Walt (4 page)

This oversight no doubt saved both Walt and the Second Mate a great deal of confusion and embarrassment. The Second Mate was saved from having to broach a difficult and personal subject. He also avoided having to explain to Walt about the nature of such diseases and how they are transmitted.

If Walt had been able to grasp the concepts involved in such a diagnosis, he would have been shocked. Walt firmly believed that he was a virgin. His one kiss with Leonore had been, so far as he knew, his most intimate contact with another member of his species.

Walt, of course, had no memory of the time that he was unconscious at the Wilkins’ residence. After he had collapsed, Mrs. Wilkins had called Leonore out of hiding to assist her in getting Walt to bed. Their motives had been, to begin with, entirely chaste.

Putting him to bed, they discovered what many had long suspected: a man’s center of sexual response is in no way connected to his processors of conscious and rational thought. For the three days he remained unconscious, he was limp in every part of his body save one.

Mrs. Wilkins and Leonore both were enchanted by the idea of a man who never interrupted them or distracted them from the things that they wanted to do, yet was continually ready to be used by them to satisfy their pleasures. They both threw themselves on him repeatedly, together and separately, in every combination and permutation their long-dormant drives could imagine.

Leonore had in fact finished with him just minutes before he awoke. Feeling Walt beginning to stir underneath her, she climbed off and ran upstairs as quickly as she could, yelling a warning to her mother as she rounded a corner.

Walt had of course been put to bed in Leonore’s bedroom, where every scrap of clothing she owned was kept. She was thus forced to hide upstairs entirely naked until Walt left the house. As may be recalled, this did not occur until many hours later when he made his clamorous dive out the window.

As it was, Walt would never find out that Leonore had been anywhere but at her Aunt’s house mending clothes. He would also never know whether any of those encounters had resulted in offspring. As it turns out, Mrs. Wilkins was pregnant with twins by Walt. Leonore was in fact sterile because she had suffered for years from an untreated case of chlamydia which she had caught from a philatelic collector of fanatical devotion who was visiting Tristan on vacation.

In any case, chlamydia was one complaint which did respond exactly as expected to antibiotic treatment. In no time at all, Walt was completely healed, without even having had the luxury of knowing the nature of his complaint.

Walt floated through his days on a sea of unawareness. There were so many things he did not know about his life; things he did not even bother to ask about. He spent afternoons in his bunk, blissfully ignorant of his surroundings.

Now, for the first time, he found himself actually listening to the Easybeats, who were continuing the endless repetition of their greatest hit inside his head. For the first time, he begen to wonder just what exactly was meant by the lyrics. He surprised himself by thinking about the music and how the different parts went together. In all, he found that he enjoyed the companionship of the music.

One night, when Walt was almost completely recovered from his bout with dysentery, an odd thing happened. For the first time in living memory he had a dream. He dreamt that he got out of his bunk. So realistic was the dream that he could feel the cold steel decking under his bare feet. He climbed the ladder leading to the main deck, wrapping his toes around the rungs for purchase.

As he walked across the deck in his dream, he felt the cold wind billowing out the pajamas that one of the sailors had given him. He climbed into the tower, the nerve center of the ship.

He saw that he was in a room filled with pictures and strange tools. He had never seen anything the least like any of the things in that room. Somehow he felt like he knew what he was doing.

He grabbed one of the pictures and started drawing. He drew lines and circles in black and in several other colors. Finally, he knew he was done.

At that moment, just as one might suspect, the lights snapped on. The sailor standing watch at that point came in to see what Walt was doing in the navigation room. The Captain was summoned.

Walt stood shivering in his ridiculous sleeping clothes. He blinked his eyes, having trouble adjusting to the light.

At last the Captain appeared, dressed in his own pair of rather ridiculous seeming pajamas. He asked Walt what he thought he was doing in a part of the ship, the only part of the ship in fact, in which he was not welcome without one of the crew.

Walt was only barely able to explain that he did not think he was there; that is, he thought he was dreaming when he went there. He fought his embarrassment, trying as hard as he possibly could to get across to these people, these strangers, that he had not done any of this on purpose. Finally he broke into continual apologies. He apologized several times to every person in the room. He apologized to most of the equipment in the room. He apologized to the ship.

The Captain tired of hearing Walt’s apologies. He glanced around the small room. His eyes landed on unfamiliar markings on the chart. He let out an exclamation as he saw what Walt had done.

Walt had computed a great circle course that took maximum advantage of prevailing winds and currents. Walt’s calculations even took into consideration the tidal effects of the phases of the moon.

It was, in short, a brilliant piece of navigation. If Nobel Prizes or Pulitzer Prizes or Academy Awards were available in navigation, Walt’s course would have swept all of them. It was the finest piece of work the Captain had ever seen. The Captain immediately tried to hire Walt on as the ship’s navigator, but Walt kept insisting that he had no idea what he had done. Among Walt’s many apologies was one that intrigued the Captain. Walt said that he had not done any of this at all, the Easybeats had done it for him.

The Captain ordered that Walt’s course be strictly followed from that moment on. He did not want to lose any of the advantages of the current moon phase, or other obscure factors which he may have missed in studying Walt’s course.

Perhaps one very important detail has been omitted from all this talk about navigation. That detail is, of course, where the course finally wound up.

Walt’s plotted trajectory for the ship intersected with land thirteen minutes south of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. By Walt’s calculations, within ten days the
San Geronimo
would arrive in San Francisco.

It may seem odd that the Captain acceded so easily to following Walt’s course. The reason for this was simple: the
San Geronimo
was bound for San Francisco anyway. Walt’s course would just bring them to their destination much faster and more efficiently.

As Walt was escorted back to his bunk, the music in his head became louder than ever.

VII

A
t this point I find myself
compelled to break into the flow of the narrative again. Since Walt is now approaching my home, and our inevitable meeting, I feel I should make some things clear.

As probably everyone has guessed by now, the transmitter I had built on top of my apartment building was playing the Easybeats twenty-four hours a day. Walt was receiving the signal from my transmitter on his fillings. The amalgam of silver and mercury used in dental fillings can make a fine radio antenna if one has the right head shape, and is exposed to the proper frequencies.

I submit here that I built the transmission unit without any thought or indication that it might one day bring a lobster fisherman to my door. I had actually built the thing in an attempt to communicate with other planets.

I had felt for some time that the reason beings from other worlds never responded to official attempts at communication was that the government always sent such stupid, boring messages. I felt the need to send a message that would be bound to attract aliens actually interested in the commonalities of culture. I felt that any race sufficiently advanced to receive messages from another world would not really be interested in an endless loop of the first hundred-thousand digits of pi. That could only be old news, a clutter of the interplanetary void. No, music, I was certain, would make for much more interesting communication.

I had long noticed the difficulty humans have in resisting good music, and had hoped that such a trait might be universal. My plan then was simple: beam a great song out into space as an invitation and wait to see who stopped by.

I submit here also that of all the creatures I imagined responding to my hail, I never dreamt of one even remotely as strange as Walt.

VIII

I
n any case, the remainder
of Walt’s journey was relatively uneventful. The members of the crew shied away from him whenever possible. Sailors are suspicious and superstitious people, and this batch was very uncomfortable with having a suddenly prodigious navigator in their midst.

Some of the crewmen thought he had been possessed. Others thought he was an agent of a foreign government, or an agent of their own shipping line sent to test them. One or two thought he might be an eccentric genius millionaire from the electronics industry who was larking on some sort of a thrill vacation.

All of the crew felt that he was not to be trusted. The Captain stopped visiting him. Even the Second Mate grew distant and cold.

Walt told himself that he did not mind. He tried to enjoy the solitude as he had in his own boat, but found that the pleasure was not forthcoming. He felt that he had been close to acceptance with these sailors; they had treated him better than anyone had ever treated him before. Now he felt a failure. Something that he had done, something he had done while he was asleep, had driven all of them away from him.

He also realized that it is possible to be somehow less alone in a small boat with no one else aboard than it is to be among others, but ignored, in a larger boat. This was a tremendously urbane lesson for any Tristanian to appreciate. Many, many people only truly appreciate this aloneness when they have left the comfort of their family and friends for the unknown excitements of a large city. Walt, of course, had left the routine and friendless discomforts of his island home for an unknown future away from Tristan.

But Walt was not entirely alone. Even when everyone else failed him, he still had the Easybeats in his head to keep him company.

Incidentally, by this time the Easybeats had taken up residence in San Francisco. They moved into the boiler room in the basement of a building on Tehama Alley, which they were able to rent very cheaply due to an enormous population of rats reluctant to share their home. The apartment, if it can be called that, was less than three blocks from my own.

They also got a job working as the night manager of the twenty-four hour pool hall underneath the Denny’s restaurant in Japantown. It might appear to an insightful observer that the Easybeats preferred to be underground.

At this time, I had no idea that the band playing on my transmitter were my new neighbors. Of course, I had no idea of Walt’s existence, either.

I spent my time much as I always had; thinking, walking around the city, playing the meager extent of my piano repertoire, drinking coffee, even writing occasionally. My roommate was off trekking somewhere in Asia, so I did not anticipate having company any time in the near future. I was soon to find out that I was wrong in that presumption.

All that, of course, will be told when the proper time has come.

Meanwhile, Walt and the others steamed steadily and highly efficiently towards San Francisco.

The Captain of the
San Geronimo
had by now turned over most of the duties of running the ship to his First and Second Mates. The Captain himself remained locked in the ship’s chart room studying Walt’s course. From days of scrutiny, the Captain was able to determine that such a course could only have been laid with knowledge of long-term trends in the Earth’s hydrologic and gravitational cycles. The Captain was no dummy. He was also intrigued by the fact that the course took them on an arc of the Earth’s surface, a Great Circle, rather than a straight linear path. He knew that such trajectories only made sense if the navigator were able to see, or imagine, the territory from above.

He was never able to deduce how Walt was able to figure this course, but, then, that had never in itself been his main intention. He was interested in reproducing Walt’s results. He knew that if he did, it would form the basis of a great revolution in navigation. He imagined, quite rightly, that such knowledge could make him an enormously wealthy man. The Captain, much like his Second Mate, felt that he genuinely wanted money and that having a great deal of it would make him very happy indeed.

As it was, he never succeeded in uncovering all the secrets of the course that had been unveiled to him. However, the bonus that the shipping company paid him for the time and fuel saved on the voyage was enough for him to start a modest fleet of his own, which he did. Through years of study and experimentation he was able to start a revolution in navigation culminating in his founding a company which made shipboard computers to assist in the tremendously complicated calculations necessary for even the simplest forms of the new method.

This company made him richer than he had ever thought to dream. Within fifteen years he owned more vessels than any person or military organization on the planet. Within twenty years, he owned eighty-five percent of all the ships on the seas. Twenty-two years, seven months and six days after Walt had drawn his fateful diagram, the Captain, then called by many the Admiral, died a horrible death in an accident so repugnant and unlikely that there was a great deal of speculation to the effect that it seemed to have been some twenty years in the planning.

In all his years of work and study he never did quite match the accuracy of Walt’s calculations, even though he had banks of computers and technical assistants helping him twenty-four hours each day. And Walt had done it without the aid of even a single scrap of scratch paper.

The problem he faced was this: the course that his calculations came up with was invariably off by a factor of up to one and seven sixteenths degrees. Over a course of hundreds or thousands of miles, this cumulative error could be quite substantial. Nonetheless, navigation by the Captain’s approximate method was such an advantage over conventional means of course-plotting that most navigators took to using the new techniques to get the ship roughly to where it was supposed to go, and then switching back to the traditional methods to bring themselves into port.

Some years after the Captain’s death, a Japanese physicist named Bruno von Gottlieb proved that the deflection was precisely equal to that which would be caused by an electromagnetic field of such strength that it could actually cause a slight warping in the localized gravity field. In the case of the
San Geronimo
, this field, in von Gottlieb’s hypothesis, would be centered at the precise location of Walt’s bunk.

Walt, of course, would never know any of this.