“. . . so that when the captain pulls that switch on the bridge,” Ski was saying, “the whole damned ship is suddenly transformed from the dingy-gray monster you see now to a gleaming knight in shining armor. Just be wearing rubber-soled shoes when you pull that switch, though, or you’ll be spread in a thin layer over southern Texas.”
“Sounds great, Ski,” Forte said abstractedly.
His mind was elsewhere, on the troubling cloud that had appeared the week before out of Russia. Time was now a crucial factor because of Russia’s recent moves on the diplomatic front. The Millenary Celebrations were already a dead letter so far as the Texas was concerned, but a more important fate awaited it-if there was time.
“I suppose you’re pretty near to finishing up?” he said.
“I’m on schedule, if that’s what you mean. Need twenty-seven more months. The hull is completely repainted. Some of the rigging and superstructure has been treated. The rest remains to be done.”
“Any problems?”
“Not really. Of course, we can’t work topside on the scale we did below the water line. Up here we have to do a single square-meter patch at a time, under cover of darkness.”
“What would you need to finish the job in, say, six months?”
“Ten more crews like the one I’ve got. Why?”
“Just asking …”
The engine room was Forte’s next stop. Six Bureau Express three-drum oil-fired boilers had been installed when the ship was converted from coal to oil back in 1925. They provided steam for two sets of four-cylinder triple-expansion engines that, even at the time they were newly built, were inferior to the steam-turbine engines used by most European navies. But fidelity to the original, not efficiency, was what Forte desired when the renovation began. Therefore the boilers, engines, and auxiliary gear had been dismantled piece by piece and removed to the SD-1 workshops, where the machinery was cleaned, repaired, and painstakingly reconstructed.
“Looks fine,” Forte observed as he inspected the various improvements that had been wrought in the engine room. “How much time do you need to wrap it up?” he asked T. D. Roebuck, the man in charge.
“Twenty-six months. Right on schedule,” he said proudly.
“If we put the engine room repairs under forced draft, how long would it take to put her back into commission?”
Roebuck considered.
“Oh, maybe thirteen or fourteen months. Why?”
“That long?” Forte was dismayed. Various other improvements could be dispensed with, but a ship couldn’t move without engines.
“You see,” Roebuck explained, “some of the connecting rods were in such sorry shape from metal fatigue that they flunked the tests last November. We could put them back as is, but they might fail if we ever got real steam up.”
“Replace them.”
“Can’t. Spares don’t exist for these old model engines.”
“Then have them manufactured.”
“We’ve looked into that. The only plants in this country capable of turning out shafts like these are backlogged with high-priority orders for the new missile frigates the Navy is working on.”
“You’re telling me we aren’t going to get this old ship underway in under a year, no matter what?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Will.”
“Thanks, T. D. Thanks a lot.”
Forte’s mood was still sour as he sought out Lincoln Bellamy, in charge of deck and bulkhead reconditioning.
“It was more complicated than I thought it would be,” said Bellamy, when Forte asked him how the work was going. “For one thing, I had to go to your chemists for help.”
“That’s what they’re paid for. What was the hitch?”
“You’ll see. Now, take this stretch of deck. This is what I had to work with.”
Kneeling, Gwillam Forte inspected the gritty gray surface. He grimaced. If it was a sacrilege to paint gleaming white holystoned oak decks, what had hell in store for those who slapped a layer of concrete on top? He rose.
“Nastiest gunk I ever saw,” he said.
“Let’s go sit and I’ll tell you about it.”
Forte followed Bellamy to two squat, fireplug-sized iron bitts around which hawsers were looped, holding the ship immobile in the slip.
Bellamy glanced casually toward the foretop, where a lookout scanned the mist-shrouded area around the ship.
The lookout could discern no sign of life except the two men sitting on the bitts far below him. He extended his arm, thumb up.
Bellamy nodded.
A sizable section of the deck at their feet was suddenly enveloped in a flash of blinding fire so hot it singed the nylon hairs on the back of Forte’s right hand. When the smoke cleared a moment later, a neat square patch of concrete deck had vanished. In its place was pristine white holystoned planking.
“How the hell did you do that?”
Bellamy chuckled contentedly.
“You should have seen your face, Will. You looked as surprised as a senator who’s passed a lie detector test.”
“For a second I thought the Other Place had opened up and the Devil come to take me.”
“That figures, because we had one devil of a time working it out. It was easy to remove the concrete and to sand down the deck to the original bare wood. But then we somehow had to transform the whole deck from concrete to white at the same moment the hull was transformed to white. The chemists said it couldn’t be done.”
“They always say that.”
“Yeah. The hull paint, they said, ionizes and is dispersed by an electric charge. It wouldn’t work with a wood base like oak. Anyway, they couldn’t duplicate the toughness and texture of concrete.”
“So?”
“So I threatened to take the problem to an outside consultant, quoting you as authority. After that they got to work. In a couple of months, they came up with this stuff. It looks thick and it looks as if its bonded to the deck. But actually it’s several distinct layers of material. On the bottom, the holystoned deck, then on top of it a very thin vylar film. To the vylar film is bonded the top ‘concrete’ layer you see-about three-hundreths of an inch thick. When the top layer is ignited electronically, it flares up with considerable heat and flame, as you saw, but the vylar film protects the oak deck from scorching during the instant the heat and flame needs to disperse in the atmosphere.”
“And the vylar film?”
“It decomposes in the heat of the burning ‘concrete.’ An instant later it crumbles to dust. In fact it’s the vylar dust, not smoke, you saw just now. Nobody better be on deck at the time, though, or they’ll have a hot foot they’ll never recover from. . . .”
And so it went for the rest of the day. Forte inspected the main and secondary batteries, the AA batteries, radar and fire-control stations, bridge, and pilothouse. He inspected the motor launches and whale-boats and captain’s gig and admiral’s barge, and the hundreds of pieces of equipment and living and working spaces that had once accommodated two thousand men. The work had been done meticulously and with considerable imagination, and most of it was right on schedule.
In two years, at the present rate of progress, the Texas would be ready for the Texas Millenary Celebrations that Governor Traynor had recently decreed.
But if President Wynn had his way, in six months the ship would be at the bottom of the sea.
As he left the ship that rainy afternoon, Gwillam Forte still had not decided which would be its fate.
9 JANUARY 1998
“You’re said to be the best in the business.”
The four men on the other side of Forte’s private bar in the depths of SD-1 smiled deprecatingly, but nobody raised a voice in protest. They were the best. Their combined salaries of more than $1.3 million a year, five doctorates, seven columns in Who’s Who, and two Nobel Prizes attested to it. At various times in recent years, they had all occupied high government posts, and their Top Secret clearances had been one of the requisites for the consultancies Forte had offered them at fees they couldn’t refuse.
Two of them had asked for Scotch on the rocks, one a glass of California white wine, and the other for any brand of non-American beer available, which proved they were men of discernment as well as intellect. Forte poured the drinks, wiped his hands on a towel, and got right down to business: at something in excess of three thousand dollars an hour, their time was too valuable for chitchat.
“You’ve all read about the Washington Protocols?”
The four nodded.
“What do you think of them, Professor?” he asked Dr. Edward T. Curry, the oldest and most distinguished among them, a man recently retired as vice-president for research and development for one of America’s leading aerospace companies.
“My wife is the political scientist in the family. She thinks the protocols are the berries. Babbles about ‘peace in our time’ and similar nonsense.”