Cape Flattery Will Get You Nowhere
4
"OK, Poindexter," Stan growled. "You always got an explanation for everything. So tell us ordinary ignoramuses—what th' heck is goin' on here?"
"I . . . don't know," Ford admitted, scratching his head and looking utterly baffled. "I've never read a thing about this kind of, well, I don't know, bubble in reality? And I've certainly never run across anything like this in my whole experience."
"I think we should go down and explore the ocean floor," Mabel said.
"Absent any other course of rational action, that might make sense," Ford said.
"I'm game," Stan said. "Anything to get us outa here and back to normal!"
"I can use the engines to hold us steady here," Ford said. "Well, for an hour or so. I don't want to use too much diesel fuel—we'll need it to get back home. Assuming we can find a way back!"
"Wait, wait, it might be a good idea to explore. Only how . . . do we get up there?" Dipper asked.
Mabel gave him an impatient look. "Uh . . . jump?"
"I'm not sure that would work," Ford told her. "And if it did, it's a fifty-foot drop from the top of the mast. Or rise. Or something. You'd break your neck!"
"Mabel," Dipper said, "come over here, over to the stern. OK, shoot your grappling hook straight up. Everyone watch out! Heads up!"
Mabel pulled out the grappling hook, stuck her tongue in the corner of her mouth, and fired the grapnel as nearly vertical as she could. It zoomed up . . . and stuck there, fifteen feet above the top of the mast, at the end of its line. "Cool!" Mabel said. "Like a helium grappling hook!"
Ford moved the searchlight and found the hook dangling weirdly in mid-air. "Clearly, the sea floor over us does exert a normal gravitational pull. What's countering it and giving us reverse gravity aboard the boat, well, that I cannot tell."
"Will that thing hold us?" Stan asked.
Mabel retracted the hook—and they had to scatter as it began to fall, but Mabel reeled it back fast enough to keep it from clonking anyone. "Nope," she said.
Dipper considered. "I think I have an idea," he said.
So he climbed the mast—the way Wendy had shown him, with Grunkle Stan's belt around him and his feet braced against the wood. A heavy thirty-pound test fishing line was tied to his own belt, at his waist, and Mabel unreeled it as Dipper ascended.
It got easier, because his weight seemed to diminish steadily and quickly as he got further up. He had a little difficulty where the radar dish and antennae were bolted to the mast, but at that point there were L-shaped cleats to stand on, and he managed to unbuckle the belt, move it higher past the electronics, and buckle it again one-handed. Then he went to stand on the topmost cleats, thirty feet above the deck.
"I can really feel an upward pull up here!" he called back to the deck. "I bet I don't weigh more than ten pounds!"
"This is our lightest anchor!" Ford yelled up. "Haul away!"
Dipper pulled the fishing line—which Mabel had cut at the bottom—up. At first it was easy, until he was holding a heavier rope, and then it became harder, because a twenty-pound Danforth anchor was tied to the rope. Even that grew less of a burden as he hauled and the strange upward gravity began to pull. By the time he grasped the anchor, it weighed only two pounds or maybe even less.
"Watch out!" Dipper yelled. With the free part of the rope wound around a cleat, he swung the anchor around and around, like a lasso.
"Get ready to duck if this doesn't work!" Dipper called down. "Here goes!" Stretching his arm as far as he could, Dipper hurled the anchor. For a dizzy moment it seemed to float indecisively—and then, at first slowly and then with gathering momentum, it plunged upward to the sea floor.
"Yay!" Mabel yelled from the deck.
Dipper unwound the twist of the rope from the cleat and pulled on the line. "It won't hold," he called down. "It's just dragging through, like the sand is completely dry and loose!"
However, Ford was an ingenious man. He had Dipper climb down, then Stan took his place and went up the mast. Stan hauled more weights up—the two thirty-pound anchors, then a fifty-pound one—and by pulling the line partly back and tying the weights on at intervals, he built up the total weight at the bottom—or top—to a hundred and thirty pounds.
"Oughta hold you two, anyhow!" Stan said as he came back down.
"Me first!" Mabel said.
"Uh, no," Dipper told her. "No offense, but I ought to go first."
Mabel blew a raspberry. "Whaaat? You had a hard time doing the rope climb in gym class!"
Feeling his face get hot, Dipper insisted, "But I did it! OK, I'll take a thinner cord with me. Mabel unreels it. Then you guys tie on some long stakes and a mallet, and I'll drive the stakes in and tie off the rope. If the stakes take a strong enough hold, anybody can make the climb."
That made sense. Again with a line tied to his belt, Dipper hauled himself upward, past the head of the mast—and soon he hit the spot where the pull toward the deck and the pull toward the sea floor canceled out, and he was, practically speaking, weightless. "Gotta turn around!" he yelled.
It was a little tricky, but with zero weight he managed it. Then, because even the fifty-pound weight was heavier than he currently was, he pulled himself downward. Before long he weighed a few pounds, and then it was a matter of climbing downward toward the upward—it was difficult to think of it—until he neared the sea floor and his weight felt back to normal.
He reeled in the cord and had to back away fast as two six-foot-long wooden stakes and a hand sledge hammer fell toward him. "Hang on!"
He stamped around the circle of illumination from the spotlight. "It's like a beach above the high-tide mark! Loose sand! Let me see if the stakes will hold!" The first one went in for eighteen inches and met no resistance. Then the ground below—above?—firmed up. He pounded with the hammer, each blow making the stake go in six more inches or so, then only two inches and then only one at a time. The last foot and a half were the hardest. He pulled at the stake—and it held firmly.
"I'm tying the rope off here," he said. "Let me drive in the other stake next to this one, and then you can test it!" He angled the second stake in the opposite direction to the first and drove it well in, too, and then secured the rope to both at once where they crossed.
"Comin' through!" Mabel shouted. She shinnied up, and then down, the rope and jumped off six feet in the air, landing flat on her face with a poof of sand. "And she sticks the landing!" she yelled, laughing and looking up. "P-too! P-too! Sand in my mouth!"
Above them, Ford and Stan seemed to be arguing. Then they saw Stan coming down hand over hand, upside-down to them. When he reached the zero-G point, he yelled, "Geeze Louise!" But he spun around and pulled himself down, grunting. When he stepped onto the sand, he said, "Let's secure this as a mooring line. Brainiac's gonna keep watch on the boat while we scout around. Nearly had to fight him for it. Here ya go." He handed around compact flashlights, the kind with brilliant high-intensity discharge bulbs.
After hammering the stakes in a little more until he said, "That's solid, now," he turned his flashlight on and waved it in a circle, pointing the beam up at the Stan O' War II. After a moment the spotlights died and the rumble of the engine cut off. "He's shut down the motor," Stan said. "We gotta conserve fuel. You knuckleheads ready? Let's have a look around. Stick together!"
They wandered over what looked like the bottom of the sea—but it was long dry, with the sand like that on a desert, though ripples from possibly ancient waves still showed. Now and then they found a shell or a complete fish skeleton. And then Mabel said, "Woohoo! Pirate treasure!" She dived for it and came up with a bright yellow coin. "This is probably worth millions of dollars!"
"Lemme take a look at that, Sweetie," Stan said. He held the coin on his palm, blew loose grains of sand off it, and studied it in the bright beam of his flashlight. "Huh."
Dipper craned to see. The gleaming coin seemed to be gold, and it bore a profile of a pudgy, puffy-faced man with leaves in his long hair. Around the portrait were the words "GEORGIVS-III DEI-GRATIA." Dipper asked, "What is it?"
"A guinea piece," Stan said thoughtfully.
"For buying guinea pigs?" Mabel asked excitedly. "I've always wanted a guinea pig!"
"You've always made me your guinea pig," Dipper reminded her. "Remember when you made me try your habanero vanilla pudding, without telling me what was in it?"
Mabel chuckled. "That was fun! Is this what they call a doubloon, Grunkle Stan?"
"Nah, it's British money, but old. This here is King George III, so this coin goes back to about the time of the American Revolution. Wonder how it got here!"
"Here's something else," Dipper said, picking up something white from the sand. "Huh. A broken pipe."
"Yeah, a clay tobacco pipe," Stan said, taking it. He sniffed. "Whew! Stinky tobaccy! Now, this is peculiar—somebody was smokin' it not long ago! Like within the last day!"
"Then somebody else is here!" Dipper said.
"Yeah, but where is here?"
Mabel flashed the beam of her light all around, over empty low hills of sand. "And where's the closest pet store? I want my guinea pig!"
"Guys," Dipper said, "it looks like there's a trail of footprints leading off that way—and we didn't make it!"
"Um . . . I think maybe we better get back to the rope," Stan said. "If there is somebody else around, no tellin' whether they'll be friendly or hostile."
They followed their own footprints back. "Tell ya what," Stan said. "You two climb back to the boat. I'll hang here and stand guard. Take the cord with you an' tell Ford I want the carbine, just in case. I'll hold the light for you."
Mabel took back the guinea piece before she climbed to the boat. For safekeeping, she popped it into her mouth.
"Don't swallow it!" Dipper warned.
"Ith thalty!" she said, her words slurred.
"Still!"
The rope, now mooring the boat, stretched taut, and she climbed it with arms and legs. They saw her reverse and then climb down—up, whatever—to the Stan O' War II. "Maybe whoever dropped the coin and the pipe found a way to get out of here," Dipper said. "Could be they've already left."
"Yeah, or maybe they're watchin' us from out there in the dark an' armed to th' teeth!" Stan said. "Go! And don't forget to send down the carbine!"
Dipper started to climb, but he hadn't gone ten feet before he heard an unfamiliar and frantic male voice: "I say, I say, I say! You fellows! Help!"
He jumped back down, not sticking the landing, but not hurting himself, and scrambling to his feet, he whipped out his compact but bright flashlight. He shone it around and gasped.
Stumbling out of the darkness toward them, sand spraying from every step of his bare feet, floundered a young man in knee-length britches and a loose white shirt, with long tangled brown hair and a wild look in his eyes. "Help a fellow out!" he called again. "I'm stranded!"
"Who are you?" Stan yelled.
"Martin! Midshipman Martin of his Majesty's ship Discovery! I fell overboard during the gale today—yesterday—I don't know how long ago! And I've been lost on this bloody island for hours!"
He came close, his chest heaving for breath. "Are you—are you English? You're dressed most strangely."
"Americans," Stan said.
"Oh—colonials!"
"Wait, wait," Dipper said, rubbing his eyes. "Mr. Martin—what's the date?"
"The date? Today, you mean? Why, I believe it's—dear me, I'm not completely certain, because I fell overboard, you know, and it's so dark. However, I expect it may be—but I'm not certain, as I say—I think it must be in the early morning hours of March twenty-fourth?" His inflection made it a question, not a statement.
"What year?" Dipper asked.
The young man blinked his blue eyes. "Why—1778, of course!"
Stan grunted, "Wha?"
But Dipper groaned. It's going to be one of THOSE things, he thought.