Not yet, anyway.
Not until they’d had a chance to do some checking on their own. Once the feds got involved, you got shut out of the game. Good chance you’d never hear another word.
With Kevin Cheever at NavTronics, he had a straight path to some of the best research scientists in the business, whom he hoped could keep their mouths shut. He hoped Kevin could get something out of the lab that would at least give them an idea about any radiation problems.
Checking his watch, Dex looked at Tommy.
“Still pretty early,” he said.
“Why? You wanna go down to the ‘Point’?”
Dex shook his head in mock sadness. “Is that all you ever think about is hanging in bars?”
“You got a better idea?”
“You have a computer?”
“Not really. I fuck around with the one at the engine house. But I don’t have one here, no.”
“That’s what I figured. That’s why I brought mine. Let’s go up to the kitchen table.”
Dex explained the need to get those log pages translated ASAP.
“So what’re we gonna do?” said Tommy when they emerged from the cellar stairway.
“Watch me.”
First thing he did was plug in his scanner to his laptop and punch up his latest OCR software which claimed to be able to not only grab and transcribe printed text, but reasonably legible handwriting. Since the program had been bundled with the scanner when he bought it, Dex had never had the need to test what sounded like dubious ad hype.
Now we’ll see, he thought.
Retrieving the captain’s log from the strongbox, he opened it to the first pages. The large block printing looked plenty legible. As soon as the laptop screen said everything was ready, he laid the open sheet on the glass bed and keyed the scan command.
A few seconds later, he saw Bruckner’s words appear on a place the captain could have never imagined — the digitized image of the computer screen. He ran the recognition part of the software, surprised to see most of the printing now transformed into word processing text.
Amazing. He didn’t even want to think of what kind of technology made this possible.
“Did it work?” said Tommy, still not sure what he was looking at.
“Like magic. Now, all I have to do is scan in the rest of the pages.”
Tommy reached into fridge for another beer. “How long will that take?”
“Maybe an hour or so.”
“You need me for anything? I was thinkin’ I’d turn on the ballgame.”
“Go ahead.” But Dex looked up, suddenly realizing something. “Hey, that reminds me — you have cable, right? You don’t, by any chance, have internet service, do you?”
“Nah, not yet, why?”
“Once I get the pages done, I need to translate them on the ’net.”
Tommy shook his head. “Hmmm, outta luck, I guess.”
“Too bad. I’ll have to do it when I get back to the house.”
Tommy picked up the remote, started clicking through the channels. “Hey, wait a minute! Augie’s got it, I think?”
“Who’s Augie?”
“The old guy next door.”
“You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. He talks to his relatives in Sicily on his computer. Watches those old black and white movies too. Always wantin’ me to watch’em too.”
Dex grinned. “How old’s Augie?”
Tommy smiled. “I don’t know — eighty-somethin’.”
“Well, God bless him — lots of old people refuse to learn anything new. Why don’t you ask him if we can hook in a little later, okay?”
Tommy gave him the thumbs-up, then slipped out the front door to check in with his neighbor.
Returning his attention to his laptop, Dex continued to scan in the pages. He needed to get everything into the computer’s memory then do a full text recognition. If that worked, then he’d get a rough translation from one of the internet sites.
He shook his head in mock disbelief. A process that would have required weeks or months boiled down to hours. Dex appreciated the technology on another level as well — he didn’t want the added hassle of getting some third-party translator into the mix. But maybe that didn’t matter. Kevin had already told his lab pal about the sub, and of course, there was the Coast Guard.
Flip the page.
Scan.
Recognize.
He began the drill, noticing right away there were lots pages. Either the captain had been very wordy, or he had an awful lot to say.
As Dex continued the repetitious steps, watching the number of pages mount up, he wondered where all this was going. What exactly would they find on what might be their last dive to the sub? And why was it so important to him? The second question intrigued him more than the first. He was aware of a subconscious alarm going off in some walled-off part of his mind. Muffled, distant, but no less insistent.
There was something weird about the wreck — not showing up in any of the internet records, its size and shape, and, of course, the brick of unidentified material. In Dex’s worst moments, his thoughts returned to his deadly radiation fears. (A couple of days under its invisible glow and he would be waking up with all his flesh oozing off his bones like molasses.)
He smiled at the image — like a Gahan Wilson cartoon — but was only a breath away from shuddering as well. Made sense. Maybe that’s why the crew left it onboard — they’d known it was dangerous as hell.
The smart thing to do was get the brick into the hands of somebody who could analyze it and find out just what the Germans had been up to. Which is exactly what he would do — as soon as he ran these pages through one of the online translators. If there was nothing in there sounding too damned odd, he and Kevin would check in with some of his lab-buddies.
But that last thought kind of pushed his thinking toward the next logical “if”.
Namely, what if the captain’s journal revealed something really weird or dangerous about the sub and/or the brick?
Then what?
Dex knew enough about the way things worked — the more people you let into any loop, the less control you have over what happens next.
The questions were eating at him, and he wasn’t the type to let that kind of neurotic crap get to him.
Suddenly the front door opened, and Tommy reappeared with a short, wizened old guy. He was thin, and a little stooped over and wore an Orioles cap over big ears.
“Hey, Dex, I want you to meet somebody,” said Tommy. “Augie Picaccio, this is my pal, Dex McCauley.”
He shook hands with the old guy, who smiled with what looked like his real teeth. “You wanna get on-a-line? No problem. I got-a Skype and Netflix and ESPN.”
Fifteen minutes and a couple glasses of wine later, Dex was sitting in Augie’s living room with Tommy and the laptop. It had been Dex’s experience with computers that nothing worked right the first time, and not until the cyber-gods had their fun with you before getting bored.
And so, he was both shocked and pleased when his laptop accepted his wireless login and let him get started. The old guy’s son had set him up with the wireless modem and it worked just the way it was supposed to — Dex was online without much hassle.
Using a website he googled called Transliteral, he started cutting-and-pasting the scanned text. It was slow-going because the site only allowed about a page at a time in the “text to be translated” box. Then you got to see another ad in a pop-up. Dex grinned as he sipped his Chianti Classico. You get what you pay for — and Transliteral was free.
Chapter Eighteen