Expiration Date (74 page)

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 me 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 God,” said Kootie, loudly but reverently, “that’s the noise of the screws. You’ve waked up the ghost of the ship herself!”

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

O
H
,” 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 breasts, 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 pronto
.”

Is this hell? the ghost-woman had asked; and Elizalde had told her that this was nowhere, and would soon pass. Sullivan stared at the woman nervously, remembering the thing that had flown over the grass 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 nobody 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 passageways, were suddenly potent, and darkly inviting, and he pushed the up button hard. “Let’s go all the way to the top,” he said hoarsely.

“Amen,” said Elizalde.

J. F
RANCIS
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 space station, and he had assured 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, arid 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 space 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—sextuplets?—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 grown-up. 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 coarsely 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 Hell,” 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 class of accommodations Sullivan and Kootie and Elizalde had booked.

Sullivan glanced bewilderedly at Elizalde, and then said heartily, “Oh, first-class!”

“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 button for R Deck, and a moment later the elevator car rocked to a stop. “The Tourist Class 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.

“I think we’d better play along,” he said quietly to Elizalde. “We’re in good cover so far, and I doubt that Edison’s field shows up at all in this chaos.” He stepped out of the car onto a carpeted hallway.

After an agonized, tooth-baring whine, Elizalde followed him out, tugging Kootie along by the hand.

Behind them the gate slid closed, and the car began to sink away down the shaft.

The ship was alive with voices now, and Sullivan and his companions seemed to have left the rumble of the screws below them.

Many of the room doors were open, and laughter and excited shouting shook the tobacco-scented air, but when they peeked into the lighted staterooms they passed, they could see only empty couches, and mirrored vanity tables, and paneled walls with motionless curtains over the portholes.

At the open, polished burl walnut stairway they could hear children’s voices ascending from below; but the dining-room doors were ahead of them, and a steamy beef smell and a clatter of cutlery on china was accompanying the voices from beyond the closed doors, and Sullivan led the way around the stairs and pushed the doors open.

The noises were loud now, but the tables and chairs set across the ship’s-width hardwood floor were empty; though a chair here and there did occasionally shift, as if invisible diners were turning their attentions from one companion to another.

Sullivan took Elizalde’s cold hand, while she took Kootie’s, and he led them between the noisy tables toward the service doors in the far bulkhead; and though there were no diners visible, Sullivan tried to thread his way exactly between the tables, and not violate the body spaces of any ghosts.