Coincidence - Alan May [87]
The lift line and harness dropped down beside him. He caught them, donned the harness, and signalled to the flight engineer to start the lift.
If Anika had thought she could never be any happier than she was at that moment when the helicopter touched down on the deck of the Serendipity and Luke Marzynski stepped out, she was mistaken. The following afternoon, as the cutter’s launch pulled alongside the Inspiration’s starboard with herself, the captain, and the doctor onboard, she felt she was going to burst.
There, pressed up against the railing, were the students—her students—some cheering, some clapping, some crying—many doing all three at once. And her fellow teachers! Mary stood with her arm around Sharon’s shoulders; Sharon had both hands up covering her mouth and was shaking her head in disbelief. Tom Michaels was waving his hand in circles over his head and shouting, “Whooo-ee!” And Dave! Dave was standing, just standing, tall and straight, arms at his sides, his face lit up by a lopsided grin. Anika’s heart flip-flopped at the sight.
The whole of the crew was there to greet them, too. Mac and Henry and Charlie, Matt and Sam, Jarred—every last one of them.
“All’s weel that ends weel, eh lads?” Mac said, stretching out a hand first to Luke and then Elliott. “As that Other Bard said.”
He peered at Elliott’s chin.
“Beard’s a wee bit shorter since I last saw ye, isn’t it?”
He turned to help Anika onto the deck, scooping her up in a bear hug.
“Now then, lass, how ye doin’?” he asked after a moment, holding her at arm’s length and searching her face with such sympathy that her intended “I’m doing fine” dissolved into a flood of tears.
He embraced her again, and then suddenly they were all embracing her, passing her down a line of waiting arms, relief and joy riding through the crowd on a wave of euphoria. By the time she reached the end of the line she was limp. She leaned against Dave, wanting only to crawl into her bunk and sleep for a week.
Sleep she did, but hardly for more than a couple of hours—the time it took to ready the Inspiration for towing. That was a complex process that involved tying one end of a one-inch line to a tow bar on the launch, the bitter end to the Inspiration’s capstan, paying out the line as the launch returned to the cutter, attaching the one-inch line to a three-inch hawser, which was then winched over to the Inspiration. Anika was refreshed from her nap and ready to tackle the task of evaluating the students and staff to try to gauge their fitness for continuing the journey.
The place to begin, she decided, was with her colleagues. If they weren’t up to going on with the trip, there was no point in interviewing the students. If they were, it would be valuable to have their assessments of how the kids were faring before starting the interviews. And the sooner everyone got back to the normal class routine, the better. Although the teachers had done their best to keep the kids on track with their studies, if only to provide enough distraction to ease some of the anxiety, no one had been able to concentrate very well. There was a lot of lost time to make up.
Anika called a group meeting of the teachers in the mess. Dr. Williamson would examine them individually afterward, to check for physical signs of stress.
The teachers were unanimous in their view: If at all possible, continue the voyage. Yes, certainly, the experience had been more frightening than anything any of them had ever been through— “even Dave,” Tom chuckled, “and that’s saying a lot!” Yet they had come through it, they felt, with no major psychological damage. In fact, as awful as it had admittedly been (“hugely scary,” in Sharon’s words; “like a nightmare,” in Mary’s), they all believed that they had emerged not merely unscathed but stronger and more capable than ever.
“And I really think that’s true of the kids, too,” Dave said. “They handled the whole thing incredibly well. Sure there was a lot of anxiety all around. How could there not be, with gun-wielding bad guys taking over the