Rim Precession
Author: A. Bertram Chandler
Date: 2010-03-07 20:37:05+00:00
Keywords: Sci-Fi Short

PRECESSION

We were steaming along peacefully on that long stretch of lonely ocean between the Galapagos Islands and Pitcairn, when we saw the raft. It was just by chance that we did see it. It was evening, twilight and I was taking stellar observations and with the rough altitude of Altair set on my sextant, was the horizon in a short arc, trying to pick up the faint image of the star in my telescope.

I saw the raft then — a small, black speck rising and falling on the long, low swell. A drifting log, I thought. Or wreckage. In any case, we'd have to report it to the Hydrographic Office.

I went into the wheelhouse, picked the binoculars out of their box. After a brief search I was able to find the thing again. I estimated the relative bearing. "Starboard easy," I said to the helmsman. "Steer two seven five."

"Two seven five it is, sir," he replied.

"Have you sighted something?" asked the Fourth Officer.

"Yes," I told him, "Wreckage of some kind on the starboard bow. I'm going for a closer look. Keep your eye on it; I'm going to tell the Old Man." The Old Man wasn't very interested. He agreed with me that it should be reported to the Hydrographic Office as a possible menace to navigation, then returned to his pink gin.

The Fourth, when I returned to the bridge, was starting to get excited. He said, "There's a mast on the thing, and a flag of some sort."

"So there is," I said slowly. "So there is ..." I took the telescope from its rack, steadied it on the frame of the wheelhouse window. There was what looked like a huddled human figure at the foot of the stumpy mast.

"Ring the engineers," I said, "and tell them that we may be stopping. Whistle for the stand-by and send for the Bosun." While these orders were being carried out I went to the Captain's telephone. "That wreckage I reported, sir," I said, "it looks like a raft. And I think there's a man on it."

"I'll be right up," he snapped.

The rescue operations presented no great difficulties. The swell was not heavy enough to cause anything more than minor inconveniences, and I took the boat away myself. The raft, as I saw by the light of my torch as I eased the boat gently alongside it, was a very makeshift affair. The mast from which flew the flag — a shirt, it was — had been improvised from a jagged, broken spar. Gleaming white and scarlet in the dark was the familiar circle of a ship's lifebuoy.

My attention focussed on the man huddled at the foot of the mast. Carefully I transferred from the boat to the raft, calling to one of the A.B’s to follow me. Together we lifted the emaciated figure with the utmost care, turning him over on to his back. His face bore all the marks of exposure and privation, was sunken to skeletal thinness over the full black beard. He was unconscious. I slipped my hand inside his jacket — he was also wearing a waistcoat, and some sort of undervest — and, after a few anxious moments, was able to feel the feeble flutterings of his heart. We picked him up then and carefully passed him into the waiting boat. As an afterthought I brought the ship's lifebuoy back with me. Black on the white paint of it were the words: S.S. Triumphant Southampton.

The castaway was passed from the boat to the saloon deck during the rehoisting, and carried straight to the ship's hospital.

I stayed with the boat until it had been rehoisted and secured, hearing the Jangle of engine-room telegraphs as Full Ahead and Full Away were rung, hearing the ponderous thumping of our diesels as we got under way once more.

There was only the Fourth Officer on the bridge when I went there to report that all was secure. He told me that the Old Man was in the hospital. I hurried down the afterdeck, anxious to hear what report our Doctor would give on the castaway's chance of survival.

The little hospital was crowded. The Doctor was there, the Old Man, the Second and Third Officers and the Chief Steward. The man from the raft had been undressed, was between the clean sheets of one of the two bunks, the blackness of that great beard in startling contrast to the white linen. The Doctor was bending over him.

"Shock," he was saying. "Shock and exposure, to say nothing of thirst and starvation. But he's got a fair chance ..."

The Old Man saw me in the doorway.

"Is the boat secure, Mr Ingraham?"

"All secure, sir," I said.

"Good. We have to make a report on this, you know. We have to notify the authorities, and also this man's family and the owners of the ship he comes from .."

"The ship," I said, "was called Triumphant. Southampton registry. There was a lifebuoy. I brought it back with me."

"Good man. Then all we have to do is to go through his clothing, to try to find some personal identification. Bring all the clothing along to the Chief Officer's office."

The Old Man sat on the office settee and watched me as I cleared the desk of papers, got a scribbling pad and pencil ready to take down anything of importance. He said, "Did you get a good look at his clothes, Mr. Ingraham?"

"No, sir."

"They're hardly the kind of thing any sensible man would wear in mid-Pacific."

"A matter of taste," I said. "You know as well as I do that Captain Perkins keeps his officers in blues with the thermometer up in the high eighties, and Captain Welts trots round in shorts and shirt when everybody's knees and arms are blue with cold."

"We are not discussing the idiosyncrasies of Masters in this employ," said the Old Man icily.

The Third and Second came in then, their arms heaped with clothing. At a gesture from the Captain they put it down on the deck. I sat at the desk, pencil ready.

"Look at those boots," said the Old Man.

I looked at them. "A little old fashioned," I said, "But plenty of people still wear boots like that. People with weak ankles, for example ..."

"And what about that?"

It was a union suit, made of flannel, or something like it. "Plenty of the older engineroom ratings," I said, "wear flannel next to the skin no matter what the thermometer's doing."

"And the suit?"

I looked at the suit. It was dirty and creased and salt stained, but I could see that it was made of some heavy black cloth. And surely the trousers were too narrow, and surely there was too much jacket ... a frock coat?

The others were emptying the pockets now, putting their contents on my desk. There was a gold watch, a pocket watch, with chain, and with a key pendant from the chain. There was a gold case, empty, with the initials H.M. engraved upon it in elaborate Gothic characters. There was a letter —
an envelope, rather — addressed to Heinrich Mannschen, Esq. I tried to read the address, but it was all but illegible, the ink having run with immersion in salt water. I turned it over. On the back of it was a scribble of what looked like calculations.

"His name's Mannschen," I said to the Old Man. "Heinrich Mannschen." I handed him the envelope.

"Sounds like a German name," he said. "And that's an odd-looking stamp. I wish I could read the postmark."

"It looks like Cheltenham," I said, "but it can't be."

"And the name of his ship was Triumphant." said the. Captain. "Of Southampton," I added.

"Sounds more like a man-o'-war than a merchantman," he said. "It was S.S. Triumphant," I told him. "Not H.M.S."

"We can soon find out more about her," he said. He picked up the telephone, rang through to the radio office. "I'd like you to look through your list of Call Signs and give us the dope on Triumphant. S.S. Triumphant of Southampton. Buzz back, will you?"

"Do you mind if I look at that stamp?" asked the Second Officer, whose hobby was stamp collecting.

"By all means, Mr. Ingle," said the Old Man. "Perhaps you'll be able to cast some light upon where the letter was posted."

The telephone buzzed. The Captain picked up the hand set. "Yes ... No such ship? Are you sure?"

The Chief Steward poked his head inside the door.

"The Doctor's compliments," he said, "and he'd like you and the Chief Officer along at once. The patient's recovered consciousness, and he's starting to talk, but the Doctor doesn't think he'll live.

It was the first time that I'd watched a man dying, and it frightened me. When I go, as I’ll have to, as everybody else will have to, I want to go with people I know around me, not strangers. And Heinrich Mannschen was going with only strangers to hear his last words, and those strangers were strange far beyond his wildest imaginings.

"Can't understand," he said. "Can't understand . . . Channel narrow sea, with shipping filled all of the time ... So long help coming, and all the time so hot . . .

"But tell them—the gyroscope was ... too powerful, too rigid. To precess impossible . . ." A faint ghastly grin parted the cracked lips. "Irresistible force, immovable object ... Too great strains, too great for even iron hull …

Roll she could not, break up she did ..."

The Old Man looked at the Doctor, raised his eyebrows enquiringly. "Shock," whispered the Surgeon. "Dreadful shock. I can do nothing more."

"Precession," muttered the dying man. "Gyroscope process must. If cannot

..." He raised his voice. "Precess must! Precess must! The roll and the pitch and the seasick passengers, and the hull too long, too long ... The precession ...

"Where?" he screamed, sitting up and glaring at us. "Where?" Before we could answer he was gone.

The Doctor's young, plump face was pale.

"He shouldn't have died," he said, "He shouldn't have died. Men have survived far worse in open boats than he did, and lived. But could men ever survive the shock that killed him?"

"What shock?" asked the Old Man.

"He wanted to know the date," said the Doctor. "I told him. I shouldn't have done. If he'd told his story before he asked what date it was I'd have been more careful, perhaps . . .

The Old Man could never stand humming and hawing and he said so with emphasis: "For God's sake, man, get on with it,"

"Horror," he whispered. "I saw sheer shocking horror on his face ... he repeated my words after me and he never doubted them ... It was telling him the date that killed him,"

The Old Man looked at me and I looked away. The Doctor's pink face had paled with intensity.

"Now, Doctor," the Old Man soothed, "this's all been nerve-wracking but I think if we all adjourn to my cabin a drop of gin ..."

But the Doctor wasn't even listening. And as if he didn't care whether we heard or not, he said:

"I'm not a professional sailor like you and Ingraham. I read books about the sea, which I very much doubt that either of you do. One of the books I brought along with me was Freak Ships, by Clitheroe. One chapter was devoted to the attempts made in the nineteenth century to build a Cross Channel packet that wouldn't roll. There were all sorts of ingenious ideas. There were ships with double hulls, like huge catamarans. There were ships that were supposed to run over the surface of the sea on great rollers. There were ships with the saloon suspended in gimbals, so that the hull rolled around it but it stayed steady. There was the Triumphant.

"She had a huge gyroscope, with its axis vertical to the keel, rigidly mounted amidships. Dr. Heinrich Mannschen was the designer of the thing. The idea was that the gyroscope, being rigid in space, would prevent the ship from rolling.

"What actually happened, nobody knows. Triumphant pushed off on her trials into the teeth of a Channel gale. She never came back, and there were no survivors.

"She had a long hull, you see — abnormally long for those days. In a short Channel sea she'd never pitch — that was the idea, anyhow. And the gyroscope wouldn't let her roll—but as you know, a gyroscope precesses at right angles to an applied force. Thanks to that long hull, it couldn't.

"But it did precess," said the Old Man quietly.

"It couldn't," I said. For that would mean that time had stood still, neither going backward or forward, and thereby creating another dimension. As if answering my thoughts, he said, "There are more dimensions than three."

"That's what he was saying," cried the Doctor, gesturing to the still figure on the bunk. "That's what he was saying, only he called it temporal precession. I thought that he was mad, and when I found myself believing him I thought that I was mad, too. Temporal precession ... But I can't log it as the cause of death."

"Temporal precession," I said, "I'll not believe it." None of us believe it officially. As far as the authorities are concerned we picked up a castaway, of unknown origin, in mid-Pacific, who died very shortly after his rescue. The authorities can make what they like of that new-looking lifebuoy with the ship's name on it — S.S. Triumphant Southampton.

And perhaps the physicists, with their radioactive isotopes, will be able to say with some certainty just how old that stamp really is, the stamp that was on the letter in Mannschen's pocket. It was, the Second Officer told us, quite a valuable stamp. Some of the penny stamps of Queen Victoria's reign are.

But if the whole story is true, why was Mannschen picked up in mid-Pacific instead of in the English Channel? And yet ... I imagine him suspended in some sort of timeless limbo, with the world spinning beneath him, and his return to normal Space-Time determined by blind chance ... And I'm thankful that any and all gyroscopes aboard a modern ship are free to precess any way they please inside the normal three dimensional continuum.