“The stations’ positions are the only stability we have down here.” Rams said through clenched teeth. “It’s only the absolute predictability that makes sailing possible. No station master would ever vary his track by a millimeter, even if his life depended on it, because every sailor is dependent on that station being exactly where he is supposed to be at all times. No, the station wouldn’t have deviated from the track for any reason.”
“Then something must have happened to it,” Pascal said slowly. “Maybe the storm moved it to a different track. Hmm, with that much wind force almost anything could be possible.”
Louella snapped her fingers. “That’s it! I’ll just bet that’s the ghost you nearly ran into earlier—we must have passed the station without realizing it.” She turned to Rams. “Is there any possibility that your inertial equipment is out of kilter; that somehow it is giving us the wrong readings?”
Rams shook his head weakly from side to side, obviously trying to clear his head. “Not possible. The inertial has a better pedigree than the king of England. Remember, I’m staking my life on it every time I set sail. I calibrate it with the station’s master system before I leave port. No, it can’t be wrong—just not possible.”
“Then, somehow the damnable storm must have moved the station off course, off track, whatever, and that’s why it isn’t where its supposed to be.”
“Brilliant deduction, Louella,” Pascal injected. “But what can we do about it. Should we try to catch up to it?”
“Can’t do that. Don’t know what track she’s following. Haven’t a prayer of finding her.” Rams took a deep breath before continuing. “If the storm blew the station off her track, then the master’s probably fighting like mad—He has to get her back on track: Probably working the sea anchors, ballast tanks, whatever to move her. Even if we use her last position we can’t predict the line he’ll take. Take more than dumb luck to find her. We’d never know how far below or above her track she’d be.”
Louella sighed and made a small adjustment to the tiller. “So what do you suggest that we do?”
“Simple,” Rams smiled groggily as he climbed out of the pilot’s seat and stumbled toward his bunk and some much needed rest. “Find ’nother station.”
By the end of his next watch Louella had decided on the station that they could intercept soonest and set them on the intercept track. The station she chose, CS-12, was farther to the south and an eighth of the way around the planet, far enough from the track of the storm not to have been affected. With proper trim and a little luck they could transit the distance to her track in little over a week or, with fair winds and some luck, a little less.
“We won’t starve before we get there,” Pascal remarked when he saw her sail plan. “I think we have enough food and water on board to last us. Just the same, I’m worried about our host. Rams’ leg is definitely looking worse and the amount of sedative I’ve got left in the medicine chest is running dangerously low. We have to get him to a doctor as soon as possible.”
“I agree. Be a pity to lose him after he rescued us. Say, our air looks good, too,” Louella said squinting at the tell-tales on the instrument panel. “We’ve enough reserves to spend another two weeks out here before the atmosphere in here goes stale on us. As long as we don’t run into any more problems we shouldn’t have any trouble reaching C-12. Piece of cake.”
“Sure,” Pascal replied with a worried glance at their rescuer. “Let’s just hope we all survive long enough to eat it.”
The following days were an endless blur of watch on watch at the wheel, trying to keep Primrose on her track and squeezing every bit of speed they could out of the ship. Pascal took to talking to Rams in the long quiet hours to keep himself awake, telling the captain of the races he had run, talking about the lean years before being hired by JBI when he and Louella had bummed around the world, their clothes their only possessions. He spoke of the clear air of a winter’s crossing, the stormy clouds of a southern storm, the crystalline brilliance of a spring night far from land, and the smooth hissing silence as a ship’s bow sliced the waves.
The one thing he never spoke about was the gut-wrenching fear he had felt when he brought Rams back to Primrose, and the shame that stilled burned inside him for his craven, cowardly behavior. Louella might think he was some sort of hero, but he knew the truth of what had happened, he knew absolutely certainly that he was, at heart, a sniveling little coward, afraid of the deep dark that was anxious to pull him to its bosom.
The return to his bunk at the end of each watch was a brief respite, a welcome relief for his poor body. He could hardly wait to lie down and release the truss that bound his lower body and protected him from rupturing himself in Jupiter’s constant two gee drag. Usually he fell asleep in seconds, only to groggily wake at the chime to return to the wheel and relieve Louella.
But occasionally he could not rest. In those periods he recalled the terror he had felt when he was outside. What if Louella found out that his cowardly fear had nearly caused him to kill himself and the captain? Would she laugh at him, belittling him in that taunting way of hers if he told her? Yes, he thought sadly, she would do exactly that. He had no choice but to hide his cowardice from her and Rams. He just wished that he could hide it from himself as well.
He had nightmares of falling endlessly into Jupiter’s bottomless depths and being crushed slowly in her enormous embrace. There was no rest from such dreams and he usually awoke bathed in the stink of fearful sweat.
Ten days after the near encounter with the wayward station, the winds, which had been generally westward, suddenly became gusty, shifting thirty degrees to the north, varying in strength each time they quartered back to the west.
Once, Thorn started to drift away from Primrose when the winds gusted, only to slam back and strike broadside as the wind shifted. Primrose shuddered with the force of the collision. A moment later, far below, Thorn’s keel, with the huge rock attached, smashed into Primrose’s and sent a vibration racing upwards that made the hull ring.
The chunk of rock embedded in Thorn’s keel had been a gift from the storm, one of the valuable bits of flotsam the storms occasionally brought up from the depths. It was these rocks that made Jupiter’s miners risk searching the edges of the hurricanes despite the dangers. A single rock could bring a fortune for its metallic content, and a modest profit for the volitiles that it might contain. By the standards of the trade the one caught in Thorn’s keel was enormous, ten times the size of the largest one Rams had ever heard of.
“Any more surprises like that and we’re liable to flounder,” Louella remarked as the vibrations dampened. “I’m not sure of how much punishment this ship will bear.”
“We ought to cast Thorn off,” Pascal suggested. “Thorn and that damned rock’s a danger to us. Besides, we could to make better time if we weren’t burdened by the tow.”
“NO!” Rams shouted from his bunk. The reduction of the dosage meant that he was conscious more than not. “Can’t do that to me… won’t let you steal my future.”
Pascal knelt beside him. “Captain, be reasonable. You need medical attention soon or you’ll never be able to use that leg. What good would all the money be if you can’t walk?”
Rams coughed. “Not ’bout money… ’s about freedom: owning my ship free and clear; being able to steer from port to port without worrying about the bank waiting to seize it. About having enough profit to get a decent crew, ’nough to put something aside for when I can’t fight the damned gravity any more.”
He pushed Pascal’s arm away and turned his head toward Louella, stretching a hand out to her. “This is about having Primrose as my own for the first time. Can’t you understand that?” he sobbed before lapsing back to unconsciousness. “Can’t… you… understand…”
Pascal couldn’t understand Rams’ concern. He’d always sailed on someone else’s boat; sometimes as captain, but mostly as crew. Ownership had never mattered to him; it was being able to sail the ship, to direct her course, to trim her heading was all he cared about: There always had been far more ships needing trained captains and crew than there were capable people. Ownership wasn’t important.
“I understand,” Louella remarked unexpectedly from the passageway, breaking his chain of thought. “We’ll do everything we can to save her, won’t we Pascal?” The tone of her voice told him that anything other than agreement would create a hell of a row.
“It’s insane,” he replied with as much emphasis as he could muster as he let her slip behind the wheel. ” We’re liable to have a hull rupture if Thorn smashes into us again! We’ll never make it to the station unless we cut the damn tow loose and get rid of Thorn and that damned rock! Its stupidity to try to save them when our own survival is at stake.”
Louella snorted in derision and twisted the wheel, heading Primrose back into the wind. Thorn was pushed away as the head wind rushed between the two hulls.
“I’m putting us on a new course. If we sail close to the wind Thorn will stay on our lee side and away from Primrose. We won’t have any more bumping.”
“That’s crazy. That is completely off our planned course! We might miss the station entirely!”
“Pascal, you bitched the same way when we were trying to work our way around Cape Horn in that storm back in ’79 and I got us through that, didn’t I? Now, instead of complaining, why don’t you try to figure out what this new course will do to our arrival time.”
After a few minutes of playing with the inertial and the computer Pascal announced that they would arrive too late, twenty hours behind the station.
Louella considered for a few minutes. “If we come up behind her then we can go on a broad reach and catch up to the station. Hey, our speed has to be faster than the station’s. We can catch it in maybe thirty hours or so. That’ll only add another day or so to what we originally thought. Close enough, and it saves the tow for the captain.” She nodded toward Rams, who had slipped back to sleep while they argued. “That should be good enough reward for saving our skins, eh, Pascal?”
Pascal couldn’t argue with that: He just hoped that their supplies would last.
And the captain, of course.
Rams’ condition was getting worse by the hour. Pascal had peeked beneath the bandages; he saw the swelling around the break, felt the heat radiating from the wound. Obviously there was an infection present within the leg, probably around the break. He’d been giving Rams the antibiotics until their supply ran out. The supply had never envisioned a journey this long, he thought, and now Rams was paying the penalty.
“We need to get him to a doctor soon,” he told Louella when she returned from her all too brief rest. “I think that an infection is setting in and I don’t have anything left to deal with it.”
“How far away is CS-17? We should be crossing its track this watch, shouldn’t we?”
Pascal started; the discovery of Rams’ problem had driven the approaching station completely out of his head. That was the trouble with exhaustion, it was so damned hard to keep your mind focused, so hard to remember anything. “Yeah, we should hit it sometime in the next few hours. Then all we have to do is catch up to her.”
Louella slipped into the seat and placed her hands wearily on the wheel. “Piece of cake.”
“Trust your inertial,” Pascal replied mirthlessly with a final glance at Rams. He headed for his bunk and a few blessed hours of relief.
He awoke with a start. An alarm was ringing shrilly somewhere. Was it time to go to school? No, that was the dream. He shook his head to clear it and realized that it was the radar alarm. They must be near the station! “Damn Louella,” he cursed. She must have let him sleep right through the watch, doubling her own burden to lighten his own. He tightened the truss, stood and moved toward the cockpit, checking the time as he did so.
Wait a minute; he hadn’t been asleep more than four hours! What the hell was happening? The station was still hours away. What could they have run into?
“It’s another damn ghost,” were the first words Louella spit at him as he entered the cockpit. “Come on over here and see what you can make of the displays.”
“Looks like something really big. Could be the station, just like the last one. Trim us up a couple of points higher, would you?” Louella twitched the wheel slightly to turn Primrose closer to the wind. Their speed picked up slightly and the radar image started to clear.
“Doesn’t look like a station,” Pascal announced as the outline clarified. “Come around another ten degrees. Yes, stay on this heading and we’ll be able to pick it up on the sonar.”