AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I wish that I could,” replied Dr. Glister, “but this medicine cost me everything I possessed to develop. It destroyed my health and damaged my reputation. If I do not recoup my losses, I will be forced into ruin, my property will be repossessed, and my six children will become destitute. I am sympathetic to Mrs. Langdon’s trouble, but this is a fiscal issue.”
“Listen,” I said to the Langdons, “it’s not up to me. The medicine is Dr. Glister’s property for him to dispose of as he wishes.”
“But she needs the medicine now,” pleaded Mr. Langdon. “If she doesn’t get it, she will die. You are the captain on this ship and so have the ultimate authority. You must make the decision.”
I sighed. I had a lot more important things to deal with right now.
“Dr. Glister, give him the medicine for a thousand guineas. Mr. Langdon, you will work to repay Dr. Glister no matter what. Understand?”
“But my livelihood!” wailed Glister.
“I place Mrs. Langdon’s definite death above the possibility of your penury, Dr. Glister.”
“But this is nothing short of theft!” he replied, outraged at my words. “And I have done nothing wrong—only discovered a cure for a fatal illness. I deserve better treatment than this!”
“You do, you’re right. But I know nothing of you, nor the Langdons. My decision is based only on the saving of a life. Will you excuse me?”
Baldwin had called from the wheel house, and I quickly scooted up the stairs.
“What is it?”
He pointed to something about a mile off the starboard bow. I picked up a pair of binoculars and trained it on the distant object. Finally some good luck. It looked like a “turmoil,” the name we gave to a small, localized disruption in the fabric of the written word. This was how heavy weather in the BookWorld got started: A turmoil would soon progress into a powerful WordStorm able to uproot words, ideas and even people, then carry them with it across the empty darkness of the Nothing, eventually dumping them on distant books several genres distant. It was my way out. I’d never hitched a ride on a WordStorm before, but it didn’t look too difficult. Dorothy, after all, had no real problems with the tornado.
“Alter course to starboard thirty degrees,” I said. “We’re going to intercept the WordStorm. How long do you think it will take for us to get there, Baldwin?”
“Twenty minutes, Cap’n.”
It would be a close thing. Turmoils increase their pace until a rotating tube rises up into the heavens, filled with small sections of plot and anything else it can suck up. Then, with a flurry of distorted sense, it lifts off and vanishes. I wouldn’t get this chance again.
“Is that wise, Captain?” asked First Officer Fitzwilliam, who had joined us on the bridge. “I’ve seen storms like that. They can do serious damage—and we have forty passengers, many of them women and children.”
“Then you can lower me in a lifeboat ahead of the storm.”
“And leave us without a lifeboat?”
“Yes…no…I don’t know. Fitzwilliam?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“What is this place?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Captain.”
“I mean—”
“Cap’n,” said Baldwin, pointing off of the port side of the ship, “isn’t that a lifeboat?”
I turned my attention to the area in which he pointed. It was a lifeboat, with what looked like several people, all slumped and apparently unconscious. Damn. I looked again, hoping for confirmation that they might already be dead, but saw nothing to tell me either way. I frowned to myself. Had I just hoped for them to be dead?
“You can pick them up after you’ve dropped me off,” I said. “It’ll only mean an extra forty minutes for them, and I really need to get out of here.”
I saw Fitzwilliam and Baldwin exchange glances. But as we watched, the lifeboat was caught by a wave and capsized, casting the occupants into the sea. We could see now that they were alive, and as they scrabbled weakly to cling to the upturned boat, I gave the order.
“Turn about. Reduce power and stand by to pick up survivors.”
“Aye-aye, Cap’n,” said Baldwin, spinning the wheel as Fitzwilliam rung up “slow ahead” on the engine-room telegraph. I walked out onto the starboard wing and watched despondently as the turmoil developed into a WordStorm. Within the twenty minutes it took to intercept the lifeboat, the whirling mass of narrative distortion lifted off, taking part of the description of the ocean with it. There was a ragged dark hole for an instant, and then the sea washed in to fill the anomaly, and in a few moments everything was back to normal. Perhaps I should have left the lifeboat. After all, the Long Now and the classics were more important than several fi
ctional castaways. Mind you, if I’d been on that lifeboat, I know what I would have wanted.
