled and he had shivered uncontrollably as he had stripped her wet clothes off her. Her unconscious body’s core temperature had measured ninety-one degrees Fahrenheit, so hypothermic that it had ceased even to shiver.
Even after minutes of skin-to-skin warming had restored, for a time, a flickering consciousness, she stared, unable to perform so simple a task as adding one plus one when he had asked her. Then she had lapsed back to unconsciousness.
Ben bent over her and pressed his cheek against hers. “Kate?”
Her lips trembled, then she said, “Shepard, how did I get naked under these blankets?”
He smiled and felt tears well in his eyes. “You’re feeling better.”
“I bet you are too, you pervert.” She tried to lift her head, but Ben laid his palm on her forehead and kept her flat. “Your circulatory system’s probably still dilated. Stay flat or you could have a stroke.”
Kate said, “How’s my dad?”
“Better than you are. That survival suit was worth every penny David Powell intended to deduct for it.”
“What about David?”
Ben shook his head, shrugged. “No sign.”
Kate managed a weak snort. “Good. The bastard. Ben, Colibri’s an alien. I mean a real one. He’s been stranded on Earth for a thousand years. He thought human beings weren’t ready to live to be a thousand yet. David tried to kill Manny because David thought we were ready, and killing Manny would be doing the human race a giant favor.”
Ben nodded. “After I took a look at Manny’s leg, I put things together and figured most of that out.” He thumbed his C-phone, frowned. “The C-Doc app says you may not be out of the woods yet.” He stood, carried an insulated hot cup of cocoa to her, then cushioned the back of her head while he dribbled the warm liquid between her lips. “Sip. Not too fast.”
“The human race isn’t out of the woods yet, either, I’m afraid.”
Ben and Kate turned to Manny Colibri, who had struggled upright.
Ben stepped to him and peered into his eyes. “How are you feeling, Mr. Colibri?”
Manny laid a small, trembling hand on Ben’s forearm. “Better than I would have been but for you, Ben. Thank you.” He nodded to Kate and to Jack. “And thanks to you both, also.”
Jack opened his eyes, sat up, and nodded toward the hot cup remaining on the bulkhead. “Is anybody drinking that?”
Ben handed the cup to Jack and he sipped, then Jack turned to Manny Colibri. “What kind of bullshit have you been feeding my daughter?”
Colibri smiled weakly as he pulled his blanket away to display his crystalline black leg bone. “This kind.”
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Jack’s eyes bugged as he choked on his cocoa.
Colibri nodded as if half-asleep. “Ben, Kate, after the additional injury caused by this ordeal I only have a few hours left, at most.”
Kate shook her head. “No.”
Colibri waved his hand. “After a thousand years, in this body alone, it’s fair to say that I’ve lived a full life, Kate. And it’s also fair to say that I’m tired. There’s really only one open question for me.”
Jack, his mouth still open, said, “The estate?”
Colibri closed his eyes. “Jack, after a thousand years I finally realize that I’m the wrong guy to choose mankind’s future.”
Ben asked, “What do you mean?”
“Mankind should decide whether mankind is ready to live forever. I’m not a god. I’m a passerby.”
Jack raised his eyebrows. “You’re going to leave it up to the mackerel snappers after all?”
“Point taken, Jack. Frank Cardinale was a remarkable, and generous, and devout man, and at first I simply honored his vision as a good friend should. But I had always found his philanthropic choice of the Archdiocese of San Francisco narrow and problematic. But when one expects to live forever succession planning is easily deferred.”
Jack said, “Problematic? I’d call the Catholic Church’s track record worse than problematic.”
Colibri smiled. “I’d call the track records of all of mankind’s controlling institutions—religion, government, the captains of industry—problematic. Mankind has excelled at blood and murder in the service of greed and of abstractions since long before the conquistadors eradicated the Inca for gold. And before men were condemned to die in the galleys for the heresy of counting the days of the year differently. For all I have watched mankind grow and all I have seen us invent, it seems that the lessons we have really learned are how to design deadlier harpoons and more efficient concentration camps.”
Ben asked, “Then what’s the answer?”
Colibri grimaced and doubled over.
Ben stepped quickly and laid a hand on the small man’s shoulder. “Sir?”
Colibri straightened, waved Ben off. “I’m alright for the moment. Ben, do you think I might have a little water?”
Ben carried a cup to him, Colibri drank, then said, “There may be no answer. And mankind may not survive long enough to find the answer even if it exists. I have only hours. Ideally, I would leave the decision in the hands of people who I know, and who I believe to be intelligent, courageous, and of good character.”
Mick Shay stepped into the survivors’ compartment, wiping his fingers with a rag. He looked around the compartment, raised his eyebrows, and smiled. “We’re feeling better, I see.”
Ben pointed at the engine room. “Are the diesels feeling better?”
Mick shrugged. “Another hour, maybe.”
Colibri sighed. “I may not even have that hour.” He pointed to the phone in Ben’s hand and said, “Ben, would you mind pulling up the Cardinal InstaWill app on your C-phone? You’ll find it under Self-help.”
Ben wrinkled his forehead as he thumbed to the app. “Sir, I don’t think—”
“On the contrary, Ben. You do think. And very well. So does Kate, as I have learned over the last few days.”
Kate looked from Colibri to Ben. “What’s going on?”
Manny said, “Kate, if I had been more foresighted perhaps there were alternatives. A worldwide search. Some sort of international commission. However, now my options are limited. But frankly, given world enough and time, I don’t think I could make a choice in which I would have greater confidence.” He looked up at Ben and nodded. “If you would be so kind?”
Ben thumbed his C-phone and the app appeared onscreen. He knelt in front of Colibri and extended the phone in front of Colibri’s face so that its camera recorded the small man’s words while a teleprompter-like display scrolled on the screen in front of Colibri’s face, so that he could read or paraphrase. The words he spoke were then transcribed into text.
The dying interstellar voyager spoke into the camera.
