7

"Everybody grab a worm," Edward had said. He stood on the deck of his tugboat and brandished a bucket of worms.

"Charles!" shouted Mary from below decks.

"What!" shouted Charlie from a different place below decks.

"Lunch!"

"I just got done with breakfast about a half an hour ago," cried Charlie resentfully.

"Yeah," said Edward to Merry. "You're doing it." Merry gamely tried to fish, but her heart wasn't in it. She had more or less said yes to a day trip on Edward's boat for her mom's sake. The whole little enterprise was broken down and faltering.

"It's half past one, Charlie," Edward hollered, looking at his gold watch.

Mary poked her head out of the hatch that led to the sleeping quarters inside the little old tugboat.

"Get down, Mary!" Edward cried.

Merry furrowed her brow at the sailor. Had he always had that gold watch?

Merry, Mary and Edward started without Charlie, eating sandwiches and drinking tea from a thermos, but the whimsy of being on a boat and eating sandwiches and drinking tea from a thermos was abruptly interrupted by the long, low bellow of the sea. It sounded like a whale. The fog obscured whatever it actually was, for the first half-hour. The only clue was a dim, distant light, maybe organic, maybe electric, a persistent pile of lightness in fog.

At quarter after two, Charlie came up from below.

"Charles, what have you been doing."

"Playing Playstation, mom."

Edward put his hands on Mary's shoulders.

"Mom," Charlie said," what is that sound?"

"We don't know yet," Mary said.

"Edward!" Charlie cried out. "Hard to port, man!"

Edward blinked.

"Dude, I am not joking. Hard to fucking port please."

"Charles," said Mary with restraining anger. "Language."

Edward must have seen something in Charlie's eyes because he tipped over a spillproof lunch plate and bolted off the deck and out of Merry's field of vision. Coffee poured down the porticullis and spilled from a cup, dry and staining.

Merry noticed a lurch in the direction of the boat.

"How can he even do it that quickly?" Merry asked aloud.

"Do what, Merry?" asked her mom.

"Steer the boat - doesn't it take a lot longer?"

As Merry peered into her mother's eyes she saw a tower of rising fire. Mary seemed not to have heard the question - her mind was on the yacht about to ram the tiny tug.

"Look lively, ya swabs!"

Merry looked around for the person doing a pretty poor job of affecting a pirate voice. Who would even do that? Charlie?

Charlie leapt above decks in an apron, with some kind of television monitor burned into it.

"Charlie?"

"Prepare to be boarded!" On the monitor on Charlie's chest was a big, proper-looking woman of 40 or 50 who Merry instantly understood and recognized to be Norwegian President Gro Harlem Brundtland. Only she had put on an extra hundred pounds since Merry had seen her last, and she wore an eyepatch of linen, gingham or silk.

"Awww," whined Charlie. "Don't all thank me at once."

Merry winced, felt sorry for her brother, but she was still at a loss to understand what had happened and why. Her mom and Edward just sat still, mouths agog.

"Awww," whined Charlie, one eye closing.

"It's true, Charles," said Edward, emerging from the control cabin. "Without you we would all be just bits of ash by now. You recognized the dim light as someone's cabin light, as seen through a porthole window, giving you a rough idea of the boat's distance from us."

Charlie seemed to brighten. "Still think those games are stupid?"