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“Right. Tell me, Baldwin, do you know this ship well?”
“As well as I know meself,” he replied proudly.
“Is there a core-containment room?”
“Not that I knows of.”
So we weren’t in a published work.
“How about a Storycode Engine anywhere on board?”
He frowned and looked confused. “There’s an ordinary engine room. I don’t know nuffin’ ’bout no Storycode.”
I scratched my head. Without a Storycode Engine, we were either nonfiction or something in the oral tradition. Those were the upbeat possibilities: I might also be in a forgotten story, a dead writer’s unrealized idea or even a handwritten short story stuck in a desk drawer somewhere—the dark reading matter.
“What year is this?”
“Spring of 1932, Cap’n.”
“And the purpose of this voyage?”
“Not for the likes of me to know, Cap’n.”
“But something must happen!”
“Oh, aye,” he said more confidently, “things most definite happen!”
“What sort of things?”
“Difficult things, Cap’n.”
As if in answer to his enigmatic comment, someone shouted my name. I walked out onto the port wing, where a man in a first officer’s uniform was on the deck below. He was in his mid-fifties and looked vaguely cultured, but somehow out of place, as though his service in the merchant navy had been to remove him from problems at home.
“Captain Next?” he said.
“Yes, sort of.”
“First Officer William Fitzwilliam at your service, ma’am. We’ve got a problem with the passengers!”
“Can’t you deal with it?”
“No, ma’am—you’re the captain.”
I descended and met Fitzwilliam at the foot of the ladder. He led me into the paneled wardroom, where there were three people waiting for us. The first man was standing stiffly with his arms folded and looked aggrieved. He was well dressed in a black morning coat and wore a small pince-nez perched on the end of his nose. The other two were obviously man and wife. The woman was of an unhealthy pallor, had recently been crying and was being comforted by her husband, who every now and then shot an angry glance at the first man.
“I’m very busy,” I told them. “What’s the problem here?”
“My name is Mr. Langdon,” said the married man, wringing his hands. “My wife, Louise, here suffers from Zachary’s syndrome, and without the necessary medicine she will die.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said, “but what can I do?”
“That man has the medicine!” cried Langdon, pointing an accusatory finger at the man in the pince-nez. “Yet he refuses to sell it to me!”
“Is this true?”
“My name is Dr. Glister,” said the man, nodding politely. “I have the medicine, it is true, but the price is two thousand guineas, and Mr. and Mrs. Langdon have only a thousand guineas and not the capacity to borrow more!”
“Well,” I said to the doctor, “I think it would be a kindly gesture to lower the price, don’t you?”
