Ghostboat (22 page)

coast, south of the great Wharton Basin. 90°-110° E. Based at 30° S. Area of enormous
 

depths, bad weather, rarely sailed.

GMA-9

East of Australia—lat. 30° S., between 180° E. and 170° W. Centered over Kermadec
 

Trench, north of New Zealand.

GMA-10

South Pacific—the Challenger Deep—30° S. lat., between 120°-100° W. Right over the East
 

Pacific Ridge—Center directly over Easter Island—2500 miles west of Chile.

Byrnes held the list longest of all. He examined it dourly, an unpleasant look settling into his usually impassive features. When he looked up, Hardy was slowly turning the globe, pointing out the funny configuration between each set of GMAs. “Five of these things lie directly to the right of a continent: Bermuda, Australia, South America, South Africa, and Japan. In all five areas we get those swirls we’ve been speaking about, opposing currents clashing on the surface as well as in the deeps. Every meteorological phenomenon you can think of happens regularly in these places. And in case you haven’t noticed, there are direct correlations between the northern GMAs and the southern ones. Each GMA is located the same distance from the equator, whether above or below it—that’s the latitude-thirty-degrees factor. Each GMA in the north has a southern brother shifted almost exactly thirty to forty degrees to the right. Ten GMAs, ringing the earth in two belts, five in the north and five in the south. And each one centered about seventy-two degrees from the next in line. All lie completely over water, except for the one in the Mediterranean and the one over Pakistan. Each is centered over a section of the earth’s core with an extraordinary concentration of magnetic pull. And each of them has a documented history of disappearing acts.”

Hardy lifted one of the skewers. “Now then, let’s see if we can find some sort of mystical correlation among all ten. Mr. Frank, you’d better kiss your globe goodbye.”

Hardy didn’t even look at Frank as he placed the skewers along the table like surgical instruments. Delicately he pointed the first skewer into the center of GMA-1 and pushed it through. He leaned over the top of the globe and seemed to fish around for a while until he decided his aim was right, then gave the skewer a shove. It came out on the opposite side of the globe, in the southern hemisphere, directly through the center of GMA-8, in the Indian Ocean. He picked up the next skewer and placed it through GMA-2, coming out in GMA-9, diametrically linking the Mediterranean to Australia. One by one, he went around the globe until five skewers had gone in the northern centers and come out through the southern centers, until the globe resembled a giant’s pincushion.

Hardy stopped and spun the globe slowly on its axis so that everyone could see where th6 skewers went in and where they emerged. “As you can see, gentlemen, there is an alignment here which we may as well call mystical, for want of a better word. Each of these blobs is linked to each of the others. We have discussed nearly all the various correlations—physical, magnetic, geographical, meteorological, and mystical. Now, I would like to show you the strangest reciprocal effect of all...”

He picked up the knife and turned’ the globe over on its side. Carefully inserting the blade at the equator, he proceeded to slice it around, like a watermelon, Frank’s features drew into a tight frown. Byrnes sat up slowly. Cassidy was sweating, clutching his bandanna to his neck. Hardy worked with deft surgical hands. The globe was composed of a hard plastic shell, and the cutting was not easy. At last he came the full 360 degrees, and the two halves popped apart by a half- inch. Hardy put the knife down and pried the pieces farther apart with his hands. They were held together by the five crossed skewers. The metal rods relented, and the two halves of the globe gave away like the ends of an accordion. When they were a full four inches apart, Hardy put the globe upright on its stand and pushed it to the center of the table. The officers peered into the opening, and one by one reacted in stunned silence.

The split halves revealed the skewers forming an almost geometrically perfect criss-crossed path, each of them cutting right through the exact center of the earth.

Ed Frank’s lips parted. He stared at the globe in disbelief for a long moment, then regarded Hardy with awe.

Hardy displayed a self-satisfied smile and met Frank’s gaze. “My students just love this one,” he said. He waited for the officers to finish poking around inside the globe. They were on their feet now, huddled around it, pointing at the various circled blobs, muttering to each other.

“A little scientific hocus-pocus, gentlemen,” said Hardy, getting their attention back. “But, as I said before, it’s easy to perpetuate legends, myth, and superstition. Personally, I don’t want to have anything to do with that. And furthermore, I insist that none of this applies to the
Candlefish.”

Again he was met with silence. Frank was getting tired of these bombshells. “What do you mean, none of it?” he asked.

“What I have given you is fifty percent fact and fifty percent supportable conjecture. But only a small percent of it has anything at all to do with this submarine.”

“You’ve taken us this far; now you better explain.”

“All right. It is quite possible that the
Candlefish tell
victim to peculiar electromagnetic forces in GMA-4, off the coast of Japan in 1944. It is possible that she is one of those legendary vanishings that have been known to occur in that area. But that just doesn’t answer all the questions. What Mr. Frank is failing to see is the selectivity that goes on in these GMAs. In some instances ships and crews disappear completely. In others only the crews disappear. In others planes are thrown off course, or lose altitude in a split second, or suddenly find themselves missing ten or fifteen minutes of time. With all these different things happening—how the hell can
one explanation suffice?
All we can say at best is that these areas have one thing in common—
weird things happen here!
A lot of weird things. And we can say that these happenings may all be related to electromagnetics. After all, our bodies are electromagnetic devices. We are held together by the same forces of energy that bind our entire planet together. Scientists are just beginning to get away from particle theories of the binding source—and they are taking off in a new area. Energy. What exactly is it? What is the force that makes particles revolve around a nucleus? What is the force that holds a body together? What holds the earth’s core together, the crust, the seas? It would seem to me that some sort of natural balancing act is at work in what we know as energy. Now along comes man and sticks his little fingers in and starts reproducing the energy for his own use—creating more energy, upsetting the balance. He disrupts what is already there. And if he starts monkeying around with an unstable environment, such as our Geomagnetic Anomalies One through Ten, the consequences could be severe. We don’t know how sensitive the instability really is! Suppose—just suppose—that the
Candlefish
somehow struck an unstable energy environment, triggering a disruptive effect which resulted in complete energy chaos. Suppose the submarine itself—bound together by rapid forces of energy, forces strong enough to be solid, such as steel and wood, forces that do not utilize energy except on a superficial binding level—suppose the sub was shot intact through a time warp and propelled into the future in a single catastrophic instant!”

He fell silent a moment, waiting for reaction, but everyone was quiet again. He had the floor.

Frank cut in. “What about the crew?”

“Different forms of energy! Man is not as solid as steel. As a matter of fact, his mind is an extraordinary propagator of electromagnetic waves. Picture a crew of eighty-four men, undergoing a mental trauma as this submarine went down on December 11th, 1944. Eighty-four minds, thrown suddenly in or out of phase with whatever energy force was causing the sub to go down. Perhaps these men were literally blown apart—disintegrated—sent off to a sudden oblivion—without any trace at all.”

Hardy looked around. Every face was beaded in sweat. “Look,” he said, “we have learned how to play with electricity. We have seen how phasing can work in experiments. Divert energy from one frequency to another, until you have a lot of frequencies in combination, interacting in phase, and what happens? They either cancel each other out or they create a new, separate impulse. Suppose the forces in GMA-4 went into phase with the energy in the minds of those eighty-four men, creating a terrible power imbalance—you might call it a mental backfiring. Minds suddenly running amok could have thrown a whole tremendous complex of power consumption out of phase. Something on board, an electronic device or a human mind, may have locked in on a frequency over which we were sailing. That frequency may have belonged to some underwater force, or to the interaction between a cool lower air fog and a hot sea surface—there
was
fog, you know, thick fog, and the surface was churning—and the interaction may have triggered the shaking that caused all the damage, and then eventually the time-snap.”

He was speaking faster now, sorting through his own mind the points he had wanted to make all these years.

“And yet, however remarkable the explanation for what happened thirty years ago may be—however much we may be able to support or prove on this voyage—I have to insist that it still doesn’t apply.”

“Why?” asked Frank.

“The
Candlefish
disappeared like all the others in all these places, for whatever physical reason there may be, but—as you pointed out, Mr. Frank—she came back! She came back after thirty years, and that is the one factor that sets her apart. Nothing ever came back before! So even if we do find out how she went down, it isn’t going to mean a thing! What we have to know is
why
she came back!”

“You mean how.”

“That’s exactly what I
don’t
mean! I mean
why!
There has to be a
reason
—not just a satisfactory explanation! There is some kind of logic to this—something beyond the physical!” He waved a hand over the charts and reports and the wreckage of the globe, and then snapped: “And all of
this
has nothing to do with it!”

Hardy subsided into silence, then turned suddenly and stumbled out of the wardroom.

Frank stood up in embarrassment. He didn’t know what to say; Hardy had drilled a hole in his self-assurance. Byrnes stood up and adjourned the meeting, ordering everyone back to stations.

As the officers filed out, Cassidy paused to stare at the demolished globe, then stepped quickly out of the compartment Frank looked down at the shambles on the table and began to clean it up.

Byrnes was the only one left. He was unbuttoning a sweaty shirt and pushing the empty coffee cups together for the steward.

“What did you think?” Frank asked.

“I think there is no question as to who is the better lecturer,” he said without expression. “I just wish he had kept his mouth shut.”

“So do I,” said Frank, and was immediately surprised at himself. But Frank was growing very sick of interference. Ever since this business had begun, he had been getting it from Diminsky, from Smitty, from Byrnes, and from Hardy himself. Now Frank was more determined than ever to follow this thing through to its conclusion, no matter how dangerous it became. He wondered how cooperative the rest of the crew would be, once the substance of today’s meeting made the rounds of the boat. It could be dealt with. Most submariners are far from superstitious; they are too busy contending with reality. The stories might make great conversation, but he doubted they would become a fixation. Frank mentally kicked himself for bringing the matter up at all. He had never even stopped to consider his own motives. What, had he tried to do today? Create paranoia? He hoped this wasn’t going to mean that eighty-four other men were going to spend their off-duty hours on deck looking for devils and triangles...

What
would
they be looking for? And, come to think of it, what was
he
looking for? Really looking for?

Repetition?

CHAPTER 12

December 1, 1974

The
Frankland
knifed cleanly through the long Pacific swells, her bow skimming the gray-green water, leaving a phosphorescent wake that shimmered in the early darkness. Ray Cook stood at the stern rail and studied the churning water displaced by her surging engines. He burrowed deeper into his jacket, warding off the cold bite of the night air. Normally this noble panorama of vast, empty ocean would stimulate him, but tonight he had other things on his mind. Something had gone sour aboard the
Candlefish
. That he was sure of... but what?

Cook snorted to himself. Over the years Cook had perfected an intricate mental alarm system which, for the most part, accurately gauged the moods of people he knew or simply met for the first time. Face to face, over a telephone or, in this case, on a speaker monitor in the
Frankland’s
radio room, all the indications were there. Frank himself was probably unaware of them: the flatness in his voice, the hint of suppressed anger, the deliberate restraint. Something or somebody had disturbed Ed Frank and he was trying to cover it up. Why? What was he trying to hide?