Chapter 19: It All Comes Down to One

I saw Mr. Hawkins flee to the rear of the bridge to look back at the portal behind us, but I gave him little heed.

Desperately I considered a way out of this. The planet was detonating. We only had a sparse amount of time. I searched my mind dizzyingly, coming up with nothing, scouring my thoughts in demolishing vain, until at last I looked up at the Doctor in defeat, wanting terribly to ask him what we had to do.

"We gotta turn around!" I was answered, but not by the Doctor. Jim Hawkins sprang from the bridge railing and landed heavily on the main floor, running for the smashed cannon on the opposite side of the deck. "What?" I choked after him, placing my hand back upon my side and looking over the railing of the bridge. Mr. Hawkins, still running for the ruined cannon, threw a finger eastward, indicating to the ghostly portal that still loomed in the midst of the destruction. "There's a portal back there!" Jim explained exasperatedly. "It can get us out of here!"

I glanced back at the portal behind us. The interior was a mass of exploding terrain and huge conflagrations that were far worse than what we had to brave outside its perimeter. The Doctor articulated my observation. "Pardon me, Jim…" he said, smoothly at first, but with a franticness that increased with every word afterward, "…but isn't that portal opened on to a raging inferno?"

Jim had reached the cannon and was pulling it apart. From the rubble he extracted a sheet of metal that had the shape of a rectangle, with one end tapering into a point. This he looked over quickly and accepted, calling back to the Doctor as he worked hurriedly. "Yes! But I'm gonna change that!"

I lifted my eyes back to the portal as Jim called, "I'm gonna open a different door!"

"Captain," the Doctor responded to Mr. Hawkins's plan. "Really—I just don't see how this could possibly—"

But a gruff, intelligent and familiar voice cut the Doctor short. Silver had descended to the companionway's base and was headed for the deck, stopping to shout an angry and decided order back to the Doctor and me: "Listen to the boy!"

I inhaled a short breath, rendering a shard of pain in my side, as I heard B.E.N above the noise shout, "One minute, twenty-nine seconds 'till planet's destruction!" I was indeed listening to Mr. Hawkins, but I also felt it was a futile attempt to turn around and go back. That was where the explosion was initiating, that was the point of complete annihilation. With so little thrust capacity, even if Jim was able to make it there and open the portal to a different location, would the Legacy be able to keep up?

Mr. Hawkins and Silver seemed determined to put this plan to action. Jim was desperately trying to attach none other than the compulsory device that had been dislodged from the mouth of the cannon to his sheet of metal with a rope. Silver waved Jim away when he reached him, throwing his mechanical hand into his arm and extracting a machine that welded the compulsory device and the metal sheet together. Then the two of them lifted the heavy concoction and set it on the bulwarks of the ship. I studied their new contraption, now that it was in full view, and was astonished to find that it loosely resembled a very hurriedly-made solar surfer. Jim Hawkins mounted it.

"Now," Jim told Silver loudly, racked with urgency, "no matter what happens, keep the ship heading straight for that portal!" Silver nodded slightly, a quick, anxious, loyal jerk of his head, before Jim hesitated only a moment and then, when B.E.N dutifully shouted, "Fifty-eight seconds!" he thrust his heel into the device's activation lever and flew away.

Silver wasted no time. "Well, you 'eard him!" he yelled at us ferociously, gesturing all about him as he spoke. "Get this blasted heap turned 'round!"

I could do nothing now. Whether I felt this plan had a chance of accomplishing what we all so desperately needed it to or not, Mr. Hawkins had launched himself toward the portal, and I couldn't simply ignore that. Besides—it was the only plan we had.

"Doctor," I commanded quietly. "Head us back for the portal."

The Doctor looked at me with deep, concerned brown eyes, but presented no argument, and wheeled the helm about as he murmured reluctantly, "Aye, Captain."

As the ship tacked back to the east, I caught a small glimpse of Jim Hawkins roaring passed the horrific destruction of the planet and fully realized the utter danger he had put himself in. A profound agitation thusly took hold of me, and as the little form of Jim on that hazardously constructed, flying sheet of metal zipped out of my vision a great deal ahead of us, I turned quickly to B.E.N and roared, "Give me whatever full speed you can manage, but blast it, sir, make sure we're moving fast!"

B.E.N complied in a flurry and we shot onward only a little faster than the speed our dismembered mizzenmast had left us with. Nevertheless, we careened through the smoldering, fiery death of the star at the speed we possessed, trying desperately to dodge the exploding, blazing terrain of the planet that shot up and spat, ablaze and destructive. The Doctor, concentrating in a panic on the terrain in front of him, called back to me hoarsely, "Captain! That compulsory device from the cannon—how many canisters does it have?"

"Canisters?"

Canisters! The device had only so much energy, only so much fuel it could hold, that likewise Jim had a limited supply to propel his manufactured vehicle to the portal in the east. I searched my memory in confusion as I tried to remember how many canisters the Legacy's cannon design held. Then I remembered.

"Three! There are three, Doctor!" I shouted, as hoarsely as he had, and inducing a sharp jab of pain in my side.

"Three!" The Doctor repeated, aghast, as his panic reached well over his head. "Let's hope that's enough to get Jim to that portal!"

The Legacy trailed desperately behind the erratic course of Jim's flight back to the portal, narrowly dodging the lurching walls from the chasms, the geysers and the horrific white beams that shredded anything that got in their way. The Doctor wheeled the ship with blind luck, scraping by massive golden walls and barely missing the deadly white flares. His panic having come back to him and my own feeling of panic probably affecting him, he was fumbling mightily. I took to shouting at him to put myself at better ease, which didn't do very much good, although when I yelled at him which direction to go and he in his panic would obey, I felt more in control of the helm. But mostly I think it frightened the Doctor.

"Dodge that bloody thing, Doctor! Eyes open now, man!" I persisted nevertheless.

The Doctor wheeled to starboard and shouted in fright as he just missed the hull getting ripped open by a white beam.

"Port! Port!" I shouted.

"Port is right, isn't it?"

"Port is left! Go to the left! Left!"

Obeying me, the Doctor barreled the ship to the left and rammed the hull into another wall, scraping off one of the ship's tailfins at the starboard stern. I roared at him the rather obvious remedy.

"Now to the right! The right!"

Finally the Doctor turned on me. "I know!" he burst out. "I know! Will you just let me drive?" And he turned back to the helm. Needless to say, I didn't do as much directing after that.

"Twenty-five seconds!" B.E.N cried.

I averted my concentration to the progress of the Legacy as she hurtled toward a massive chasm shredded into creation by the planet's detonation. The portal was growing ever closer, at a snail's pace compared to the declination rate of the time we had left. The green isosceles triangle watched our desperate advancement as though an apathetic eye of Treasure Planet itself. I staggered to my feet with frustration at our hideous situation, the ship drawing closer to the portal and yet seeming never to reach it.

At that moment I heard the Doctor cry out to me with genuine fright, and I will own it pained my very being to hear it.

"Captain! Do you see Jim?"

Mr. Hawkins had been lost to my line of vision for some time. The Doctor's inability to see him now, however, was of incredibly more importance, for he had surely been keeping him in full view so as to follow him and make sure to keep up. I shot my gaze over the burning landscape all around us now, fighting down a feeling of panic I hadn't felt for a long time. I couldn't see Mr. Hawkins either.

"No, Doctor! I don't…" I shouted weakly, this time indifferent to the sweltering pain in my side. The Doctor was shouting hoarsely.

"He started to fall! He was flying over that chasm and I watched him start to fall…!"

On the deck near the bow I caught a glimpse of Silver hugging the bulwarks, in the very same place Jim had left him.

A bitter grief and sickening heaviness washed over me as I listened to the Doctor, still looking beyond him into the vast blazing pyre of Treasure Planet for any sign of Mr. Hawkins. All I could see was the green and watchful portal that we were still now pointlessly careening towards. We had lost Jim Hawkins. And with him our last fleeting chance of survival.

"He must have run out of canisters…" the Doctor finished, losing the volume in his voice.

"Seventeen seconds!" B.E.N called shrilly.

We were now shooting towards the portal with no hope of escape by its means. I fell back against the mizzen mast and stared at the Doctor's back as the Legacy swept over the chasm.

And then I heard Silver yelling excitedly. B.E.N had started counting down from ten.

We had reached the portal. The fiery inferno that awaited us inside its perimeter was the only thing we had left. I didn't know what to think. I barely recollect if I was breathing.

Then the Doctor shouted. I rose from the mizzen mast at his shout and at that moment saw a small image of Jim Hawkins on his makeshift solar surfer dart out from underneath our hull and rocket toward the small globe before the portal. He was alive! And he was reaching out to the holographic globe at the base of the Flint's portal to deliver us from Treasure Planet's detonating pyre.

B.E.N was counting down.

"Seven!"

"Six!"

"Five!"

"Four!"

"Three!"

"Two…"