We got more excuses than warm bodies. Part of the reason for the seminars was to convince people that the islands really existed, but we still hadn’t made believers out of them.
It took us just over a week to arrive at our estimated position for the island. We were on deck, along with most of our people, but there was nothing to look at but an empty ocean. The island wasn’t there, but we weren’t worried. Even though it was statistically the most likely place for the Western Isles to be, we had calculated that there was only about a one in twenty chance that we could see them from where we were. The islands moved, after all, with the winds and the currents.
We started in on a standard search pattern, spiraling outward from our point of origin. Besides having at least two men on lookout at all times, we had both radar and sonar going continuously as well. We’d find it.
Adam and I continued working, checking on the progress of our submarine milling robot, encouraging the negotiations on the island’s products, and generally keeping busy. The truth was that we both had first-rate cases of nerves. We each found excuses at least six times a day to go up on deck, have a look around, and see nothing but the empty sea.
Adam came to me one morning, looking excited.
“Treet! You heard the news?”
“We found the island?”
“No. That lab got back to Shirley about what Super-Hemp is made out of.”
“The chemical formula? So?” I said.
“It’s polyethylene. Super-high molecular weight polyethylene.”
“Bullshit. Polyethylene is the cheapest plastic around, and it was almost the first one invented. If it could be made that strong, somebody would have done it years ago.”
“I’m serious! Ordinary, commercial polyethylene is weak because the molecules are short, they slide against each other, and slip apart. Super-Hemp has molecules three feet long! To break it, you have to break a covalent bond, and that’s not an easy thing to do.”
I said, “It still doesn’t make sense. The molecules would have to be thousands of times longer than the cells of the plant they were formed in. How could that be?”
“So maybe they stick out a hole in the cell wall. Did I say I was a botanical cytologist? All I know is that we are dealing with a high-molecular-weight plastic.”
“Interesting, but I don’t see where it changes anything. No news on the island, huh?”
“No.”
The ship’s crew and our police, who were standing deck watch, were doing their duty in a calm, professional manner, but I had the feeling that they didn’t really expect to find anything, much less a fabulous floating island. Several times, we heard laughing from the crew’s quarters, and we were pretty sure that they were making jokes about us.
Four days later, Adam and I were still less confident. In fact, it was getting downright nervewracking. What if everybody else was right and we were wrong? People have gone crazy before. Good, sane men have had hallucinations. I had been hit on the head on three separate occasions. Could I have imagined Roxanna? Was it all just a fantasy trip indulged in by two horny, middle-aged men? These were not pleasant thoughts to dwell on.
“We’re now circling our starting point at a radius of four hundred and thirty miles,” Adam said.
“We’ve been gone from the islands for over a hundred days,” I said. “At one mile an hour, which is slow for an ocean current, that gives them time to go two thousand four hundred miles.”
“I know. And if we go on circling and searching for another hundred days, our radius will be only twenty-two hundred miles, while they could easily have gone a total of forty-eight hundred miles by then. What it adds up to is that if they want to run and hide in some other area of the ocean, we can’t catch them by searching, even though we’re twenty times faster than they are,” Adam said.
“So we have to go on the assumption that they aren’t deliberately running from us. Let’s continue using the present search pattern two more days, and see what turns up.”
“Okay. For now, I’m going to see if I remember how to do a Drunkard’s Walk analysis.”
“You do that,” I said. “I’m going down to the mess to do some empirical tests on the same problem.”
“You’re going to get drunk and then try to walk.”
“Right.”
Being drunk does not make your problems go away, but it does make enduring them seem to take less time. When the two days had gone by without incident, we went to the captain and asked him to return to our original position and to try the search pattern again, only running it clockwise this time. After all, a standard search pattern can be guaranteed to work only if the target stays in one place, and ours was obviously not doing that.
Captain Johnson agreed to follow our instructions, mentioning that we had fuel and supplies aboard for another two months. Adam prayed that it wouldn’t take that long, and I almost wished that I could do that with him.
At three the next morning, I was beating on Adam’s cabin door.
“Adam, wake up. Tell me, how would the Western Islands show up looking from a geosynchronous weather satellite?”
“We checked that out once,” he said groggily. “An area the size of the islands is just on the edge of detectability from a weather satellite. It would appear to be about the size of a single pixel. A spy satellite can read the headlines on a newspaper, but they have to be pointed at what you want to see, like the telescopes they are, and nobody much cares about this part of the ocean.”
“Right. So what we need is the raw data from several months of weather satellite observations. We look for anomalies, glitches and noise right on the edge of detectability that are close to other glitches that showed up on the previous day’s photo. When we have a string of glitches in a row, we know the position of the islands!”
By this time, Adam was fully awake.
“It’s easier than that,” he said. “We know the starting position, the date and place of our first sighting on the Concrete Canoe. We need some computer programmers, and there’s an outfit I know of in New Dehli that works cheap. Also, they’ll be awake right now.”
“But, we can’t tell them about the islands!”
“Right, but not because they’d believe us. Nobody believes us about the islands! We need a story that they will believe. How about we lost a huge drift net that got tangled up with a lot of flotsam at a certain time and place, and the ship that left it there had to run from a storm. Now we need to find it to stop it from causing further ecological damage.”
“Sounds good to me, except that it wasn’t us who were using the thing, but some bad guys we heard about,” I said.
“Good point. That way they’ll know that we were using it and want to get it back before we’re caught.”
I said, “Then you are letting them think that we committed a crime!”
“True. That way they’ll keep it quiet, since if we get arrested and our accounts are frozen by the courts, the programmers won’t get paid.”
“Adam, you have a devious mind.”
“Don’t it make you feel proud?” Adam almost slipped back into his Hamtramck accent, caught himself, and continued on in English. “Come on, let’s put in a call to New Dehli!”
* * *
Captain Johnson continued our search pattern for five more gut-wrenching days before the Indian programmers finally got back to us. They had a definite fix on the islands, and a chart showing where they had been almost every day for the last four months.
As it turned out, we had been within a hundred miles of the islands on three separate occasions since the search began, but had just missed them each time. I razzed Adam about his “God’s on my side” statements, and he didn’t even get decently mad at me.
We “wired” the programmers a check for their services, along with a nice bonus, with the understanding that they were to destroy their files on the job and tell no one about the work they’d done for us.
This they promised to do, thanking us for the prompt payment and the gratuity. We were confident that they would keep it all quiet, since they thought that they had participated in an international crime, using a drift net on the open ocean.
We changed course for the island’s present position, and our captain said that we would be there by the next afternoon.
The captain soon had the crew cleaning and polishing the ship, and our police promptly joined in. The next morning was spent cleaning ourselves, since a mostly male group can get pretty rank at sea.