Stairway to Forever (4 page)

He arose as far as his knees and looked about him to discover that he was kneeling in or near the center of a shallow depression. To his left, high dunes marched, one after another in succession, their tops grown with sea-oats, coarse grasses and what looked to be a few stunted shrubs. It was from his right that the surf sounds came, but he could actually see only the slope and low ridge of another dune, so he stood up on his feet.

In slow, gentle, curling-crested swells, white-topped surf broke upon a sloping, sandy beach. Within his vision, dozens of small birds paced on thin, stiltlike

legs just beyond the constantly varying reach of the combers, their sharp-pointed, spiky bills dipping now and again to glean sustenance from sand or water. The sea or ocean or whatever it was seemed empty and endless, stretching on to misty distance where it became as one with the blue sky. There were no offshore islands in sight or any ships, only a few, very distant specks which most likely were gulls or other flying birds.

Fitz could not recall having ever in recent years seen a beach so clean. The only objects marring the smooth, natural sweep of the sand were some bright shells and, here and there, some larger and small bits of driftwood and rafts of sunbleached seaweeds —no candy wrappers, empty bottles, used condoms, grease-stained fried-chicken buckets and not one pop-top beer can or discarded, well-used, disposable diaper.

The low breakers proceeded from his left to his right and he recalled that that fact was supposed to tell him something about his geographical location, but just then he could not remember its entire significance.

"First things first," he said to himself and stepped back over to where the flashlight stuck out of the sand hard by the six- or seven-foot length of a thick, bulky, near-buried log of faded, bleached wood. Bending at the waist and resting his hands on his flexed knees, he essayed thrusting his head through the opening his senses could not detect.

Sure enough, while his body was sweating in the hot sun, while the sand crunched beneath the soles of his shoes, his head was suddenly back within the almost-darkness of the stone-walled crypt and his nose was breathing of the cool, damp, earthy-smelling underground air. And from somewhere, far above those stairs, he heard-felt what was either a sonic

boom, or old Henderson illegally blasting out stumps with dynamite again.

A sudden brainstorm sent him moving haltingly to one side until his neck and shoulder encountered the clamminess of the buried masonry and then, bracing his left hand against the invisible wall, he extended his left leg backward as far as it would reach and plowed a furrow in the sand with the toe of his shoe. Working back over to his right, he repeated the process. Then, with all of him once more in what he now was thinking of as "the sand world," he squatted before the driftwood log and, using his worn pocket-knife, scribed marks precisely aligned with those furrows in the sand, plus a much larger, centered, "this way" arrow. The flashlight might become deep-buried in blowing or drifting sand or displaced by a high tide, but the huge, heavy log stood r he felt, in far less such danger.

With his way back home now as clearly marked as he could make it, Fitz felt finally safe to further explore this new-found land of his. The beach just stretched away into the far, dim distance and was as empty as the expanse of water, so far as he could determine with his unaided vision, so he turned inland, setting his feet to the incline of the nearest dune. But with the successful ascent and descent of it and the ascent of the next one beyond it, he suffered a return of the cold, prickly, uncomfortable sensation. His way back might not be, he realized, as clearly and enduringly marked as he had at first so rashly assumed.

For below him, in a deep canyon between towering dunes, lay ample proof that the gentle, now-placid sea or ocean could at times assume demonic proportions. Such force as could lift and deposit so far from the high-tide marks a wooden ship that

looked to be more than a hundred feet long could displace his flimsy marker-log with consummate ease and hardly an afterthought.

But then he resolutely mastered his quick fears. He rationalized that such as the apparent shipwreck was more than likely the result of a storm or hurricane, and the sky above him just now harbored not so much as the bare wisp of a cloud, so there was almost no chance of any serious blow in the time it might take him to examine the wreck, below, at closer range.

Close up, he found the hulk to be really huge, impressive despite its sad condition. Timbers of its fabric ran from several inches to a full foot and more in thickness. But he was at first hard-put to think of a satisfactory explanation for the regularly spaced hol-ings in the sides of the ship, extending in lines on both port and starboard and almost from one end to the other.

"Cannon?" he thought, aloud.

No, the thicknesses of the decking between the tiers of openings would have been insufficient to bear the weights and recoils of even small cannon. It was not until he had clambered up into the open waist of the hulk that he understood. The cluttered profusion of thick, broken off and splintered shafts told him the story.

"Oars! Of course, it's a galley. No, I think I recall that galleys only had one bank of oars, this one had at least two. What was that old word for a ship with two banks of oars, anyway? Trireme? No, not trireme, that meant three banks of oars. Bireme? That was it, a bireme. This is a bireme, I'm on . . . or, rather, what's left of one.

"But, good God, man, that's plain ridiculous, on the face of it. I mean, I don't think this kind of a ship

has been used for a thousand years, anyway; maybe two thousands years. And this close to water, no kind of wood wouldVe lasted that long in any recognizable shape. And even without water and rot, in that length of time wind and sand wouldVe ground it down to nothing but dust. Hell, maybe I am just hallucinating, after all. I . . . OWWWl"

The renewed thought of hallucinations speedily departed his mind, for the baulk of sun-bleached timber against which his shin had just made painful contact while he had wandered, musing, was just as solid and real as anything he ever had felt before, in the other world above the stone-walled crypt.

Only the uppermost portions of the wrecked ship appeared to be in any way easily accessible, Fitz soon found. All of the low forecastle and the entire length below the deck on which he was standing seemed to be solidly packed with sand. The splintered stubs of two masts stood up out of that deck, it being the larger of them against which he had barked his shin, so oars and men's strong backs had not then been its only motive power.

At the level on which he stood, he could see that the sterncastle was pierced with two low doorways, each of them plugged with solid-looking, unwarped wooden doors, the wide planks bound and hinged and studded with rust-flaking iron. Once Fitz had, with a shrieking of long-unused metal, shouldered open the left door, he was glad that he had marked the log back there on the beach and brought the flashlight with him. The yawning cavity before him was—especially now, after his lengthy exposure to the bright sunlight, enhanced by the mirror effect of the sand—as pitch black as it could be.

A bit hesitantly, fearful of what horrors the ancient wreck might still hold within its dark, secret places,

Fitz switched on the flashlight and played its beam about the interior of the low-ceilinged, cramped space, only to find his fears to be utterly groundless.

Despite the closed door, fine sand had drifted in over the space of the long years to dust the spartan furnishings of what looked to have once been sleeping quarters for one or more men. On the top of a tiny table built into the very fabric of the ship itself sat a few shallow, earthenware cups and one smaller one, of verdigrised copper; a stack of plain, uneven earthenware bowls; and a big, rusty knife, half out of a rusty sheet-metal case, with a throat and chape of greened bronze or brass.

Ducking his head, Fitz stepped through the low doorway into the cabin. He picked up the knife and drew the full length of the blade—which, overall, was about the size and heft of the Ka-Bar knife he had carried in the Corps, so long ago—from out its sheath. Rusty, it most assuredly was, but both the lower edge and the first third of the upper edge still were frighteningly sharp. Deep fullers ran down both faces of the blade to a wicked point. He hefted the sizable knife, clearly more weapon than mere tool, then carefully resheathed it and thrust it under his belt. Finders, keepers. The small copper cup looked cute, so he stuck it into a pocket; his rented home boasted few enough knickknacks.

The door on the port side seemed shut permanently and for good, barring the destructive use of a wrecking- or crowbar, an axe or a heavy sledge, and Fitz had all but despaired of budging the contrary portal until he noted and finally recognized for just what they were the two badly rusted slide bolts at top and bottom. But, even then, the pitted, decomposed metal did not move in any way easily after so long in the one place and, before he was done, he

had added to his raw palms, barked shin and bruised shoulders, two sets of skinned knuckles and an assortment of broken fingernails; also, he had dusted off and brought vehemently out some choice words and phrases that he had not used since the Korean War. But at last the stubborn door swung open, gaping wide, and he could view the interior of what seemed an appreciably larger cabin.

Strangely, inexplicably, a sense of deja vu swept briefly over him as he ducked to enter the low door, but it was gone almost before it had come. His flashlight beam picked out the furnishings—a low armchair of carven and inlaid wood, a brace of even lower stools, a small octagonal table centered under a large brass lamp coated with verdigris and hung from the ceiling with three equally coated brass chains. A chest or locker was built into the hull side of the cabin and atop it was a shallow trough looking a bit like a dry sink; from the rotted remnants of cloth and felt within it, Fitz assumed that it had once been a bed or bunk.

"And a damned hard bed," he muttered to himself, poking with the chape of the knife scabbard at the moldering strands and pieces of felt and wool. "But, then, nothing I've yet come across on this whole boat seems to have been designed or built with comfort or pleasure in mind—anybody's comfort or pleasure."

Three great, massive hasps of rusty, pitted iron on the front of the chest-dry sink-bed were secured by three equally massive padlocks. The leftmost and the center of these hung stiffly open but, though the rightmost still was locked, the ring-handle of a bronze or brass key jutted from the face of it. It turned very slowly and very, very stiffly under Fitz's fingers and he had to tug and work at the shank for some time

before it finally quitted the body of the lock. With all three of the heavy locks on the floor at his feet, he pulled up the hasps and opened the lid of the chest with yet another scream of rusty hinges.

The interior he found to be some five and a half feet long, by about two feet wide and deep, and fitted with a hinged bar that could be swung up to prop open the lid. It contained numerous large and smaller cases of various shapes and constructions. Some were of metal-bound wood, some of tooled, dry-rotting leather; a couple of smaller ones seemed to be wrought of sheet metal, the lack of rust showing that metal to be nonferrous in nature.

The largest chest within was about the size and shape of a GI footlocker, but with a convex lid. An experimental tug at one of its metal handles told Fitz that it either was bolted to the deck beneath, or contained something extremely dense and weighty; also, it was locked with another of those iron padlocks, so he turned his attention to the smaller caskets, for the nonce.

A leather box secured by a pair of strap-and-buckle arrangements caught his eye so he lifted it out and bore it over to the octagonal table where light from the opened door spilled in. But the array of instruments, each fitted into carved openings in a wooden form, were an utter mystery to him. The largest of them did put him somewhat in mind of the ancient predecessor to the modern sextant called an astrolabe—he had once seen one in a museum and had seen others drawn in books—while yet another instrument looked vaguely like a navigators* parallel.

The second case he chose, though much smaller, was infinitely heavier. It seemed to Fitz to be about the size and general shape of a .50 caliber ammunition box, though with a slightly convex lid. But when

he had gotten the box upon the table and opened, he could only gasp and gawk, open-mouthed, at so graphic and thoroughly unexpected an explanation for the bulkless dead weight. Gold\

After he had sunk, rubber-legged, into the inlaid chair and forced himself into a measure of composure, he dipped his still-trembling hands into the nearly brimftil box and found the treasure to all be in coin—some of them rather crudely made specimens, but coin, nonetheless. They seemed to vary in size from tiny things less than half the diameter and thickness of an American dime to pieces as large as or larger than a half-dollar coin, averaging out at about the size of a quarter-dollar or, possibly, a five-cent piece. He guesstimated the total weight at thirty to forty pounds.

Thirty to forty pounds of gold! How many ounces was forty pounds? Let's see . . . sixteen times forty? No, no, precious metals used another scale, ahhh . . . troy weight, they called it, back when I was in school. Okay, twelve times forty is four hundred and eighty. How much is gold selling for, these days? Back during the war it was thirty-five dollars an ounce and some of the more morbid types in the Corps in the Pacific carried around a pair of pliers to take the gold teeth out of the jaws of dead Japs.

But I think it's gone up in price since then. Somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty dollars an ounce, last I heard ... I think. Good God Almighty damn! There's somewhere between fifty and seventy-five thousand dollars sitting here on this old table!

"Sweet Jesus, I thank you," he breathed fervently. "It looks like a bit of the Luck of the Irish has finally come the way of Alfred O'Brien Fitzgilbert II."