Chapter 2

When the Sun Jumped

“The captain wishes to see you, sir,” the sailor said.

Craig snubbed the cigarette and rose to his feet. He had eaten and drank sparingly, very sparingly indeed. They had tried to take him to the hospital bay with the others, but he had gruffly refused. There was nothing wrong with him that a little food and water wouldn’t cure.

He followed the sailor to the captain’s quarters. Unconsciously he noted the condition of the ship. She was a battleship, the Idaho, one of the new series. Craig guessed she was part of a task force scouting the south Pacific. She was well kept and well manned, he saw. The men went about their tasks with a dash that was heartwarming.

The captain was a tall man. He rose to his feet when Craig entered his quarters, smiled, and held out his hand, “I’m Captain Higgins,” he said.

Craig looked at him, blinked, then grinned. He took the out-stretched hand.

“Hi, Stinky,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Stinky!” Higgins choked. “Sir--”

“Don’t get stuffy,” Craig said, laughing.

Higgins stared at him. Little by little recognition began to dawn on the captain’s face. “Craig!” he whispered. “Winston Craig! This calls for a drink.”

“It does, indeed,” Craig answered.

Captain Higgins provided the whiskey. It was Scotch. They drank it straight.

“Where on earth have you been?” Higgins asked.

“Gold,” Craig said. “Borneo.” A frown crossed his face. “Our little brown brothers came down from the north.”

“I know,” said Higgins grimly. “They came to Pearl Harbor too, the little--. They ran you out of Borneo, eh?”

“I got out,” Craig said.

“But this life-boat you were in? What happened?”

“Jap bombers happened. They caught the ship I was on. Luckily we managed to get a few boats away--”

“I see. Where are the other boats?”

“Machine-gunned,” Craig said. “A rain squall came along and hid us so they didn’t get around to working on the boat I was in.” He shrugged. “We were ten days in that boat. I was counting the jewels in the Pearly Gates when your task force came along. But enough about me. What about you?”

Higgins shrugged. “What you can see,” he said.

Craig nodded. He could see plenty. The boy who had been known as “Stinky” in their days at Annapolis was boss of a battle wagon.

“I heard you resigned your commission within a year after we had finished at the Academy,” Higgins said.

“Yes,” Craig answered.

“Mind if I ask why?”

“Not at all. I just wanted some action and it didn’t look as if I could get it in the Navy. So--”

It was not so much what Craig said as what he left unsaid that was important. He was a graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis. He and Stinky Higgins had finished in the same class. Higgins had stayed with the Navy. Craig had not been able to endure the inactivity of belonging to a fighting organization when there was no fighting to be done. He was born with the wanderlust, with itching feet, with the urge to see what lay beyond the farthermost horizon.

“So you were prospecting for gold?” Captain Higgins asked.

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do now, if I may ask?”

“Well,” Craig said, “I was on my way back to the States, to join up again, if they would take me.”

Higgins grinned. “If they would take you? They will grab you with open arms. They could use a million like you.”

“Thanks,” Craig said.

A knock sounded on the door.

“What is it?” Higgins said to the aide who entered.

“One of the men we picked up in the life-boat wants to see you, sir.”

“What about?”

“He would not say, sir. He insists it is of the utmost importance. His name is Michaelson, sir. Shall I show him to your quarters?”

“Very well. I’ll see him immediately.”

The aide saluted smartly and left.

“Who is this Michaelson?” Higgins said to Craig.

“I don’t know,” Craig shrugged. “Just one of the passengers in the life-boat. We didn’t ask each other for pedigrees. About all I can say about him is that he is a queer duck.” Craig explained how Michaelson had been constantly studying the contents of the notebook he carried.

The captain frowned. “There is a Michaelson who is a world-famous scientist,” he said. “I don’t suppose this could be he.”

“Might be,” Craig said. “This is the south seas. You never know who is going to turn up down here or what is going to happen.” Abruptly he stopped speaking. A new sound was flooding through the ship.

It had been years since he had heard that sound yet he recognized it instantly. The call to action stations! It could have only one meaning. The Idaho was going into action. Something thrilled through Craig’s blood at the thought. He turned questioning eyes toward the captain.

Higgins was already on the phone.

“Flight of Jap bombers approaching,” he said, flinging the phone back on its hook. “Come on.”

This was probably the first time in naval history that a bare-footed, bare-headed man, whose sole articles of clothing consisted of a pair of dirty duck trousers, joined the commanding officer of a battleship on the captain’s bridge. Captain Higgins didn’t care what Craig was wearing, and his officers, if they cared, were too polite to show it. They didn’t really care anyhow. They had other things on their minds.

Far off in the sky Craig could see what the officers had on their minds. A series of tiny black dots. They were so far away they looked like gnats. Jap bombers. Big fellows. Four-engined jobs.

The notes of the call to action stations were still screaming through the ship. The Idaho, at the touch of the magic sound, was coming to life. Thirty-five thousand tons of steel was going into action. Craig could feel the pulsation as the engines kicked the screws over faster. The ship surged ahead. Fifteen hundred men were leaping to their stations. The guns in the big turrets were poking around, hoping that somewhere off toward the horizon there was a target for them. The Idaho was a new ship. She was lousy with anti-aircraft. The black muzzles of multiple pom-poms were swinging around, poking toward the sky.

An officer was peering through a pair of glasses. “Seventeen of them, sir,” he said. “I can’t be certain yet, but I think there is another flight following the first.”

The Idaho was part of a task force that included a carrier, cruisers, and several destroyers. Craig could see the carrier off in the distance. She had already swung around. Black gnats were racing along her deck and leaping into the sky. Fighter planes going up. Cruisers and destroyers were moving into pre-determined positions around the carrier and the Idaho, to add the weight of their anti-aircraft barrage to the guns carried by the big ships.

“Three minutes,” somebody said in a calm voice. “They’ve started on their run.”

The anti-aircraft let go. Craig gasped and clamped his hands over his ears. He had left the Navy before the advent of air warfare. He knew the roar of the big guns in their turrets but this was his first experience with the guns that fought the planes. The sound was utterly deafening. If the fury of a hundred thunder-storms were concentrated into a single area, the blasting tornado of sound would not be as great as the thunder of the guns. The explosions beat against his skull, set his teeth pounding together. He could feel the vibrations with his feet.

High in the sky overhead black dots blossomed like death flowers blooming in the sky.

The bombers kept coming.

The anti-aircraft bursts moved into their path. Death reached up into the sky, plucking with taloned fingers for the black vultures racing with the wind. Reached and found their goal. One plane mushroomed outward in a burst of smoke.

Craig knew it was a direct hit, apparently in the bomb bay, exploding the bombs carried there. Fragments of the plane hung in the sky, falling slowly downward.

Up above the anti-aircraft, midges were dancing in the sun--fighter planes. They dived downward.

Abruptly a bomber fell out of formation, tried to right itself, failed. A wing came off. Crazily the bomber began spinning.

Black smoke gouted from a third ship. It began losing altitude rapidly.

The others continued on their course.

Michaelson suddenly appeared on the bridge.

How he got there, Craig did not know, but he was there, jumping around and waving his notebook in the air. Michaelson was shouting at the top of his voice.

“--Danger!--Must get away from here--”

Craig caught the shouted words. The thundering roar of the anti-aircraft barrage drowned out the rest.

No one paid any attention to Michaelson. They were watching the sky.

The planes had released their bombs.

For some reason they were not attacking their normal target, the carrier. Perhaps a second flight was making a run over the carrier. The first flight was bombing the battleship.

The Idaho was their target.

Craig could feel the great ship tremble as she tried to swerve to avoid the bombs. A destroyer would have been able to spin in a circle but 35,000 tons of steel do not turn so easily.

The bombs were coming down. Craig could see them in the air, little black dots growing constantly larger. Fighter planes were tearing great holes in the formation of the bombers. Few of the Jap ships would ever return to their base. But their job was already done.

The bombs hit.

They struck in an irregular pattern all around the ship. Four or five were very near misses but there was not one direct hit. Great waterspouts leaped from the surface of the sea. A sheet of flame seemed to run around the horizon. It was a queer, dancing, intensely brilliant, blue flame. It looked like the discharge from some huge electric arc.

Even above the roar of the barrage, Craig heard the tearing sound. Somehow it reminded him of somebody tearing a piece of cloth. Only, to make a sound as loud as this, it would have to be a huge piece of cloth and the person tearing it would have to be a giant.

The blue light became more intense. It flared to a brilliance that was intolerable.

At the same time, the sun jumped!

“I’m going nuts!” the fleeting thought was in Craig’s mind. He wondered if a bomb had struck the ship. Was this the nightmare that comes with death? Had he died in the split fraction of a second and was his disintegrating mind reporting the startling fact of death by telling him that the sun was jumping?

The sun couldn’t jump.

It had jumped. It had been almost directly overhead. Now it was two hours down the western sky.

Tons of water were cascading over the bow of the ship. Waves were leaping over the deck. The Idaho seemed to have sunk several feet. Now her buoyancy was asserting itself and she was trying to rise out of the sea. She was fighting her way upward, rising against the weight of the water.

A wind was blowing. There had been almost no wind but now a gale of hurricane proportions was howling through the superstructure of the ship.

A heavy sea was running. The sea had been glassy smooth. Now it was covered with white caps.

The bombs had exploded, a blue light had flamed, a giant had ripped the sky apart, a gale had leaped into existence, the sea had covered itself with white capped waves, and the sun had jumped.

Craig looked at the sky, seeking the second flight of bombers. The air was filled with scudding clouds. There were no bombers in sight.

The anti-aircraft batteries, with no target, suddenly stopped firing.

Except for the howl of the wind through the superstructure, the ship was silent. The silence was so heavy it hurt the ears. The officers on the bridge stood without moving, frozen statues. They seemed paralyzed.