The Old Valley Road Hotel.
By Wombat. ------------------------- Any constructive comments are appreciated. I'm at 'bungala_wombat@yahoo.com.au'. ------------------------------------
Chapter 5 part 12.
------------------------------------ Part 47: Lochinvar ------------------------------------
Derek sped off through the water towards the hulk of the ship lying on the seafloor that he had discovered with his cryptoscopic sense. Scott followed him and caught up with him. He enjoyed flying through the water.
After their rapid flight across the seabed Derek dived down to the shipwreck that was his destination. The men were in complete darkness but Derek with his cryptoscopic sense could perceive everything nearby with complete clarity. Derek was literally able to see in the dark without using his eyes but by using the enhanced power of his brain.
Scott was bewildered. He understood that mastering this skill would take him a little time. It seemed very complicated.
Derek was quite sanguine. << When I teach you, you'll learn in no time flat. >>
He reached the hulk of the ship and came up to it. The ship towered over him as it rested on the ocean floor. Creatures of the deep swam in and around it.
Derek swam around to the stern and made out the ship's name. He perceived that it was the 'Lochinvar' from Southampton.
Scott switched on his luminescence. He wanted to see for himself instead of piggybacking on Derek's cryptoscopic sense. He saw the large brass letters spelling out the ship's name and home port affixed to the rusting black-painted stern. Orange and yellow marine growths were accreting on the hull in many places.
Scott saw the ship's great rudder and two large brass propellers that were relatively free of marine growths. The propulsion gear was partially buried in the silt.
Derek sent out a message on the telepathic net interconnecting his friends and many other people around the world saying that he had found the 'Lochinvar' and asking for information about the ship.
He sensed a ripple of excitement emanating from England.
<< The 'Lochinvar' has been found in the Indian Ocean. >>
A group of Englishmen made ready to join Derek and Scott at the shipwreck. They were very interested in Derek's find.
Derek and Scott swam around the ship. Scott was impressed by its dark bulk. However, he realised that it was not as big as the cruise liners he had seen docked in Sydney Harbour. It was an average sized ship.
Derek's cryptoscopic sense had a greater range than Scott's sight. He could perceive more.
The steamship had two funnels. The forward funnel had been knocked over by some force but was still attached to the top deck. They saw that a number of windows had been smashed. The bridge had every one of its windows broken. The same had happened to the windows of the upper decks. Scott wondered what could have done it.
The ship's masts had also been broken.
Scott swam to the bridge. The open door hung loose on its hinges. Glowing brightly, he swam inside. He saw the big steering wheel covered with marine growths. He saw the brass compass binnacle and peered inside. A surprised fish hurriedly swam out and disappeared through a broken window into the inky blackness outside. The compass inside was still visible. The needle still pointed north.
Scott saw the brass engine room telegraph that looked very old- fashioned. Around the bridge were a number of very old-fashioned instruments that he did not know the function of. He was reminded of the movie 'Titanic' that he had seen a few years before.
He was aware of Derek tracking his perceptions telepathically.
Derek: << Clearly it's quite an old ship. Probably been here for years. >>
Derek sent off a request for information to the interested English supermen who were getting ready to depart. In order to join Derek and Scott at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, they had to strip naked. The supermen had to find somewhere to do it discretely. If any normal people had seen them, they would have regarded it as most odd behaviour on a cold dark December morning in Liverpool. People would have gossiped. Homosexual orgy?
Piers, one of the Englishmen, replied with some known facts. The RMS 'Lochinvar' was a steamship of 19,000 tons built in 1904 in Belfast. She used to sail from Southampton to ports in the Mediterranean Sea up to 1914. At the outbreak of World War I she was commandeered as a troop ship. She was used to ferry troops across the English Channel to France and across the Mediterranean to Egypt and Palestine. She had participated in the landing at Gallipoli in 1915. The ship had escaped damage during the war.
After the war the former owners of the 'Lochinvar' had gone bankrupt and the ship had been bought by the P&O Line. The ship was put to work servicing ports in the Indian Ocean. In April of 1922 the 'Lochinvar' set sail on a voyage from Durban in the British dominion the Union of South Africa to Bombay (now Mumbai) in British India when she had disappeared without a trace. There was absolutely nothing ever found, not even a lifebuoy. She had remained lost until Derek had discovered the wreck. No distress call was ever received. The 'Lochinvar' was still using Morse code. She had not been fitted with the then modern radio telephony equipment.
When the ship disappeared, 826 passengers and crew had gone with her. The disappearance had caused quite a stir at the time because there were some titled and wealthy passengers on board sailing first class. Among them had been the newly wed Earl and Countess of Manderton who were on their honeymoon. The Earl was the eldest son of the Duke of Finsbury and had been prominent in London's social life. The pretty young Countess had been regarded as very fortunate to marry the rich, handsome and gay young bachelor.
The ship's disappearance had occurred when the British Empire was at its height. Royal Navy ships had been detailed to join the search but nothing was ever found, not even a lifebuoy.
Piers and his first cousin Tony were especially interested because their grandmother's uncle had been one of the crew. He had been a stoker and had vanished along with all the rest of the people aboard. Their grandmother was still alive and was now a very old lady. She had loved her uncle dearly when she was a girl and still talked about him all these years later. She still missed him.
Derek looked around the outside of the ship, transmitting his perceptions to Scott and the Englishmen. The ship had come to rest almost upright on the sea bottom. The lower part of the bow was crumpled as if it had hit something. Derek was puzzled by the damage to the ship's superstructure. So were the Englishmen.
If it had hit something, why were the masts broken, the front funnel knocked over and the upper deck windows broken?
Just then the Englishmen arrived after travelling in a hypersonic arc from Liverpool. They plunged into the sea five kilometres above and dived down to meet Derek and Scott.
There were four of them, the cousins Piers and Tony and their friends Richard and Charles. They were older than Derek and Scott, all aged in their early forties. However, they did not look much older than the two young Australians. They had slimmer but muscular builds. They were around six feet tall (183 cm) and weighed between fourteen and sixteen stone (196 to 224 pounds, 90 to 100 kilograms). They all liked playing rugby but not at the professional level.
They went to explore through the ship except for Derek. He wanted to find out what caused the ship to sink.
He followed the timeline of the ship back in time to the sinking almost eighty years ago. It was a little like rewinding a videotape and following the action backwards. He sped back the eighty years until he perceived the ship sinking down through the water. It was coming down bow first. The superstructure was already damaged but the bow was not. The ship's bow hit the silty bottom and crumpled with the impact. The silt was stirred up into a big cloud that obscured vision. That did not hamper Derek's cryptoscopic sense at all. He watched as the ocean liner settled on the dark abyssal floor more or less upright. Bits fell off and landed on the ocean floor around the ship. It looked like a junkyard around the vessel.
Derek swam around through the silt-laden water and scanned the ship. He detected that there was no one left alive on board the sunken liner. If any people had been alive inside when the ship started sinking, they would have been killed by the enormous pressure of the five kilometres (three miles) of seawater above them.
Derek was still outside the timeline. He was able to look but not touch. It was like being in a three-dimensional video that he could move around in. He was in a kind of limbo outside of time. He was out of contact with the telepathic net that had enveloped him ever since he had first become telepathic. He reached out with his mind. He could perceive no one else but God, who was omnipresent. On Earth in 1922 there were a few weak telepaths, mad people and holy people. But none of them could perceive him.
The dying ocean liner was noisy as it settled on the bottom of the sea. Creaks and groans and the roar of escaping air and steam filled the water. Bubbles cascaded up to the distant surface.
Something landed softly on the ocean floor near Derek. He investigated. It was a human body. It was that of a young Indian woman dressed in a bright orange sari. She was quite dead. Other bodies landed on the seafloor around Derek. It was for a short while raining bodies. They were all dead through drowning. Derek was appalled by the scale of the tragedy despite it occurring so many years ago. So many lives were lost. There were men, women and children, European, Indian and Chinese. Derek felt that he was in some ghastly nightmarish kind of hell with the dead bodies raining down all around him in the impenetrable stygian blackness. There was nothing reasonable or practical that he could do. This tragedy occurred eighty years ago. It was all done and finished with. He could not rescue the people and bring them back to his own time. For a start, God would not allow it.
The bodies stopped coming down. Derek floated in the water. All was still not quiet yet. Noises were still coming from the sunken ocean liner. There was another noise as well, a dull distant roar that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It seemed to rise and fall. Derek could not place it.
Derek went up to the surface of the ocean and found himself in the midst of a furious storm. Mountainous waves towered around him. Their tops were being blown off by a shrieking hurricane-force wind.
He flew up out of the water and took in the tumultuous scene. A towering sea raged about him, whipped up into a fury by a fearsome shrieking wind. The air was thick with hurtling foam blown from the wave tops.
Derek realised that he was in the middle of a tropical cyclone or hurricane. The sea was huge. The wind was ferocious.
Derek went down underwater again to where the sunken liner lay. He followed the timeline backwards again to the point the 'Lochinvar' was still on the surface just before she sank. He went back up to the surface.
He saw that the ship was on her side, tipped over by the furious seas. Huge waves crashed over her. She looked like a wounded and dying whale. She was taking water fast. The forward funnel had already been broken, as were the masts. He saw the water pouring into the stricken ship through the funnels. Some of the forward hatches had been broken loose and water was pouring into the forward holds. The windows of the upper decks were already broken and water was pouring in through them. A gigantic wave crashed over the ship and dealt her deathblow. She sank beneath the waves.
Derek saw scores of people struggling futilely in the water. They had been washed off by the waves crashing over the ship. Waves would wash over them and they would disappear underwater. It took a little time after the ship had sunk before they all disappeared beneath the waves. Many were sucked under by the sinking ship.
Derek went further back in time to when the ship was still upright and intact. He saw the ship wallowing in the enormous seas. The cyclonic wind was shrieking in fury. The ship was being buffeted by huge waves and was struggling to make headway. She could not maintain her course. She had already been blown a long way off course by the hurricane-force winds.
Derek hovered invisibly above the ship. As he watched, a gigantic wave crashed over the ship's bow dislodging the hatches over the forward holds and breaking the windows of the bridge and the upper decks. More huge waves crashed over the ship. She quickly began to list as the forward holds filled with water. The bow sank low in the water leaving her more vulnerable to the huge waves. She listed further. Another gigantic wave crashed over her and broke the masts and the forward funnel. She tipped over onto her side and began taking water fast. It was only a matter of minutes before she sank.
Derek was reminded of the time when he was a small boy having a bath at home in Canberra when his father was stationed there. In his bath he had plastic boats floating in the water. Every now and then he would create a huge storm in his bathtub. He would make big waves and make all his little plastic boats fill with water and float upside down. Of course water would splash out all over the bathroom floor. The bathmat would become a sodden mess. His mother would get very cross.
Once when he was a little bit older, he filled the old Simpson washing machine they had with water and floated his fleet of plastic boats in the water. He switched on the washing machine and watched the central agitator make mountainous waves in the washing machine tub. His little boats were quickly overwhelmed and ended up floating upside down in the turbulent water. His mother heard the washing machine and came into the laundry. She was quite irritated. She turned the machine off and made him get all his little boats out. She told him that the washing machine was for washing clothes only, not anything else.
The sea before Derek was like the perfect storm he had created in his bathtub twenty years before. No, it was more like the mountainous waves in the washing machine when he had his boats floating in the water. They did not stay upright for very long. The furious and mighty ocean waves whipped up by the cyclone had similarly sank the 'Lochinvar' in quite a short time.
Derek soared up high above the cyclone into the intense sunlight of the ionosphere. He saw the wheeling circular mass of bright white clouds spread out below him. The cyclone was quite small but it was intense. He saw the small eye surrounded by whirling clouds. The winds were tremendously strong.
He fast-forwarded in time and followed the small cyclone's progress across the Indian Ocean. It came near to a few small uninhabited islands but not close enough to do any serious damage. It swung north and petered out because it came too close to the equator.
He jumped forward in time and joined Scott and the Englishmen at the wreck of the 'Lochinvar'. He arrived back just an instant after he left. The others had not even moved to start exploring the shipwreck.
He passed the information he had gathered about the sinking of the ship to the rest of the group. The Englishmen were very interested. Now the mystery of the disappearance of the 'Lochinvar' had been solved.
Piers pointed out that no one at the time knew of the existence of the cyclone or hurricane in the Indian Ocean. It was well before the age of weather satellites and modern weather forecasting techniques. The cyclone had come out of nowhere and had wreaked its destruction upon the ship with nobody else being any the wiser. The ship had listed and sunk so quickly that the radio operator did not have a chance of sending out a distress signal in Morse code. To the shipowners and the relatives of the lost, the ship had just vanished from the face of the earth. It had not. Its hulk was resting on the bottom of the Indian Ocean only about a hundred kilometres (60 miles) from Holey Dollar Island.
Piers and Tony knew that their elderly grandmother would be glad to know the fate of the 'Lochinvar' and of her uncle.
Derek swam off to where he saw the body of the young Indian woman sink to the ocean floor. The sight had made a powerful impression upon him. He came to the spot and was surprised to find the orange sari still lying upon the sea bottom not far from the shipwreck. There was no sign of the body. He knew that the deep-sea creatures would have feasted on her flesh and picked her skeleton clean in a very short time. Also after all this time her skeleton would have dissolved in the seawater. Eighty years was quite long enough.
He scouted around further. He found the abyss floor littered with boots and articles of clothing. There were no bodies. However, the clothes and boots were often arranged as if laid out for someone to put on and wear. The bodies had gone from inside them. The deep-sea creatures would have had a tremendous feast. In some cases the clothing had been disturbed by a larger creature joining the feast of human flesh.
Scott and the Englishmen followed Derek and piggybacked telepathically on Derek's cryptoscopic sense. Piers, Tony, Richard and Charles marvelled. They had heard of the cryptoscopic sense but had never met anyone with the sense so well developed as Derek's was. They were informed that Derek had been a student of Hal Wray, the Grand Master of the Order. Hal was known as a great guru or teacher. His reputation was awe-inspiring. The Englishmen felt privileged to come to know one of Hal's students.
Scott wanted to know more about the cryptoscopic sense. Derek explained that he was able to perceive the subtle vibrations emitted by all matter, even their very atoms. He had learnt to interpret the many and varied vibrational frequencies and integrate them into a meaningful whole. He could see through and past all things. He could see inside objects. He could see the internal organs of the other supermen, much to their amusement. Just earlier he had discovered that he could see right across the Indian Ocean and appreciate all its wondrous complexity. The cryptoscopic sense took a lot of skill but Derek had learnt from Hal the Master. To Derek it was like seeing without eyes. He could see with his brain.
Down in the impenetrable darkness of the ocean abyss the sense of sight was useless. The others in the group were glad to be able to use Derek's cryptoscopic sense by proxy to sense their surroundings.
Scott obliging switched on his luminescence. The scene lit up like a surreal stage set. Scott's light was bright.
Richard: << Scott, you're a light in the darkness! >>
The others laughed.
They could see the ocean bottom and the clothes and bits of wreckage scattered about. The shipwreck loomed darkly above them.
Derek kept his cryptoscopic sense on. He found it very useful.
Strange toothy fishes started gathering around Scott attracted by his light. They were like moths but much bigger.
One horrible-looking fish about a metre (3 feet) in length with long needle-sharp teeth snapped at Scott's torso and broke its teeth on his invulnerable hide. It swam off only to be attacked and eaten by other equally horrible fish. Scott was mildly irritated by the attack. The others were not very sympathetic.
Charles started teasing Scott about the enormous size of his penis that was glowing brightly in the darkness along with the rest of Scott's body.
Charles: << I never have seen such a big penis, not even on a bull elephant. Yours is absolutely huge! If I let that thing up my arse, it would surely scramble my brains. >>
The other Englishmen joined in. They laughed as they teased Scott relentlessly.
They knew that Scott had face-fucked the colossal squid earlier. They were totally amazed by his exploit.
Richard: << Thirty inches long and four and three-quarter inches thick, Scott. That cock is way too big. You'd never fuck any human being with that bloody great big pork sword. Even that huge squid found it too much to take. You rendered the poor thing senseless. >>
Charles: << Yes, you scrambled the poor thing's brains. >>
Richard: << Talk about brain-fucking. That was brain-fucking with a vengeance! >>
Tony: << You're absolutely amazing, Scott. It sounds like you went and face-fucked a kraken. It was big enough. >>
Scott: <+ Kraken? +>
Tony explained that a kraken was an enormous legendary sea monster from ancient Nordic sagas. It was said to be like a giant squid or octopus and it was the size of an island. It was reputed to wrap its huge tentacles around ships and drag them down into the ocean depths.
Charles: << You Australians! You really do love your big muscles and big dicks. Scott's dick is big enough to fuck a kraken! >>
Derek: << I'm not going to shrink any part of my body just to appease your sensitivities. >>
Tony: << You know, Scott, that huge penis of yours would never do in Italy. The Italians like their penises nice and dainty. Any dick over five inches long is considered gross there. Yours is way over the limit. Thirty inches! Well, really! >>
Scott <+ ? +>
Tony recounted the time about twenty years ago when the four friends had been staying in Marseille. They were in their early twenties then. They had gone to a burlesque or revue in the port of Marseille. Most in the rowdy audience were sailors. The show had consisted of various stripteases. The sailors loved it. The young men from England were fascinated. They stayed well back in the auditorium.
Part way through the show the mistress-of-ceremonies, a tall statuesque transvestite in exuberant drag, invited audience participation. One or two sailors got up on the stage and were subjected to amusing humiliations.
Then a Sicilian man was pushed up onto the stage by his companions. He was a short, swarthy and muscular man about five feet (152 cm) tall. He was quite good-looking. The girls on the stage tied him to a chrome pole and stripped him naked. His penis was very big. One of the girls sucked on it until it became ramrod stiff. It was huge, about nine inches (23 cm) long. It looked truly enormous on such a short man. The poor man was terribly embarrassed and ashamed of his huge penis. All through his teenage years he had been told by his relatives back home in Sicily that it was shameful to have such a big penis. Only animals had big penises, he was told.
The MC had got all this out of him while he was on stage tied naked to the pole. The MC could speak Italian and translated what the Sicilian said into French for the benefit of the audience. The Englishmen could understand him well. They were fluent in French.
Some of the girls pretended to adore the Sicilian man's cock. One of the girls sucked him off until he ejaculated his semen across the width of the stage. The audience went wild with delight.
Charles: << Yes, Scott, that monstrous penis of yours would be way too much in Italy. They'd all think you were a real animal. But no, you're a real kraken-fucker! >>
The Englishmen teased Scott merrily.
Finally Scott relented. He shrunk his penis down from thirty inches to sixteen inches. He refused to shrink it further. It was now the same size as Derek's penis.
Charles: << Oh, sweet! >>
The others laughed good-naturedly.
They started looking around inside the ship. They were particularly interested in the ship's strong-room down in a lower deck. They knew from the old records that there was five tons of gold on board from the rich gold mines of the Witwatersrand at Johannesburg. The gold was being transported to India. Not only that, but there was all the jewellery of the wealthy first class passengers.
The four Englishmen were members of The Lost Ships Society that was based in Liverpool. The two cousins Piers and Tony were members of a family that owned a marine salvage company.
They found the strong room and jumped inside. It was still sealed tight. The door was still firmly in place but the room was filled with water that had leaked in over the decades.
The gold was in a partitioned off section of the strong room. Hundreds of gold bars were scattered about untidily. They still gleamed brightly in the light emitted by Scott. Derek picked one up and hefted it. It was quite heavy for its size. It was still bright. The intervening decades had not dulled it.
<< Mind if I keep one as a souvenir? >> Derek joked.
The four Englishmen looked at one another. A cascade of thoughts flashed between them.
Piers: << Well actually, Derek, since you found the 'Lochinvar' for us with that wonderful cryptoscopic sense of yours, we think that a fifth of the proceeds of the salvage should go to you. We would never have found it otherwise and my grandmother would so glad to hear that it has been found at last. What we'll do is, now that we know exactly where the wreck is, we'll organise a proper salvage through the company and do everything properly and above board. That way we won't get too much interference from governments and we'll be able to keep our superpowers a secret. No one has to know how we found the ship. We'll just say it's top secret hush-hush new technology. >>
Derek: << That's very generous of you. >>
Piers: << It's the least we can do. You did find it after all. >>
Derek: << Thank you. >>
Tony: << All we have to do now is to arrange to come and get it. >>
Scott: << Jeepers! How much is all this going to be worth? Heaps, I reckon. >>
Piers: << You're right there, Scott. Gold's currently about 360 pounds sterling an ounce. >> Calculations started flashing through his head. << That's about 12 million pounds a ton, which makes a total of 60 million pounds. And your cut, Derek, would be about 12 million pounds, which would make it about 30 million Australian dollars. >>
Scott tried to whistle underwater but failed. He blew bubbles instead, much to the amusement of the others. He grinned.
Derek's eyes opened wide. << Like I said, that's very generous of you. >>
Piers: << Like I said, it's the least we can do. There's the jewellery on top of that too. Your cut includes a fifth of that as well. >>
Derek: <+ Thanks +>
Scott: << Derek, you're turning into a bit of a money magnet. >>
Piers: << Well, it's all in a good cause. That community you two are going to set up sounds as though it would be very useful. >>
Charles and Richard were already looking through the safe deposit boxes in the strong room. They were using their psychokinetic powers to unlock them and look inside them one by one. They had already found a substantial haul.
Derek used his cryptoscopic sense to scan the strong room. He perceived that there was a lot more jewellery and other valuables kept in the as yet unopened safe deposit boxes. The gold watches had of course long since ceased working. Their insides were all corroded. Nonetheless, the haul of valuables to be had was considerable. It was worth many millions of pounds or many more millions of dollars.
After making an inventory of the strong room contents, they all explored the rest of the ship. They split up and went their separate ways, keeping in telepathic contact. They found that all the cabins were very much disordered by the rolling of the ship in the cyclone and its final descent. Personal effects that had survived eighty years of immersion in seawater were scattered all about the cabins. All six of them felt that they were in almost hallowed territory. There were of course no bodies. The flesh had been eaten by deep-sea creatures long ago and the skeletons had dissolved in the seawater. They felt as if they were invading a tomb. Scott souvenired a few knick-knacks but put them back when Richard asked him how he was going to explain how he came by them. They gathered in the first-class dining room.
Tony: << I wonder if we could find something of Great-great-uncle Albert's to show Granny. She would be ever so pleased, particularly if we found his dog tags that he used to wear ever since he was a soldier in World War I. >>
Piers: << Super idea! Derek, do you think you could find something with that marvellous sense of yours? We'd all be most terribly grateful. >>
Derek considered. He scanned around the ship. << As it stands, I'd never find anything of his in or around the ship. It's all such a terrible jumble. What I could do is go back in time and find your Great-great-uncle Albert on board the ship and then track him through the sinking. Then I'd come back to the present and we could go to where his body was lying. We could have a look in his cabin as well. He was a stoker, you said. >>
Piers: << Yes. >>
Derek: << That would mean he would have been down in the bottom of the ship. I don't know whether he tried to escape. I won't know until I go back and have a look. >>
Tony: << You're terribly good at time-travelling, Derek. >>
Charles: << Yes, we have our very own Doctor Who. >>
Derek cracked a grin.
Piers: << Oh shut up, Charles. >>
Derek: << It would be a great help if I knew what your Great-great- uncle Albert looked like. Then I'd be able to pick him out and follow him. >>
Tony: << Would you be able to talk to him? >>
Derek: << If I dropped into that reality and forced a forking of the time-lines, I could. >>
He transmitted to the others an image of the time-line of all events leading to the present and the forking of time-lines that occurred whenever a superman actually went into a past time and interacted with people and events in it. No one can change the events in the past that would change the present and the future. A superman could only influence the future of the stub time-line that he had created when he physically went into the past. The other alternative was to go back to the past and view the events as they happened. It was like watching a movie. There was nothing one could do to influence the unfolding of events without physically going into the past time and forcing a fork of time-lines. One could only sit and watch what was essentially a three dimensional movie.
Derek: << If I did talk to him, what would I say? >>
Piers and Tony looked at one another. They did not know.
Derek: << I could say, 'Hi! I'm your friendly neighbourhood superman. I'm here to tell you that you're going to die when the ship is sunk by a cyclone, or hurricane, or whatever you call it.' The poor fellow would probably die of fright if I just popped into view in front of him like a genie. >>
Charles, Richard and Scott laughed.
Piers: << Well, on thinking about it, perhaps it would not be such a good idea to appear to him. >>
Tony: << Derek, I think we'd better leave it to your discretion. If you think it would serve any useful purpose appearing to him, then do so. Otherwise don't bother. >>
Derek: << OK then. How long was the voyage supposed to take? >>
Piers: << Ten days or thereabouts. >>
Derek: << So I've got a bit of time to play around with then. If the 'Lochinvar' went down north of Madagascar, it would have been about three days into the voyage to India. That right? >>
Piers: << That's about right. The 'Lochinvar' sailed from Durban in the late afternoon on the first day. She sent radio transmissions in Morse code giving her positions for the next two days. After then, nothing. Not a peep! Radio transmissions were always scheduled for 12 noon. That was the standard thing back then. People weren't all that worried then because the radio transmitters were pretty unreliable. Valves were always blowing and that sort of thing. Nobody was very concerned until the 'Lochinvar' didn't show up in Bombay. People didn't really start to worry until after about a week had gone past and she hadn't turned up. >>
Derek: << Anyway, what did he look like and what was his name? And how old was he? >>
Tony: << His name was Albert Roy Bennett. Bennett is my grandmother's maiden name. He was born on August the sixteenth, 1885. He was sixteen years older than Granny. >>
Piers: << The 'Lochinvar' vanished before his thirty-seventh birthday. He would have been thirty-six. >>
The two cousins looked at one another. Neither of them had a clear recollection of their great-great-uncle's features. They certainly remembered the photographs kept by their grandmother but were hazy about the details.
Derek suggested they look into their grandmother's mind telepathically and see if they could glean his likeness from her memories.
Piers and Tony did so. They found their grandmother taking her morning tea in the sunroom attempting to enjoy the feeble December sun struggling through the lowering wintry clouds. She was living with Piers' parents in Liverpool. Both Piers and his sister had married and left home.
The old lady was thinking about what a jolly good show her hundredth birthday party had been. It was back in September. It was lovely to have the whole family together. She was so pleased to receive the congratulatory telegram from Her Majesty the Queen. She treasured that.
A telepathic nudge from Piers sent her thoughts rambling in the direction of her dear Uncle Albert. She was only twenty years old when his ship vanished. What a shame it was! What a tragedy he died so young! And after all he had been through in the First World War too, being wounded and patched up and sent back into battle time and time again. It must have been absolutely ghastly being in the trenches. Uncle Albert had said very little about his experiences in the First World War. She had to use her imagination based on the published accounts. It must have been terrible. He had come back a changed man. Gone was the happy-go-lucky, gay and carefree young man she had known before the War. He was silent and moody, prone to going off on long walks by himself. He never played with her. Not like before the War when she and he often played games together. He was such fun back then. Then about two years after the War had ended, he announced that he was going to sea. He went and got himself a job as a stoker shovelling coal into the boilers for the steamships of the P&O line. It was not very romantic but he told her he would see Africa, India and the Far East. He seemed genuinely excited by the prospect. He was more animated than he had ever been since the end of the War.
She hated the War and all that it had stood for. So many of her male friends had never come back. And many of those who did were wounded or damaged in other ways. Her dear brother was killed in the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. He was only nineteen at the time, still only a boy. He went like a lamb to the slaughter, mown down by the German machine-guns.
Tony: << We're not going to get very far like this. >>
Derek was piggybacking on the two cousin's telepathic interaction with their grandmother. He popped the telepathic suggestion into the old lady's mind that she should remember her dear Uncle Albert's features. However, her old mind had difficulty focussing. She kept slipping back and forth between the time he was twenty-one and she was but a little girl and the time he was first in uniform going off to fight in the War. He looked so handsome then. She could not remember clearly what he looked like after the War. She remembered that he was dark and moody but she could remember little else about him. When she was a little girl she loved it when Uncle Albert used to toss her up into the air and catch her. Then he would whirl her around until she got quite giddy.
Tony: << The old girl seems a bit wafty this morning. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. After all, she is a hundred years old. >>
Piers: << It's probably because it's wintertime. You know how she hates the winters. >>
Derek: << We'll try something else. >>
He popped the suggestion into her mind that she should go and look at her photographs of dear Uncle Albert. She carefully got up out of her chair, picked up her walking stick and went towards her room.
"Have you finished your morning tea yet, Mater?" asked Piers' mother Janet.
"Yes, thank you, dear," replied the old lady.
Janet went into sunroom and found the teacup half full of lukewarm tea and the two biscuits half-eaten. She sighed irritably. She was finding her elderly mother-in-law rather a trial to look after. The old lady did forget things.
Piers: << Poor old Mum. She's getting a bit sick of running around after Granny. >>
The old lady was looking at the large collection of family photographs that cluttered the mantelpiece in her bedroom. She picked up a photograph of Piers and Tony in their bathers taken last summer in Majorca. They had their arms around each other's shoulders. The holiday had been such fun. Piers and Tony had grown into two very fine young men. They were both splendid specimens of manhood, big, strong, handsome and muscular and both as fit as fiddles. She loved their splendidly muscular physiques and handsome faces. She was so proud of her two grandsons.
Charles: << Well I never! The old girl is drooling over you two. >>
Piers and Tony rounded on him. << Shut up, you idiot. >> It was an underwater snarl.
Derek: << Please be quiet. I'm trying to concentrate. >>
It was quite hard for Derek to get the old lady to concentrate on looking for a photograph of Uncle Albert. Her thoughts were wandering about all over the place. It was like trying to herd cats. The old lady was not used to thinking along these lines. Derek did his best to steer her thoughts along these less-travelled pathways.
Derek: << Uncle Albert, Gertrude, Uncle Albert, please, pretty please. Just a look, please! >>
Piers: << A little frustrating? >>
Derek: << Just a tad. >>
Charles: << How did you know the old girl's name is Gertrude? >>
Derek: << I picked it up from her mind. >>
Tony: << Duh! >>
Charles ignored him.
Gertrude found a photograph taken when Uncle Albert was just sixteen, cradling her as a baby in his arms. He was so proud of his first niece. She was only about a week old then. She was born the year Queen Victoria died. Uncle Albert was such a sweet-looking boy then, she thought.
Piers: << We're getting warm. >>
She looked at several more photos of Uncle Albert. There was one she particularly liked of him and her in their tennis clothes. It was taken in the summer of 1914. He was nearly twenty-nine. She was nearly thirteen. He looked so happy then. To think that it was all blown away by the bloody, bloody horror of the First World War.
Derek steered her to looking for the last photo she possessed of Uncle Albert. She found it. It was hidden behind some of the other ones of happier times. It was not one she liked much. The sepia-tinted photograph was taken early in 1920, just before he went to sea. Under telepathic prompting from Derek, she looked searchingly at it, taking in all his features. She noted his drooping moustache, which she did not like. She observed his gaunt face and his hollow cheeks. His short dark hair was parted in the middle and slicked down with grease in the fashion of those times. Above all she looked at his dark, haunted eyes. The spark, the twinkles had quite gone from them. His eyes were now sad and dead looking.
She looked at the framed photograph for several minutes, plenty of time for Derek to gain a good impression of what Albert Bennett looked like in 1920. Then her eyes blurred with tears. She clasped the photograph to her breast and wept copiously as the grief welled up in her. Tears streamed down her face.
"Mater, are you all right? Whatever's the matter?" Piers' mother heard her mother-in-law crying and came to investigate.
She sat down on the bed next to the old lady and put her arm around her shoulders, doing her best to comfort her. After a while, the tears eased. Gertrude showed her daughter-in-law Janet the photograph that she had clasped to her breast. She was glad Janet was so understanding.
Janet looked at the photograph of Uncle Albert. She thought it was dreadful. Uncle Albert looked such a sad little man, she thought.
"Bloody hell," thought Janet to herself irritably. "The old girl's getting a bee in her bonnet about that bloody Uncle Albert of hers again. I wonder what set it off this time."
Piers and Tony looked at Derek.
Piers raised one eyebrow. << Yes, I wonder indeed. >>
He grinned. << Well, at least we now know what Uncle Albert looked like before he died. Even though Granny's going to cause Mum some grief. >>
Tony: << Poor old Aunt Janet. She's had a lot to put up with. >>
Piers: << She'll cope, like she has always done. Poor Mum. It's not been that easy for her looking after Granny. >>
Derek: << I'm sorry. I did not mean to trigger a grief reaction like that. I'll try and set things right again. >>
Piers: << Please don't be too worried. Look, Derek, you didn't know this was going to happen. Poor Mum, it's one more cross she has to bear. Look, I suppose I'd better whiz back and see what I can do to help. >>
Tony: << What can you do? >>
Piers: << Be there. Be a support to Mum. >>
Derek: << Don't worry. I can fix this. >>
With that, Derek beamed soothing mind glyphs into the old lady's mind. He assuaged her grief for her lost uncle and eased her pain. The tears ceased. Derek cleverly inserted software containing healthy mechanisms for coping with the grief into her neural pathways.
The four Englishmen watched Derek in wonder. His dexterity, cleverness, knowledge and power amazed them.
Piers: << Bless you and thank you, Derek. >>
His gratitude was heartfelt.
Derek: << Your grandmother's in pretty good shape both physically and mentally, especially considering her age. Her mind is still more or less OK. I wouldn't want to try these sorts of tricks on someone with a seriously damaged brain. I'd leave that sort of stuff to people with a lot more experience than I have. >>
Scott thought of Cave Bear.
Tony: << Well, Derek, it's a marvel you doing what you did. That's brilliant work, getting that last photo and then patching up the grief reaction. >>
His grandmother stood up and placed the photograph prominently on the mantelpiece. She adjusted the other photographs around it so that it would not be obscured.
"You know, Janet," she said to Piers' mother. "I was just thinking about Uncle Albert this morning while I was having my morning tea. I was thinking how sad he looked after the First World War. It was a terrible business. Nobody will ever know what dreadful things the poor man went through. He was a completely changed man afterwards. All the fun and spark had gone out of him. I felt I just had to find that photo taken just before he went away to sea. It was the last one ever taken of him. He looked so sad. I just had to cry. I just couldn't help it."
She looked at the photograph placed near the centre of the mantelpiece.
"Well, that's it," she said. "I've had my cry now. It's all over now. After all, he did go missing with that ship the 'Lochinvar' nearly eighty years ago. It is about time I was grown up about it. I am a hundred years old after all."
"Thank God for that!" thought Janet to herself.
Gertrude hugged her daughter-in-law.
"Thank you, Janet, for being so understanding of your mother-in-law's little foibles," she said.
"That's all right," replied Janet. "By the way, lunch's ready."
Derek: << I'll be off then. See you guys in a flash. >>
With that, Derek jumped out of the present time to the time soon after the ship had sunk. He would return to the others an instant after he left.
He hovered around the dying hulk of the 'Lochinvar' and considered what to do. He scanned the ship once again and found no one alive inside or nearby.
Derek sped backwards in time to about three hours before the 'Lochinvar' was disabled and sunk. He rose up out of the water and found the ship some distance away. Already the ship was being tossed around by the wild seas. It was already very uncomfortable for those on board. The wind was very strong.
Derek glided like a ghost into the ship searching for the stokehold. He was outside the time-line so he was not detectable by anyone.
Deep in the bowels of the ship he found the stokehold. The stokers were working extremely hard shovelling coal into the ship's boilers and keeping up a full head of steam. The furnaces were roaring infernos. The engines were set at full speed ahead. Even despite that, the ship was struggling to make headway against the storm force winds. It was all the captain could do to keep the ship's bow pointed into the huge seas. The ship was being tossed around like a cork.
The storm had come upon them without warning. They were sailing on glassy calm seas. The barometer had dropped suddenly. The next thing the ship's crew knew, the storm was upon them with shrieking storm force winds and mountainous seas.
Ghost-like, Derek glided among the stokers searching for Albert Bennett. All the stokers were stripped to the waist and their undershorts. They were clad in the minimum for decency but they were all wearing boots.
It was very hot in the stokehold. The stokers' glistening muscular bodies were dripping with sweat as they frantically shovelled coal into the boiler furnaces. Blasts of heat radiated out through the open furnace doors from the infernos inside. The athletic skill and grace of the stokers impressed Derek as they danced around on the heaving steel deck while shovelling large shovels full of coal accurately and quickly into the furnaces.
Derek was puzzled. None of the stokers looked anything like the photograph he had seen through old Gertrude's eyes. All had lean, fit and muscular bodies. None looked like the small lean man that Derek thought Albert Bennett to be. Only two of the men wore moustaches and neither of them looked even remotely like Albert. None of the men wore dog tags. Their muscular torsos were bare.
Derek considered that Albert might have been sleeping in a cabin somewhere. He glided into the crewmen's cabins in the forecastle. They slept four to six men each. There were many cabins. Derek quickly looked through them all.
All the cabins were empty. It was a case of all hands on deck, man the pumps and stoke the boilers. Derek considered how he would search for Albert's dog tags. His cryptoscopic sense did not work very well outside the time lines while he was in the in-between space. He was unable to perceive the fine details. Things seem to blur. He could not open the chests of drawers because he was like a ghost. It was as if he were in a three-dimensional movie and he could not alter the script.
Derek had no means of knowing which were the cabins the stokers slept in. He could not find out which cabin Albert would have slept in. There were many cabins for the crew. Derek was faced with the gloomy prospect of searching through the doomed ship.
There must be a better way, he thought. He asked God for Albert's mind tag but God told him to go and find it himself. Derek could solve this little puzzle all by himself. He certainly had the means to. God derived some pleasure from making his agents work through puzzles themselves.
---------------------------------- Continued in Part 48. ----------------------------------