Last Call: Expiration Date Part 40

"Down?" panted Elizalde. Her breaths were frightened sobs. "No, Pete-up! Sunlight, normal people!"

"I should have thought of this before," said Sullivan. "Kootie, do you remember how Alice's coronation ceremony got wrecked?"

The boy's brown eyes blinked up at him. "The food at the banquet came to life," he said, "and it didn't want to be eaten."

"Right, the leg of mutton was talking and laughing and sitting in the White Queen's chair, and the pudding yelled at Alice when she cut it, and-and the White Queen dissolved in the soup tureen, remember? The bottles even came to life, and took plates for wings and forks for legs. And Queen Alice was knocked right out of the Looking-Gla.s.s world." He punched the b.u.t.ton that had a downward-pointing arrow on it. "We've got to find the after steering compartment."

The little booth shook, and then with a hydraulic whine the deck outside started to move upward; before his vision was cut off by this ascending fourth wall, Sullivan heard the sirenlike laugh again, closer, and he saw Bradshaw shift heavily around to face the way they had come.

The bare bulb in the shelved, inlaid elevator ceiling made the faces of Kootie and Elizalde look jaundiced and oily, and Sullivan knew he must look the same to them.

Elizalde was shaking. "G.o.dd.a.m.n you, Pete, what's in this after steering compartment?"

"The degaussing machinery," said Sullivan, trying to speak with conviction. "They'd have had to install it when the Queen Mary was a troopship during the war, to keep her hull from attracting magnetic mines, and there's no way they'd have gone to the trouble of tearing it out, afterward. And the after steering room is the electrical spine of any ship-there'd have been a diesel engine there to run a sort of power-steering pump, so they could steer the ship from down there if the bridge was blown away. It's the backup bridge, in effect, and I don't suppose they're using the real one for anything at all now, with tourists dropping snow cones all over everything. There'll be live power down below still." It's certainly possible, he thought.

"So what?" Elizalde was leaning against the back of the car, her sunken eyes watching the riveted steel of the elevator shaft rising beyond the frail bars of the gate, and she spoke quietly in the confined s.p.a.ce. "What the h.e.l.l good is this old anti-mine stuff going to do us? Jesus, Pete, tell me you know what you're doing here!"

"How did this apparatus keep the ship from attracting magnetic mines?" asked Kootie.

Sullivan looked down at the boy. "The mines had a specific magnetic polarity," he said. "Once that was known, it was easy enough to forcibly reverse the ship's own natural magnetic field by pa.s.sing a current through a set of cables around the hull."

"But it's turned off now?"

"Sure, it'll be disconnected, but it'll still be there."

"And you think there'll still be power there too. So you're planning to reconnect it and crank up a big magnetic field; and," it was Kootie's little-boy cadences that went on, "you're gonna wake up every dinner aboard."

"It'll draw 'em out," Sullivan agreed. From the walls, he thought, from the closets in the old staterooms, from the deck planks weathered by three decades of sunny summer cruises and North Atlantic storms. "And none of 'em will want to be eaten. It'll be a ma.s.s exorcism." Once drawn out, he thought, they'll dissolve away in this alien Long Beach air. He remembered Bradshaw's explanation of the L.A. CIGAR traps, and he hoped the dim old ghosts might somehow understand that this was ... rescue? Liberation? Finishing the job of dying, say.

A breeze on his ankles made Sullivan look down past Kootie, and he saw that an edge of the elevator shaft had appeared down by their feet; the gap below it rode up until he could see another deck, dimly lit by electric lights somewhere. The elevator floor clanged against the painted steel deck, and he pulled the accordion gate aside. The bulkheads of the silent old corridors were ribbed and riveted, painted gray below belt-height and yellowed white above.

"This has got to be as close to water level as you can get," he said, instinctively speaking quietly down here so close to the sanctum sanctorum of the vast old liner. "It'll be right behind us, directly over the rudder."

"Get these cuffs off us," said Kootie.

"Oh, yeah." Sullivan took out his comb, broke off another narrow tooth, and quickly opened the handcuff that was still on Kootie's right wrist; then he did the same for Elizalde.

"Where did you learn that?" Elizalde asked as the cuffs clanked to the floor and she ma.s.saged her freed wrist.

Sullivan held up his hands, palms out, and wiggled the fingers at her. "If you hadn't glued that plaster finger back on, I'd be missing one right now." He started down the corridor toward the stern. "Come on."

Ancient bunks, with brown blankets still tumbled on them, were bolted on metal trays to the steel bulkheads down here, and as he led Elizalde and Kootie past them Sullivan shuddered at the thought of coming back this way if he got the field up and at maximum intensity.

"That's serious electrical conduit," said Kootie, pointing at the ceiling.

Sullivan looked up, and saw that the boy was right. "Follow it," he said.

A few steps farther down the hall the conduit pipes curved into the amidships bulkhead over a dogged-shut oval door, and Sullivan punched back the eight dog clips around the door's perimeter; the door rattled in the bulkhead frame, and Sullivan realized that the rubber seal had rotted away. He prayed that he wasn't the first person to open this door since the ship was docked here in Long Beach in 1967.

But there were lights burning inside the twenty-foot-square room beyond the door when he pulled it open; and they were new fluorescent tubes, bolted up alongside the very old lights, which were hung on C-shaped metal straps so that the recoil of the big wartime guns on the top deck wouldn't break the filaments.

A diesel engine the size of a car motor sat on a skid supported by two I-beams laid down near the left bulkhead, with two banked rows of square batteries on shelves behind it; and Sullivan saw a new battery charger bolted to the bulkhead over them.

"They're live!" he said, his shoulders slumping with relief. "See? This must be the ship's backup power supply now, in case the AC from ash.o.r.e goes funny. UPS for their computers, uninterrupted power supply so they don't lose their data."

"Groovy," said Elizalde. "Hook it up and let's get out of here."

"Right." Sullivan looked around and identified the reduction-gear box and the steering pump and the after steering wheel to his left, and so the three-foot-by-four-foot box on the right-hand bulkhead had to be the degaussing panel. He walked past it and began unlooping heavy coils of emergency power cable from the rack riveted to the bulkhead.

Sullivan was remembering another exorcism he had helped perform, at the Moab Nuclear Power Station in Utah in 1989.

The Public Utilities Commission had claimed that it would be cheaper to produce power elsewhere than to spend the millions needed to bring the reactor up to current safety standards-but the real reason had been that the site had become clogged with ghosts attracted to the high voltage. The things had cl.u.s.tered around the big outdoor transformers, and some had got solid enough to fiddle with the valves and switches and steal the employees' cars.

The power line from the degaussing panel had been cut, just beyond the breaker, disconnecting the panel from the rest of the ship; but a post stuck out above the hacksawed conduit, and Sullivan pulled the dusty canvas cover off the emergency power three-phase plug on the end of the post.

"They call these things biscuits," he told Elizalde defiantly.

"Call it a m.u.f.fin if you like," she said, "today I'm not arguing."

He picked up one end of the cable and separated the inch-thick wires protruding from the end of it. The red one he shoved into the positive hole in the biscuit, and the black one he shoved into the negative hole. They fit tightly enough to support the weight of the cable. He would be getting direct current from the batteries, so he let the white wire hang unconnected.

The Moab station had in its time produced more than fifty billion kilowatt hours, enough power to light half a million homes for a quarter of a century. But he had stood in the control room and watched the dials as the power had fallen from fifty to twenty to three percent of capacity, and then a voice on the intercom had said, "Turbine trip," and Sullivan's gaze had snapped to the green lights on the control panel in the instant before they flashed on, their sudden glow indicating that the circuit breakers were open and no electricity was being produced.

And as the superintendent reached for the switch that would drive the cadmium rods into the reactor core, killing the uranium fission, Sullivan alone among the technicians in the control room had heard the chorus of wails as the resident ghosts had faded into nothing.

He was setting up the same devastation now. The current he would shortly be sending through the degaussing coils in the length of the hull would wake up all the dormant, undisturbed ghosts aboard the ship; focused, they would venture timidly out of their housekeeping-tended graves, only to evaporate into nothingness when the drain on the batteries outstripped the ability of the recharger to counter it, and the magnetic field collapsed.

Perhaps sensing his unhappiness, Kootie and Elizalde wordlessly stepped aside as he dragged the other end of the cable across the painted steel deck to the stepped ranks of batteries against the left bulkhead.

Steel bars connected the terminals of each battery in a row to the next, and he wedged the inch-thick end of the red wire under the bar on the first battery in the top row, then did the same with the black wire to the first battery on the bottom row. He had now hooked up the degaussing panel, at the expense of the diesel engine's starter motor.

As he straightened up, he softly whistled, in slow time, the first notes of reveille.

He walked back across the deck to the panel and, with a sigh, pushed the master switch up into the on position. There was a m.u.f.fled internal click.

The needle of the first DC voltmeter on the face of the panel jumped to 30, but that one was only indicating full power from the batteries. Then he took hold of the rubber-cased rheostat wheel and started turning it clockwise; the second voltmeter's needle began to climb across the dial toward 30, as the needle on the ammeter next to it moved more slowly up toward 150. For the first time in more than forty years, current was coursing through the wartime degaussing cables that ribbed the hull all the way from back here by the rudder to the bow a thousand feet north of him.

The deck had begun to vibrate under his feet, and a droning roar was getting louder; when he had cranked the wheel all the way over as far as it would go clockwise, the noise was so loud that Elizalde had to shout to be heard.

"What are you doing?" she yelled. "You've turned something on!"

"My G.o.d," said Kootie, loudly but reverently, "that's the noise of the screws. You've waked up the ghost of the ship herself!"

CHAPTER 46.

"What matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied. "There is another sh.o.r.e, you know, upon the other side."

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland "OH," ELIZALDE MOANED, "LET'S get out of here!"

Sullivan backed away from the panel, and even Houdini's hands were trembling. "Yes," he said.

Sullivan led the way out of the after steering compartment and back down the corridor toward the elevator. The hallway reeked of sweaty bodies now, and he could hear a scratchy recording of Kitty Kallen singing "It's Been a Long, Long Time" echoing from somewhere ahead of them.

Bony figures were shifting among the blankets on the bulkhead-hung bunks as Sullivan and Elizalde and Kootie hurried past; hands still translucent groped at Elizalde, and voices blurred by unformed mouths mumbled amorously at her.

The elevator motor was buzzing and rattling when they rounded the corner, but the car was coming down to this deck-and through the bars Sullivan saw the burlap sack with the black Raiders baseball cap on it slumped on the elevator floor, shifting furiously and yowling as if it were filled with cats.

Before he could grab Kootie and Elizalde and run, the cat noises stopped and the front flap of the bag fell away, and as the car clanked down to the deck a naked young woman, slim and dark-haired, stood up in it and blinked through the bars at Sullivan and beyond him. Her body wasn't solidified yet-ribs showed faintly through the white softness of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and her loins were a wash of shadow.

Her eyes were bewildered brown depths, and already solid enough for Sullivan to see tears on the lashes. "Es esto infierno?" she asked.

Elizalde pulled back the gate. "Esto es ninguna parte," she said. "Y esto pasara p.r.o.nto."

Is this h.e.l.l? the ghost-woman had asked; and Elizalde had told her that this was nowhere, and would soon pa.s.s. Sullivan stared at the woman nervously, remembering the thing that had flown over the gra.s.s at the cemetery yesterday, laughing and clanking metal wings-and she stared back at him without any recognition, her imprinted malice having fallen away with the burlap sack under her bare feet.

The woman stumbled out of the elevator car, looked blankly around, and then walked uncertainly back toward where the bunks were hanging, and Sullivan paused as if to stop her or warn her; but Elizalde grabbed his arm and pulled him into the car.

"Tumble a bunch of old books together," she said. "Books so old and fragile that n.o.body can read them anymore. The pages will break off and get mixed up. Does it matter?"

Sullivan was sweating as he stepped into the car, crowding the wall to make room for Elizalde and Kootie. These limitless dim lower decks, with all their forgotten alcoves and doors and pa.s.sageways, were suddenly potent, and darkly inviting, and he pushed the up b.u.t.ton hard. "Let's go all the way to the top," he said hoa.r.s.ely.

"Amen," said Elizalde.

J. Francis Strube had found a carpeted hallway and he had started running downhill along it, past silent doors recessed in the wood-paneled walls. The hallway curved up ahead of him to disappear behind the gentle bulge of the glossy ivory ceiling, as if he were sprinting around the perimeter ring of a very elegant s.p.a.ce station, and he had a.s.sured himself that somewhere between here and the eventual bow he must run across someone who could help him.

But a grinding roar had started up under the carpet and the whole ship had moved slightly, as if flexing itself, and he had lost his footing and fallen headlong; his hands had still been cuffed behind him, and though he had managed to take the first hard impact on his shoulder, his chin and cheekbone had bounced solidly off the carpeted floor.

Now he was up again, and walking, but he had to step carefully. Perhaps it was some Coriolis effect that made walking so difficult; he had to plant his feet flat, with the toes pointed outward, to keep from rolling against the close walls.

Over the droning vibration from below the deck he could presently hear children laughing, and when he came to a gleaming wooden staircase he saw a little girl with blond braids come flying down the banister; she rebounded from the floor and the wall like a big beach ball, and her long white dress spread out in an air-filled bell to let her sink gently to the carpeted landing.

Another girl came zooming down right behind her to do the same trick, and a third simply spun swan-diving down through the vertical s.p.a.ce of the stairwell, graceful as a leaf.

"Up, up!" cried girl voices from the landing above, and when Strube stepped forward to tilt his head back and peer in that direction, he saw three more blond little girls stamping their feet with impatience.

All six of the girls seemed to be identical-s.e.xtuplets?-and to be about seven years old. How could they be doing these impossible acrobatics? They were a little higher up than he was-was the gravity weaker up in that ring? When he counted them all again, he got seven; then five; then eight.

"Girls," he said dizzily; but the three or four on his level were holding hands and dancing in a ring, chanting, "When the sky began to roar, 'twas like a lion at the door!" and the three or four above went on calling, "Up, up!"

"Girls!" he said, more loudly.

The several who had been dancing dropped their hands now and stared at him wide-eyed. "He can see us!" said one to another.

Strube was dizzy. His neck was wet, and he couldn't shake the notion that it was wet with blood rather than sweat, but with his hands cuffed behind him he couldn't reach up to find out.

"Of course I can see you," he said. "Listen to me. I need to find a grownup. Where's your mother?"

"We don't think we have a mother," said one of the girls in front of him. "Where is your mother, please?"

This was getting him nowhere. "What are your names?"

One of the girls at the landing above called down, "We're each named Kelley. We all became friends because of that, and because we couldn't sleep, even though it was pitch dark."

"In most gardens," spoke up a girl in front of Strube, "they make the beds too soft, so the flowers are always asleep."

"We came from a hard, noisy garden," put in one who was sliding slowly down the banister. "We've got to go up," she told her companions. "If there isn't the sun, there'll be the moon."

"Who is taking care of you?" Strube insisted. "Who did you come here with?"

"We were thrown out of a dark place," said one of the girls above. The four or five below were climbing the stairs now with graceful spinning hops. "Again," put in another.

At least they seem to be well cared for, Strube thought. Then he looked more closely at a couple of them and noticed their pallor and their sunken cheeks, and he saw that their dresses were made of some coa.r.s.ely woven white stuff that looked like matted cobwebs.

"Where do you live?" asked Strube, speaking more shrilly than he had meant to. His heart was pounding and his breath was fast and shallow; he realized that he was frightened, though not of these girls, directly.

"We live in h.e.l.l," one of the Kelleys told him in a matter-of-fact tone. "But we're climbing out," one of her companions added.

Strube wasn't able to think clearly, and he knew it was because of the bang his head had taken against the floor back up the hallway. His stomach felt inverted; he would have to find a men's room soon and throw up. But he felt that he couldn't leave these defenseless, demented children down here in these roaring, flexing catacombs.

"I'll lead you out of here," he said, stepping up the stairs after them. He had to hunch his left shoulder up and stretch his right arm to hold on to the banister, for the ship was rolling ponderously. "We've all got to get out of here."

The girls looked down at him doubtfully from the landing. One of them said, "Would you know the sun, or the moon, if you saw either of them?"

Jesus, thought Strube. "Yes. Definitely."

"What if it's just another painted canvas?" one of the girls asked.

"I'll tear it down," Strube said desperately. "The real one'll be up there, trust me."

"Come on, then," a Kelley told him, and the girls whirled and leaped around him as he climbed on up the stairs. The gravity did seem to be weaker as one ascended higher, and he had to restrain himself from dancing with them.

A lift attendant had abruptly appeared in the elevator, cramping things terribly. He was an elderly man in a white shirt and black tie, and in a fretful English accent he demanded to know what cla.s.s of accommodations Sullivan and Kootie and Elizalde had booked.

Sullivan glanced bewilderedly at Elizalde, and then said heartily, "Oh, first-cla.s.s!"

"All the way!" added Kootie.

The old man stared at their dirty jeans and disordered hair, and he said, "I think not." He pushed the b.u.t.ton for R Deck, and a moment later the elevator car rocked to a stop. "The Tourist Cla.s.s Dining Saloon is down the hall ahead of you," he said sternly as he leaned between Sullivan and Kootie to slide open the gate, "just past the stairs. See that you go no higher up."

Sullivan hesitated, and considered just throwing the old man out of the car and resuming their upward course; but he and Kootie and Elizalde were deep in the ghost world now, and they might well find the solid ghosts of security guards from the 1930s waiting for them on the higher decks.