TW07 The Argonaut Affair NEW (17 page)

Delaney estimated that the gale was at least Force 9. The waves were now cresting at about 30 feet and the
Argo
was being tossed about as if it were a toy. There was no point in trying to rig some sort of sea anchor, the
Argo
was too large for such a solution to be practical. The greatest danger to the ship was not the winds, but the seas shaped by those winds.

In such conditions, the
Argo
could easily be knocked down or the waves could come aboard and pound the deck to splinters. Even with the sail down, the mast might be torn away and if the distance between the waves was less from crest to crest than twice the length of the
Argo,
the ship would come over one wave and crash into the next as if it were a solid wall. The different movements of the water at the tops and bottoms of the swells created strong turning forces on the ship, inviting the danger of a broach.

Delaney was not for heaving to. It meant giving up control. An experienced sailor, his solution ran contrary to what common sense would seem to dictate. It terrified the Argonauts and even Argus thought it was insane. Both Steiger and Delaney were grateful for the fact that the crew had tied themselves down, otherwise they might have interfered.

Instead of taking down the sail, Delaney did just the opposite. With Steiger working on deck with the aid of an improvised safety line, they ran under full sail, surfing down the waves at a twenty degree angle to the crest. The idea was to keep the ship sailing as fast as possible and to avoid allowing the sea to get dead behind them, for if the ship sailed straight down a wave, the bow would almost certainly "catch" on the next wave and the ship would flip end over end.

Riding out the storm in the open sea was far less hazardous than it would have been to take the ship close in to land. There, they would have risked running into unseen capes or sandbars or crunching on a reef due to lack of visibility. The currents close in to land in heavy weather would be completely unpredictable and there was the risk of outlying rocks and tidal bores, tidal floods which ran roaring into rivers or narrow bays in a succession of large, irregularly breaking waves that could broach the ship or hurl it up onto a reef or beach.

Delaney held the ship on course for the open sea as he and Argus leaned their combined weight on the tiller. The
Argo
rose up on the swells as if it were climbing vertical walls, then shot down the faces of the waves into the troughs between them. The Argonauts soon saw the reason why they had been directed to secure themselves, as the waves swept over the ship and forced their bodies to strain against the ropes which held them. With a modern yacht, such conditions would have been arduous enough, but with a primitive vessel like the
Argo,
it was torture.

Argus quickly assimilated Delaney's technique of running full tilt before the storm and ceased to require prompting, but after several hours of such punishment, the old shipbuilder's strength started to give out and soon he was little more than dead weight on the tiller. Suddenly Hercules appeared at Delaney's side, having fought his way back to them. He untied Argus and lowered him down, then secured him once again and took the tiller with Delaney. Together, with their hair and beards matted down and the spray stinging their muscles and threatening to blind them, they strained against the tiller and controlled the ship on its roller coaster ride up and down the swells. They fought the storm all night, sailing more by feel than by sight, for it was impossible to see well in the hurricane force winds.

By dawn, the winds started to die down and soon the sea was once more choppy and covered with whitecaps. As the sun came up, the storm moved past them and the seas grew calmer. They were out of sight of land. Argus, though still weary, took over the tiller and steered south toward shore as Hercules helped Delaney down, supporting his weight with an arm around his shoulders.

"Aren't you even tired?" asked Delaney.

"You have l-labored for m-m-much l-longer than I," said Hercules. "Sleep now."

"Right," Delaney murmured. "Wake me when we get to Colchis."

He closed his eyes and fell asleep almost immediately.

"Let him sleep," said Jason, who had recovered from Delaney's blow in plenty of time to see the worst of the storm. "He has earned his rest and my respect. We have seen Poseidon's fury unleashed and he faced it without fear. Truly, he must be in favor with the gods."

"If he were," Steiger mumbled under his breath, "he wouldn't be here."

"It is as I have always known," said Jason. "When right is on one's side, one must prevail. And we have prevailed. Titans, winged demons, clashing rocks, the fury of the sea, all have tried to stop us and we have prevailed over all. The mightiest of forces have been aligned against us and we have defeated each of them."

"Yet not without cost," said Idmon. He was staring off into the distance.

"Come, soothsayer," Theseus said, "after the fearsome foes that we have faced, what is there left to fear?"

"I cannot say," said Idmon. "My vision is not always clear. Still I perceive a danger that seems inexplicable to me. The vision seems quite strong."

"What vision, soothsayer?" Theseus said. "What danger is it that lies ahead of us?"

"One of us shall die soon," Idmon said. "I cannot see which one. Yet death seems very near. And death from a most unexpected source." He looked around at all of them, as if something in their faces would make the vision clearer. "You will think me mad," he said, "but I see that one of us shall be felled by a feather."

"We must be getting close to shore," said Jason, pointing to the south. "See? A flock of birds."

"Can you see land?" asked Theseus.

Jason shook his head. "Not yet, but it cannot be far away. It will be good to reach our destination. I am weary of the sea."

"We still have to return," said Orpheus.

"But we will not be returning empty-handed," Jason said, grinning. "We shall have the golden fleece aboard with us and a kingdom will be mine to claim when we reach home."

"What sort of birds are those, I wonder?" Argus said, looking up at the sky. "They do not look like any I have ever seen."

"It is a large flock," Mopsus said. "Perhaps they migrate."

"It is not the season," Argus said. The birds were almost overhead now and they could see how large they were, like frigate birds, with wingspans of forty inches or more. There were at least a hundred of them, flying in a V formation like migrating geese.

"See how they shine!" cried Hylas.

Indeed, the birds did appear to shine. Sunlight glinted on their feathers as they flew so that they almost seemed to give off sparks. Orpheus suddenly cried out and grabbed his shoulder. A steel shaft protruded from between his fingers, as if he had been shot with an arrow. Theseus carefully pulled it out.

"Why, it's a feather!" he said, astonished.

Something went "phfft" and thunked into Mopsus' forehead. For a moment, he stood there openmouthed with a steel feather protruding from his skull, then he fell back onto the deck, lifeless. More feathers flew down at them, embedding themselves in the deck and sticking in the mast. Hercules swore as one stuck in his leg. Another shaft struck Jason in the arm.

"Down!"
shouted Steiger. "Down on the deck! Raise your shields, everyone!"

They all crouched down on the deck, grouped together with their shields raised over their heads as the steel feathers rained down on them, beating a metallic tattoo as they struck the shields and bounced off.

The birds made a circle around the ship and came back again, loosing another deadly volley, firing their feathers like steel darts. Several of them found their way through gaps between the shields and struck a number of the Argonauts in their arms and shoulders. The birds made several more passes over the ship, then headed north, flying out to sea.

They remained beneath their shields until they were certain that the birds had gone, then they slowly lowered them. The entire deck of the ship looked like a bed of nails. Delaney pulled one of the feathers out of the wood and examined it closely.

"What strange manner of metal is this?" asked Jason, examining the feather he had pulled free from the deck. "Silver?"

Argus plucked another feather from the mast. "No, not silver," he said, puzzled. "I have never seen the like of it."

"Birds with metal feathers," Hylas said, with wonder. "How can they fly?"

"How can they shoot them as if they were arrows?" Theseus said.

As the Argonauts plucked the metal feathers free from where they had stuck in the ship, marveling at them, Delaney handed his feather to Steiger. "Take a look at this," he said in a low voice.

Andre came up beside them, also holding a feather in her hand. "It's nysteel," she said.

"Robot drones?" said Steiger, looking out in the direction the birds had taken. "Either preprogrammed or remote controlled." He looked down at the feather thoughtfully. "This could just as easily have contained an exploding warhead."

"I don't get it," said Delaney. "Why throw this kind of stuff against the Argonauts without going all the way? Why go to all this trouble to kill a few people indiscriminately?"

Steiger threw his nysteel feather overboard. "I'm fresh out of ideas. There's no rational pattern to any of this."

"Land!" shouted Orpheus, pointing to a fog enshrouded coast off the starboard bow. They could barely make out the peaks of a large mountain in the distance, looming up out of the mist.

"Caucasus," said Jason, excitedly. "The peak where Prometheus was chained. We have reached Colchis at last."

They sailed along the coast, looking for a place to anchor. As the sun went down, they discovered a small, marshy inlet. They pulled the ship in close to shore, took down the mast, lashed it to its crutch and covered the
Argo
with tall reeds that grew in profusion along the banks. Jason poured wine upon the ground, an offering to the earth and the gods of the land, then they buried Mopsus.

"Your vision proved prophetic, Idmon," Jason said. "The astrologer was indeed felled by a feather."

"I only wish I had been wrong," said Idmon, gravely. "Mine is, at times, a most unwelcome gift. I sometimes see things I wish I had not seen."

"Can you look into the future now?" asked Orpheus. "Can you see if we shall find the golden fleece in Colchis?"

Idmon closed his eyes and remained silent for a long time.

"I have the intuition that more of us will die here," he said at last. He opened his eyes. "Ask me no more.

The gods are watching us, gods who kill and gods who create life and it frightens me to be so close to them."

They camped in a thick grove of birch trees so their fires would not be seen from a distance. After the Argonauts bedded down, the temporal agents took advantage of the opportunity to hold a conference during their watch. They sat around the embers of their campfire, speaking in low voices.

"We still don't have much more of a handle on this scenario than when we started," said Steiger. "We're going to have to take what we know and improvise a plan of action. The trouble is we don't know very much."

"We know there's a temporal mission being conducted here by people from the future of this timeline,"

Andre said. "We know events aren't following our myth exactly. Maybe their version is different.

According to our version, Hercules left the voyage at Arganthus when Hylas was pulled into a lake by water nymphs and drowned, but we never stopped at Arganthus, Hylas is still alive and Hercules is still with us. There were a number of other events mentioned in the story that haven't occurred. In fact, if you eliminate everything the opposition has done to alter this scenario, what you're left with is a perfectly ordinary sea voyage. Ordinary except for the episode of the Clashing Rocks, which was undoubtedly the result of an earthquake or volcanic action, just the sort of incident that could give rise to a legend.

"We know from historical records that Theseus actually lived in our timeline. If we assume the same about the others, then we have a logical explanation for the origins of our myth. A sea voyage was made during which certain events occurred, such as the earthquake which resulted in the story of the Clashing Rocks. We saw how the story about Athena pushing the rocks out of the way so the ship could get through must have started. The figurehead broke off, struck against the rock at the same moment that it settled backwards in the water and Jason assumed that Hera moved the rock. So the name got changed.

Or maybe in this universe, it was Hera who moved the rock instead of Athena. When they returned, the Argonauts told the story of the Clashing Rocks and added some other exaggerations or they were added later as the story was passed on in the oral tradition. Eventually, the myth was recorded according to that tradition. That tells us the Argonauts returned safely from their voyage, otherwise the story would not have been started in the first place. What we've experienced so far supports that. It's like Forrester said, a mirror-image universe, but the image is slightly distorted."

"That still doesn't tell us what the opposition is up to," Steiger said. "They're restaging the events according to the myth, or their version of it. The question is, what happens when you're confronted with a temporal scenario in which the actual historical details aren't known? If there's no known historical account of the voyage, you can clock back and gather intelligence so you can verify what actually happened, separating the facts from the legend. Once you have those facts, you could then stage a temporal scenario in which the mythical elements of the story are made into the historical elements, but that brings us back to the one question we can't answer. What reason would there be for doing it? It would have to affect the original historical outcome."

"Perhaps," Delaney said. "It's possible that it would only have a minimal effect, not significant enough to disrupt temporal continuity."

"How do you figure that?" asked Steiger.

"When I was studying zen physics in RCS, we worked with some hypothetical problem modules designed to break down our notions of common sense," Delaney said. "One problem module postulated an imaginary court case involving a murder. The defendant was innocent, but was mistakenly convicted on circumstantial evidence and executed. Now suppose you clocked back and restaged the temporal scenario so that the defendant was actually guilty and the evidence was incontrovertible. You've changed the facts, but you haven't changed the outcome. History remains unchanged."