NanoSteps Brainstorming 3 - And a Step to the Right

[Bob Schroeck]

November 10, 1975

Captain Ernest McSorley clutched the rail that surrounded the
pilothouse with one chilled hand as he checked his watch. Five
PM. The stranger had been hard at work on the deck below for at
least fifteen minutes now, ignoring the roaring gale and driving
rain as though they weren't there, and somehow able to keep his
balance in all but the most extreme heaving and rolling as the
ship struggled through the rough waters of Lake Superior.

The man in gray had appeared out of nowhere on a flying...
McSorley didn't know what to call it. It looked like a cross
between a motorcycle and a jet plane, and the man in gray had
ridden it out of the storm atop a blue-white glow that looked
more like lightning than the bolts that struck the churning waves
aound the ship did. "Never mind who I am," he'd said. "I can
try to help you get the last fifteen miles you need to reach
Whitefish Bay, otherwise you're going to go down."

McSorley couldn't deny that... the ship had a history of flexing
even in the best of weather, and he and the crew had been hearing
the groan of stressed metal for hours now. It was a wonder she
hadn't broken in half already. "Do it," he'd said. The man in
gray had nodded, and then parked his... vehicle just behind the
bow. McSorley had stationed himself on the narrow deck
surrounding the pilothouse, where he could look down on what the
man was doing. Despite the storm, he had no intention of letting
him just do... whatever, unwatched.

The man in gray had crawled around the thing on his hands and
knees with one glove off, and flashes of actinic light lit him
from below, like an arc welder. Where the light came from,
McSorley couldn't guess, but when the flashes stopped, the man in
gray sat up and opened up the side of the device, revealing
nothing at all that looked like any kind of engine McSorley could
recognize. He spent another fifteen minutes, punctuated by the
heaves of the deck and curtains of driving rain, doing
something to its guts.

Finally he slammed the panel shut and climbed into the thing's
seat, as if he were about to fly off again... and for a moment
McSorley feared that that was exactly what he was about to do.
But then there was an unexpected moment of calm in the midst of
the tempest, and the wind carried words, apparently spoken by the
man to himself, to McSorley's ears. He frowned as he puzzled at
what they might mean.

"Okay, time to cheat Lightfoot of a hit. Please, schooled,
don't let me fuck this up."

Then he flipped several switches on the dashboard (control
panel?) between the thing's handlebars, and it began to emit a
howl like a jet engine, loud enough to be heard over the gale and
the thunder of the storm. That blue-white light was back, only
now it was sheeting across the deck and running like tracers
along the rails.

McSorley suddenly realized the rolling of the ship had abruptly
stopped. They were still heeled over, but even as it registered
on him, the ship ever-so-slowly, ever-so-gently levelled itself
out. With as much dignity as he could muster, he dashed around
to the side of the pilothouse, where he could look down at the
churning surface of the lake -- a surface that was growing
farther away even as he watched.

Captain McSorley wouldn't've believed it had he not seen it.
Slowly, ponderously, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was rising into
the air, all thirty thousand tons of it.

Spoiler

-- "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot