Walt by Ian Stoba Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

IX
    A t long last the San Geronimo arrived in San Francisco. Walt found his familiar shipboard routine suddenly at an end. He was assaulted by the presence of a modern city. An average residential block in San Francisco contains many times as many inhabitants as the entire island of Tristan de Cunha. Walt had no idea that such a population of humans existed as he saw in his first moment off the ship’s gangplank.
    The sailors all had business to attend to ashore. They forgot about Walt in their hurry to do things and find things and sell things. Within minutes Walt found himself alone on the pier. Without noticing it, he had begun to sing along with the music in his head.
    I had spent the last several hours riding the N Judah back and forth again. At the end of the line, Embarcadero Station, I decided to get off the train and stretch my legs for a while.
    I walked down to the foot of Market Street, past the Vallaincourt Fountain and under the broken-off stubs of the Embarcadero Freeway. I turned right, walking towards the working docks instead of the hopeless tourist installations to the left.
    I had not gone very far when I saw what could have been a male human. He was shuffling around, looking very lost indeed, and quite frightened too. San Francisco has a large population of homeless people, many of whom have severe mental health problems. It is a daily event to see these people wandering around. They are a fact of life in this city.
    Two things about this person, however, attracted my attention. These are the reasons: first, he did not look at all like a street person. He was wearing several wool sweaters and knee-high rubber fisherman’s boots. He did not seem to be suffering from the privations that the homeless endure daily. Second, he was singing the Easybeats.
    I do not really