The Dream Vessel (8 page)

Morning in the mainland mountains, even on an early summer day, was much too cold for a skinny, young man to be standing outside in his underwear. This thought was on Farmington’s mind as he shivered on the rim of a small swimming pool at the downhill end of Cred Faiging’s compound.

The hillside had been cleared of trees and surrounded with high electrified fence against all outsiders—scavengers, Revolutionaries and Government people alike. (Faiging, the renowned inventor and manufacturer, treasured his privacy and independence.) The grounds were dotted with long and low manufacturing huts, the main laboratory-residence, and the garages beyond. The scrubby grass was criss-crossed with muddy vehicle tracks running between the structures.

The sun was bright but warmed little, and Farmington, in drenched undershorts, was enjoying very little privacy. The aging, yellow-and-white-haired inventor was strapping a tank-and-hose contraption onto the younger man’s back. Faiging’s assistant, a drawling stick figure named Kim, was dragging up a duffel bag of other gear.

“The trouble with showin’ those brochures around,” Faiging was saying, “is that once in a witch’s moon you’ll make an immediate sale. Big Tom don’t know that the only SUB we have is the prototype. But we can’t be disappointing an eager customer, can we?”

Farmington’s entire pale body was shaking. “He wasn’t…eager enough to pay…cash this time,” he stuttered. “Seemed odd to me. Always…he always paid cash before.”

Faiging sucked in his pocked cheeks as he considered the point and released them again with a comical pop. Like Farmington and many other southlanders, he razored off his facial hair every few days. “Ya said they was a load of red-leggers what Captain Bull brought up. See there? Big Tom’s got plenty of money—we can wait for the delivery. Just you get expert at using the SUB, while I see can we throw together a couple more. By time I’m done, you’ll be able to demonstrate your merchandise like a proper salesman.”

Kim was pretending not to notice the cold little bulge in Farmington’s pants. She lifted each of Farmington’s feet to strap them into a pair of downward-curving paddles fashioned from old tire rubber. Next, the mask, a thick piece of window glass surrounded by more rubber and sealed to the face with a coating of gum to keep the water out. She secured it by tightening a strap across the back of his head.

“Captain Bull’s due back in Edenton in juss three weeks,” the younger man said, his nose stopped up by the mask. “Reckon you’ll be done then?”

Air whoosed out of the hose as the inventor pressed the mouth piece for a final test. “This I call the air-stager,” Faiging said, fitting it into the salesman’s mouth. “Think of it as a mouth switch—you suck in, it’ll feed you air till you stop. And yeah, I can make a couple more—if the inspectors leave me alone meantime.” Faiging and Kim exchanged sober glances. Farmington noticed and wondered what kind of heat the old man was drawing this time.

He breathed in on the mouthpiece and filled his lungs with stale-tasting air, then heaved it out again. Seemed to work. Mouth only—don’t breathe with the nose—that would be one of the hard parts.

“How’d you think up a machine like this?” Farmington asked.

“Like a lot of my inventions,” Faiging said, rapping the tank, “I just plain didn’t. A scavenger, a scummy old bugwart name of Alistar found it nearbout the coast. Didn’t know what it was, but knew I’d have a use for it. This tank’s an original, ancient stuff. The hose was rotted, just enough there to copy the design.”

Not at all reassured, Farmington jumped into the pool feet first. The water was just thirty feet across, muddy looking. It was formed by sloping concrete walls that were hard to see and easy, he had found out during his earlier swim, to scrape knees on. Before, when he had just dipped into the pool, the visibility underwater was virtually nonexistent. Now, he could see at least a few feet away. He stood up, thrust his head out of the water, and nodded his tentative satisfaction to Faiging.

“Good,” the inventor called out. “Now go to the deep part—try out those foot paddles.”

Farmington obeyed, swimming down, hands out front in case he encountered another wall. The paddles supplied remarkable propulsion, but at a depth of twelve feet or so he could barely see his hands in front of his face. The water was seriously numbing his body, too, and Farmington hoped that vision and temperature were not going to be such a problem in Caribbean waters. The breathing was not too bad, though—an easy hissing intake; a flatulent-sounding rush of bubbles on the exhale.

His right leg brushed against seaweed, and Farmington thought that odd in a concrete pool. He swam upward for better light and turned himself upright in the water to look: A long black band with white speckles was wrapping itself around his ankle. He screamed a torrent of bubbles, losing the mouthpiece, and scraped the creature away frantically with his left foot paddle.

Arms and legs flailing, he scrabbled up the hard bank into the grass at Cred Faiging’s feet. He rolled onto his back, the tank propping him up, and examined his numb legs for fang marks. “Snake,” he stammered. “Pig-poking speckled…big ol’ snake.”

“Dammit,” Kim said, hooking a thumb into her dingy denims, “I thought water moccasins might a got in there! You rest up, and I’ll try to rake ’em out.”

“Thanks,” the salesman said, watching her boney little rear end wobble away.

Faiging knelt and swept aside the blood on Farmington’s knees. The scrapes didn’t look too bad.

“You did that just right,” the older man said, “letting the air out like that.”

“Huh?”

“In deep water—you rising fast like that—I figure if you didn’t exhale, your lungs ’ud burst.”

“Mr. Faiging…uh, gawd. Never mind.”

Three streamers flew from the mainmast of Tooth of Horan, one blue and two orange. The skimmer pointed out at just 125 feet, but with three small cannons starboard and three backboard, she was the most heavily armed—and the most sluggish—of Big Tom’s fleet.

Bishop sipped coffee from a metal cup and chewed lazily on a sausage biscuit brought up from the crew slots. At such a peaceful summer daybreak, Bishop thought to himself, hard to believe there was tragedy here just two months back. The Tooth of Horan was anchored fore and aft, just a mile south of that low lump of sand, rock, and jungle called Dunkin Island.

They had spent yesterday locating the wreck of the Lucia. Bark had sight-reckoned the area to be searched, and swimmers scanned it in a criss-cross grid with the new Cred Faiging diving masks or the old-style glass viewing bowls. And now a yellow net bob marked her 140-foot hulk, seventy feet below. She had appeared intact, but with light falling the actual search of the downed skimmer was put off until today.

Bishop’s morning peace did not last long. Big Tom’s growl rumbled from below—“On deck, lagbellies! On deck!”—as he pounded the walls of the crew’s quarters with his fists. And then the bearded trade master burst up out of the hatch, fresh and clear-eyed like Bishop had not seen him in months, an eager black bear done with hibernation.

As the crew grumbled into a loose assembly near the starboard rail, Bishop considered that it was nothing like the military-style assembly he imagined the Government would require. If it had a navy. They were a sag-eyed lot, and these clothes they had slept in quite needed an airing. But they fell respectfully quiet when Big Tom waved his meaty arms over his head. They numbered nine, total: Big Tom captaining for this expedition only; Bark as first mate; Bishop; the Tooth of Horan’s usual captain, a round young woman named Altia, demoted temporarily and fairly silent about her indignation; her usual first mate, Mark Ontario; the Tooth of Horan’s usual three crewmen; and Farmington, looking as if he’d prefer to be on land.

That one Farmington, Bishop thought, he looks awfully out of ease—something about these new breather tanks.

Big Tom cleared his throat with a loud harf, and shouted his speech into the steady sailor’s wind: “We will be starting a search today of the Lucia, which holds the leavin’s of my only son. But it’s a search about which I have not been full in the telling, for reasons you’ll gully right rapid. Some among you, I’d wager, are those talking that it’d be more right-minded to let the bones lie with the Lucia, a captain an’ her ship forever. But her ballast…hmph…well, she went down with a bellyful of gold, and we’re here to bring it up a hoist-load at a time.”

There was a gale of spontaneous conversation. Altia mumbled, “I knew it.” A dubious claim.

Altia lowered the dory over the side, and tied it off at the aft anchor rope. That would serve as a station for the divers.

Farmington shuffled, sickly looking, to the gasoline-powered air compressor center deck and yanked at the starter rope. It sputtered to life, then leveled out into a gargly hum. He clapped its feeder hose over the valve of the first tank and tightened the screw ring.

Bishop watched Farmington with a suspicious eye, as the two of them had argued the day before about this process.

“How come is it,” Bishop had asked the young salesman, “that you expects a man can breathe out of such a little bottle of air for half an hour?”

“Because the air is compressed—uh, mashed together—into the tank by this machine until it actually holds as much air as the entire ship does below decks. Think of that!”

“But below decks a this skimmer,” Bishop had replied, “how come is it that I could breathe for a week withou’ coming up, huh? An’ you says your bottle of air won’t last a whit of that?” Farmington had not completely thought out his response before Bishop spat and lurched away.

Now, Bishop shoved himself off the backboard rail and decided to busy himself with assembling the spare winch into a side hoist. The tripod-boom-and-pulley rig would bring the gold up ten bars at a time.

Bark clapped Bishop on the shoulder and whispered, “If I’d a been Big Tom, most of my fortune in the Lucia, don’t know as I’d have let her outta the harbor. And let Little Tom captain her? Never.”

Bishop crossed the deck, dragging the pulley gear in a sack behind him. He exaggerated the hunch in his shoulder on purpose—the one arm hanging lower than the other. Some of the Cell Island trugs said it made him look animalistic—cunning and powerful. Yes, the ladies were paid for favors both physical and mental, but this particular point he chose to believe.

There were only three air tanks for Farmington to fuss over. Cred Faiging had sent an apologetic letter with Farmington explaining that the unexpected order had temporarily depleted his stock.

Farmington had delivered the letter and kept to himself his reservations about life-critical equipment that had been manufactured in such a hurry. He recalled with trepidation the procession of factory workers entering the low huts at Faiging’s compound. They were grime-faced mountain folk with bad teeth and split fingernails. Geniuses at assembly, Faiging claimed. And so far the tanks and air stagers and gauges (originally boiler parts) functioned flawlessly. So far.

Farmington had taken each of the SUBs to the bottom of Faiging’s muddy test pool—once it had been freed of moccasins—so mayhap there was nothing to worry about. He had given them another trial run while teaching Bark and Big Tom how to use the tanks in the shallows of Thomas Harbor.

The three of them would make the first dive to scope out the skimmer, cut some exploratory holes, and set up the hoist line: Farmington would make the dive because of his expertise with the breathing equipment, Big Tom because of his builder’s knowlege of the Lucia, and Bark out of the unspoken notion that a first mate should take part in setting aright a mess he helped create.

Big Tom shouldered one of the three harnesses, but Farmington said no, and pointed to the rig with six lead weights lashed to the front belt. The other harnesses only had two.

Farmington looked embarrassed. “Um, bigger men, they float more easily—the extra weights compensate.”

As they strapped on their harnesses and belted the tanks into them—Bark towering over the two of them, looking puzzled, Big Tom looking impatient—Farmington reviewed aloud his teachings on use of the gear. Admonitions against panic. Stay together, to watch for emergencies. Breathe slowly, evenly.

He tried to sound authoritative, but his stomach knotted with the uncertainty of what would happen with the breather tanks at a depth of seventy feet. That was a lot of water to have on top of ya, a lot of pressure, far from a man’s natural grab of air.

They splashed into the Caribbean blue cold, and Altia threw their tire-rubber foot paddles after them. They were too awkward for a man to stand in on deck.

Big Tom coughed, shouted an anguished “Hooo-ahhh” at the frigid sting, then silenced himself by biting into his breather. On a hemp line, Altia carefully lowered to him a heavy cloth satchel of saws, drills, and ropes. Bark splashed around folding the sling that was tethered to the winch line, which he would take to the bottom. Farmington led the way over to the dory, then down the aft anchor line into the blue bubbly quiet.

Now Big Tom understood the point about the weights. Even with the six slung under his large belly, and the extra weight of the tools, he had to work to push himself deeper as he followed Farmington, one hand pulling along the anchor line. The foot paddles provided astounding propulsion, but when he paused he would slowly begin to rise again. His thoughts flickered to Moori, her ranting about all the ale he consumed, and then the sea floor and the Lucia came into focus.

Big Tom’s renewed vigor seemed to fade as he descended into the gloom where his finest skimmer lay. The horror of her sinking was not real until this moment. She lay on the bleak sandy landscape exactly as she had last been seen—fatally weighted onto her backboard side by her precious shifted ballast. A word came to Big Tom’s mind, dark-sounding and foreign: Port. That was it. A Rafer word. Rafers, he remembered now for some reason, called the backboard side of a skimmer port.

The Lucia’s top deck faced away from them. With Farmington still in the lead, they left the anchor rope. Big Tom dropped lower than the rest, compelled to do just this one thing—touch her keel. And he did that, ran his hand along the wide beam sadly, the way he would stroke the spine of a lover.

Then, like a mountain climber freed from gravity, he glided up her hull to join the others where the starboard rail arced up like the rim of a canyon. Big Tom was taking a breath every two or three seconds—too much, he knew. He wouldn’t last the thirty minutes. The cold did it. And the distress.

Farmington was looking excited, his head twisting back and forth from the Lucia’s deck below him to Big Tom approaching. The young man’s black hair rose into a dancing mop that jerked with each turn. Bark rose over the rail, too, and waved Big Tom on.

When he topped the rail, the trade master saw. The skimmer’s nonbouyant debris was already fanned out across the rippled sand. A narrow slice of the backboard decking was missing. Not fractured by impact. Not eaten away arbitrarily by the Caribbean’s fabled sea worms, the giant gluttons that would just as soon make a meal of a mast as they would a man.

No. The decking had been pried away precisely as he, Farmington and Bark had planned to do—by intelligent hands. The reason was obvious, and Big Tom knew immediately that the gold would be gone.

As he stared in shock, Big Tom drew the air-stager out of his mouth as if discarding a cigar he had lost the taste for. He scanned the looted yacht defiantly, a minuscule stream of bubbles trippling out of his lips, as if he dared the sea to take his life as well as his wealth. Farmington issued an audible squeak through his mask and jammed the mouth piece back between the fat man’s teeth.

A tiny dragon fish trailed colorful fins across Big Tom’s mask, and he swatted the little beast away irritably.