On the Wheel

From his perch in the foretop of the Vlakengros, Akim could see almost straight down into the cargo well of the old tub, where half a dozen trogs were still scrambling about. Nearby stood his father and the shipmaster, Hizoor Niarefh. Akim could see the tops of their turbaned heads and the bright shafts of their lances. The trogs, black and foreshortened, were like clumsy insects. Akim blew out his breath impatiently and lifted his eyes to the horizon. Westward, above the low hills of the mainland, the sun lay behind veils of purple and gold. A faint offshore breeze roughened the water. To the east, above the ocean, one of the moons had already risen. It was the end of his watch; another day was gone, wasted. Nothing ever happened on the Vlakengros.

At last there was a stirring, a distant shout. The trogs were climbing over the rail into their catamarans. Akim waited, twitching with impatience, until a figure stepped leisurely toward the foot of the mast and began to climb.

It was his brother Ogo, who had pimples and never smiled. “Pig,” said Akim. He swung himself down the side of the lookout without waiting for Ogo to climb in; his toes caught the rope ladder and he started down. Ogo’s dark head appeared above him. “Squid!” Akim shook his fist and kept on descending.

The deck trembled faintly under his feet as he crossed toward the forecastle; the auxiliaries were on, they were under way. Smells of cooking came from the galley. Akim ran down the companionway, snatched a meat pie from the table and was out again, followed by the curses of the cooks. Eating as he went, he reached his cubby and shut the door behind him. He tossed his fire lance into the rack, pulled off turban and robe, and sank down in his chair before the viewer. Now, at last!

He remembered exactly where he had left off, but he thumbed the rewind, listened to the tape squeal for a few moments, then punched “play.” The screen lighted. There he was, Edward Robinson, opening the door at the end of the long hall. Still chewing, Akim settled lower into his chair, careful not to move his eyes a millimeter from the screen. The room was large but divided by frosted glass partitions into a jungle of smaller spaces. Behind one of these partitions, looking out through a hole in it, sat a girl with pink and white skin. Over her glossy brown hair she wore a telephone headset. Somewhere in the labyrinth behind her, close and yet invisible, a voice was raised in anger. She looked at Robinson with weary indifference. “Yes, can I help you?”

He advanced, straightening his thin shoulders, and took a folded paper out of his pocket. He unfolded it and laid it on the counter. “Central Employment sent me.”

“All right, fill this out.” She handed him a card. Along the wall to his right were straight chairs in which three young men sat. One was biting his pencil and scowling. Robinson sat down and began filling out his card. Name. Address. Sex. Age. Race (crossed out by a heavy black line). Education. Previous Employment (list your last three jobs, with dates, duties performed, and reason for leaving). Robinson made up the education, the dates, the reasons, and one of the jobs. While he was doing this, one of the other young men was called. He walked down the corridor between the glass partitions and disappeared. Robinson finished his card and gave it to the girl behind the partition, who was filing her nails. A typewriter clattered somewhere. The second young man was called. Robinson looked around, saw a copy of Time on the table beside him, and picked it up. He read an article about dynamic Eric Woolmason who at the age of forty-one was forging a new empire in Pacific Northwest public utilities. The third young man stood up suddenly and crumpled his card. His face was pink. He glanced sidelong at Robinson, then walked out. The girl at the window looked after him with a faint one-sided smile. “Well, goodbye,” she murmured.

Robinson began to read the ads in the back of the magazine. He did not think about the coming interview, but his heart was thumping and his palms were moist. At last the girl’s voice said, “Mr. Robinson.” He stood up. She pointed with her pencil. “Straight down. End of the hall.”

“All hands! All hands!” He sat up with a jerk, his heart racing. The room was dark except for the tiny lighted screen. The bellowing voice went on, “All hands to stations! All hands!”

Akim staggered out of the chair, painfully confused. He got into his robe somehow, snatched up the fire lance. Where was his turban? In the screen, a tiny Robinson was walking between the rows of frost-white partitions. He hit the “off” button angrily and lurched out of the room.

Abovedecks, searchlights and the jets of fire lances were wavering across the windy darkness. Something heavy fell to the deck and lay snapping and squealing. A half-naked sailor ran up and hit it with an axe. Akim kept on going. He could see that the foretop was crowded already—three lances were spitting up there. There was another shriek from the sky, a pause, then a splash near the bow. He ran to the quarterdeck rail and found a place between his brother Emmuz and his uncle’s cousin Hudny. A searchlight in the bow probed the sky like a skeletal finger. Something appeared in it and was gone. The beam swung, caught it again. Half a dozen lance flames spitted it. It fell, trailing oily smoke. There were more shrieks, splashes. Back toward the waist, there was a flurry of running feet, curses, shouts. Something was thrashing, tangled in the foremast shrouds. A voice screamed, “Don’t shoot, you fool! Up the mast and chop it!”

Something came whistling through the darkness under the search-beam. Akim crouched, raised his lance, fired. The flame illuminated a ferocious tusked head, a pink hairless body, leathery wings. There was a shriek and a stench, and the thing plopped down beyond him like a sack of wet meal. Someone hit it with an axe.

The noise died away. The searchlights continued to swing across the darkness. After a time, one of them picked up another bright shape, but it was far away, swinging wide around the ship, and the lance-flames missed it.

“Any more?” came a bellow from the deck.

“No, your worship,” answered a voice from the foretop.

“All right then, secure.”

Akim lingered glumly to watch the deckhands gather up the bodies and throw them over the side. Pigs were the only excitement in these latitudes; in the old days, it was said, ships had fought them for days with musket and cutlass. But now, not ten minutes since the first alarm, it was all over. A few sailors were swabbing the blood away with sea water, the rest were drifting back belowdecks.

Yawning, Akim went back to his cubby. He was tired, but too restless to go to bed. He wondered whether he was hungry and thought of going to the galley again, but it did not seem worth the effort. With a sigh, he sat in front of the viewer and switched it on.

There was Robinson, walking stiffly into a large area filled with desks cluttered with papers and typewriters. A heavy dark-haired man with black-rimmed glasses stood waiting. His white shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow. “Robinson? I’m Mr. Beverly.” At other desks, a few men glanced up, all pale, unsmiling. Beverly gave Robinson a brief, moist handshake and motioned to a chair. Robinson sat down and tried not to look self-conscious. Glancing at the card in his hand, Beverly said, “Not much experience in this line. Do you think you can handle it?”

Robinson said, “Yes, I think—well, I think I can handle it.” He crossed his legs, then uncrossed them.

Beverly nodded, pursing his lips. He reached for a magazine on the desk, pushed it an inch closer. “You’re familiar with this publication?”

The cover had a picture of a woman in a tramp’s costume smoking a cigar, and a headline, “SMOKES TEN STOGIES A DAY.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it,” Robinson answered. He tried to think of something else to say. “It’s, uh, the kind of thing you read in barbershops, isn’t it?” Beverly nodded again, slowly. His expression did not change. Robinson crossed his legs. “Your job,” Beverly said, “would involve choosing pictures for the magazine from photos like these.” He pointed to the next desk; it was covered with disorderly heaps of photographs. “Do you think you could do that?”

Robinson stared at the topmost picture, which showed a young woman in what appeared to be a circus costume. He could see the powder caked on her dimpled face, and the beads of mascara on her eyelashes. “Yes, sure. I mean, I think I could handle it.”

“Uh-huh. Okay Robinson, thanks for coming in. We’ll let you know. Go out that way, if you don’t mind.” He gave Robinson another handshake and turned away.

Robinson walked to the elevator. He knew he was not going to get the job, and even if he did get it, he would hate it. In the street, he turned west and walked against a tide of blank-eyed, gum-chewing faces. A taxi went over a manhole cover, clink-clank. Steam was rising from an excavation at the comer. The world was like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. What was the point of all these drab buildings, this dirty sky?

In his room, he made some hash and eggs and ate it, reading the Daily News and listening to the radio. Then he poured a cup of instant coffee and took it to the easy chair in the corner. On the table beside him lay a paperback book. The cover showed a half-naked redskinned young man whose smooth muscles bulged as he struck with a scimitar at a monstrous flying boar. A maiden in metal breastplates cowered behind him, and there was ship’s rigging in the background. Robinson found his place, bent the book’s spine to flatten it, and began to read.

Sometime during the night (he read), the young crewman awoke with a start. He had fallen asleep in his chair, and his legs were cramped, his neck stiff. He got up and walked back and forth the few steps the cubby allowed, but it was not enough, and he went out into the passage. The ship was silent and dark. On an impulse, he climbed the companionway and emerged under a spectral sky. The deck was awash with moonlight. Up in the foretop, there was a wink of red as the lookout lighted his pipe. That would be Rilloj, his second cousin, a heavy, black-browed man who had the same ox-like face as his father, and his uncle Zanid, and all the rest. On the whole ship there was not one of them he could talk to, not one who understood his yearnings.

Hugging himself for warmth, he walked over to the lee rail. A few stars shone above the dim horizon. Up there, somewhere, unreachable and unknown, there must be worlds of mystery, worlds where a man could live. Gigantic cities thronged with people, exotic machines, ancient wisdom. . .

And he was Akim, seventeen years old, a crewman on the Vlakengros. As he turned, he felt a queer loss of balance for an instant; the world seemed to split, and he had a glimpse of a ragged crack with grayness showing through it. Then it was gone, but it had frightened him. What could cause such a thing?

Back in his cubby, he sat down heavily in front of the screen. He would be sorry for it in a few hours, when the watch turned him out, but after all, what else was there? He turned on the machine. There was Robinson, reading in his chair. A cigarette beside him in the ashtray had burned to a long gray ash. The alarm clock read two-thirty. It was the gray turning point of the night, when the eyes are dry and the blood flows thin. Robinson yawned, read another line without interest, then shut the book and tossed it aside. He began to realize how tired he really was. He shut off the viewer, pulled his bunk down out of the wall, stripped off his robe. He got up and headed for the bathroom, unbuttoning his shirt as he went. He brushed his teeth, wound the alarm clock (but did not set it), undressed and got in between the rumpled sheets. He went to the head, made sure his door was secure, then rolled into the bunk. As he lay there between sleep and waking, the events of the day got all mixed up somehow with the story he had been viewing. Tomorrow they would be at their next port of call, and he would pick up his unemployment check. Maybe he would get a job. The ship was rolling gently. Under the edge of the blind, the neons winked red-blue, red-green, red-blue. Good night, good night. Sleep tight, don’t let the seapigs bite.