Remembrances of Future Past
By Storm
Cold, so
cold. A cold so deep it burned.
He was starting to loose the feeling in his fingers, making holding onto the
hatch cover difficult. Thoughts were starting to slow down, get sluggish. He
groggily lifted his head and looked around, hoping
that someone else might have escaped when the fishing boat smashed into the
iceberg, but as far as he could see around him there was nothing but black
water and ice, dimly illuminated by a rapidly setting sliver of a moon.
He let his head sink back
down on the rough planking. To have come so far only to fail.
To have escaped the ravenous maw of the Czar’s army only to
die of exposure at sea. Part of him laughed at the irony. Well, he had
asked not to die on the battlefield, so he could hardly complain about his
prayers not being answered. What was it his grandmother had so often said? Be
careful what you ask of God - you might actually get it.
He should have paid more
attention. Or at least been a bit more explicit in his
request.
He was only seventeen and he
was going to die here on this damned hatch cover in the middle of the North
Atlantic. He would never see America, never see a wild
Indian or a buffalo. The only event of importance he would have witnessed was
the change of the nineteenth century to the twentieth - but he’d only been six
years old when that happened. Not old enough to really understand
or participate in such a momentous event. There’d be no wife, no children to
pass a legacy on to, no…
An odd low toned whoosh broke
though his morbid thoughts. The hatch cover rocked
and spun, bringing him around to see what had to be the most astonishing sight
of his young life.
It was, he surmised after a
moment of stunned surprise, a just surfaced submarine. He had heard of such
craft from the crew of the fishing boat; they had spoken disparagingly of the
small, crowded, smelly vessels, mockingly referring to them as ‘pig boats’.
This was no pig boat, though. It’s size was far larger
than anything the fishermen had mentioned and it’s streamlined shape and sooty
black color were unlike anything he had ever imagined.
It looked like a shark - a
dangerous and deadly predator. He shivered, and not from the cold.
A hatch clanged on the smooth
rounded deck and a figure climbed out. His mouth gaped open as he realized that
the gray haired figure in the Captain’s uniform was female. She carried a line
with a small grappling hook on it; as the submarine eased up next to his
makeshift raft, the woman hurled the line across. He managed to flop his arm across it, insuring the hook setting into the
wood. Other figures joined the captain, a mix of male and female; he found
himself being pulled aboard the incredible vessel and carried below. As the
warmth below within enveloped him, he faded into oblivion. His last coherent
thought was that the boat didn’t really smell bad at all. Odd,
but not bad…
************
He drifted back to awareness
to the sound of voices.
“Are you sure we ought to be
interfering here?” asked a male voice.
“Any reason
why we shouldn’t? It’s not our
timeline after all,” answered a female voice. At least that’s what he thought
was said. His grasp of English was still somewhat rudimentary, so he might be
misunderstanding.
“Yeah,” rejoined another
feminine voice. “You can see who he looks like.”
“But he’s not Lee Crane - or
David Hedison, for that matter,” responded the male
voice in protest.
“He wouldn’t be, not in this
time period,” said the first female voice, in a reasonable tone. “But he could
be an ancestor of one of them. We’ll have to find out his name to know if it’s
even possible - or which one.”
Ancestor? He felt his brow wrinkling in puzzlement. He was only
seventeen. He couldn’t possibly be anybody’s ancestor.
“But if he could be Lee‘s,”
commented the second female voice in a thoughtful tone, “then that means Seaview
might someday be possible here too.”
“And as we all know,” said
the first female voice dryly, “Seaview looks after her own. No matter
where or when.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” responded the male voice in tones of exasperation, “you
people are all crazy.”
“Of course we are, Commander.
This is a boat named Seaview and most of us in the crew are Voyage fans.
By definition that makes us crazy. But I might point out that you
volunteered for this little experiment. And it’s my boat, so it’s my rules.”
He heard the sound of someone
stomping out, with a hatch clanging noisily behind them. He thought about what
he’d just heard and decided to sleep on it. Maybe it was all just a dream
anyway.
*****************
He drifted back to awareness
for a second time. Or was it the third? It seemed blurred to him. He became
aware of heat on his face and opened his eyes to sunlight streaming through an
open window.
Well. He definitely wasn’t
aboard the submarine anymore. He heard the sound of a door opening and turned
his face to see a nurse bustling in. She stopped short when she saw his eyes
were open.
“Oh,” she said, “you’re
finally awake.” She leaned back out the door and he heard her speaking to
someone to fetch the doctor.
He nodded. The young woman
was speaking English. “How long?” His voice sounded rusty
to him.
“How long have you been here?
A week.” She smiled as she came closer and picked up
his wrist to feel for his pulse. “We were starting to wonder if you were ever
going to wake up.”
“Where?” He was beginning to hate how creaky his voice sounded.
“Mercy
Hospital, Providence, Rhode Island.”
Rhode Island. Wasn’t that on
the east coast of the US? Had the submarine Seaview brought him here? “Who
brought me?” he managed to croak.
“You washed ashore,” she told
him. “A family at the beach found you and brought you in.”
He frowned. Found on a beach?
What had happened to the Seaview? “Submarine?” he asked.
The girl blinked at the
unexpected question, but the arrival of a tall patrician looking man who he
surmised was the doctor prevented her from answering. The doctor, however, had
also heard.
“You were on a submarine? I
hadn’t heard of one being lost around here.”
He shook his head. “On fishing boat. Sank. Submarine
rescued me.”
“Ah.” The doctor’s expression
looked puzzled. “No one saw a submarine around.”
He sank back on the pillow,
himself perplexed. Why wouldn’t they want to be seen? Or had it all been a
fever dream?
No, he decided on reflection,
it couldn’t have been a dream. The fishing boat had struck an iceberg in the
central North Atlantic. There was no way he could have swum to the US coast.
The crew of the Seaview must have had a reason they didn’t wish to be
seen. He’d have to think about that.
“In any case, young man,” the
doctor was continuing on, “we need your name.”
His name. His tongue suddenly seemed stuck to the roof of his
mouth. Did he want to use his real Armenian name? Would they send him back if
they knew where he was from? His thoughts flashed back to the names he’d heard
mentioned on the submarine.
“David Lee Crane,” he
answered his benefactors.
****************
The old man was still tall,
his step sure despite his eighty years. He stood on a pier at the New London
Sub Base, waiting for his grandson’s boat to arrive. A boat named Seaview.
He couldn’t help the slight
shake of his head. This Seaview wasn’t the same one that had rescued him
so many decades before, but he had seen similarities of design between the two
vessels the first time he’d ever seen a picture of this one. He still wasn’t
sure where that other boat had been from, though from what he knew now an
alternate universe was a distinct possibility. He sincerely hoped that the
captain of that other boat had been right when she’d said “Seaview looks
after her own. No matter where or when.”
The rumors he was hearing about his grandson Lee’s boat suggested he would need all the help he could get.