Glass checked the watch list. The sarcastic Racca was in the engine room. Glass pressed a buzzer beside a voice pipe.
“Get up here. On the double.”
“Can’t leave the station. We’re on generator.”
“Move it. Move it.”
Racca entered the bridge, took the telescope, looked.
“I’m going below.”
“You see it?”
“And I’m staying below. For always. You’ve done some crazy things, Glass, but this cuts it.” Racca’s face was the color of whey, or at least it was that color when Dane later called him back to the bridge.
Glass, having once before woken Conally on the subject of Hester C., went to the crew’s compartment to wake him again. Glass thumped down the ladder with loud indifference to all sleepers.
“This better be good.” Conally came from sleep, and he moved like a man half afraid, half joyous over some grim confirmation. As he passed Howard’s sack, Conally shook Howard.
“You’ve had something on your mind, chum.”
“It’s not my watch.”
“Get movin’. Glass caught hisself a ghost.”
Howard found himself staring, wide-eyed, awake. “Something funny’s been going on.”
“Somethin’s going on, but it ain’t funny.”
“I’m surrounded by experts,” Glass chattered.
Fallon snorted, snorked, came awake. “What? What?” He rolled out, began pulling on his pants, then followed.
The mist was updrafting, back flowing, like cold layers of slag magically unfrozen. There were cliffs and crevices in the mist; hollows, arroyos, switchbacks. It seemed geologic, and it seemed like the indifferent sweep of time or timelessness that chews planets into forms of dark mountains and dark seas.
“You see it, you see it there?”
“Call Dane. On the double.”
“Log it.”
“Don’t log it. You crazy? Log it and you got it.”
“What do you reckon? ”
“It’s fightin’to get loose.”
“What is it? What?”
“That lobster guy, I think.”
“I don’t think so,” Fallon said. “I don’t know what I think.” He lowered a set of binoculars, and his keglike shape seemed suddenly frail, thin. “We’re doin’ okay,” he said in a voice wrung from fear. “We’re makin’ it.” He seemed to be pleading with a friend.
A burst of static came from the radio, like chattering teeth, and, muted by mist, the commission pennant tapped from high above the heads of confused and frightened men. On the mudflats the arms waved, grasped, groped in undisguised battle as the creature struggled. The mist opened, closed.
“It’s swelling. Gettin’ bigger.”
The mist closed over the bright light, opened again, and when Dane arrived on the bridge like a startled frog a-jump from a known and comfortable river bank, the bright light was dimming to luminosity. Dane looked at Conally, at Fallon. Dane’s expression changed. His face no longer held the opinion that he had been woken by some punk seaman having dreams.
“There,” Conally said. “Right over there.”
Dane wrinkled his flat nose. “It’s lights from the million dollar bridge. The mist cleared aft, and the bridge is glowin’ at us.” He looked at Conally, at Fallon. “Tell me.”
Conally told him. ”… and it’s walking in that mist right now.”
“Then you got no trouble, right?”
“A’course we got trouble,” said Fallon. “What’s it mean?”
“Smell the breeze.”
“Wind?”
“No fog by morning,” Dane said. “It’s just this minute come onto winter.”
Howard’s voice was as querulous as a child begging to be spanked. “That has nothing to do with it. What does that have to do with it?”
“If it’s walkin’ in the mist, and if there ain’t no mist, then you got no trouble, right?”
“I have trouble,” Glass admitted with perfect diction. “I am not going to stand this watch alone.”
“You’ll stand it on top of the mast if I say so.” Without his chief’s hat, Dane seemed not as bulky or tough. Thin strings of hair, and most of them white, lay across his skull like a tangle of webbing spun by a committee of spiders. His rolled shirt sleeves revealed thick wrists, heavy hands, and his fingers were tapping some invisible surface. He looked like a man digging through his ditty bag of tales. He discovered the memory he sought. He looked at Glass, at Conally. “Stuff like this happens. I never seen it mean nothin’ yet.”
“It means something,” Fallon said. “You didn’t see it, chief.”
Dane, whose one law was competence, looked at Fallon, who had spent a winter running the engine room after the drowning of Jensen. Dane seemed to be mentally turning over the tale dredged from memory. “It means one thing. Crews get spooked if their main guys get spooked.”
Fallon hesitated, thought himself toward a brief jolt of understanding.
Dane turned back to Glass. “Relieve the engine room.” He turned back to Fallon. “When your punk Racca gets here, square him away.” To Howard and Conally he said, “Set double watches. Kiddies get lonely.” Dane gave a vague snort, for a moment seemed indecisive. Then he gave a full blown and heavy snort, the contempt falling back into his voice as surely as any actor pulling on his mask of role before stepping toward a familiar stage. “I was on an icebreaker once. You punks don’t know nothin’ a-tall about winter.” He went below, stomping, as though feet could hammer nails of certainty through the brains of uncertain and tremulous men who stood on the bridge, watched each other, looked at the dark mudflats, and concealed from each other their private tremors.
Chapter 15
That man with a propensity for miracles, that Lamp, whose job it was to know what fits in those spaces between groin and heart, took the news hard when he woke. Instead of chatter, of boisterous soothsaying because his grim views were proving out, Lamp fought back. He told Brace to “get crackin’”; and Brace hustled, complained, was always three steps behind Lamp, who behaved like a man in combat. Lamp challenged the miraculous with bacon, sausage, beef, ham, eggs, biscuits, gravy, fresh fruit, cold juices, and a vat of hot chocolate made from stores cached back in anticipation of holidays. Brace dashed about like a complaining sea sprite, one burdened with tasks that whirled his planet backward. There were not enough pots, pans, peeled potatoes. Men who were accustomed to eating rapidly sat on the messdeck and felt the small plunge of Adrian in the freshening breeze. They helped Brace along with their chortles, smart remarks; and they chewed and chomped and burped and chewed some more, as though it were Christmas.
Lamp had “a feelin’,” as he confided to Howard, and Lamp was doing something about his feeling. Even Howard had to admit that the mist ridden night seemed a little silly when remembered across a full plate—and with gravy, too.
“Like that time in Hong Kong,” Lamp confided to Howard. “The cook coulda pulled that one out.”
“What happened in Hong Kong?”
“Later. I’ll tell you later,” and Lamp bustled, charged his enemy, attacking the invisible through a smokescreen of whipped cream for men to smear over pie. “It’s almost a relief,” he told Howard. “We know we got a fight. It ain’t skiddy, now.”