Conundrum

Suddenly, the gulls lifted off the Indestructible, squawking in irritation. The waters around her sides began to bubble as though she were floating in a pool of gigglehiccup. The ship commenced to sink, slowly and evenly, as if on purpose. As it sank, the flowpellar started spinning, propelling the ship toward its waiting victim. Her nose dipped beneath the surface, dark water rolled over her bow and she descended into the depths bit by bit. Now the pair of fins situated fore of the conning tower started to swim in the air. As the ship sank deeper and the water reached this strange apparatus, its purpose became apparent. The fins swirled in the mounting wave and the nose of the ship dipped even deeper, sending the Indestructible into a swift and graceful dive. The water mounted higher, swirling around and then over the conning tower, until all that remained above water was the mast. Suddenly, it, too, vanished beneath the waves, leaving behind hardly a ripple. A trail of bubbles continued toward the garbage scow for a few more seconds until the last bubbles appeared, popped, and were gone.

The crowd waited in breathless anticipation. It seemed improbable if not entirely impossible that the gnomes had actually built something that worked as it was supposed to work. Those who had bet heavily on its sinking gnawed their fingernails, while those who had wagered a copper or two on the ship actually performing as promised made quick mental calculations of the fortunes they stood to receive, and then began to sweat. The dwarves muttered into their beers.

Then a bald brown head appeared on the surface not far from where the Indestructible had slipped beneath the waves. It was joined by a second, and then a third, then a dozen, then a narrow, spritely head sporting a bedraggled topknot. For the next few minutes, more gnome heads bobbed up, until the crowd along the shore counted an even twenty. Those who had bet on all the crew surviving made quite a nice return on their wagers, as this had garnered the best odds next to the ship actually working.

Dozens of small fishing craft darted out from the city docks and in less than thirty minutes, the rescue was complete. The gnomes (and their kender companion) were treated to a sumptuous breakfast at the Ring and Feather, a reputable inn not far from the docks, for it was still quite early in the morning and most people were not quite ready to go home yet. The mayor stopped by to offer his condolences, which were graciously accepted by Commodore Brigg despite the fact that he already had a nasty sniffle. The dwarves finished their beers and returned to their forges.

In six weeks’ time, the gnomes raised the Indestructible and pumped her dry. The problem had lain with the seal around the mast-there wasn’t one. Never in gnomish shipbuilding had anyone ever needed to place a seal around a mast, and so they never even thought of installing one, obvious though it seemed upon post-sinking reflection.

So they pumped the vessel out, held an enormous fish fry with all the fish left floundering inside the ship, and replaced all her now-rusted gears, switches, levers, motors, and springs. A few rust spots had also appeared on the gleaming black hull, but these were deemed to give the ship character and were ignored. Members of the original crew who had fled, never to be seen again after the breakfast in the Ring and Feather that inauspicious morning of the Indestructible’s first-note: first-sinking, were replaced. Returning crew members were trained to operate the various improvements conceived, designed, created and installed since the ship sank to the bottom of the harbor six weeks before.

The morning of the relaunch of the MNS Indestructible dawned brighter and clearer than the first, and it seemed impossible that the sky could be any bluer. Despite the brilliance of the day, there were noticeably fewer attendees watching from the city. The gnomes were there in full regalia, of course, but there wasn’t any band, and the catapult that had launched the Indestructible with a bottle of gigglehiccup had already been shipped to Mount Nevermind to be put to the use for which it was designed-launching loaves of bread from the Baker’s Guild level up to the Dining Hall level. On the city side, the dwarves were noticeably absent, as were the bookmakers and gamblers, who couldn’t get odds on the ship’s success. A few bums, old salts, seadogs, rummies, and loungers idled around the docks, but the results of the launch seemed such a foregone conclusion that most of the citizens of Pax who desired distraction this fair morning were attending the unveiling of a new marble statue of Gunthar uth Wistan, former grandmaster of the Knights of Solamnia, dead some thirty years. The statue had been erected in the city center by the family of Lady Jessica of Isherwood, herself a Knight of some renown. Even as the Indestructible slipped out of the quays, the mayor of Pax was giving a speech honoring Lord Gunthar’s achievements, as well as the generosity of Lady Jessica.

Commodore Brigg gave no speech. He wore a dark leather jacket and a leather cap pulled well down over his eyes, hiding the angry coals smoldering there. But the grim set of his white-bearded chin, and the harsh bark of his voice as he ordered the ship on a direct course for the garbage scow still anchored in the midst of the harbor, betrayed his disgust with humans and their fickle ways, as few had bothered to come to see them off.

As the Indestructible neared its rusting victim, the gnomes along the shore cheered with new enthusiasm, and their shouts brought something of a smile to Commodore Brigg’s face. He ordered both UAEP tubes flooded and pressurized in preparation for firing. Deep inside the ship, things begin to clang and clamor busily. The commodore took aim on the scow, sighting along the lubber’s line drawn on the forward rail of the conning tower. He lifted a small flexible tube, blew into it, and then shouted “Prepare to fire!” Something in the bowels of the ship rang out like a struck bell, sending vibrations throughout the ship.

Commodore Brigg placed the tube to his ear, listened for a moment, then put it to his mouth again. As he began to blow, his outpuffed cheeks were suddenly filled with seawater. He dashed the spewing hose from his mouth, coughing and gagging. The stern of the ship began to sink, lifting her how out of the water. Commodore Brigg opened the hatch to see what was the matter, but this only hastened the ship’s demise. Green seawater fountained forth from the opened hatch, bowling the commodore overboard while vomiting out much of the crew along with the water. The Indestructible slipped stern foremost beneath the waves, pausing only long enough to launch one of its UAEPs in a concussive explosion and spray of green seawater.

The giant arrow scribed a tremendous arc hundreds of feet in the air across the brilliant blue sky. The people along the docks (and the gnomes) suddenly realized, to their horror, that the projectile was bound to fall to earth somewhere within the confines of the city. Commodore Brigg cringed as he bobbed in the water.

The UAEP descended like a hive of bees, buzzing madly over the first row of warehouses, past streets of homes and businesses, onward and downward toward the city square. It streaked down an alley, slicing through clotheslines strung between the buildings like so many strings of a harp, before passing over the crowd gathered to listen to the mayor’s dedication speech. It then struck off the head of the statue of Lord Gunthar, as neatly as an executioner’s blade, just as the mayor and the sculptor were triumphantly pulling aside its covering sheet. The head leaped from Lord Gunthar’s shoulders in nothing less than complete surprise and landed on the mayor’s foot, breaking only his pinky toe, by some strange luck. The giant arrow careened off the statue, passed through the open second story bedroom window of the house of Nathan the Tailor, through the open bedroom door, down the hall, and out the open staircase window without touching a thing or waking any of the occupants of the house. From there, it skipped once off the shallowly-pitched roof of a chicken house, frightening its occupants out of three days” laying before coming to a quivering stop inside the slat wood fences of a pig sty owned by the dwarf Dernbannin- who was busy at his forge next door and heard the whole thing, he would loudly proclaim in the months that followed- and neatly skewering his prized and much-beloved pig, Humphrey Afterwards, no one could say who squealed the louder: Humphrey, or the mayor with his broken pinky toe.

Meanwhile, out on the bay, twenty-one heads surfaced in the general vicinity of the sunken submersible, greatly defying the odds a second time. Of course, there were only twenty crew members on board at the time she sunk. The extra head belonged to a very angry oyster diver who had nearly been crushed under the Indestructible as she settled to the bottom of the harbor. He’d been working the oyster beds, completely unaware that the Indestructible was to launch that morning, else he’d have never come within a hundred leagues of the place, he would later declare in court.

Three weeks later-the gnomes having learned much about re-floating and re-outfitting sunken submersibles after the first time the Indestructible sank-Commodore Brigg stood in the conning tower and leaned against the rust-covered aft rail as his ship slipped for the third time from her moorings. Indestructible, fully provisioned and stocked with a handsome supply of fresh Humphrey sausages, pulled quietly away from the quay under its own spring-generated power. Its once-gleaming black iron hull was now a dull rust red. Across the bay, the city of Pax slept, for the most part blissfully unaware. Only the