Remembrances of Future Past

By Storm

 

 

Cold, so cold. A cold so deep it burned.

 

He was starting to loose the feeling in his fingers, making holding onto the hatch cover difficult. Thoughts were starting to slow down, get sluggish. He groggily lifted his head and looked around, hoping that someone else might have escaped when the fishing boat smashed into the iceberg, but as far as he could see around him there was nothing but black water and ice, dimly illuminated by a rapidly setting sliver of a moon.

 

He let his head sink back down on the rough planking. To have come so far only to fail. To have escaped the ravenous maw of the Czar’s army only to die of exposure at sea. Part of him laughed at the irony. Well, he had asked not to die on the battlefield, so he could hardly complain about his prayers not being answered. What was it his grandmother had so often said? Be careful what you ask of God - you might actually get it.

 

He should have paid more attention. Or at least been a bit more explicit in his request.

 

He was only seventeen and he was going to die here on this damned hatch cover in the middle of the North Atlantic. He would never see America, never see a wild Indian or a buffalo. The only event of importance he would have witnessed was the change of the nineteenth century to the twentieth - but he’d only been six years old when that happened. Not old enough to really understand or participate in such a momentous event. There’d be no wife, no children to pass a legacy on to, no…

 

An odd low toned whoosh broke though his morbid thoughts. The hatch cover rocked and spun, bringing him around to see what had to be the most astonishing sight of his young life.

 

It was, he surmised after a moment of stunned surprise, a just surfaced submarine. He had heard of such craft from the crew of the fishing boat; they had spoken disparagingly of the small, crowded, smelly vessels, mockingly referring to them as ‘pig boats’. This was no pig boat, though. It’s size was far larger than anything the fishermen had mentioned and it’s streamlined shape and sooty black color were unlike anything he had ever imagined.

 

It looked like a shark - a dangerous and deadly predator. He shivered, and not from the cold.

 

A hatch clanged on the smooth rounded deck and a figure climbed out. His mouth gaped open as he realized that the gray haired figure in the Captain’s uniform was female. She carried a line with a small grappling hook on it; as the submarine eased up next to his makeshift raft, the woman hurled the line across. He managed to flop his arm across it, insuring the hook setting into the wood. Other figures joined the captain, a mix of male and female; he found himself being pulled aboard the incredible vessel and carried below. As the warmth below within enveloped him, he faded into oblivion. His last coherent thought was that the boat didn’t really smell bad at all. Odd, but not bad…

 

                                                ************

 

He drifted back to awareness to the sound of voices.

 

“Are you sure we ought to be interfering here?” asked a male voice.

 

“Any reason why we shouldn’t? It’s not our timeline after all,” answered a female voice. At least that’s what he thought was said. His grasp of English was still somewhat rudimentary, so he might be misunderstanding.

 

“Yeah,” rejoined another feminine voice. “You can see who he looks like.”

 

“But he’s not Lee Crane - or David Hedison, for that matter,” responded the male voice in protest.

 

“He wouldn’t be, not in this time period,” said the first female voice, in a reasonable tone. “But he could be an ancestor of one of them. We’ll have to find out his name to know if it’s even possible - or which one.”

 

Ancestor? He felt his brow wrinkling in puzzlement. He was only seventeen. He couldn’t possibly be anybody’s ancestor.

 

“But if he could be Lee‘s,” commented the second female voice in a thoughtful tone, “then that means Seaview might someday be possible here too.”

 

“And as we all know,” said the first female voice dryly, “Seaview looks after her own. No matter where or when.”

 

“Oh, for crying out loud,” responded the male voice in tones of exasperation, “you people are all crazy.”

 

“Of course we are, Commander. This is a boat named Seaview and most of us in the crew are Voyage fans. By definition that makes us crazy. But I might point out that you volunteered for this little experiment. And it’s my boat, so it’s my rules.”

 

He heard the sound of someone stomping out, with a hatch clanging noisily behind them. He thought about what he’d just heard and decided to sleep on it. Maybe it was all just a dream anyway.

 

                                                 *****************

 

He drifted back to awareness for a second time. Or was it the third? It seemed blurred to him. He became aware of heat on his face and opened his eyes to sunlight streaming through an open window.

 

Well. He definitely wasn’t aboard the submarine anymore. He heard the sound of a door opening and turned his face to see a nurse bustling in. She stopped short when she saw his eyes were open.

 

“Oh,” she said, “you’re finally awake.” She leaned back out the door and he heard her speaking to someone to fetch the doctor.

 

He nodded. The young woman was speaking English. “How long?” His voice sounded rusty to him.

 

“How long have you been here? A week.” She smiled as she came closer and picked up his wrist to feel for his pulse. “We were starting to wonder if you were ever going to wake up.”

 

“Where?” He was beginning to hate how creaky his voice sounded.

 

“Mercy Hospital, Providence, Rhode Island.”

 

Rhode Island. Wasn’t that on the east coast of the US? Had the submarine Seaview brought him here? “Who brought me?” he managed to croak.

 

“You washed ashore,” she told him. “A family at the beach found you and brought you in.”

 

He frowned. Found on a beach? What had happened to the Seaview? “Submarine?” he asked.

 

The girl blinked at the unexpected question, but the arrival of a tall patrician looking man who he surmised was the doctor prevented her from answering. The doctor, however, had also heard.

 

“You were on a submarine? I hadn’t heard of one being lost around here.”

 

He shook his head. “On fishing boat. Sank. Submarine rescued me.”

 

“Ah.” The doctor’s expression looked puzzled. “No one saw a submarine around.”

 

He sank back on the pillow, himself perplexed. Why wouldn’t they want to be seen? Or had it all been a fever dream?

 

No, he decided on reflection, it couldn’t have been a dream. The fishing boat had struck an iceberg in the central North Atlantic. There was no way he could have swum to the US coast. The crew of the Seaview must have had a reason they didn’t wish to be seen. He’d have to think about that.

 

“In any case, young man,” the doctor was continuing on, “we need your name.”

 

His name. His tongue suddenly seemed stuck to the roof of his mouth. Did he want to use his real Armenian name? Would they send him back if they knew where he was from? His thoughts flashed back to the names he’d heard mentioned on the submarine.

 

“David Lee Crane,” he answered his benefactors.

 

                                                     ****************

 

The old man was still tall, his step sure despite his eighty years. He stood on a pier at the New London Sub Base, waiting for his grandson’s boat to arrive. A boat named Seaview.

 

He couldn’t help the slight shake of his head. This Seaview wasn’t the same one that had rescued him so many decades before, but he had seen similarities of design between the two vessels the first time he’d ever seen a picture of this one. He still wasn’t sure where that other boat had been from, though from what he knew now an alternate universe was a distinct possibility. He sincerely hoped that the captain of that other boat had been right when she’d said “Seaview looks after her own. No matter where or when.”

 

The rumors he was hearing about his grandson Lee’s boat suggested he would need all the help he could get.