Jonah Watch by Jack; Cady Read Free Book Online

find it, after chattering bursts of frenzy, nestled for no scrutable reason in a locker in the wardroom. Howard searched desperately for a lost requisition which, the following week, appeared like a flick of sorcery between unused pages of the ship's log.
    In later years while cooking at the Base, Lamp would vow that nothing had been exactly unusual, nothing exactly wrong. There had been only the feeling that gravity had slipped and time was laughing. Events, normal enough when isolated, had piled up, jumbled and tumbled together, swept back and forth like a lost net washed onto a rocky, pooling beach.
    As Lamp revealed that Pluto was conjuncting in some dismal way with Venus and the local newspaper spoke of sunspots—while reporting that the nation's president had lost another golf ball in a sand trap—Brace received a "Dear John" letter from a teenager named Mona. Glass gossiped to Howard that while on midwatch he saw Brace walk silently to the rail and drop a flat object which plunked into the dark water.
    A piece of waste materialized in a rebuilt check valve. There was a revolution in Chile. Engineman-designate Racca, with luck as bad as his bad mouth, and ashore with a deep thirst, encountered a young person named Peak's Island Sally and a subsequent dose of penicillin, both for the very first time.
    "Boys, boys. Boys, boys."
    Chief engineman Edward Snow reported aboard a day early to the consternation of a black gang still smarting with a plugged valve; the same day that Brace left the engine room, and the day when the phone on-shore connection failed for two hours, only to be discovered when a messenger arrived from the Base with a testy TWX message from First District saying that Operations was trying to make a routine call to Levere.
    "Skiddy, boys. I be double-dog-damn if it's good nor bad. Just backwards."
    The ordinarily smart-moving Indian Conally sprained an ankle and hobbled in tape like a wounded racehorse. An admiring senator spoke of proud traditions and of cutting the service's budget. The commandant sent an all-units memorandum to express the hope that each man would do his best; and cutter Abner , showing its stern, steamed toward a mess that would soon work out to be one of the biggest flukes in the history of line breaking.

Chapter 6
    Chief engineman Edward Snow was small and quick, and only a little effeminate. He leered displeasure from a raised left eyebrow instead of hollering; and he took a tough and competent black gang and made it better.
    "We'll not do it that way, lads."
    Snow moved as accurately as a dipper gull, but he looked like a trim, khaki-colored towhee. By many pounds, and two or three inches, he was easily the shortest and lightest man aboard. Even the compact Amon seemed like a lumbering two-decker bus in comparison. Snow's feet never tapped with impatience, but he caused others' feet to tap as they pondered his administration. Fallon swore that Snow had typical brown English hair and was a socialist. When Howard pointed out that Fallon had never met a brown Englishman, socialist or not, Fallon muttered curses.
    "He took down Jensen's watchstanding orders."
    "The Ark of the Covenant," Glass said. "Yids understand these things."
    "Don't make jokes. "
    Snow pulled piping and wiring diagrams from the files. In league with Fallon and electrician Wysczknowski, he traced the systems and altered the diagrams. Cutter Adrian had been replumbed and rewired so many times that the diagrams were a cat's-paw of revision. Quartermaster Chappel and yeoman Howard knew less about a drafting board than they knew about an abacus, but they began learning to draft. Revised schematics slowly began to stack up in the ship's office, and even more slowly to appear in freshly redrawn form. Chappel and Howard struggled and cursed. Adrian 's twin, cutter Abner , was at sea and equally struggling. Seaman apprentice Brace was tilted slaunchways from another encounter with Dane and—because of the lost Mona, or