As it turns out, Celeste and I beat Professor Stewart to the bridge by a good two minutes. When he finally arived, Captain Corbett asked where Kalama was.
"She's assisting Dr. King on a vitally important necropsy," the professor replied: "Why? What's the matter?"
The skipper pointed to the Gentile twins.
"Care to do the honor, ladies?"
Both carrot-tops grinned as they stepped forward. Their long hair dripping salt water all over the light blue windbreaker that each girl now wore over her respective bikini. And, seemingly by prearranged agreement, Flora (the one to my left) went first.
"Dora and I were exploring the eel grass patches half way between the shore and the surrounding coral reef, with Dora handling the other XC-1. She suddenly noticed something to her right, and excitedly signaled that we should stop! So, I tapped out the same signal, in Morse Code, on the conning tower of the dry sub. When Jann brought us to a full halt, Dora swam back in and tapped out that she had spotted what looked like...giant brain coral."
"Giant brain coral?" I echoed: "Are you sure?"
You see, giant brain coral is supposed to be endemic to the sea floor of the Caribbean! Dora, however, nodded in enthusiastic affirmation. Whereupon, she put the videocassette in the VCR that Gary Latimer had been asked to bring up from the audiovisual lab. Sure enough; there it was! Giant brain coral, in a perfect circle,...
...surrounding the barnacle-covered remains of a sunken ship.
"What on Earth is that?!" the professor exclaimed.
"Looks like a Viking dragon ship," replied Sid Starbuck: "Only bigger and wider than anything I've seen in marine engineering books."
"That's because it's Cantonese," replied the skipper: "The Chinese in Canton have some kind of annual festival featuring vessels like this one."
"Wait!" Dora excitedly demanded: "There's more."
The XC-1 slowly panned to the right. And there, in a perfectly straight line (almost as if arranged that way by some giant hand) were two more derelicts. Both of them of relatively more recent vintage! How did I know that? Well, for one thing, there was a lot less coral and barnacle coverage. And, for another? They both looked to be made almost entirely of metal.
It was at this point that Flora resumed narrating.
"I signaled Jann to journey over to the second derelict, which he did. En route, I spotted another anomalously perfect circle. Only much smaller, and not containing any coral at all. In fact; it seemed to be harboring a colony of garden eels! Anyway, here's what I observed when I swam over to remove some of the detritus."
The videocassette clearly showed that her definition of "removal" meant lifting that whole circular object up (scaring the garden eels back beneath the sea floor sand in consequence). And, in turning that circle over, she revealed it to be a life saver of white-painted cork wood with black-painted lettering.
"S. S. DEWITT CLINTON"
Professor Stewart gasped.
"It can't be!" he half-whispered to himself.
"What's the matter, professor?" I asked: "You recognize that name?"
He slowly nodded.
"When I was still an undergrad, back in Philly, one of my jock classmates invited me to a Halloween party at his frat house. And, among the ghost stories told, that night, around the backyard bonfire they had going, was a campus urban legend contributed by his girlfriend. A history major. According to this legend, one of the school's nineteenth century alumni grew up to become a world-famous archeologist. So famous, in fact, that the Museum of Oriental Studies named an entire wing after him! Unfortunately, for him, the naming was in memoriam. Due to the fact that he had mysteriously disappeared, overseas, in the early 1920's!! Both his disappearance, and the subsequent haunting of that wing by his alleged ghost, being attributed to a supposed curse on a certain long-lost Chinese artifact that he was apparently _obsessed_ with finding."
I looked at Celeste.
"Why do I suddenly have the feeling that he was last known to be a passenger on a ship with this exact same name?"
tbc
Giantess World
