The Martian Pendant (26 page)

The two
men closest to the railing lit up cigarettes, keeping the glow away from their deck officer, a chief gunner’s mate.

“These damned fruitless chases can be fun the first couple of times, especially in these waters at night with the wake lit up so. Makes a
guy want to light up himself, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” replied the other, taking a deep draw
. “But what I like most is when we spook a big fish, and it shoots away from us, leaving its own trail of light.”

Flipping his cigarette butt into the roiling foam below, the first sailor remarked, “Isn’t it amazing how quiet it gets when you get used to the sound of the turbines and the spinning of the propeller shafts and screws at this speed?
”

“Wait
,” the other exclaimed. “What’s that? I could swear I heard a voice crying ‘Help’ off there to port.” Thinking quickly, he called to the gunner’s mate on the starboard rail.

“Someone’s in the water out there. Get on the horn to the bridge to come about!”

Leaping to the phone, the deck officer shouted the message. A hand overboard always took precedence when the safety of the ship was not an issue. With its klaxon blaring, and the Captain on the bridge, the
Jarvis
heeled, leaving an arc of green in her wake as a high speed 180-degree turn to port was made. She slowed, her searchlights playing on the chop, as she glided through the spray of her own wake. To the watching crew, there was a sudden, almost dead silence, marred only by the gentle slap of waves against the destroyer’s sides. Every ear was listening.

“I can’t hear anything now except the noise the turbines made the last few hours,” the taller of the two seamen whispered.

The deck officer, who had come over to their side to dress them down for smoking, called for silence after a faint, hoarse cry of help was heard off the port quarter. It didn’t take long for the searchlights to be brought to bear in that direction. A rubber dingy was launched, and began to make ever-widening half-circles in the search.

The dingy and its occupants cast a long shadow in the light of one of the searchlight beams, while the other briefly caught a flicker of reflection, seen from the elevation of the bridge. But then it was gone, and the search went on for another hour.

Almost too exhausted to grasp the water container any longer, so hoarse from shouting that her voice was a muted croak, Diana began to despair, thinking
I might not be found in this blackness after all.
But then she recalled that some of the newer lifejackets were equipped with a small light to mark their presence in the dark.
She hadn’t noticed one on hers in her haste to conceal her specimens, however.

“Just my luck,” she muttered partly aloud as she felt through the lining of the flotation garment. No dice. Ready to give up, she reached up in frustration to scratch her neck for some reason, and there she felt the small
cylinder of a marker light and battery, and turned it on.  On the bridge, the sharp-eyed signalman spotted her gently bobbing light, tiny against the black velvet of the night. Using a bullhorn, the men in the dingy were quickly directed there. They almost ran over the water can.

“It’s just some debris reflecting our lights,” exclaimed the man at the bow, retrieving it with a boat hook, as the beam of a searchlight continued to play
. “Tell ’em to douse the glim. Maybe movement in the dark will throw some phosphorescence.”

When the
Jarvis
’s lights were cut, it was plain that something, now underwater, was glowing off to the side.

“It’s a marker light,” s
houted the man in the bow, using the boat hook in that direction. Pulling it toward him, his elation could be heard on the bridge a quarter-mile away. “It’s someone in a lifejacket. Guys, give me a hand to bring him in, his head is under water, and he’s dead weight!”

As they hauled
Diana over the side, coughing up water, she was rolled face up onto the floorboards. Alert then, and sweeping her wet hair from her face, she looked up at them. “Thanks, chaps,” she croaked, “just like the U.S. Cavalry, bugle call and all, and just in time!”

“Holy shit,” the crew exclaimed almost in unison, “
it’s a girl!”

They were soon jarred out of their astonished immobility by the bullhorn on the bridge, and it wasn’t long before
Diana found herself tenderly lifted from the dingy and escorted to the officer’s wardroom, there to be surrounded by the solicitous Captain and his fellow officers. Enlisted men crowded the doors, and all were proudly beaming at their rescued female.

“Here, have a Coke! But you sound British, so maybe some
tea? Put on these dry dungarees, that’ll help,” all offered almost simultaneously, and in the concerned voices of those gathered around. Someone added, “Let me help you off with that soggy lifejacket, it’s no damned good anyway.”

“Thanks for saving my life, gentlemen! I’ll have about four Cokes, but I’m keeping this vest, if you chaps don’t mind. And how can a lady get into dry clothes with everyone hanging around gawking?”

As soon as she had changed in the little adjoining head, she emerged with her treasured specimens, wrapped and watertight still. Sitting down comfortably, despite the tent-like fit of her navy issue, exhausted but happy, she began slowly to down her Cokes.

She told the story of being kept as a hostage on the
American Traveler
, and thrown into the drink by the passing TOW missile’s control wire. She answered their questions about the identity of the submarine, with its distinguishing red star. Her information that the otherwise obscure name looked like Cyrillic script excluded the Chinese, who were not known to have nuclear ships anyway. It had the number “64” or “84” on its conning tower also, which was helpful to them.

In the meantime, the
Gregory’s
contact with the nuclear sub was lost as the Soviet vessel took advantage of the noise the freighter made as it headed into the depths, and the interference with sonar by the mass of sinking steel. The fact that a major international incident had been avoided between the rival navies of the cold war was a minor triumph.   As for the attack on the lifeboats, that could easily be justified under marine law, merely pursuit of perpetrators of piracy on the high seas. The USSR could even claim credit, instead of being condemned for having attempted to hijack the American ship and its cargo for themselves.

*
  *   *

As the little destroyer flotilla headed back to Guam, and the widespread search operation was called off, the second lifeboat was under sail,
slowly moving southwest. As Lopez had told Diana, his goal was the nearest non-aligned island nation, where he would have a fair chance at freedom. The distance was greater than the lifeboat’s diesel fuel supply, but the boat still had some sailing capability. The second missile, a near miss, had splintered their mast, killing two of the four crewmen, and had reduced the canvas to barely enough for a jury-rig, which was augmented occasionally with the engine when Lopez became impatient.

The days passed slowly, as they either baked in the unforgiving sun, or cooked in the stifling cabin.
During the day the deck was too hot to stand on for long, even in their sneakers. At night the stars feebly lit the swells when the moon was new, and as it was waxing, they could see a persistent shark fin following them, although warded off in daytime by Lopez's angry rifle fire.

The
lifeboat had only a hundred miles to go before first landfall, when the fuel ran out. They could make barely two knots an hour in a good breeze, but they were in the doldrums. It could still take weeks of that hell to reach their island refuge on their voyage of escape. At first spurred on by Lopez’s description of how pirates were dealt with, the heat and the monotonous food slowly sapped the two crewmen’s resolve, despite his gory description of their fate if caught by the Americans.

O
n the thirtieth day, a fresh breeze filled their little sail, the promise of nearby land heralded by an occasional seabird. The direction of the swells had changed, and getting a fix on the stars with his sextant, Lopez was able to correct their heading to account for the current, which was carrying them far to the west. On a night that in his log he had entered as December the Twelfth, and riding almost due south on appreciable swells, they were awakened by the sound of thundering surf ahead. The wind had died down. Somewhere out there in the darkness was a coral reef, possibly that of Fais, the closest island of Micronesia.

“Not exactly as I ca
lculated, but good enough.” Lopez said to the two frightened seamen. “Get out the oars,” he ordered, as he put the wheel over to come about. The flapping of the sail was disconcerting, as the boat only partially responded, continuing to drift, the increasing swell now abeam.

“Dios mio, row!” He shouted, “We have to avoid approaching the reef in the dark. If we can stand off until first
light, then we’ll have a chance.” After a few minutes, he feverishly ordered them to drop anchor. Paid out to the end of its chain, it failed to ground, and their drift toward the increasing thunder of the surf continued, despite the men’s frantic efforts on the oars. In the inky darkness they could see the faint greenish-white of the monstrous surf lighted by the phosphorescence of its tumultuous motion as it crashed against the jagged coral reef.

“Every man for himself,” Lopez
yelled, as he put on his lifejacket, grabbing an extra one provided for the crew. Overboard he went, to the amazement of the lifeboat’s other occupants, and was not seen again, swept away by the current to an unknown fate.

The two frightened sailors began to pray, and just then, the anchor caught, swinging them around stern-first to the foam and spray. They huddled in the cabin until dawn, repeating the
Hail Mary
in Spanish uncounted times. When the light of day encouraged them to go on deck, they could see an entry to the atoll’s lagoon just fifty feet away.

Together, they lifted the aft anchor, after undoing its lashings, and with a coordinated effort, they sw
ung it toward the nearby pass. Their united effort brought the stern over just enough to be encouraging. At that point, the tide began to run toward the reef’s entry. They needed to cut the chain to the forward anchor, and when this was finally accomplished with a hacksaw from the toolkit, the bow came around in a wide arc on the incoming tide, almost reaching the pass into the calm lagoon. There was a rending crash as the swinging bow hit the jutting coral at the entry, the impact throwing the men into the surging water. Both were carried into the lagoon as the lifeboat quickly sank into the blue water outside, the churning surf dislodging its holed hull from the massive outcropping that had impaled it.

NINETEEN

Flying Back

Diana was a celebrity when they docked at Guam, but wearing baggy dungarees, and with her unkempt hair, she looked and felt like the castaway she was. Courtesy of the Captain of the
Jarvis
, she was given privileges at the base PX, where she was able to buy replacements for the personal items she left on the sunken ship. In the meantime, her khaki shorts and shirt, underthings, and shoes, which she had rinsed and hung out in the sun, had quickly dried.

Lunch was at the Officer’s Club, and after a long nap, she paid a visit to the admiring crew of the destroyer, again thanking her rescuers for having saved her. She then gave a brief description of her work with the hijacked alien material that was sent down with the ship. She was asked why her lifejacket failed to keep her head above the surface by the crewmember who had fished her out of the sea.

“Ma’am, after we pulled you aboard, you wouldn’t part with that lifejacket, which had failed you. What was in it besides kapok? That stuff is supposed to give good flotation for way more than just three hours.”

From her shoulder bag, she pulled out the fossil Martian jaw and the still-wrapped book and photos. “I saved this thing, and it almost killed me,”
she said, waving the alien mandible. “How’s that for Martian gratitude?”

After the laughter subsided, the sailor who had steered the rubber dingy stood there observing, “Ma’am, speaking of jawbones, with your luck, not even the biblical Samson swinging
an ass’s jawbone could kill you. You must be lady luck herself!”

Diana laughed at that, replying, “No, for me, Lady Luck was the
Jarvis
and her crew.”

The next morning at breakfast, she was given a note by an enlisted man from the Base Adjutant. It seems that an Air Force plane was leaving for the West Coast at noon. Arrangements had been made to include her among the passengers if she wished.

“Home!” She exclaimed to the waiting seaman. In her enthusiasm, giving him a quick hug, she excitedly told him, “Tell them yes, and many thanks!”

The big plane was a four-engine C-54, fitted for freight rather than passengers, judging by the benches. There was one bench on either side, with all the hallmarks of having been installed just for that flight. There would be nothing luxurious on this hop, she realized, except for the anticipation of arriving back in the U.S. and seeing Danny again. Thinking back, she recalled her quarters on that freighter. Hardly first-class, either.

A friendly crewman, who turned out to be the Navigator, gave her a hand up the steps. With a mischievous smile, he said, “Your first-class accommodations, Ma’am. The lavatory is just behind the flight deck there, and the galley is that thermos and brown bag on the right.” Seeing her look of disbelief, he added, “Lady, in the Air Force, class is always relative. If you don’t believe me, just take a look through that curtain past the benches. That’s tourist class, usually known as cargo.”

As he showed her how to buckle her seat belt, he handed her a blanket. “You might not think staying warm will be a problem, but at 10,000 feet, where we’ll be flying, it can be cool enough for you to wrap yourself in this. Our first stop will be Wake Island, around 1,500 miles for our first leg. Then Midway, Honolulu, and finally San Francisco.”

“Just like the China Clippers,” she offered.

“Not quite,” he replied, “We better not set down in the water the way they did. It could get really wet.”

Diana reflected once more on struggling to stay alive in the ocean, and said, “I’ve been there recently, no thanks!”

Their conversation was ended when the idling engines were opened up one by one to test their magnetos. With a smart salute, he disappeared through the flight deck door, taking his seat behind the copilot, and buckling up. The takeoff run seemed longer than Guam was wide, but in no time the blue of the Pacific below could be seen from the single pair of windows.  The four powerful engines created very little vibration, and after a half-hour, she wrapped herself in the blanket, and using its mate from the opposite bench as a cushion, lay down for a long nap. The first leg of the flight would take at least six hours, she figured. Sleep was the best way to speed up any plane ride.

And so the flight, Spartan as it was in accommodations, progressed uneventfully. She had been through so much in the last year, and now all she wanted was to get back to normal, whatever that was. Exotic islands, even lovely Oahu, held no fascination for her.

When they landed at Hickam Air Field outside Honolulu, she was able to obtain a telegraphic money order from Max for enough to buy warm clothes and airfare to Chicago from San Francisco.
No more cargo planes for me,
she thought.

The first landfall was navigationally perfect, and, from the open door to the flight deck, she could see through the windshield the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, glowing orange-gold in the setting sun. She could hardly control her tears of joy at the sight. It was the same feeling she had when they flew over the Statue of Liberty on their return flight from the Spanish dig. She was, after all, half-American.

When they landed at Hamilton Field in Marin County, on the north shore of the Bay, she gathered her meager belongings and stiffly negotiated the steep steps to the concrete.

Thanking the crew for the safe flight, and accepting with gratitude the GI raincoat they insisted she take, she got a cab for the trip into San Francisco. On the way, they passed through the charming little waterfront town of Sausalito, just north of the Golden Gate.

“This is so pretty; I could be happy here,” she remarked.

“Yeah,” the cabbie replied, “And it’s prettier up in those hills, what with the view of the whole Bay Area.”

“How’s the weather here usually? I know San Francisco gets plenty of fog, but I just hate anywhere that gets really cold.”

“It’s not bad, but didn’t you say you were headed for Chicago? It’s plenty cold in January there, and this year I hear is the coldest in the last fifty!”

Despite the Air Force crew’s gift of the raincoat to cover her tropical khakis, she still hadn’t been able to get warm, and she began shivering at the thought of freezing weather. She got out at Union Square in the City, paid her fare, and headed across Geary to the White House Department Store. She was still cold, and it was just as well, since she was already motivated to get an outfit that would hold up to the frigid winds that howled off Lake Michigan.

Wearing her chic new outfit, incongruously carrying her sea-bag, she took the bus to the airport. There was just time to hop the red-eye to Chicago. Although exhausted, she was able to sleep only fitfully during most of the flight. Finally she was shaken awake by the stewardess, announcing their arrival at Midway.

In her sleepy confusion, Diana blurted out, “It can’t be! I’ve just come from there!” It took a minute for her to realize Midway Airport was what was meant, on Chicago’s South Side.

Groggily getting off the plane, she remembered her precious bag in the overhead only after being jarred by the biting wind. After retrieving her bag, she made for the nearest coffee shop on the concourse. A strong brew was a necessity right then. It was only eight AM, much too early to call the Department at the University to talk to Max. When she was more than awake by virtue of a second cup of coffee an hour later, she called the Department office. Myra answered, elated when she recognized Diana's voice. The enmity she had felt toward Diana was long gone after all they had endured together in Africa. When Max came on the phone, his amazement was evident; he assumed that she was still aboard the missing freighter. The Navy had not yet released news of its sinking.

After he drove hurriedly across the South Side and arrived at the airport, she quickly spotted him and hailed him to a stop. He nearly stumbled over his own feet, sprinting to her and wrapping her in a celebratory bear hug. He was all questions, centering on the whereabouts of the ship, and the condition of the cargo they had worked so long to secure.

She extricated herself from his embrace with some effort, saying breathlessly, “Thanks for coming, but slow down, Max. It’s too cold out here. I’ll fill you in on the details in the car.”

During the drive to the University, she recounted what had happened to the ship and to her, from the time they put out of Dar-es-Salaam until she was picked up by the
U.S.S. Jarvis.

“My God, our entire shipment at the bottom of the Pacific? Please tell me, not all our fossil specimens!”                     

“Well, no, not quite,” she replied. I did manage to save a mandible, my photo journal, and the Martian book. The rest of the one skeleton I packed is hidden on the second lifeboat, wherever it is. God only knows what happened to the craft. The last I saw, it was heading toward Ulithi, in the Caroline Island chain.”

Max was silent as they drove the rest of the way. Turning onto South Woodlawn Avenue, he asked where she was staying, offering a nearby apartment that the Department leased to house their grad students.

“They’re on another dig, and won’t need the flat for almost a year, probably. It’s quiet, and would be ideal for us to work on the paper about our findings.”

“I’ll take it, Max, but forget about the two of us spending time together there in my bedroom. I think we can work together, but only in the Department office or the library, seated at a table.”

When they entered the office, she received hugs of greeting from all those who had been at the dig with her. Everyone was curious about her story, and again she recounted the essentials of her odyssey. Opening her bag, she displayed the fossil mandible and her journal with the photos taken of the bones and Martian words that had been uncovered on walls and machinery. She enthusiastically showed the Martian book, pointing out the symbols that matched the print.

One of the men who had done a lot of the sifting through the soil alongside the spaceship exclaimed, “Almost a Rosetta Stone!”

“Exactly my impression,” Diana replied, “when at first I saw the two elements. But remember, that stone has one thing these don’t: Parallel Greek to match to the Egyptian.”

At that point Max interjected, “Okay, gang, back to the grind. She and I have to get to work on this material. The Society is meeting here in two months. Maybe we can at least finish a preliminary paper by their deadline.” Then, turning to Diana, he said, “Bring your stuff to the library with me. There’s so much to talk about.”

They spent an hour re-examining the fossil specimen, comparing it with the human skeleton hanging in the corner as well as similar specimens.

“See,” she pointed out, “the mandibles match in every detail. Look at the condyles, and the anterior symphysis, forming a modern chin. The dentition is pure modern human, although the teeth are in much better shape than we see these days, especially in Britain.”

“What you say is certainly correct, but that’ll be our very problem. To convince our colleagues in the field that the fossil is not really from one of our contemporaries, altered to appear a million years old. Remember
Piltdown Man,
‘found’ in 1912
?
It was a jawbone then too, but of an orangutan, matched with a modern cranium. That hoax misled many of our profession until as recently as five years ago.”

“I know, Max, but
this
mandible is mostly fossilized, attesting to its age. Sure, there’ll be doubt, but certainly we’ll be able to establish its existence in Africa before Neolithic times. The spaceship is in the field of lava flow from that volcano, and the part of the vessel not covered by basaltic rock from the volcano was almost totally encased in calcific depositions, analogous to stalagmites in limestone caves. Some method measuring the rate of decay of radioactivity in the volcanic rock, or dating the deposition of the lime salts, would be ideal.”

“You always have been a visionary, Diana, thirty years ahead of your time. But there is a technique now that could show that your Martians got here at least fifty thousand years ago, somewhere in the Pleistocene age,
using Bill Libby’s new carbon-14 dating method.” 

She replied, “I read his book, published when he was still here at Chicago in 1952. Carbon dating can be accurate only back that long, since carbon-14, upon which the method depends, decays to undetectable levels by that time. Still, we
could
place humans from that spaceship here before
Cro-Magnon
man, the earliest true
Homo sapiens
known until our discovery.”   

Turning the Martian fossil over, the professor said, “Even if mankind originated in Africa, wouldn’t that be expected? It would take time for a migration of primitive people to get so far into Northern Europe. And it’s a million years we’re talking about. That means that unless someone comes up with a method of assay based on the decay of some other natural isotope with a longer half-life, we’ll have to rely on geologic evidence from the strata of rock where our discovery was found. But you know how broken and jumbled that stuff is everywhere around the dig. What’s more, even if the rock were still arranged according to geologic time, because of the ship’s position in the fault itself, assigning an age to its time of landing there might be anybody’s guess.”