The Case of the Arctic Anomaly

(September-December 2012)

7-End of the Chase

There was no time to hoist sail. Ford took the helm and yelled, "Start the engine, Stanley!" Stan did, then ducked into the cabin, carrying the heavy wooden box.

He nearly lost his footing as Ford urged the diesel to give them as much speed as possible. "Take it easy!" Stan bawled.

"I really need your help!"

"Keep your shirt on, Poindexter! We got a whole bunch of stuff to do all at the same time, so can it!"

At the wheel, and despite the nip in the air, Ford was sweating bullets. If the lookout aboard the Kalanautis had not spotted the Stan O'War II, the sound of the sloop's engine would attract attention soon enough.

One small consolation: from the submersible's position, it would have to swing wide to haul around the north side of the deserted island before setting a pursuit course. The scattered offshore spires and rocks, the stony, shallow, shelving bottom, made a direct line impossible for the larger vessel. Ford had at least the advantage of a few minutes' start.

That would not be enough. Though he had no exact knowledge of the submersible's capabilities, he realized that with her multiple engines she could outpace the sloop. It would be only a matter of time.

Gripping the wheel and advancing the throttle, Ford steered due south, for deep, open water. As his perspective changed with the course, Ford saw the Kalanautis vanish behind the island, though the submersible undoubtedly was swinging northeast to circumnavigate the obstacle. "Stanley! We are going to need the quantum destabilizer!"

"Gimme time, Ford! Let me know when the sub's in range, OK?"

"You can bring the destabilizer up at any moment now!" Ford bellowed, furious with his brother. Always so selfish—

But then, so am I. Before Weirdmageddon, I was on the verge of kicking him out of my home . . . again. After thirty years.

The Stan O'War II hit the swells hard now, the bow ploughing into them before tilting back, the engine driving the sloop up and over the wave and then down into the trough. Lucky the stormy weather had abated, if only temporarily. Lucky that Ford had brought the QDR aboard. He knew that, at a decent range and with a moderate spread, the beam could punch a hole completely through the hull of the Kalanautis, one that the crew would have to fix if they could. If not—

Ford's great gift was also his curse: an analytical mind. The sort that had to ponder every action seven times before acting, and then when the acting was done, had to re-run all the events, all the decisions, to try to puzzle out a better way of having carried out the plan.

How many crew members were aboard the Kalanautis? At least a hundred, Ford thought. Well—it was largely automated. He knew he had seen forty to fifty men battling the kraken. Say fifty. And their captain. If, forced to take the shot, Ford sent the submersible and all aboard to the bottom of the sea, could he sleep at night? Was there another way?

To his own incredulity, Ford still agonized mentally about Bill Cipher. I should never have trusted him. Yet in the end, I shared the guilt for his demise.

Could it have ended differently? Could I have educated Cipher, shown him that others' lives were valuable? Calmed his maniacal rage?

Of course the triangular demon was deranged.

"Bill, you're insane!"

"Sure I am, what's your point?"

I had to do it.

Yet—is it an honorable achievement, to end the existence of someone who is insane? Insanity, after all, is a handicap. What did I do? What kind of monster am I?

One that wanted to save my own family. My own world.

Yet—

"Stanley!" Ford yelled. "I need you on deck! And bring the quantum destabilizer!"

"I'm busy. Are we even in range?"

"Not yet. We have a four or five-mile lead, but the Kalanautis will soon be hot on our trail!"

"Call me when they're closer, then!"

"Stanley!"

Selfish! That's Stan all over. Only thinking of what he wants, of his priorities!

Still, one could say . . . I'm just as selfish. Mere days before Weirdmageddon I was on the verge of evicting Stanley, Mabel, and Mason because Stan had taken over my house to create his tourist trap. I was ready to kick my own brother out of house and home!

For the second time . . ..

Ford adjusted their course to bring the wind nearly astern. Now it added its ten knots to the speed the engine could develop, though it was merely shoving the sloop along a bit faster, maybe twenty knots instead of eighteen. Every little bit helped, though.

When he had a chance at the crest of a swell, Ford took a quick look back. From where he stood at the helm, he could see . . . Elevation of 2.5 meters, square root of that times 1.22459 . . . 5.2 kilometers.

In other words, from where Ford stood, the northern horizon looked about three and a quarter miles away. He could still glimpse, barely, the peak of the island, the merest nick in the sky. So far he could not see the Kalanautis.

But of course the submersible would have radar, or if it were indeed from an alternate dimension, it would have some equivalent of radar. There would be no evading it for very long.

A chilling thought struck him: What if it has submerged?

The last Stanford had read, a fully-submerged Earthly craft could reach a speed of twenty-four knots. That would beat the sloop's top speed.

"Stanley! On deck! Please!"

A grumbling Stan ducked his head as he came out of the deckhouse doorway. "OK, OK, here I am." He held the quantum destabilizer angled across his chest. "Where you want the furshlugginer gun?"

"Stand by with it. Keep a watch astern."

"That's behind us, right?"

Ford glared at his brother. "Correct! And if you see any sign of the Kalanautis, including just the periscope cutting through the water, you take the helm and let me handle the shooting!"

"Yes sir," Stan said. "Just hold it until then?"

"Please!"

"OK, keep your hair on! Jeeze! I don't see nothin' but waves and ocean so far."

Forcing himself to come down from his panicky high, Ford said deliberately, "Grab the binoculars. Keep watching the horizon! I'm sure Omen must be aware that we're running from him."

Stan slung the QDR round his shoulder, opened the water-tight compartment near the helm and pulled out the binoculars, a good Navy surplus 7x50 pair. Bracing himself against the deckhouse, he raised them to his eyes, found the horizon, lost it, found it again, and focused for distance. "I can just barely see something pointed and kinda gray, way off," he said.

"That's probably the island, the volcanic cone with the caldera."

"Yeah, think it is, don't seem to be moving. Don't see the sub."

"Let's see how long we can keep it that way." Ford tinkered with the controls, trying to find the optimum combination for speed. "What were you doing for so long?"

"Trying to figure out a place to hide the treasure box."

"Did you find one?"

"Nah, gave it up. Box is too boxy to hide. We just gotta outrun 'em."

"If we can," Ford said.

The problem with that was they . . . couldn't.

Oh, Ford pushed the Stan O'War II hard, coaxing twenty-two knots from the sloop, but after two hours, Stanley said, "Uh-0h. I got 'em in the binoculars."

"How far away?"

"How the heck should I know?"

Clenching his teeth in frustration, Ford growled, "Take the wheel, Stanley, and let me look."

After Ford had spent a couple of minutes gazing to stern, Stan said, "Gimme the bad news, Poindexter. Are they gaining on us?"

"Yes. If we could just maintain this lead until dark—but their vessel is the fater and sunset is hours away."

"Your BFG is right—"

"My what?"

"Big freakin' gun!" Stan said. "The destabilizer, whatever you called it—"

"QDR. Quantum destabilizer rifle. It's an initialism, Stanley."

"Ain't it an acronym?"

For some reason, such questions from Stan always frustrated Ford into snappishness. "What? No! To be an acronym, it would need at least one vowel so it could be pronounced as a word! NASA is an acronym because you pronounce it like it's spelled! SCUBA and, and RADAR are acronyms. FBI is an initialism. Nobody ever tries to pronounce it fuhbeaye."

Adding to Ford's frustration, Stan ostentatiously yawned. "Thanks so much for the grammar lesson, but how does it get us out of our fix?"

Ford blinked. "It . . . doesn't."

"So get the QDR and get ready to shoot 'em when they get close!"

Ford picked up the weapon and held it crosswise in his big hands, just staring down at it. "There has to be another way. Has to be."

"I got one," Stan said.

"What?"

"Give the gun to me. You steer. When they get close enough, I'll put a hole right through 'em. How's that for a plan?"

"Tantamount to admitting defeat," Ford said.

"Can't amount to worse than just lettin' 'em sink us or capture us!"

"You don't understand," Ford groaned, sitting in what they called the navigator's seat, though it wasn't that. Without the binoculars, he had to scan the horizon before he saw the submersible, surfaced and running at top speed, or so he presumed. He could distinctly see the white bow wave it was raising. "I'm not absolutely certain that Omen would harm us. It's like—like if Marshal Dillon shot some guy in the back because the fellow had a reputation as a troublemaker!"

"Yeah, that woulda cut lots of the episodes short," Stan agreed "So what? We let 'em take the first shot and hope they don't blow us out of the water?"

"I don't know," Ford said with the eerie calmness of a man out of options. "Keep her on this heading. We'll see how much they're gaining on us and maybe I can come up with something."

"You mean we," Stan said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You mean maybe we can come up with something. 'Cause we're in this together. Win or lose, we're in this together, the two kings of New Jersey? Right? Right?"

Despite his clear anxiety, Ford smiled at his brother. "No matter what happens, Stanley, that will always be true."

"That's the spirit. Buck up, Ford. An' notice I said 'buck,' with a B. An' I did say 'thanks' just a while back. I'm getting' used to it, it don't make me so nauseous anymore."

The Kalanautis steadily gained, about half a mile in every hour. "If we just had a little more power," Ford said, "we might possibly outrun them."

But they didn't. One hour, two, three, and then the submersible was so close that with binoculars Stan could see the figures of men on deck in the bow. "I think they're gonna try an' harpoon us as soon as they get in range," he warned. "They got one of those cockamamie cannonny things right in the front."

"They'll close the range within the next hour. I wish we could have held our lead until nightfall."

"What's the range of the quantum thing?"

Ford frowned, concentrating. "It's overcharged, about a hundred and twenty per cent over and above theoretical maximum."

"Whoa! Is it gonna blow up?"

"Theoretically not. It's still at least five per cent below the critical stage. But it has a great deal more than its nominal top power to put behind the shot."

"So that means . . .?"

"At a quarter of a mile it could put a hole in the submersible's hull. Assuming the Kalanautis is not made of impervious material, and 'impervious' is a tricky word. If I'm right and it's from another dimension, all bets are off."

"Eh," muttered Stan. "I don't like all bets being off."

"Theoretically," Ford continued, "if we dialed the destabilizer power way down, we could in effect set the device to 'stun.' It might be possible to render the sailors aboard helpless for an hour or so. And we could take up to six shots that way, consecutively, without waiting for the capacitors to recharge."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Stan roared. "How do you turn it down? Where's the dials?"

"It has to be done manually, with a screwdriver, and I would have to guess at the settings. Too low and it wouldn't do much of anything, unless the Kalanautis were in a flux state—"

"Simple words, Brainiac. I'm the dumb one, remember?"

"Stanley, when things are displaced from their own dimensions into another, under certain conditions their hold on the new reality is tenuous—uh, really, really shaky. A destabilizer might be able to give it a slight push so it's forced through a momentary hole in reality—"

"Like a portal."

"Sort of like a portal. In the Mulitiverse I met one very unpleasant man who had somehow devised a portal gun that opened glowing green gateways into other dimensions—never mind. If the submarine were put in a flux state, its foothold in our dimension might be disrupted so it would be sucked back into whatever universe it came from."

"You never tell me these things!" Stan said. "I wouldn't understand them anyway, but you never tell me! Here, fix up the BFG, set the stunners to faze or whatever, and let me take the wheel."

From time to time the U.S. Army has fielded weapons so fiddly to assemble before operation that the soldiers practically have to reinvent them in the midst of battle. The quantum destabilizer—something Ford had acquired while lost in the Multiverse—was such a device. McGucket had studied it and thought he might be able to produce variant versions, a pistol, or a rifle that recharged more quickly, or a toned-down one that would properly be called a disruptor rather than a destabilizer.

Unfortunately, he had been busy buying the old Northwest mansion, moving in, and with the funds in which he was presently rolling, due to his patents, setting up his new laboratory. Fiddlefording with the QDR was on his backmost burner.

"They're getting closer!" Stan warned, looking back over his shoulder. "You gonna shoot, or what?"

"I'm not sure it's on a nonlethal setting," Ford said. "I wish the kraken were here."

"Oh, yeah, outa the frying pan and into the tentacles!" Stan said with a snort.

"No, I merely meant that when the kraken wrapped its tentacles around the submarine, both the creature and the vessel were flickering pale blue discharges as though—forget it. I'm going to take the shot."

Ford raised the weapon.

He lowered the weapon.

"I can't do it," he said.

"Hide the gun, then," Stan snapped.

"I beg your—"

"Hide the freakin' gun! We're gonna have to bluff them, and if they grab the gun, first, we're gonna be without a hole card and second, they're gonna have their mitts on a real dangerous weapon, savvy?"

"Everything but 'savvy,"" Ford said.

"Just hide it! Hide it good! But somewhere you can grab it in a hurry!"

Ford ducked below deck and was back in a few minutes. At the bow of the submersible, Captain Omen stood with a huge megaphone lifted to his lips. His voice came over the waves: "Heave to, or we'll sink you where you are!"

"Ford, what's he mean by heave to?"

"He means 'stop,' Stanley. Throttle the engine way back. Keep just enough way on toe keep her prow headed into the swells."

"You better come do it."

The Kalanautis seemed to surge forward, but that was because the Stan O'War II was quickly losing headway. The rogue captain must have given orders, for the submersible blew gushes of air from tanks and sank a few feet, so the deck of the Kalanautis was only about two feet above that of the sloop. Ford raised both hands above his head. "Hold your fire, Captain Omen," he called when the submarine was only a few yards off the stern.

"You disappointed me, Dr. Pines!" Omen called back, without benefit of the megaphone.

"Hey!" Stan said, leaning so he held the wheel steady with his butt while he reached for the sky. "You were fightin' that nightmare thing with great big testicles!"

"'Tentacles,' Stanley," Ford said automatically.

"Yeah, the thing had them, too, but I'm sayin' Omen had muchos cojones! As Dad would say, a butt-load of chutzpah! Hey, Cap'n, did you kill it?"

"We drove it away," Omen replied. The sailors had lowered a skiff into the water, and he descended a sort of ladder built into the nose of the submarine and stepped into the boat. "My quest to vanquish the sea-beast continues. Or will continue, once I have dealt with you."

"What are you gonna do to us?" Stan asked as the skiff pulled alongside the barely-moving sloop. "Take us prisoner again?"

Omen stepped aboard. "After you violated your word to me once? Do you think I would trust you aboard my craft? No, I shall treat you as I would treat any enemy craft. I will disable your sloop and then sink you."

The captain had given no orders, but two of his men entered the deckhouse. "What are they doing?" Ford asked.

"I read the interesting account written by Semyon Romanov," Captain Omen said. "You reached the island before we did. Must we search the island, or have you done that work for us?"

"No!" Stan yelped. "We didn't find no treasure chest with a two-headed chicken on the lid, if that's what you're implying!"

"Vorlang!" shouted Number 2, appearing from the deckhouse with the big, heavy wooden box in his arms. "Vir ha set vond!"

"Interesting," Omen murmured. "Open it."

"Ek nik ta clepen von."

"Then you," Omen said, turning to Stan. "Open the box."

"I ain't got no key!" Stan said. "And besides, it ain't got no lock. If you look at it closely, you'll see it's like carved out of one big piece of wood. It ain't got no lid!"

The captain rubbed his eyes. "Your use of double negatives displeases me."

"Talk to my brother about that," Stan said.

Omen turned to Ford and asked, "What does he mean?"

"Stanley means that we have found no way to open the box."

"What does it contain?"

"Oh, you know, emergency rations," Stan said in a sly, wheedling voice. "Cans of beans and brown meat, like that."

"Cans? What are cans?" Omen asked.

Ford and Stan exchanged a glance. Ford raised one eyebrow a quarter of an inch. Stan interpreted that to mean See, you numbskull, I was right, these clowns are from an alternate dimension! Stuff that in your pipe and sit on it!

Stan nodded almost imperceptibly.

Ford took over: "Captain, the truth is that enigmatic, seemingly solid chest may hold a fortune in historical rarities. It may in fact contain some lost riches that once belonged to the Tsars of Russia."

"The what?" Omen asked, looking truly baffled.

"Tsars," Stan said. "Pronounced czars."

"It's a Russian variant of 'Caesar,'" Ford supplied. "It's actually quite interesting. When Ivan IV was crowned as a teenager, an Orthodox archbishop anointed him as the Tsar of all Russia, tsar having come to mean 'leader' in the Russian—"

"I do not understand," Captain Omen said sharply. "Ivan? Russia? Caesar? These words have no meaning!"

After a pause that gave the three men time to stare at each other, Stan asked, "What about America?"

"I know that country," Omen said, his bafflement showing in his voice. "Though you grievously mispronounce it. It is in the Western Hemisphere, and actually it is called Amorika. The country was begun by colonists from the islands and mainland of Bretannia!"

"Captain," Ford said, "as a fellow scientist, may I respectfully ask, when you first encountered the kraken, when it killed two of your men, did anything unusual happen?"

The captain gave him a look and somehow managed not to say You mean more unusual than a gigantic squid suddenly seizing my ship and squeezing two of my crew to death before the rest of us drove it off with axes and electric spears? His look implied that, but he manfully refrained from saying it. "There was a sudden and very unusual electrical storm," he finally responded.

"Khvag ez sta?" asked one of the crewmen, coming out of the deckhouse. He carried an open plastic container. In it were all six of the sloop's flare guns, a video camera, a can opener, Stan's spare pare of spectacles, two pairs of wraparound sunglasses (the kind that fit over regular glasses), Ford's personal voice recorder, and other assorted oddments and bits of bric-a-brac.

"Yes, what is this?" the captain asked, picking up one of the signal pistols.

"Careful!" Ford warned. "That fires a small rocket straight up in the air and is used to summon aid if the sloop is in danger and someone might be close enough to see."

"I've never heard of such a thing. And this?" He touched the camera.

"That's a navigation device," Stan said quickly. "We'd show ya how to use it, but it has to be night and you have to be able to see the stars."

"I think," the captain said, "we'll just take the wooden box."

"But we can't figure out how to open it!" Stan said.

"The judicious application of an axe may solve that problem."

"Look, look," Stan said, his face red, "can't we trade? Leave us the worthless wooden box and we'll give you the secret of unlimited power."

With a scornful smile, Omen replied, "If you had such a secret we could never have caught you."

"OK, it's not exactly all-powerful," Stan said. "But it's a source of electric power that never runs down. And it doesn't need fuel, right, Ford?"

"Stanley, what are you doing?" Ford asked. "Let him have the box! I can't give him the zero-point energy device."

"OK! Let him take the box, too!" Stanley said. "As long as he leaves us on the sloop and promises not to sink us!"

"I see what you are trying," Omen said. "You both tell me to take the box, which means you want to give me the impression that it is of no value. Therefore I will take the box." He spoke rapidly to his men and then called to the oarsmen in the skiff. With a careless shrug, the captain tossed the flare pistols overboard, one by one. "I will relieve you of the guns and leave you with your navigational devices and small contrivances."

"Cap'n," Stan said, "are you a wagering man?"

"No."

Stan deflated a little. "OK, scrub that. Will you give us a sporting chance?"

"What are you proposing?"

"Give us a head start at least. I mean, look at us, little wood boat, great big giant submarine, just let us try to make a run for it. We wanna go down fighting if we have to go down. What do you say?"

Despite his bleak expression, the captain smiled. Barely. Then he held up one finger. "For one hour I will not sink you. But unless you manage to sail out of my sight before that hour is up, then I shall follow you, ram you at speed, and destroy your vessel."

"An hour?" Ford asked, sounding outraged. "We can't outsail your submersible!"

"Take the chance," Omen advised. "It is the only one you will get."