Viator

—I was with Viator less than a year, Lunde said after a substantial pause. The company had promised me a new tanker, but there was a labor dispute. The tanker’s construction was delayed. They gave me Viator as a temporary command. At the time she serviced a route between Yokohama and Magadan in Siberia…and on occasion down to Vladivostok. She was seaworthy, but in constant need of refitting and not long after I came aboard they decided to scrap her. The crew was Russian, mostly. They disembarked at Magadan, and five of us, five officers, a skeleton crew, were ordered to take her to Panama, where she would be broken. We were a few days…

—Five officers? Were they of Scandinavian blood, like the five of us?

—They were Swedish, Lunde said. The company’s Swedish. The majority of officers are Swedish.

—What in God’s name are you up to?

—You asked to hear my story. Now let me tell it. I’ll explain as much as I’m able. Lunde made the sort of mild complaint that old men tend to make when they shift in their chairs and then went on: A few days out into the Bering Sea, we encountered a storm. It was nothing special. The sort of blow one expects in those latitudes. But we had no weight. Our cargo consisted of two small crates. Gifts from a company official to friends in Panama. That was all. The sea tossed us about as if Viator were a rowboat. On one occasion we nearly capsized. Then the engines failed, and it was a miracle we stayed afloat. If the winds had lasted an hour or two longer, I doubt we could have survived. Ulghren, my engineer, did an inspection. He told me that with two or three days, he could have the engines running. I consulted with my superiors, they consulted with theirs. It was decided that we would make repairs and continue our voyage south. Should another emergency arise, they would send rescue. Despite Ulghren’s estimate, the repairs took more than a week. Eleven days, to be exact. He found it necessary to fabricate parts. The weather was holding. There seemed no cause for alarm. But during that time, things changed.

Lunde coughed and had difficulty in clearing his throat. This happened so long ago, he said. It’s difficult to know how memory has transformed events. As I recall, the change was seamless. There were no moments of recognition when I said to myself, Aha! This is what’s going on! It all happened so quickly, much more quickly than it’s happened with you. Yet it was gradual. I noticed the changes, of course. The shifts in behavior, the differences in the way I thought. They seemed odd, these things. Odd enough to comment upon, but not anything I needed to be concerned about. Initially the men became secretive. I became secretive. And I began to have dreams. This is where our stories have the closest correspondence. My dreams were very like yours, except the flying things…I saw them as well, but they made me think of microscopic life. Like the creatures I observed under a microscope when I was a student.

—I recall thinking that myself, Wilander said. It was how they moved. It looked sometimes as if they were swimming, not flying.

—Swimmers, yes. That’s how I perceived them. But the most compelling change was the sense I had—the sense we all had—of a subtle presence. I suspected that something had come to us during the storm. Nothing so ordinary as a ghost. Something not so easily describable. At times this feeling rose to the level of a frisson, but for the most part it was just something I was aware of, something disturbing in the back of my mind. Like a word you’re seeking, one you can’t quite put a finger on. Ulghren claimed the presence was Viator. Viator was alive, he claimed. Spekke and Ottendahl, my first and second mates, sided with him. Since they’d been assisting with repairs, I assumed Ulghren had influenced their opinions. And Kameus…

—You said you were secretive, all of you—yet you discussed what was happening?

—We had sailed together for almost a year. Kameus and I…Peter Kameus. He was my radio officer for almost eight years. So, yes, we discussed it. That was our training, our habit. But we discussed it superficially. We did not speak everything we thought. Not by a long shot. And as I was about to say, Kameus, my friend, my best friend…he deferred to me, he sided with me. But eventually I discovered that he had been paying lip service to my opinion.

—The point I’m making, Wilander said, is whatever the similarity between our stories, there’s one major dissimilarity. You discussed what was happening among yourselves and we’ve done very little of that.