The Eyes of the Beholders - A. C. Crispin [16]
“Okay, I’m with you. Go on. These sailors got lost …”
“Yeah, ships used to disappear, and they had all these legends about why. Everything from sea dragons eating them to them sailing right off the edge of the ocean. They used to mark the unexplored areas on their navigational charts with the warning ‘Here Abide Monsters.’”
Gomez giggled. “And the real truth about those mysterious disappearances was that the crews just decided to mutiny and live blissful lives of leisure on a tropical isle with beautiful, scantily clad women, right?”
“Sure, lots of times. But there were places out there that were really deadly for ships. One of the deadliest was the Sargasso Sea.”
“Sargasso?”
“Sargasso is a type of thick seaweed that grows all the way up from the seabed. A ship would be sailing along, free as a bird one minute, and then the next it would get caught in a sargasso bed and come to a grinding halt. The seaweed would wrap its tendrils around the ships’ keels, and they’d be caught—trapped, so they could never break free.”
“They couldn’t cut themselves loose?”
“Those unfortunate sailors would try everything to break free—towing the ship out with longboats, cutting the weed, anything they could think of. I suppose sometimes they got out, but all too often they were caught past all hope of escape. The ships and their crews would stay there, helpless, stranded, until there was no more fresh water and food ran out. Sometimes the men would manage to survive for months on rainwater and fish they caught, but …” He shook his head, imagining what it must have been like. “Eventually, they must have gone mad and turned to can—”
He broke off abruptly, realizing how gruesome a picture he’d been painting. “Anyway, it was pretty grim. Ships would come back to port and tell tales about discovering these rotting wooden hulks with skeletons sprawled across the decks …”
Geordi saw Sonya shiver suddenly, watched her body color alter with her mood, and realized contritely that he’d really scared her. “Hey, enough spooky stories,” he said, giving himself a mental shake and her shoulder a comradely pat.
“We’d better get busy on that fuel consumption report,” he said briskly, changing the subject, “before Wesley calls again. Wes is so gung ho to impress the captain with the efficiency of his search pattern that he’s going to be down here himself, wanting to count every individual atom used for power.”
“Right, chief,” Gomez agreed, and she gave her superior officer a shaky grin. “And by the way,” she said thoughtfully as they walked over to the other side of the engineering deck, “if you ever decide you’re bored with serving on a starship, you could probably have a career as a horror writer.”
Geordi chuckled. “I’ll leave the writing to Data.”
Doctor Beverly Crusher sat before the communications screen in her office, struggling not to reveal the anger she was feeling. Her call to Thonolan Four was not going well.
“Let me get this straight, Administrator Thuvat,” she said. “You agree to accept the little girl at your facility, but only if we contact every possible relative of hers on every Andorian-colonized world and are refused? Why, that could take months!”
“Very possibly.” The administrator’s pinched blue features grew even more pinched as he pursed his thin lips. His antennae twitched with impatience. “But rules are rules. We must not overlook the slightest possibility that some of her kin may agree to take her. Possibly she may find a place in one of the less advanced agricultural colonies, where any pair of hands, no matter how handicapped, might be valued. Tell me, can the child sew? Knit? They say that”—his mouth tightened even more—”blind individuals are often clever with their fingers. Perhaps this child could be trained for some type of manual-sorting job that would not require vision …” He sighed,