The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (18 page)

Many seemed to be totally unaware of each other’s existence, for one thing. Some seemed to shimmer occasionally, others were a little blurred or indistinct to my eyes no matter how I rubbed them.

And, once in a while, they’d walk through each other.

Yes, I’m serious. One big fellow in a flowered aloha shirt and brown pants carrying a tray of soft drinks from the cafeteria to his wife and three kids in the lounge didn’t seem to notice this woman in a white tee shirt and jeans walking right into him, nor did she seem aware of him, either.

And they met, and I braced for the collision and spilled drinks—and it didn’t happen. They walked right
through
each other, just as if they didn’t exist, and continued obliviously on. Not one drop of soda was spilled, not one spot of mustard was splotched.

There were other things, too. Most of the people were dressed normally for summer, but occasionally I’d see people in fairly heavy coats and jackets. Some of the fashions were different, too—some people were overdressed in old-fashioned styles, others wildly underdressed, a couple of the women frankly wearing nothing but the bottoms of string bikinis and a see-through short cape of some kind.

I know I couldn’t take my eyes off them for a while, until I got the message that they knew they were being stared at and didn’t particularly like it. But they were generally ignored by the others.

There were strange accents, too. Not just the expected Maine twang and Canadian accents, or even just the French Canadian accents—those were normal. But there were some really odd ones, ones where I picked out only a few words, which sounded like English, French, Spanish, and Nordic languages all intermixed and often with weird results.

And men with pigtails and long, braided hair, and women with shaved heads or, occasionally, beards.

It was weird.

Frankly, it scared me a little, and I found the purser and introduced myself.

The officer, a good-looking young man named Gifford Hanley, a Canadian from his speech, seemed delighted that I’d seen all this and not the least bit disturbed.

“Well, well, well!” he almost beamed. “Maybe we’ve found our new man at last, eh? Not bloody soon enough, either! We’ve been working short-handed for too long and it’s getting to the others.”

He took me up to the bridge—one of the most modern I’d ever seen—and introduced me to the captain and helmsman. They all asked me what I thought of the
Orcas
and how I liked the sea, and none of them would answer my questions on the unusual passengers.

Well, there
was
a St. Clement’s Island. A big one, too, from the looks of it, and a fair amount of traffic getting off and wanting on. Some of the vehicles that got on were odd, too; many of the cars looked unfamiliar in design, the trucks also odd, and there were even several horse-drawn wagons!

The island had that same quality as some of the passengers, too. It never seemed to be quite in focus just beyond the ferry terminal, and lights seemed to shift, so that where I thought there were houses or a motel suddenly they were somewhere else, of a different intensity. I was willing to swear that the motel had two stories; later it seemed over on the left, and four stories high, then further back, still later, with a single story.

Even the lighthouse as we sped out of the harbor changed; one time it looked very tall with a house at its base; then, suddenly, it was short and tubby, then an automated light that seemed to be out in the water with no sign of an island.

This continued for most of the trip. St. Michael looked like a carbon copy of Southport, the passengers and vehicles as bizarre—and numerous—and there seemed to be a lot of customs men in different uniforms dashing about, totally ignoring some vehicles while processing others.

The trip back was equally strange. The newsstand contained some books and magazines that were odd to say the least, and papers with strange names and stranger headlines.

This time there were even Indians aboard, speaking odd tongues. Some looked straight out of
The Last of the Mohicans
, complete with wild haircut, others dressed from little to heavy, despite the fact that it was July and very warm and humid.

And, just before we were to make the red and green channel markers and turn into Southport, I saw the girl die for the first time.

She was dressed in red tee shirt, yellow shorts, and sandals; she had long brown hair, was rather short and stocky, and wore oversized granny glasses.

I wasn’t paying much attention, really, just watching her looking over the side at the wake, when, before I could even cry out, she suddenly climbed up on the rail and plunged in, very near the stern.

I screamed, and heard her body hit the water and then heard her howl of terror as she dropped close enough so that the propwash caught her, sucked her under, and cut her to pieces.

Several people on the afterdeck looked at me quizzically, but only one or two seemed to realize that a woman had just died.

There was little I could do, but I ran back to Hanley, breathless.

He just nodded sadly.

“Take it easy, man,” he said gently. “She’s dead, and there’s no use going back for the body. Believe me, we
know
. It won’t be there.”

I was shocked, badly upset. “How do you know that?” I snapped.

“Because we did it every time the last four times she killed herself and we never found the body then, either,” he replied sadly.

I had my mouth open, ready to retort, to say
something
, but he got up, put on his officer’s hat and coat, and said, “Excuse me. I have to supervise the unloading,” and walked out.

As soon as I got off the ship it was like some sort of dreamy fog had lifted from me. Everything looked suddenly bright and clear, and the people and vehicles looked normal. I made my way to the small ferry terminal building.

When they’d loaded and the ship was gone again, I waited for McNeil to return to his office. It looked much the same really, but a few things seemed different. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there
was
something odd—like the paneling had been rosewood before, and was now walnut. Small things, but nagging ones.

McNeil came back after seeing the ship clear. It ran almost constantly, according to the schedule.

I glanced out the window as he approached and noticed uniformed customs men checking out the debarked vehicles. They seemed to have different uniforms than I’d remembered.

Then the ticket agent entered the office and I got another shock. He had a beard.

No, it was the same man, all right. No question about it. But the man I’d talked to less than nine hours before had been clean-shaven.

I turned to where the navigation atlas lay, just where I’d put it, still open to the Southport page.

It showed a ferry line from Southport to a rather substantial St. Clement’s Island now. But nothing to Nova Scotia.

I turned to the bearded McNeil, who was watching me with mild amusement in his eyes.

“What the
hell
is going on here?” I demanded.

He went over and sat down in his swivel chair. “Want the job?” he asked. “It’s yours if you do.”

I couldn’t believe his attitude. “I want an explanation, damn it!” I fumed.

He chuckled. “I told you I’d give you one if you wanted. Now, you’ll have to bear with me, since I’m only repeating what the Company tells me, and I’m not sure I have it all clear myself.”

I sat down in the other chair. “Go ahead,” I told him.

He sighed. “Well, let’s start off by saying that there’s been a Bluewater corporation ferry on this run since the mid-1800s—steam packet at first, of course. The
Orcas
is the eleventh ship in the service, put on a year and a half ago.”

He reached over, grabbed a cigarette, lit it, and continued.

“Well, anyway, it was a normal operation until about 1910 or so. That’s when they started noticing that their counts were off, that there seemed to be more passengers than the manifests called for, different freight, and all that. As it continued, the crews started noticing more and more of the kind of stuff you saw, and things got crazy for them, too. Southport was a big fishing and lobstering town then—nobody does that any more, the whole economy’s the ferry.

“Well, anyway, one time this crewman goes crazy, says the woman in his house isn’t his wife. A few days later another comes home to find that he has four kids—and he was only married a week before. And so on.”

I felt my skin starting to crawl slightly.

“So, they send some big shots up. The men are absolutely nuts, but
they
believe what they claim. Soon everybody who works the ship is spooked, and this can’t be dismissed. The experts go for a ride and can’t find anything wrong, but now two of the crewmen claim that it
is
their wife, or their kid, or somesuch. Got to be a pain, though, getting crewmen. We finally had to center on loners—people without family, friends, or close personal ties. It kept getting worse each trip. Had a hell of a time keeping men for a while, and that’s why it’s so hard to recruit new ones.”

“You mean the trip drives them crazy?” I asked unbelievingly.

He chuckled. “Oh, no.
You’re
sane. It’s the rest of ’em. That’s the problem. And it gets worse and worse each season. But the trip’s
extremely
profitable. So we try to match the crew to the ship and hope they’ll accept it. If they do it’s one of the best damned ferry jobs there is.”

“But what causes it?” I managed. “I mean—I saw people dressed outlandishly. I saw other people walk
through
each other! I even saw a girl commit suicide, and nobody seemed to notice!”

McNeil’s face turned grim. “So that’s happened again. Too bad. Maybe someday there’ll be some chance to save her.”

“Look,” I said, exasperated. “There must be some explanation for all this. There
has
to be!”

The ticket agent shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette.

“Well, some of the company experts studied it. They say nobody can tell for sure, but the best explanation is that there are a lot of different worlds—different Earths, you might say—all existing one on top of the other, but you can’t see any one except the one you’re in. Don’t ask me how that’s possible or how they came up with it, it just
is
, that’s all. Well, they say that in some worlds folks don’t exist at all, and in others they are different places or doing different things—like getting married to somebody else or somesuch. In some, Canada’s still British, in some she’s a republic, in others she’s a fragmented batch of countries, and in one or two she’s part of the U.S. Each one of these places has a different history.”

“And this one boat serves them all?” I responded, not accepting a word of that cazy story. “How is that possible?”

McNeil shrugged again. “Who knows? Hell, I don’t even understand why that little light goes on in here when I flip the switch. Do most people? I just sell tickets and lower the ramp. I’ll tell you the Company’s version, that’s all. They say that there’s a crack—maybe one of many, maybe the only one. The ship’s route just happens to parallel that crack, and this allows you to go between the worlds. Not one ship, of course—twenty or more, one for each world. But, as long as they keep the same schedule, they overlap—and can cross into one or more of the others. If you’re on the ship in all those worlds, then you cross, too. Anyone coexisting with the ship in multiple worlds can see and hear not only the one he’s in but the ones nearest him, too. People perception’s a little harder the farther removed the world you’re in is from theirs.”

“And you believe this?” I asked him, still disbelieving.

“Who knows? Got to believe
something
or you’ll go nuts,” he replied pragmatically. “Look, did you get to St. Michael this trip?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Looked pretty much like this place.”

He pointed to the navigation atlas. “Try and find it. You won’t. Take a drive up through New Brunswick and around to the other side. It doesn’t exist. In this world, the
Orcas
goes from here to St. Clement’s Island and back again. I understand from some of the crew that sometimes Southport doesn’t exist, sometimes the Island doesn’t, and so forth. And there are so many countries involved I don’t even count.”

I shook my head, refusing to accept all this. And yet, it made a crazy kind of sense. These people didn’t see each other because they were in different worlds. The girl committed suicide five times because she did it in five different worlds—or was it five different girls? It also explained the outlandish dress, the strange mixture of vehicles, people, accents.

“But how come the crew sees people from many worlds and the passengers don’t?” I asked him.

McNeil sighed. “That’s the other problem. We have to find people who would be up here, working on the
Orcas
, in every world we service. More people’s lives parallel than you’d think. The passengers—well, they generally don’t exist on a particular run except once. The very few who do still don’t take the trip in every world we service. I guess once or twice it’s happened that we’ve had a passenger cross over, but, if so, we’ve never heard of it.”

“And how come I’m here in so many worlds?” I asked him.

McNeil smiled. “You were recruited, of course. The Corporation has a tremendous, intensive recruiting effort involving ferry lines and crewmembers. When they spot one, like you, in just the right circumstance in all worlds, they recruit you—all of you. An even worse job than you’d think, since every season one or two new Bluewater Corporations put identical ferries on this run, or shift routes and overlap with ours. Then we have to make sure the present crew can serve them, too, by recruiting your twin on those worlds.”

Suddenly I reached over, grabbed his beard, and yanked.

“
Ouch!
Damn it!” he cried and shoved my hand away.

“I— I’m sorry— I—” I stammered.

He shook his head and grinned. “That’s all right, son. You’re about the seventh person to do that to me in the last five years. I guess there are a lot of varieties of
me
, too.”