Chapter 5

All Hail Murphy!

Beth waited patiently for the school ferry. She had tied up to the marker buoy almost forty-five minutes earlier. The ferry was late! Waiting in an airboat, in bad weather, was absolutely no fun at all. Despite the fact that her slicker material was truly waterproof, the warm air and high humidity combined to insure that the slicker was as wet with perspiration inside as it was with rain outside.

Adding injury to insult, while the rain wasn’t intense, it was constant, and to avoid sinking, she and the girls had to bail out the boat every few minutes. Next time, I’m gonna bring one of the tarps! Beth decided. She would just drape it over the entire hull to wait out the school boat.

Just as she was about to give up and take the girls on to school, she heard the chug! chug! chug! of the ferry’s engine, and shortly it appeared out of the mist. She started the airboat’s engine while Nessa cast off from the bouy.

The ferry didn’t actually stop to pick up its juvenile passengers, but it moved slowly enough that Beth could easily match speed and tie up alongside. That done, she hugged and kissed the girls, and hustled them aboard their transport to school.

Once aboard, they would immediately begin classes. The ferry took much too much time completing its rounds to allow the children to be idle. By the time they were delivered to the school compound, they would have completed the day’s classes in two or three subjects, depending on the order in which they boarded the ferry.

Their studies would continue into the early evening and would be completed in conventional classrooms. Following the evening meal, the children would be separated into groups by age and sex, and allowed some unstructured social time in the dormitories, before being sent to bed for the night.

Early the next day, the children would arise, and after breakfast, they would resume lessons in the classrooms. The lessons would continue after they boarded the ferry for the return home, until they were deposited with their parents at their respective pickup points. In this way, the children were able to maintain a semblance of family life, being at home at least every other night. The system was cumbersome, but it maximized instructional time.

It also minimized operating expenses for the school district, which explained the “keep moving” policy in effect for the ferry. Kinetic energy is expensive, and the ferry was a large vessel, requiring a substantial energy investment to get it moving. Each time it came to a stop, energy was wasted, and more energy had to be invested to start it moving again. For this reason it only stopped at its home dock.

After seeing her girls safely aboard the ferry, Beth swallowed the lump in her throat, and cast off. She kicked up the speed of the idling engine and moved carefully away, to bring the airboat around for the ride home. She began to carefully pick her way home among the small islands. Never an easy thing, navigation was made even more difficult by the constant rain and low visibility. As she proceeded, her surroundings became more familiar, Beth opened up the throttle and allowed the airboat to travel a little faster. Faster, that is, until a previously unnoticed bit of solid ground suddenly made itself very evident.

Fortunately for Beth, she had (out of habit) belted herself into the pilot’s seat, so that when the boat came to an abrupt halt, she wasn’t pitched out. Instead, she found herself gasping, as the safety harness drove the air out of her lungs. When she regained her breath and a little of her composure, she looked around and realized that she had strayed a way out of the channel. As a result, the airboat was perched atop a very small hummock.

Beth opened the throttle up wide, but the boat refused to budge. She tried to turn the boat with the rudders, without any effect. Finally, cursing the designer of a vehicle that had no reverse gear, she killed the engine, released the safety harness and climbed out of the boat to push. This was no more effective than any of her prior efforts. Just as she was about to give up and call for a tow, she heard the drone of an approaching airboat. Peering in the direction of the sound she could see running lights, so she began shouting and waving her arms.

Because of his overwhelming attraction to Beth, Hardy had deliberately avoided visiting the Pasteur homestead since ferrying Jean to Poliniriton. Today, however, he felt comfortable with his level of self-control, so he decided to mooch a cup of coffee before proceeding on his morning rounds. He was already moving toward their homestead when he heard the unmistakable sound of an airboat running hard aground. Shortly afterward, the troubled airboat’s engine speed dropped to an idle, then stopped completely. It seemed close by, so he changed course slightly and moved carefully in the direction from which the sound had come.

As he approached the source of the sound, its running lights formed a halo in the dense fog, and soon he could see a small figure, frantically waving. He was near enough to recognize Beth before he could hear her shouts over his engine noise. He saw that although the boat was stuck at the top of a hummock, Beth was waist-deep in muddy water. It was clear that she had attempted to free the craft on her own.

“How in the world did this happen?” he teased, as he helped her climb aboard his own boat. He listened to her story, and looked the situation over. The hummock upon which she was “dry-docked” was surrounded on three sides by other, similar hummocks, making it impossible to maneuver his boat close to hers. After a moment’s thought he said “If I can get a line on your bow, between both engines we might be able to get you off the hummock, but I don’t have enough line to reach. Maybe between the two of us, we can push the nose around.” At that, they both climbed into the water and waded around to the bow of the stranded airboat.

Beth took up a position on the starboard side of the boat, near the nose, and it became obvious to Hardy that the only way they could work in tandem would be if he moved directly behind Beth and positioned his hands on the boat outside of hers. Thus arranged they could both apply maximum force at the point where it would do the most good.

The arrangement made sense to both of them, and things went well initially. The bow of the boat began to slowly rotate around its pivot point on the hummock towards Hardy’s craft. He very quickly realized, however, that there was no way to avoid frequent collisions between his front and her rear. Since he had been admiring that rear from a respectable distance for some time, these conditions had a predictable physiological effect upon him. He made a valiant effort to ignore it, acknowledging it only to apologize when his best efforts to maintain decorum failed in an obvious manner.

For her part, Beth grew ever more nervous about the working arrangement. It was necessarily clumsy, and a little embarrassing when they bumped together, but he kept apologizing, and truthfully, it felt ... interesting ... and a little scary. She had long since accepted, and even enjoyed, his poorly suppressed admiration. That was not a problem for her. Her problem was, that he was an attractive, virile man, whom she liked a great deal, and at the moment, they were physically closer than they had been for many weeks. Her body reacted to that proximity, and so did his. Despite the chilling effect one would expect from being waist-deep in swamp water, she realized that the continuing intimate physical contact was arousing them both.