Weathermonger

II THE CHANNEL

TWENTY minutes later they came out of the fog: a soft south wind was putting a tiny lop on to the water, making it flash, million-faceted, under the sun. It heaved sleepily too, stirred by the slow remains of Atlantic rollers. England, behind them, was still lost in grayness.

Geoffrey went into the cabin and found his gold robe. The saltwater stains were leaving it mottled and blobbed, but it was still too damp to show how bad the final result would be. He took it out to spread on the cabin roof. Coming out, he noticed how much sicker the engine was sounding than when he’d started, and realized at the same time how much the spear-prick in his chest was beginning to hurt. The first aid box was in its proper locker. (“Never stint yourself for splints and bandages,

laddie. I’ve seen men die for want of a proper dressing

“What happened to Uncle Jacob, Sal?”

“The weavers killed him. They came from all over Dorset and threw stones at him, and the neighbors watched out of their windows. It was because of something he was trying to do in the big shed by the stream. Shall I help you with that?”

She wasn’t much help, not knowing how Elastoplast worked, but he managed quite a neat patch, with some analgesic cream (rather thick and crumbly with age) on the actual cut. Then he decided he ought to do something about the engine, or try to. He’d watched Uncle Jacob tinkering often enough, and done simple jobs himself, but he knew that it would have to be something pretty easy and obvious if he was going to tackle it alone. At least the tools would be there. (“No use trying to do a complicated job with a knife and fork, laddie. I’ve seen ships lost at sea for the lack of the right wrench.”) He put the engine into neutral and stopped it. When he opened the hatch a blast of scorching air weltered up at him and there was a guggle of boiling water in the cooling system.

Oil? He’d been so cock-a-hoop about finding the petrol that he’d forgotten to check the oil. Just like him to get this far and then land himself, by sheer stupidity, with a hopelessly buckled crankshaft. But the dipstick, too hot to hold without a cloth, showed reasonably clean oil up to the “Full” mark, though it smoked bluely and gave off a bitter smell of burning.

Cooling system then? Yes. There was far more water in the bilge than there should have been, and both hoses were dripping and hissing. He took off his jersey and bent down to try the intake hose. Damn! His arm seemed to come back of its own accord, like a recoiling snake, five inches of skin scorched white by the quivering metal. He rubbed in Antical and tried again more carefully. Both hoses were perished, useless.

“Is there anything for me to do, Jeff?”

“I don’t think so. Wait a sec while I look at the spare hose.”

There was a decent length of it in the locker, but this too was mostly cracked and powdery. He needed about eight good inches for the intake: the outlet could take care of itself, really, provided they didn’t mind a bit of bailing. One stretch in the middle of the spare felt not too good, and while he was reaching down to measure it against the rotten piece his eye was caught by the filter bowl under the carburetor. It was dark with little crumbly bits of brown stuff, like coffee grounds — rust off the inside of the jerricans. Much more of that and the jet would be choked. He went into the cabin and found two plastic buckets and a plastic sieve.

“Look, Sal, if you pour the petrol out of this can into those buckets through this strainer, all but a little bit, you can give the last drops a good swill round and empty it over the side. Then you can pour it back into the can through this funnel — and we’ll have some clean petrol. And keep an eye on the coast. This sun will clear the fog up in a jiffy and they’ll spot us.”

“You could make another one/’

“I dunno. I’ve a feeling that’s all there is, by way of fog, for the moment. It takes an awful lot of cold. You can’t make bricks without straw. I daresay I could make a calm.”

“They’ve got rowing boats, quite big ones. They go terribly fast. Do you really mean that you can’t remember how you make weather?”

“I can’t remember anything, Sal. It must be something to do with being hit on the head. You’ll have to explain to me what’s been going on.”

“The Changes, you mean? I don’t know much. We weren’t supposed to talk about them.”

“Well, tell me what you know later. It’s more important to get that petrol clean now. And keep a good look out.”

He went back to the perished hose. The good bit of spare would just about do. The trouble was that to get a screwdriver into the bulldog clip at the inner end involved working with his hands slap up against the scorching cylinder block. He got a towel out of the cabin, soaked it in the sea and hung it, hissing, down the side of the engine. The screw was very stiff, and before he got it to move the towel was dry and turning toast-brown in places. He soaked it again, and this time moved the screw a quarter-turn before he had to damp the cloth again. Three more goes and it was loose. The other end ought to be easy.

“Jeff, there are boats putting out.”

She was right; he could see half a dozen water beetles, just outside the mole, scratches on the surface of the blue-glass sea.

“OK, Sal, I’ll see what I can do. When you’ve finished that you might see if you can do something about the outlet hose — this thing here. I haven’t got enough spare to change it, but if you cut a piece out of one of the sou-westers in the cabin — there ought to be scissors in the galley drawer — you could bind that round and round with insulating tape — here — as tight as you can. Several layers, and then it shouldn’t do more than drip. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

He hadn’t put his jersey back on, so the robe lay next to his skin. The gold threads were full of the warmth of the sun. All round the Channel basked, like a sleeping animal, and on its skin the beetles moved towards them, murderous. They were larger now. He sat on the roof of the cabin with his chin on his knees, judging his time.

Now.

A squall, from the southwest. Airs gathered over the Atlantic, moving steadily eastward under the massaging of the high stratospheric gales, in their turn moved by the turning world, dangling behind it like streamers. The march of airs flawed and splintered on meeting the land mass of Europe, some sucked back in whirlpools, some shoved on in random eddies, funneled by invisible pressures. One here, now, crumpling the water, a fist of wind, tight, hard, cold, smashing northeast, hurling a puny fleet of beetles about in a pother of waters and broken oars and cries that carried for miles, then on, inland across the unyielding oaks of the New Forest, to shiver into eddies and die out among the Downs.

When he came to, Sally was making a neat finish to the outlet hose. She had bandaged it over and over, like the broken leg of a doll. She smelt of petrol and looked sad.

“I hope there wasn’t anyone we know,” she said. “You broke two of the boats, and the other four picked a lot of people out of the water and they all went home.”

‘‘Fine.”

“Look, Jeff, I found this in the cupboard where you got the tape from. I didn’t know you had another one.”

“That’s an ammeter. You use it for measuring electric currents. What do you mean, another one?” “Oh, but ... oh Jeff, it was your talisman — the thing they took away when they hit you on the head. They thought you couldn’t make weather without it. You wore the other one on a gold chain round your neck, and you hit me once when I touched it. You’re much nicer, now, since they tried to drown you, you know.”

“I’m sorry, Sal.”

Funny, he thought. Perhaps if you have powers that seem magical you are a bit frightened of them, and so you have to pretend to yourself that the magic isn’t in you but in something that belongs to you, a talisman. He still felt like that — superstitious, so to speak — about the gold robe. It would be interesting to try and make weather, something easy like a frosty night, without even that. Not now, though. He took the robe off and lay on the deck planks to detach the outer end of the hose and fit the new piece. The cylinder block was cool enough to touch now.

“Tell me about the Changes, Sal.”

“I really don’t know very much. They happened when I was a little girl. Everyone suddenly started hating machines and engines. No, not everyone. A lot of people went away, over the sea. They just started feeling miserable in England, I think. There are whole towns, quite empty, or that’s what they say. And after that anyone who used a machine, or even anyone who just seemed to like machines, they called a witch. And I think everyone started to become more and more old-fashioned, too. Really, that’s all I know. I’m terribly hungry; aren’t you?” “Yes, I am. Famished. Go and see if there’s any gas in the butane cylinders. I saw some tins in the larder. You could rustle up some grub while I finish this lot off.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to show me how.”

The butane hissed happily, but most of the matches in the larder were duds. Geoffrey worked almost through a whole box before he got a light, and then he panicked and dropped the match. The second box was better, and he got the cooker going. There was fresh water in the tank, quite sweet, which was another sign of how carefully he’d been servicing Quern in his forgotten-dream world. He had to show Sally how to put a saucepan on and how to open a tin. Then he went back to his engine. It took him about half an hour to fit the hose and clear the carburetor jet, and when he turned the crank it moved quite easily. He must have stopped the engine just in time, before the heat could do any real damage. It started at once when he switched the petrol on and swung it again; it sounded fine now. He turned Quern s head south. France seemed the best bet. He thought about all the people who had left England — there must have been thousands, millions of them, unable to live in a world without machines. How’d they got out? How many had died? Where had they gone?

He locked the wheel, after five minutes’ pointless guessing, and went in to see what sort of a mess Sally had made of supper. It was beef stew and butter beans, and it was delicious. They ate it out in the cockpit, with the engine churning smoothly and the first stars showing.

“Is France the right place to go, Sal? We could turn round and land somewhere else on the English coast, where they don't know us.”

“We couldn’t land in this. They’d kill us at once. France is where all the others went, Uncle Jacob said. When he found out about me drawing pictures he wanted us all to go there, but you wouldn’t. You liked being one of the richest men in Weymouth too much.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Anyway, we’re going to France now.”

“OK. I’ll go and see what charts we’ve got. I wonder if we’ve got enough fuel to go all the way to Morlaix.”

There was a message in the middle of the big^ Channel chart, written in Uncle Jacob’s backward-sloping hand on a folded piece of tissue paper. It said:

Good luck, laddie. I should have taken you and Sal south long ago, before you got hooked on this weather thing. Now I don’t think I shall last long. I’m going to try and wean these fools of burghers from their cottage industries by building them a water-driven power loom. Can’t be much harm in that, but you never know* This anti-machine thing seems a bit erratic in its effects — it’s pretty well worn off me now, but it seems just as strong as ever with most of the honest citizens of Weymouth. I can’t be the only one. It’s not sense. But everyone’s too afraid even to drop a hint to his neighbor (me too) . We’ll just have to see what happens.

One thing I’d like to do is go nosing about up on the Welsh borders, Radnor way. There’s talk about that being where the whole thing is coming from.

You’ll find a spot of cash in Cap’n Morgan’s hidey-hole.

Geoffrey went and looked in the secret drawer under his old bunk. If you felt under the mattress there was a little hook which you pulled, and that undid the catch and you could push the panel in. Uncle Jacob had made it for him to keep his spare Crunchie Bars in, but now all it held was a soft leather purse containing thirty gold sovereigns. In a fit of rage he thought of the men he’d spilt into the roaring sea with his squall, and hoped that some of the people who had stoned Uncle Jacob had been among them. Then he thought about that last trip to Brittany, in the summer holidays when he was ten, ,and decided to go to Morlaix if they possibly could. He did some sums and realized it would be a close thing: but he needn’t make up his mind until they •were on their last can of petrol.

“Time you turned in, Sal. One of us ought to be awake all the time, just in case. I’ll give you four hours’ sleep, and then you can come and be Captain while I have a snooze.”

When the time came to wake her he couldn’t, she was so deep under. And he was tired all through, so that unconsidered nooks of his body screamed at him for sleep. He cut the engine, turned off the petrol and rolled into his bunk, wondering whether .a night’s dreaming would bring back his memory of \the lost six years.