Cape Flattery Will Get You Nowhere

6

"William Bligh?" Dipper asked Ford softly. "As in the Mutiny on the Bounty? Captain Bligh?"

"I presume so," Ford whispered back. "Though as I recall, that incident happened a good deal later than Cook's last voyage."

"Come under our lee!" yelled the hoarse, angry voice from the British ship. Ford took the wheel from Stan and carefully edged to Stan O' War II close to the side of the ship away from the wind. Then from the deck, the voice ordered, "Come aboard, Mr. Martin! Whoever is in charge of that cockleshell, you come, too! The Captain will want a word with you!"

Martin sighed, doffed the jacket and handed it to Stan, and then, to Dipper's amazement, climbed straight up the side of the Resolution on a kind of ladder, a set of shallow cleats, really, built into the ship. Ford said, "Take the wheel, Stanley. Then he shouted up: "I'll need a man-rope! I'm not deep-water sailor!"

"Stand by."

A rope whipped over the side, and Ford grasped it. "Wish me luck," he said.

Using the rope more than the ladder, he climbed upward. At the last second, Dipper grabbed the rope, too, and hauled himself up, hand over hand—and with his palms burning from the effort, he tried hard not to think of climbing the rope in gym class.

At the top, Ford stepped onto the deck, and Dipper followed him a second later. A glaring yellowish light from the binnacle lantern showed them Mr. Martin hugging himself against what suddenly was an icy, sleet-ridden wind—and next to him, the man Dipper guessed was William Bligh, in a heavy blue jacket. Though a very young man, probably in his early twenties, Bligh was balding, with a frizz of damp hair sticking out around his ears and strands of it blowing in the wind. "Who's this boy?" Bligh asked grumpily.

Ford looked back, blinked, and said quickly, "My servant, sir He always follows me everywhere."

Bligh gave Dipper a sneering glance. "A dog would do as much. Come, sir, stir yourself! The captain is waiting."

They went aft and down a ladder below decks, and Dipper's first thought upon experiencing the interior of an 18th century British three-master was Man, it stinks! It was worse than the locker room in the gym, worse than the pile of long-unwashed lucky socks that the track team had saved up to burn after the season ended (though Dipper had missed the bonfire—he preferred going to Gravity Falls), worse than Waddles had ever smelled on a humid day. Putrid sweat, old tar, stale urine, something like rotting potatoes, and other stenches competed to make him gag. He held his breath until Bligh stopped and tapped on a closed door.

"Yes?" came a voice from inside.

"Owner of a small boat and his brat to see you, Captain," Bligh said. "They found young Martin and returned him to us."

"Come in."

Dipper staggered—the deck was tilting and bouncing alarmingly in the British vessel's private stormy sea. Captain James Cook sat at a table. He had been writing in an oversized book with a quill pen. Dipper saw that he had a long, intelligent face with a prominent nose and a stern, no-nonsense set of his mouth. He wore a cream-colored waistcoat with brass buttons—his blue officer's coat hung on the back of his chair—and what looked like a gray-powdered wig. "And who are you, sir?" Cook asked, impatiently but with none of Bligh's sneer in his tone.

"Stanford Pines, Captain," Ford responded. "Owner of a small sloop."

"What the devil are you doing in these parts?" Cook asked.

Ford shrugged. "A little trading, a little fishing."

"You're Colonials, I gather?" Cook asked.

"Yes, in a way. My people were originally from New Jersey, but we relocated here many years ago."

"Curious, coming from a settled land into a howling wilderness!" Cook thought for a moment and then asked, "Did you know that the Atlantic Colonies have revolted against the Crown?"

"No, sir," Ford said. "Our colony here has never revolted."

"That's good. Then I suppose I do not have to consider you enemies and put you under arrest. Where exactly are your people?"

"Oh, inland some way. We're a peaceful group."

"Begging your pardon, Captain," Bligh interjected, "shall I clap Midshipman Martin in irons?"

"For what?" Cook asked.

"Desertion!" Bligh snapped.

Cook smiled thinly. "Sailing master, the young fellow fell overboard during a storm! I'd hardly call that desertion!"

"And," Ford added, "from the moment we found him, he was concerned only with getting back to his ship."

"A few good lashes would teach him not to fall," Bligh growled.

"He's a young gentleman," Cook responded. "We do not whip young gentlemen. Mr. Bligh, you and I came in through the hawse-hole—we both started out as mere seamen because we come of no great family. You are a very competent navigator and an excellent cartographer. If you learn to add to that a sense of forbearance and justice, you should go far in His Majesty's service. Martin may return to the Discovery as soon as weather permits. Dismissed, Mr. Bligh."

The young sailing master gave a stiff bow and left them. Cook turned back to Ford. "Now. Do you require assistance, sir? This is a long-lasting storm! Though only minutes seem to have passed since it hit us, sometimes it seems to me that years have gone by. Years, sir!"

Ford was staring at a reddish chunk of pitted stone, a rough ball about the size of Dipper's fist, on a stack of papers next to Cook's arm. "What? Uh, no, no assistance needed, sir. But may I ask—is that stone from Hawaii?"

"How do you know of the Island of Hawaii?" Cook asked with an air of a baffled man. "Why, I reached it on this very voyage, and the natives assured me no European had ever been there before!"

"We've heard of it in these parts," Ford said. "But if you please, Captain, did that chunk of stone come from Hawaii?"

"Yes, it did," Cook said. His expression became sour. "These Islanders are all thieves, sir! Eager for iron! Why, they'd pry the very nails from the timbers if we did not watch them! And yet an old woman became exceedingly angry when I took that stone as a memento—and a paperweight—but believe me, a mere stone is small enough repayment for the loss of chains, nails, and hammers pilfered from our stores!"

Ford murmured. "An old lady—I begin to understand! Pele."

Instantly, something strange happened.

Mabel waited as long as she could stand it. Then, when everything just—stopped—she decided she had to go. "Grunkle Stan," she said firmly, "I'm climbing up there! Uh—Grunkle Stan?"

But he, too, had stopped. The ocean was frozen—not literally, not turned to ice, but stuck in mid-wave. The sails of the big ship beside the Stan O' War II had been flapping, but now they, too, were still, like sails on a painted ship on a painted ocean, and no wind stirred. "Grunkle Stan?" Mabel asked. She nudged him. She might as well have nudged a statue. "Don't worry! I'll be back!"

She didn't trust those cleats built into the side of the ship, not even with a rope to help. But she did trust her grappling hook. She fired it, it caught on the rail of the ship, and she went up as if on an invisible elevator.

The deck lay in deep night, except for a few scattered lanterns whose flames looked as if they were made of glowing glass. Dimly in the darkness she could see sailors up in the rigging and on deck—but like Stan, they were all stuck, like mannequins in a weird nautical-supplies department store. She yelled, "Uh—anybody home?"

"Mabel?" It was faint, but she followed Dipper's voice back across the deck, down some steep steps, and to a closed door.

"You in there, Brobro?" she yelled, pounding.

"Yeah—uh, come in, I guess."

Mabel pushed the door open. "What?"

Dipper and Ford stood in front of a table, at which a man wearing a gray wig sat frozen, his mouth open as if on the verge of speech. At first Mabel didn't register the fourth person in the room—but then she saw an ancient-looking woman, exotic, white-haired, and wearing a sort of flame-colored sarong. Not only flame-colored, she noticed—it moved like flames, too, oranges and yellows and reds rolling up through it. "Neat dress!" she said.

"Madame Pele," Ford said, "this is my great-niece, Mabel, sister of Dipper. Mabel, this is Madame Pele, the Hawaiian spirit of fire."

"So be nice!" Dipper whispered.

"We have a problem," Madame Pele said in a voice that was neither angry nor sad, though it seemed to touch on both emotions. "I have been waiting for two centuries and more for someone with knowledge of the curse to pass this way and solve it." She smiled, her creased face looking like a relief map of a volcanic island. "By the way, do you have a cigarette? I'm dying for a smoke."

"Uh—" Ford said. "No. I've never smoked."

"That's all right. I have a cheroot. It will do." And suddenly the old woman held a thin black cigar between the first and second fingers of her right hand. "I suppose you have no matches, either."

"No, sorry," Ford said.

"There's always my way." She cupped her left hand—and the palm glowed red-hot, then white-hot. She lifted her hand to her face, touched the end of the cigar to the glowing spot on her palm—it lit her whole face a glowing red—and puffed. "That's better," she said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke. "You, Stanford Pines, know what must be done."

"He has to return the stone to the island of Hawaii," Ford said.

"Wait, I'm missing something here," Mabel said. "Lady, I don't want to be rude, but somebody tell me what the heck is going on!"

Madame Pele chuckled. "I like this one. She has a fiery spirit!"

"That's one way of putting it," Dipper mumbled.

"Child, do you know what a taboo is?"

Mabel snorted. "Yeah, that's the final boss in one of Dipper's video games!"

"That's spelled differently," Dipper told her. "A taboo is a decree that something is forbidden. It's like—a moral law."

"Correct," Pele said. "And one of the most serious taboos is that one cannot take sand, stone, or coral away from my islands! This man Cook was warned—I warned him myself—but in his arrogance, he stole a volcanic stone from my big island. He must be persuaded to return it, and even then, he must pay a price."

"So—let me understand, now, you created this—this nowhere to hold him until someone who could make it clear to him came along?" Ford asked.

Pele puffed on her cheroot. "Yes."

"Wait, wait," Mabel said. "Lady, this is 2014! He's been here, what, two hundred years and change? If we turn him loose, won't he like crumble into bones and stuff?"

Pele laughed softly. "You do not understand my power. He will be returned to his own time, to the same day when he was first brought here. You will be released in your time, to the same moment when you were pulled into the nowhere, as Stanford Pine puts it."

"Boy, Time Baby must hate you!" Mabel said, shaking her head.

Pele shrugged and made a face. "I admit, I do occasionally make him grumpy. He is a big baby about it."

"Well, yeah!" Mabel said. "High five, sistah!"

To Dipper's surprise, Pele smacked Mabel's hand with a ringing clap. Mabel shook her stinging hand. "I like you!" she said. "You high-five as hard as me!"

Ford had pushed his spectacles up and was rubbing his eyes. "Back on track, please. So, Madame Pele, why didn't you just appear and tell him what he had to do?"

"I told him once," Pele said, blowing a smoke ring. "I do not warn twice. A man much like Cook, inquiring, intelligent, and imaginative, had to come along. One who understood taboo and how to break the spell. You're it. Sorry for the inconvenience."

"Uh, wait, sorry, uh, Madame Pele," Dipper said, "but I have to ask: What if Ford can't persuade Captain Cook to go back to Hawaii with the stone?"

"Then you and your family will simply have to stay here in nowhere and nowhen for a few centuries until the right person does come along," Pele said with a smile.

"I knew there'd be a catch!" Dipper groaned.

"We'll persuade him!" Mabel said.

"I think you may need her help," Pele said to Ford.

"Yes!" Mabel crowed. "Leave it to Mabel!"

"Then I suggest you begin . . . now! Pele said.

And like a puff of smoke dissolving in air, she vanished.

To Be Continued