At the Midway (5 page)

Methuselah shook his head and emitted a low mucous sound.  It could have been disagreement.  Or disgust with the nickname the young man had pegged him with.  Methuselah!  Well, it was true, his face was like worn patent leather.  He could no longer hear the surf without putting his ear an inch from the shore and clambering up the shrouds was a dream he'd had long ago.  But his hands were still strong.  He would have easily squeezed tears out of the spry upstart, if only he could raise his arms high enough to grip his shoulder.  When Methuselah spoke of the past, his body filled out like a mainsail in a wester.  He had lived events Seaman Second Class Amos Macklin knew only from storybooks.  His spyglass was not rose tinted, but blue and white and raucous with roaring waves and rude women.

Seaman Second Class Amos Macklin paused to let Methuselah rest.  He nodded amiably at a group of sightseers ogling his uniform.  The whites did not know how to respond.  They looked away and walked straight ahead.

Negroes had been discouraged from attending the Jamestown Exhibition.  They were not allowed to ride the 'rolling chairs' or the Tanner Creek Trolley.  There were no separate bathrooms or fountains for coloreds.  But now that winter had chased away the largest crowds, the blacks came to see the great things Man had wrought.  Most of these structures had been raised from the muggy Virginia mists by Negro laborers.

The black sailors in the Fleet did not participate in handball, quoits, or other games that their white counterparts played during their sojourn on the James.  They did not attend the grand fetes, the balls, the jewel
-
studded ceremonies sharpened by glittering dress swords.  That was all right with them.  They did not care to play football in the muddy fields
-
-
they couldn't have afforded the deductions from their pay to replace ruined fatigues.  Nor did the black sailors think much of the food served at the grand parties.  Better vittles could be found at any of the Negro shanty towns lying outside Portsmouth and Norfolk.  Of course, white men did not know how to dance, so it would have made no sense to attend their balls, even had they been allowed on the floors of the dance pavilions.  Besides, they had no music worth dancing to.  As for their absence from the ceremonies--well, that did rankle.  But what could they say?  The consolation was too rich for the blacks to raise a protest--because, in the place were it most mattered, on the ships, all sailors were equal.  The sea and the sun bleached color from all men.  Rank was the only distinction on a fighting ship.  And Amos Macklin stood a fair chance of making Seaman First Class within the year.

Amos had met Methuselah that summer.  Fellow bachelors had urged him to join their liberty party for a bit of carousing, not to mention some trim.  But Amos was smitten by a desire for solitude.  He borrowed a skiff and rowed upriver.  He came to a large creek and turned against its current.  Cypress and gum trees crowded the banks, funneling the heat over the shallows.  Catfish and bream flicked lazily below.

He came upon a small black settlement and tied up at a rickety pier that pulsed with every small wave.  The shacks of the dreary hovel seemed like artificial caves excavated from solid forest.  Residents nodded at him as he followed a dirt lane, a glimmer of sea-envy in their eyes.  It was always good to see a black sailor decked in the natty summer whites of the Navy.  Through him, they touched the horizon.

He came to a tavern.  Though he had worked up a prodigious thirst, he could only cut the edge.  The depths of drink where a man could, with some illusory luck, find better reflections of himself would have to remain unfathomed.  Captain Oates could spot a floating red eye a league away.

The liveliest thing in the tavern was a mutt in the doorway that wagged its tail whenever children darted by.  The emptiness of the place, with its woebegone stools and crate-tables, reinforced a sense of destiny thicker than the humidity.  And when he saw eyes peering out of a dark corner, he was sure this was the demon he'd set out to meet.

But Methuselah was no demon.  His first words did not comprise an incantation, but a complaint:

"Jackies aren't worth shit, these days."

This seemed a fair enough invitation to talk.  "How's that, Methuselah?"

Constant exposure to salt spray and tradewinds had etched a convoluted chart of the major and minor sea lanes in the old man's face.  The ancient, singular sea had worked its magic into his very bones.  Every port had its bevy of crusty salts, the tar from old hemp ropes still clinging to their fingers and innumerable sea-yarns hanging from their lips.  Yet Amos had never met anyone so
saturated
with the sea.  Just went to show that experience was the man, not the experience.

Amos found he was unable to free himself of the ancient's mystifying influence.  He took Methuselah on forays into Norfolk.  Once, he managed to get him aboard the
Florida
for a closer look at the New Navy.

"Humph!  The
Tin
Navy!" he groused, unimpressed.

Amos' mates made fun of his affection.

"Found your long lost pappy?"

But the time had come for separation.  The Fleet was about to embark on a cruise that might take several years.  The old man might not be alive when Amos returned.  A mystique unique to Man, who could die with a single breath--something the ocean could never hope to do.

So he brought Methuselah out for one last sojourn by the sea.

More whites stared at them.  They could not be locals, long accustomed to the sight of blacks in naval uniform.

"Maybe they know something you don't."

"I tell you, Methuselah, you're wrong."

"Damn!" the old man made a violent gesture.  "I let you get away with that long enough.  My name's Daniel!  Daniel!  Not that it matters to you.  You're the one walking into the lion's den."

"Admiral Evans is nobody's fool.  He depends on us!"

"Oh the niggers run the navy, ahoy!  You tell me this: who's going to cook for those white boys, now the Nips been kicked off?  You oughtta jump ship now, while you got the chance."

Scandalized by the thought, Amos turned away from the ancient tempest.  The Government Pier and its great arch rose before them.  One year ago it had not existed even as a plan.  Created by the Exposition's Board of Design, it was a brief on what Americans could do when they set their chins to it.  The new sea wall extended over a mile, while the two arms of the great double pier were consummated by a majestic one hundred and fifty-foot tall arch, the largest single-span bridge in the nation.

This was the same kind of mind, the same kind of
science
, that had raised the Atlantic Fleet from keel to crow's nest at the Brooklyn Navy Yard--which was even now constructing the Panama Canal.  There was a word for this science: the United States.  It was inconceivable to Amos that his country would revert to medieval ways of thinking and acting.  Yes, most blacks lived oppressed lives, but they were Negroes... not sailors.  If the blacks in the Navy were not allowed to attend the grand reviews, they were at least equal to the whites where it most mattered: on ships at sea.  Amos had no doubt he would soon make Seaman First Class.  It was occupation, not color, that made a clan.  'Colors' was a time of day, before breakfast.  Eight bells, when the Quartermaster hoisted the flag and the band played the Star Spangled Banner.

From the Roads came the tooting and blowing of whistles and horns.

"The president's leaving," Amos observed.  "They'll be running up steaming colors on the flagship."

"Ever wonder why you got liberty?  Evans doesn't want any dark faces on deck when the big man's around."

"What's made you so bitter, Methuselah?"

"Ah, damn... I was born in the South."

On board the
Florida
, Captain Oates shook his head morosely.

"Something wrong, Captain?" his exec inquired.

"Hoist blue peter," Oates ordered absently as he watched Midshipman Davis hand Dr. Singleton his straw hat.  He had slung his hammock, and was here to stay.

On the Cliffs of Time

Two hundred and twenty-five million years ago the earliest recognizable ancestors of the Tu-nel ruled the earth.  They were the therapsids.  Mammal-like reptiles.

There were also the dicynodonts, roaming in stupendous herds that stretched the horizon.  The largest of these was the size of a rhinoceros.

But the Tu-nel originated with the cynodonts that preyed upon the herds.  Their precursor was
Cynognathus
crateronotus
, a carnivore with a dog-like visage and prominent fangs.  Although only seven feet long, by working in packs they could bring down a large herbivore with relative ease.

On the early continents no other form of life challenged the mammal-like reptiles.  Giant, primitive crocodiles patrolled the rivers.  The long and slimy reptile
Nothosaurus
clambered over sun-baked rocks.  But the broad vistas belonged to the creatures who were the forerunners of all mammals.  For one hundred and thirty million years they unknowingly shaped the master plan of the planet.  Someone from another world would have looked at their advanced metabolism, their enormous population, their variety and the sheer weight of invested evolution, and have little doubt that true mammals were on the verge of permanently conquering the land.

Then came the archosaurs.

The ensuing battle lasted thirty million years.

The defeat of the therapsids, the catastrophic faunal displacement, was final--almost.  The various mammal-like reptiles either died out or slipped into the holes and crevices of history.  For now, a mighty triumvirate of thecodontians ruled: the sluggish crocodilians, the flying pterosaurs... and the all-powerful dinosaurs.  For one hundred and forty million years the mammal-like reptiles quailed in the shadows of cold-blooded reptiles and warm-blooded dinosaurs.

Not all of the defeated therapsids remained on land.  A tiny handful took to the water.  Among them were the proto-Tu-nel.

During the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods a variety of elasmosaurs and pliosaurs swam the shallow seas in enormous reptilian schools.  They now wrought havoc amongst the creatures that would one day resemble them so closely.  The proto-Tu-nel were driven to the evolutionary wall.  They were faced with four options: they could return to the rivers, retreat to the cold polar waters where reptiles could not follow, or fight back.  They could also become extinct--extinction being an evolutionary choice.

Many millions of years later, in the Holocene Epoch, early cartographers would compile their meager information to create the first maps of the world.  Those maps showed two huge (and for the most part mysterious) continents with a sea in the middle--the Mediterranean.  It was as if they had seen the planet from space one hundred and forty million years earlier, for in the Late Jurassic, there
were
two huge (and for the most part mysterious) super-continents.  To the north was Laurasia.  To the south, Gondwanaland.  The sea in the center was the Tethys Sea and it was there that one species of Tu-nel fought the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs for oceanic domination.  This branch of the Tu-nel was wiped out in a brief but furious million years.

The polar Tu-nel never had much chance of success.  Most of the primitive fish of the period remained in the tropics and sub-tropics.  Whenever famine struck, the Tu-nel had to enter the warmer zones to find food.  More often than not, they themselves became food as they entered the domain of the aquatic reptiles.

The riverine Tu-nel remained small, archaic--and alive.  Like many of the therapsids before them, they had weaned themselves from the egg-laying habits of the amphibians and reptiles.  They gave birth to live young.  The newborns clung to their mothers' teats.

Once grown, quickness, intelligence and luck remained the keys to survival.  The early Tu-nel could slip into the water when predators approached on land or race to the beach when a great croc angled towards them.  They remained quadrupeds with webbed toes.  Their powerful diamond-shaped flippers would come later.

Eventually, catastrophe overcame the dinosaurs.  It began with a series of great ice ages.  The oceans retreated from the fertile land.  The food chain of the sea altered drastically.  The reptilian serpents began to starve.

On land, hot-blooded dinosaurs had no problem with the lower temperatures.  But when land bridges were exposed, herds that had been kept separate for geologic ages came into contact. The result was very much like that which would happen to the American Indians when the European explorers arrived.  Sometimes entire herds were destroyed by disease.  For three hundred thousand years the two dinosaur orders,
Saurischia
and
Ornithischia
, maintained a perilous hold.  Many species were wiped out.  But a few, such as the
Stegosauria
, clung tenaciously to their ancient foothold.  For all their travails, it was beginning to seem dinosaurs would survive.

Then the asteroid hit.

The weakened structure that had supported the dinosaurs and marine reptiles collapsed.