The Glory That Was

Chapter One

The Dagmar II sank into the trough of the waves, hiding all but her naked poles. As if to take advantage of the momentary shelter afforded by the crests, Knut Bulnes shouted forward, "Any sign of Antikithera?"

"What?" called Wiyem Flin.

"I said, is there any sign of Antikithera?"

Flin shook his head and picked his awkward way aft. When he reached the stern, Bulnes repeated his question.

"No," replied Flin. "But that doesn't mean anything. With this beastly rain on my glasses, I might as well be blind."

"Then go below, if you please, and see if you can pick it up on the scope. It'll soon be too dark for a viz."

Flin hesitated, looking up at the white crest of the nearest wave. He said something that Bulnes could not catch, except for the words "hippoi Poseidonos," then went below.

Bulnes, hoping that Flin would not blow the fuses again, watched his shipmate squeeze his chubby form through the cabin door. Bulnes admitted that it was something to be able to get up from an attack of seasickness that not even the latest antivertigants could cure and spout Classical Greek. On the other hand, Flin was the kind of man who thought that the right to call himself a Greek scholar made up for his other shortcomings.

Lightning flashed in the dusk. Bulnes smiled faintly. A few good ones like that, and the circuit breakers on Antikithera would go. Then, with luck, the Dagmar II could slip through before the force wall was re-established. To run into the wall while it was up would not be good for the little yawl and its crew. Nor would it be good to be picked up on the scopes of Antikithera in the act of slipping through the wall into forbidden Greece. Bulnes was gambling on the hope that the personnel of the station would be taking a relaxed view of their duties, just as he had gambled on the chance of a late spring storm.

Flin stuck his head out the cabin door and shouted, "Ten nautical or seventeen metric, on our right."

Bulnes suppressed an impulse to correct the statement to "starboard." Instead, he shouted back, "We'd better edge up to the wall. It's dark enough."

He set their course to azimuth thirty, then turned the rheostat control. The Dagmar II quivered and squatted in the water as her bow rose with the added speed. Although darkness and level-blowing rain hid Antikithera, Bulnes could see the aurora-like glow of the force wall ahead. He called down, "Watch out for those rocks!"

Flin shouted something. The pair of islets between Antikithera and her big sister Kithera ought to show up on the oscilloscope in ample time to avoid them — at least with a more competent radar-operator than Wiyem Flin.

A flash of lightning, and the light curtain dimmed for a few seconds. It would take a bigger one than that to knock out the force wall.

Flin came out and shouted, "The rocks are a good four nautical away. Going to run it?"

The light curtain loomed; Bulnes twisted the rheostat control to low speed. The Dagmar II, the wind on her port quarter, settled into a long dignified pitch with a little roll at the crest of every buck. As each wave bore her up from behind she slid forward down the slope like a surfboard, then slowed almost to a stop as the crest of the wave passed under her keel and her bowsprit poked skyward on the rear slope.

Bulnes looked speculatively at the great white crests. He didn't like the shaking-up they'd get if they hove to in that position, nor did he like the prospect of turning broadside to the swell in order to circle to kill time. Although it was hard to judge distance in the murk, he guessed the curtain to be no more than a hundred meters ahead.

Then came the granddaddy of all lightning flashes. Thunder roared, and the light curtain blinked out.

"They're out!" yelled Flin. "Why don't you ..."

Bulnes had already spun the rheostat to "Full." The Dagmar II leaped forward, wings of spray rising from her bow. Her pitching ceased as she caught up with the waves and skittered along with them.

Flin said, "I hope we get through before they ..."

"If you please," interrupted Bulnes, "go below and check the scope again."

Trust Wiyem to put the obvious into words. Of course they hoped the ship would pass through the barrier zone before the electronicians replaced the circuit breakers and the force wall built up again. They ought to be passing through the zone now.

A yelp came from Flin as a misty radiance appeared in the atmosphere around them. Bulnes, gripping his control column, shook as the spasm went through his nervous system. If he once let go, the uncontrolled jerking of his muscles would send him over the side into the black and white smother around them.

Forcing his neck to obey, Bulnes craned it far enough to see that the radiance was mostly astern. If they had been right in the middle of the zone, nothing would have saved them.

The lights went out.

The Dagmar II slowed, lost way, and lay drifting before the wind and pitching wildly. Flin's pale round face appeared dimly in the cabin door. "The motor — fuses — stopped ..."

Bulnes, blessing the caution that had led him to rig the sails against the remote possibility of power failure, felt for the button controlling the flying-jib winch. He pressed it. Nothing happened.

He shouted to Flin, "Know where the headlamps are?" Flin nodded.

"Get a couple, if you don't mind."

The cabin door closed, and the shimmer of the force field faded out astern. Flin reappeared wearing one headlamp and handed the other to Bulnes, who slipped it on over his oilskin hat. The lights cast wan beams into the dark, but with the power off they were the best source of light left.

Bulnes said, "Can you find the crank for the sail winches in the tool locker?"

"I think so."

During Flin's absence Bulnes shifted the steering control from the now useless gyro to the direct-steering wheel. When Flin came out with the crank, Bulnes said, "Kindly take the wheel. Keep the wind on our port quarter."

Bulnes took the crank and worked his way forward. He located the flying-jib winch at the base of the mainmast and inserted the crank. Not having had to hoist sail by hand power for over a year, he hoped the hand winch wouldn't be corroded.

The ship bounced beneath him. He squatted, holding the mast with one hand and the crank with the other, and heaved. The crank moved, sluggishly at first, then faster. The flying jib rose, the light gaskets that held the sail popping, and water spilling out of the folds in the canvas to blow away. The ship began to pick up way as the wind tautened the sail.

When he had hoisted both jibs, Bulnes went aft, took the wheel from Flin, tested it until he found a stable angle of bearing, and lashed it. Then he and his companion went below.

"I'm soaked," came the plaintive voice of Flin in the dark.

"What d'you expect?" snapped Bulnes. "Get out a flashlight if you please." Flin had made that same remark every time they had run into a blow.

Water sloshed under the floor boards now that the automatic bilge pump had stopped. Bulnes braced himself in the confined space to look at the power plant. With the flashlight added to the beams of the headlamps he soon saw that the case was hopeless. Leads were fused all over the place, and the heart of the system — the great barium-titanite crystal, as big as a small suitcase — had split along a dozen planes of cleavage.

"Surge from the force wall," he grunted. "Raised the interface tensions and broke the crystal all to pieces. We might as well throw this junk overboard."

Bulnes began dismantling the power plant and extracting pieces of the crystal that had powered it. The motor, at least, seemed intact. With a new crystal and some repairs to the wiring, Dagmar II would again move under power.

Flin said, "Why didn't you get a spare crystal when we stopped at Marseilles for a recharge?"

Bulnes smoldered. "My dear comrade, where would you store a spare crystal in here? Go on forward and hit the sack, if you please. I'll tend to this."

"Really, I must say you don't take these things well. It's not my fault your ruddy crystal broke down."

"Oh, yes? Whose idea was this trip anyway?"

"You should have foreseen ..."

"I warned you there were risks, my dear sir. And whose wife are we hunting?"

"Mine of course. But don't try to make out that it's all on my account. You were as keen to go as I, in hope of getting a story for your magazine."

"Oh, well," said Bulnes, trying to turn off the acrimony, "I only hope that if we do find Thalia, you'll think she was worth it. Some of my old married friends would be only too glad to have the Emperor's agents kidnap their wives."

"You don't understand these things, Knut. Being a mere selfish bachelor — ouch!"

"Hit your head again?"

"Yes, dash it."

Bulnes smiled. "Where'd you put the booklet of radar instructions? I saw you looking through it today."

"Oh, I don't know — there it is on the floor."

"You mean the deck. Damn it, I wish you'd be so exceedingly kind as to put things back where they belong!"

"Sorry. What have you got in mind?"

"To run the radar from the hand-crank generator. It has an attachment, though I've never used it."

Bulnes thumbed through the waterproof instruction booklet by the light of his headlamp. Since a man lacked the strength in his arms to power the transmitting side of the radar circuit, one had to connect up the bank of condensers (C, D, E in Diagram 4) to the output, charge the condensers with the hand crank, switch the hand generator over to the scope circuit, and then close the switch (L in Diagram 6) that discharged the condenser bank through ...

"Knut," came the voice of Wiyem Flin.

"Yes? I thought you were asleep."

"I'm not sleepy. I was just thinking about wives and marriage and things."

"Well?"

"Look here, old man, why don't you and Dagmar do it? Thalia was telling me Dagmar told her she'd.be glad ..."

"Caramba!" shouted Bulnes. "My dear man, my relations with Miss Mekrei are my own damned business! When I want advice on subjects like that, I'll go to a regular psycher. Now kindly shut up and let me work."

"Oh, very well, but you needn't be so blasted touchy."

Still fuming, Bulnes screwed his last connection home. Touchy! Knut Bulnes considered himself, with reason, an even-tempered and self-controlled man, but after two weeks of Wiyem Flin, plus the strain of running the force wall, with God only knew what penalties awaiting him, and on top of that to have Flin offering unsolicited advice about Dagmar ...

He spun the hand crank. When the generator whined, he flipped the switch. The scope sprang into light, as if a brushful of luminous paint had been swirled against its surface. Bulnes strained his eyes upon the little glass disk to catch every detail before the picture faded. The disk sparkled with sea return, through which he could make out Antikithera well to their rear. There was nothing ahead. Ashe remembered the charts, there should be nothing in the northeast quadrant within sixty nauticals. By the time they had to look for the Kiklades, it would be day.

Flin's remark still rankled. Hell, Bulnes thought, the world was getting too damned well-organized and everybody in it too well-adjusted and too thoroughly conditioned to make the best of it — at least for an anachronistic individualist like himself, Bulnes thought, smiling a little. He couldn't help a certain sympathy for that fellow in the poem, Miniver Cheevy, who

[* From Miniver Cheevy, by Edwin Arlington Robinson, copr. by Chas. Scribner's Sons.]

This new Puritanism was the fault of the last three Emperors. Though denied political power by the World Constitution, they exerted real leadership in manners and morals. Hencewhile under Kaal IV men became sport fanatics, under Serj III they affected a pallid aestheticism. And whereas under the dissolute Rodri they competed in worldliness, under the strait-laced trio ending with Vasil IX, the incumbent, they ...

"Knut."

"What now?"

"Sorry, old man. Didn't mean to tread on one of your corns. But I thought you should know — I was about to tell you that was why you weren't asked to join the Sphinx Club."

"So?" said Bulnes in a changed voice. "Interesting. I was just thinking I should have lived in the twenty-first century, when a man's private life was his own affair."

"Oh, I don't think the twenty-first century was so wonderful. For uninhibited freedom, now, take Periklean Athens. Where else could a man walk down the main street stark naked without exciting the least remark?"

"That doesn't prove them unconventional. Nudity happened to be among their conventions, like eating your parents in ancient Ireland."

"A base libel on my Irish ancestors," said Flin. "The Athenians really did pride themselves on letting people do as they pleased so long as they didn't bother other people. Read your Thucydides."

"All very fine for the citizens, but I seem to remember that most of the people of Athens were slaves."

"Still, I'd give anything to see it as it was then.'' "Well, my good friend, you'll soon see it as it is now, whatever that may mean. I wonder what Vasil Hohnsol-Romano has been up to all these years?"

"That kosker!"

"You surprise me, Wiyem. Lèse majesté, no less."

"I mean it. Lenz not only turns Greece over to him for his dashed experiments, but lets him kidnap people's wives because they happen to be Greek. I say!"

"What?" said Bulnes.

"Just remembered something that might have a bearing on the Emp's activities. I was talking to old Djounz — you know, Maksel Djounz the historian — just before we left England. It seems old Djounz knows a chap named Adler — Ogust Adler — the curator of the Dresden Museum."

"Is he the one who told you your wife had been shipped back to Greece with all the other émigré Greeks?"

"No. That was Dagmar's friend Baiker. Anyway, d'you know those caves or saltmines or whatever they are in Saxony?"

"I've heard of them."

"Some years ago, Djounz says, Adler got orders from His Majesty, down the chain of command, to store some building stone and marble — all carefully crated and numbered. Trainloads of the things, enough to build a city. Took Ogust nearly a year to store them. A couple of the crates broke in handling, and he saw the blocks and says one bore a Classical Greek inscription. It's as if the Emp had dismantled all the ancient ruins in Greece and shipped the pieces to Saxony for storage."

"Very interesting," said Bulnes. "But you'd better get some sleep, if you'll let me say so, because in a few hours I'm going to wake you up to take the con."