Gosling, the first mate, licked his sandpaper lips and lit his pipe.
Something wasn’t right.
He stood outside the pilothouse door, staring across the decks. They were lit and he could see everything. Nothing looked amiss… yet, yet something was not kosher. He could feel it deep down inside. Call it instinct, call it intuition, call it whatever you wanted, but something was really wrong here. He just couldn’t put a finger on what it was. He could feel the steady throb of the engines through the deck plates beneath his feet. It was not mechanical. After years spent on freighters, he could actually sense when there was a mechanical failure somewhere just as a man can sense something not quite right with his own body. It was like a sixth sense you developed when you knew the sea and you knew your vessel and how she felt and responded and reacted to every wake and swell.
No, the ship was fine.
The crew was fine.
What then?
He stood there, smoking, sending feelers out in every direction.
It didn’t make any sense. Yet, he’d been sailing long enough to know he could trust his instincts. But this seemed almost beyond experience, beyond comprehension, something intangible and unknown.. . an almost physical menace.
There was trouble.
There was danger… but where? How?
Gosling’s skin had gone clammy and his hands were trembling. It was bad and he had no explanation. He threaded his way amongst the cargo lashed to the spar deck and went to the railing. The sea was calm. Like glass. Like the water in some kid’s little backyard swimming pool. That wasn’t right. He’d been sailing the Atlantic for years and he’d never seen the waters so inexplicably calm. Especially this far out in open water. And March was a notoriously bad time in this part of the ocean. Storms came and went like notions. But never, never, was the sea so positively… dead.
Okay, he thought, okay. Let’s see what’s happening here.
He walked into the pilothouse, secured the hatch, stood there with his hands on his hips.
“How goes it?” Gosling said.
Iverson, the wheelsman, was seated at the chart table, banks of computer screens glowing before him. A copy of Hustler was balanced on his knee. He shrugged. “Good to go, Mr. Gosling. Pretty quiet out there tonight.”
Gosling nodded, sighed, just couldn’t get that certainty out of his system that something was terribly wrong or about to go south on them. It was on him, in him, an almost physical sense of expectation, of dread.
The pilothouse was rectangular in shape, looked much like an air traffic control tower from the interior, windows to all sides. It was a handsome room, decked out in oak and brass, all original construction from the ‘50s. The original ship’s wheel was still in place, next to the binnacle and gyrocompass repeater which was connected to the gyro down in dunnage. Of course, nobody manned the wheel anymore. The Mara Corday was navigated exclusively by DGPS, Digital Global Positioning System, which was monitored by computer and fed to autopilot. To get to point B from point A, it was only a matter of entering preset coordinates. Gosling checked the screens, was only marginally reassured. Across the front of the pilothouse were panels of controls and instrumentation – radar units, bow thruster controls, RDF and Navtex receivers.
“You get the weather?”
“Yeah, about twenty minutes ago. NWS calls for clear skies through tomorrow night.”
Gosling checked the satellite imagery on one of the computer screens where the ship was fed continuous atmospheric info. He read through the forecast on the weather fax receiver. Yeah, like Iverson said, there was nothing of concern there. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Still, Gosling wasn’t satisfied. The ship had two Kelvin radar units and Inmarsat B and C Satnav, Electronic Chart System. Everything checked. They were on course. What the hell was it then? The more he couldn’t find the glitch here, the ghost in the machine, the more it ate at him.
“Calm tonight, eh?” Iverson said, flipping through pages.
Calm before the storm, Gosling thought morosely.
Iverson set his magazine down. Looked nervous and picked it up again. “You ever seen a calm like this, Mister Gosling?”
Gosling ignored him. He checked the communication systems. The ship had standard radiotelephone, VHF, SSB, MF/HF stations. It had voice, data, fax, and telex connectivity via Inmarsat Satcom. Gosling scanned all the channels. Everything. Commercial, marine, aviation, even the distress frequencies. There was nothing but static and a shrill white noise he’d never heard before.
“You had activity before?” he said.
Iverson nodded. “Shit, yeah. I had chatter all over the place.”
“Nothing now.”
“Gotta be.”
Iverson scanned the channels himself. He checked the components over. Everything looked good. “I don’t get it.”
But Gosling was beginning to. Because whatever was coming, he figured, it was coming now, swooping down on them out of the night. It was crazy thinking, still it persisted. His guts were roiled like stormy waters, his throat tight, his scalp itchy.
“You all right, Mister Gosling?”
Gosling looked at him hard and for the first time in his life, he couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Nothing that would make sense anyway.
Satnav was still operational. Radar was blank… oddly blank, not so much as a cloud out there. They were still online, operational. But audio and radar were down or seemed to be… now why was that?
Lights out, Gosling found himself thinking. The lights are being turned out on us one at a time. Lights out.
He was imagining a tall building at night, all the windows lit.. . then, one by one, the lights going out. Lights Out. That was also the name of an old spooky radio show. And what did the announcer say at the beginning while that distant bell was gonging? It… is.. . later… than… you… think…
Iverson kept scanning channels. “Something funny here,” he said.
And, yeah, it was funny, all right. Gosling was thinking it was funny, too. Because something was building here, something was happening incrementally and he didn’t honestly know what it was. Only that he could feel it gathering momentum. Like some negative electrical charge in the air gaining impetus.
There was a shrill beeping.
Iverson said, “GPS says we’re off-line… interference or something…”
There was a hint of panic to his voice and Gosling knew it wasn’t just his imagination now: Iverson was feeling it, too. Maybe one system would go to hell, but all of them? One after the other?
Together, they walked over to the binnacle. The magnetic compass was spinning around in circles. The gyrocompass was rolling, trying to find a bearing.
“Jesus,” Iverson said.