“Distance,” she mused. “That’s a variable. But how far?”
Isaac, paying attention now, gave her the distances. She pulled a notepad from her skirt pocket and jotted them down. The man really was a fount of trivial information.
“What other variables have we got?”
“Time,” Heinlein said. “Time between jumps. If we are looking at the coordinates in multi-dimensional space-time….”
“How long did we have between jumps?”
“We were in Bermuda for about an hour,” Asimov said.
“And how long were we with the plesiosaurs?”
“About four hours,” Heinlein said.
“We were in the rainstorm for less than an hour, and among the snowflakes for about eight hours,” Grace said. “Let me see what I can do with this. Bob, why don’t you and Isaac devise a plan for shutting down the generators immediately upon our arrival home. I will assign as many crew members as you need to make it instantaneous.” She spoke with more confidence than she felt. “Meet me back here when you’re done.”
Was it an hour later? Or a day? She didn’t know. Someone shook her shoulder and there was Bob Heinlein, looking worried. She had fallen asleep sitting on the deck, doing calculations by the lurid light of the permanently setting sun.
This was a world that had never known life, and never would. She shivered. No matter where they ended up, she wouldn’t want to stay here.
By the light of an incandescent bulb, she double-checked her figures. The results of her calculations gave the coordinates from which they had to jump and the time at which they had to discharge the coils. “What time is it?” she said in a panic. “How long have we been here?”
“Four hours,” Asimov said.
“Good. Here’s what we need to do.”
They had four more hours to get to the proper location. Full speed ahead, through the lifeless sea. It was good to rouse the men to power the ship; good to be moving. They reached the jump-off point with twenty minutes to spare.
She was waiting, hand on the switch and eye on the clock, when there was a polite knock on the door. At her command, the last person on earth she expected to see entered, and saluted. “Seaman Kobinski, reporting for duty, ma’am.”
“Kobinski?! Where the hell have you been?”
“Invisible, ma’am. I kind of blacked out and when I came to, I couldn’t see myself, so I thought, well, maybe I should be in the sick bay.” He grinned shyly. “I’m better now.”
The second hand swung round to zero-second. “Hang on to your hat,” she said, and, praying her calculations were right, threw the switch.
Sprague
Sprague was sitting in a dim corner of Pop-Pop’s Tavern waiting for Catherine when the invisible sailors poured in, looking for a fight.
The irony was that Pop-Pop’s was a respectable tappie. It wasn’t one of Heinlein’s dives, with b-girls hustling two-dollar ginger ale cocktails or a “Magic Window” over the bar where naked women enacted supposedly classical tableaux. Pop-Pop’s was the kind of place where the old neighborhood women had their own entrance and a back room where they could buy a quart of beer to drink with their girlfriends without suffering the unwanted presence of men.
But it was near the Yard and so there were sailors in the front room. And, being sailors, when challenged they fought back. That their opponents were invisible made surprisingly little difference to the dynamics of the fight. Somebody was jostled when the newcomers rushed to the bar. He threw a punch. It hit the wrong person. The bar erupted.
Sprague saw a sailor lifted struggling into the air by unseen hands. Somebody smashed a chair over his invisible opponent, and the sailor fell to the floor. With a roar of rage, a bottle swooped up from the bar and smashed over the chair-wielder’s head.
Sprague was a lieutenant, bucking for lieutenant commander. His first impulse was to break up the fight. He was pretty sure he could do it. Military discipline was all theater, really. A commanding voice and a dramatic presence could quell the rowdiest enlisted man. He had both of those.
But in the time it took to lay down a quarter to pay for his unfinished beer, stand, and tuck his cap under his arm, a better thought came to him.
So, quietly, Sprague slipped into the back room and, with a nod and a wink to its denizens, ducked out the Ladies’ Entrance. He didn’t want to get involved in an incident that would tie him up for hours with the Shore Patrol. Not now.
He arrived at the sidewalk out front just as one of the invisible seamen pushed through the door, dragging an unconscious sailor by the feet behind him.
This Sprague could not ignore.
In the bright sunlight, the seaman was not entirely invisible — more like a clear glass filled with water, which an observant man could see if he looked closely. Sprague stepped forward and tapped him on the shoulder. He felt solid enough.
The man dropped his burden, spun about, and aimed a haymaker at Sprague’s jaw.
Deftly, Sprague stepped aside from the blow. As the fist whistled past, he seized the man’s wrist, and twisted — a technique he had learned from a Kuomintang ensign — forcing the fellow to bend over. Then he drove his knee into the man’s stomach. Hard.
The transparent ruffian fell to the ground with a concrete thud.
I’ve seen action at last, Sprague thought. Now, nobody can say I spent all the war behind a desk. If only Catherine had been here to see it, though!
“Sprague, what on Earth is going on?” Catherine had come up behind him. “Are you all right?”
Thank you, God.
Catherine stared down at the unconscious sailor. He was slowly fading back into visibility.
“What’s going on here? What on Earth does it mean?” she asked wonderingly.
Sprague grinned. His brain had been operating at top speed since this incident began, combining disparate elements, putting together hints and rumors and troubling snatches of radio transmission that had been recorded, shown to him, and then stamped TOP SECRET and filed away forever. Now it processed all the information and spat out an answer: “It means Bob and Isaac are back!”
A couple of days later, Sprague dropped by Asimov’s office to find him fiddling with a radio. He had the Bakelite cover off and the innards all over his desk and was inexpertly making connections between vacuum tubes. It looked a terrible mess.
Sprague swept a corner of the desk clear and perched elegantly upon it. “I just ran into Bob in the hall,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen him so angry.”
Without looking up from his work, Asimov said, “It’s the report Ensign Hopper submitted to the Navy. You know how when you’ve got a SNAFU, you put a good face on it by subtitling the report ‘Lessons Learned’, but when it’s FUBAR, you use ‘Early Lessons Learned’?”
“I hadn’t, but I’m always glad to learn the local lingo.” He picked up the report. “‘Project Rainbow: Some Early Cautionary Lessons Learned.’ This seems to go beyond FUBAR.”
“It’s governmentese for ‘Revive this project and watch your career die.’ We won’t be teleporting battleships again any time soon.”
“Well, that explains Bob’s mood.” Sprague stroked his mustache, ignoring the younger man’s puzzled look. “But, Isaac, don’t you think that’s a terrible shame? Imagine the adventures you’re missing out on. I would have loved to have gone with you on your little jaunt.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Oh, there are worse things to look at than bare-breasted girl pirates, I’ll grant you that. But when the god-creature first appeared, shrouded in darkness and rushing down upon us — ”