: Time for survival by Smith George O George Oliver Finlay Virgil Illustrator - Science fiction; Short stories; Time travel Fiction; Mary Celeste (Brig) Fiction

@FreeBooksThu 08 Jun, 2023

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TIME FOR SURVIVAL

The storm ruined my plan.

Not by seasickness. I'd come prepared for the worst, knowing how rough it could get on a sailing ship of the Nineteenth Century. I outrode the storm easily, stowed away in the hold. Not even the breakage of some of the 1700 barrels of alcohol carried as a cargo bothered me although the stench was terrific.

But on the morning of 25 November 1872, the first mate, Albert Richardson sent the second mate, Andrew Gilling below with two of the German seamen to assay the storm damage. They found me and I was hauled aloft before Captain Briggs as a stowaway.

"How can you know so much?" he exclaimed. "How can you live as a stowaway for almost twenty days?"

I held up my chronithon contactor, knowing that now I could impress him indeed. "Captain Briggs," I said, "I am a time-travelling historian from the Twenty-Second Century." I pointed to the big red button on the top. "Until I depress this button and return to my own day and age, every morning I receive my daily ration of food and water. It's about--"

I'd timed it close. I was interrupted by the click of the chronithon as it time-transferred my daily ration. I opened the cabinet and offered a bite of twenty-second century breakfast to the captain.

The steward, Edward Head replied, "I don't rightly know, ma-am."

I turned to look. No more than fifty feet from the starboard rail was a vast barge. Upon the barge were serried rows of seats that stretched upwards and backwards for hundreds of feet. The seats were filling rapidly; ushers were escorting the spectators efficiently, vendors were selling refreshments and programs. A thrumming sound came from overhead and I looked up to watch the materialization of jetcopters and personnel carriers and even a poised spacecraft hanging in a dome above our heads.

Over the lee rail came a crew of technicians carrying the heavy Ward-Workman tridi recorders of the twenty-seventh century, and their director pulled a script from his pocket and said:

"Joe, you and Pete dislocate the binnacle and break the compass. Al, open the fore hatch and lazarette. Tony, that spring-wound chronometer is a pre-atomic clock and worth a fortune to the National Museum, put it among my personal loot, along with the sextant. You can keep the ship's register, but give the navigation books to George with my compliments. Let's see, um. Sails, jib and fore-topmast. Now toss the yawl overboard; get it out of the way. It's missing." One of his men came up and said something to him that I could not hear. "No," he replied, "It would not be more dramatic to dummy-up a half-eaten breakfast and a pan of milk warming on the stove for the baby. Too many writers tried to make it that way in the beginning. I know what's authentic."

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