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Cape Flattery Will Get You Nowhere

By William Easley

(July 9-14, 2014)

1

From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Wednesday, July 9: Now I understand why Grunkle Stan had us get passports last spring. We're on our way to Vancouver! That's where Stan and Ford have docked the Stan O' War II, their sloop. We're going out on a little ocean cruise aboard it!

As we drove up, Ford went on and on about the specifications: it's 34.9 feet long, it has a diesel engine and a specially enlarged fuel tank and can go about 250 miles on engine power alone—but it's a sloop, so it has one mast and can be rigged with a fore-and-aft mainsail, a foresail, and a jib (I think I got those right) and can go indefinitely on wind power, of course.

But our plan is to go out in the Pacific for three nights and days and return to port on the fourth day. It's just a pleasure cruise, and so far, the weather forecast looks great for that. It's weird, but White Rock Marina, where the boat is moored, is within sight of United States waters. "But the boat's registered Canadian," Stan explained, "and it's cheaper to keep it there than in the States."

Mabel is really excited! Of course, on Lake Gravity Falls we've sort of sailed (though she was so full of Dramamine she could have put on the complete works of Shakespeare), but we've never been on a sea-going boat before (well, not if you don't count "It's a Small World" at Disneyland, where she got seasick), and she's eager for the experience. Me, I'm glad to be along. If only Wendy could have come . . . but Soos really needs her right now. The Shack gets super-busy from the Fourth on through the end of summer, and Wendy's Assistant Manager and all. Sigh. Be adult about it, Dipper. Be adult.

Rats. I wish she could be with us!

But, realistically, that wouldn't be practical anyhow. The Stan O' War only has three bunks—one aft (that's in the stern, or back, of the boat, matey!) and two forward, in the prow. I think it's "prow." Note to self: Look that up.

Mabel and I will sleep in the forward bunks, and Stan and Ford will rotate in the aft one—because you have to have someone awake at all times. Stan promises that once Mabel and I get oriented and learn some basics, we can take PART of a watch—at night, Stan and Ford will do four-hour shifts, one of them awake and running the boat for four hours while the other grabs some sleep, and then they'll swap out.

But me and Mabel can stand short two-hour watches in the late afternoon and then in the early morning. We just have to be together and in sight of each other at all times, and either Stan or Ford or sometimes both will be awake, so they're within call if anything happens.

It's nearly night now, and we're on the outskirts of Vancouver. The plan is to stay in a motel tonight, then tomorrow morning spend a little time exploring the town, and then we'll drive a few miles to the marina and set out on our adventure.

Here we are, just turning in at the motel! I'll close for now—Stan says the marina should have the Stan O' War II cleaned up and in the water and fully stocked, so sometime tomorrow afternoon we'll go aboard and, I guess, weigh the anchor? Or cast off? Anyhow, we'll be on our way!

The proper term turned out to be "casting off." A dockhand slipped the mooring line over a cleat, tossed it aboard to Stan, and waved them off; Stan coiled the line and stowed it while Ford, at the wheel, backed the boat out, then turned it and headed south into Puget Sound. To the right and ahead lay a scatter of islands, not very imposing and blue with distance; to the left a flattish shore littered with tons of driftwood slipped past.

"Ready to raise sail, Stanley?" Ford called.

In his grumpiest voice, Stan answered, "Aye, aye, Cap'n Bligh!"

"Mainsail haul!" Ford ordered.

"Oh, this is so hard!" Stan complained as he pulled on a lever. An electric motor raised the triangular sail, Stan pushed it to the right—to starboard, Dipper mentally corrected—the wind caught and filled it, and the boat leaned eagerly. Ford cut the engine, and as the roar stopped, Dipper heard the bow cutting through the calm water, like the sound of shears scything through silk.

The afternoon was warm and perfect, the wind gentle, barely rippling the surface, and they might as well have been on Lake Gravity Falls. Ford easily threaded the passage between Saturna and Patos Islands, then between Vancouver and San Juan Islands, and then they turned to starboard and trimmed the sails—by then Stan had raised the jib as well—for the long haul down the Strait of Juan de Fuca, heading for the open water of the Pacific.

Just with the sails they made good time, and Ford explained how they were sailing on an imaginary line that was the border between Canada on the right and the USA on the left. "Aha!" he said finally. "If you look off to port just ahead, you'll see Cape Flattery. Once we're past that, we're in the ocean!"

"Yay," Mabel cheered, though she was looking green. True, they enjoyed the smoothest of sailing, but the water was salt water, and the boat was even bigger than Soos's, and . . . Mabel got seasick.

"Starboard rail!" Stan ordered. "Barf on the side the wind's blowin' away from!"

So she leaned on the rail and heaved. Once. Then twice. And true seasickness struck with full force.

Well, Mabel was seasick. Dipper enjoyed watching, though, and timing her bouts of nausea and feeding the fishes. "How was that?" she asked after the third one, wiping her mouth.

"Not bad. Two minutes and twelve seconds."

Mabel punched the air. "Yes! A new personal best!"

When she decided she had given her all, they went to the port rail and watched the rugged, wind- and water-carved rocks of Cape Flattery as they hit the first long Pacific swells and the Stan O' War II began to rise and fall in a way that made even Dipper feel a little queasy—though not enough to throw up.

"Why's it named Cape Flattery, Grunkle Stan?" Mabel asked.

"Well, Sweetie, that's an interestin' question," he said. Both Stans looked a little strange, dressed in pea jackets, Stan's green and worn, Ford's Navy blue and brand-new. "Ya see, it was discovered by John Jacob Flattery, a guy who got rich 'cause he knew how to woo wealthy women with his romantic words." He wiggled his fingers. "In fact, all the ladies said he had a silver tongue—"

"Oh, Stanley, please!" Ford said from the wheel. "Kids, Captain James Cook came this way on his final voyage of exploration in 1778. He and his crew were looking for a safe anchorage, and when they spotted the entrance to the straits here, he wrote in the ship's log that they spied, quote, 'a small opening which flattered us with the hopes of finding a secure harbour.' He somehow missed the harbor, but he named the spot 'Cape Flattery.'"

"My version's juicier," Stan said with a suggestive grin.

They had life-jacket drill—though at the moment the boat rode with a gentle motion—and the kids learned where the life jackets were stored—in six different spots, just in case. They were bright yellow or orange, varying by manufacturer, and featured flashing lights, plus GPS beacons. "Cool," Mabel said. "Even if we fall off, we can't get lost!"

"Yes, but don't fall overboard," Ford warned seriously. "The North Pacific water's cold—usually at this time of year, it's somewhere in the fifties Fahrenheit. In the sea, you'd succumb to hypothermia in about three hours!"

"So you'll sleep with the life jackets next to you," Stan said. "And if the weather gets even a little rough, you'll wear them twenty-four seven."

"We won't be out for seven," Mabel said reasonably.

"Then you'll wear 'em until I say take 'em off," Stan growled.

As evening approached, Mabel decided she could probably keep some food down. Stan took the wheel, Ford went to the galley, and Dipper accompanied him to help. Mabel could cook, if you allowed an offbeat definition of the word "edible." Ford wasn't very good at it—his idea was to open a couple of cans and heat the contents until they were lukewarm. He started heating beef stew on the compact little stove, and Dipper suggested sandwiches, which he took charge of making.

He also encouraged Ford to stir the soup often and heat it more than he usually did. Meanwhile, Dipper built sandwiches: thick-sliced light rye bread, onions, garlic, and zucchini sautéed in olive oil and seasoned, roasted red peppers, Greek olives, and feta cheese. Then he grilled the sandwiches in the same pan he'd sautéed the veggies in until the bread was crusty and the cheese melted. By that time, the stew was bubbling hot.

Mabel carried Stan's portion up to the deck, along with a frosty-cold Rimrock Beer—no, he told her, she couldn't sample it—and returned for her own soup and sandwich, but with a Pitt's instead of a beer, and took them up to have dinner with Stan. Dipper and Ford sat in the galley below decks and ate.

"Very good sandwich, Mason," Ford said, munching appreciatively. "Where did you learn how to do that?"

"Aw, from Wendy," Dipper said, shrugging. "She's an occasional part-time vegetarian. Usually when she thinks she's put on a few pounds. She knows all these great recipes, though, for everything from venison to vegetable stew!"

Ford smiled and shook his head. "I never learned to cook properly," he said. "Every explorer should, though. I can tell you, in a few of those alternate dimensions I ate things that I couldn't even stand to look at when they were alive!"

Dipper cleaned up the dishes, and then he and Mabel got to take a turn at the wheel—though Ford and Stan hovered close by with advice and were quick to correct them if they made a wrong move. Their short two-hour watch ended at nine p.m., Ford and Stan flipped for the first watch—Stan won, which meant he'd turn in for some sleep—and they all watched the sun set around 9:15 PM. It went down in a blaze of red and gold, sending a bar of glorious light across the wide Pacific horizon to the west; behind them, night crept up toward the zenith like a violet cloak, bringing out the stars.

"Well-p," Stan said as he stretched, "I'm goin' below to catch some z's. Wake me at one A.M., Ford! Don't go tryin' to take an eight-hour watch on me!"

"I'll wake you," Ford promised. "Kids, you want to turn in now?"

"No!" Mabel said. "I got my sea legs! I want to lie on the deck and see the stars over the ocean!"

"Good night for it," Ford admitted. "Rare to have a night like this at sea without a cloud in the sky. Very well—but both of you put on your lifejackets. You'll do that on deck whenever it's dark. And take them with you to your bunks when you go to bed."

"Aye, aye, Cap'n Blight," Mabel said cheerfully.

So the twins did lie on the deck staring up, past the sail and the mast, into the dark depths of the universe. And they saw a brilliant scatter of stars and counted nine meteors before they started to yawn and at last shuffled forward, down the companionway, through the narrow corridor, and to their adjoining berths. "Night, Dippingsauce," Mabel muttered as she got into her sleep shirt and shorts.

"Night, Sis," Dipper returned as he decided to sleep in his shirt and undershorts. It was dark anyway. The bunks were against the forward bulkheads, and they slanted toward each other—in fact, the bottoms had no panel between them, so they could touch feet if they wanted—but the heads of the bunks were separate. The night had turned cool—nights in the North Pacific had a way of doing that—and they both snuggled under a couple of blankets. Soon Dipper could hear Mabel snoring gently, and he smiled.

He'd got used to that sound during their first summer in Gravity Falls. It was comforting, whether in a tent or . . . he yawned until his jaws creaked . . . or way out . . . at . . . sea.

And then he, too, drifted easily into sleep.

He didn't even feel the change when, in the cockpit, Ford altered their course. He was staring at one of his anomaly detectors.

"Odd," he murmured to himself. "Not very far, and not very strong. Well, it'll never hurt to check."

Still—just in case—he donned his own life jacket.

Because he knew all too well that when you chased an anomaly—you never could tell what you might find.

2

From the Journals of Stanford Pines: 4:05 a.m., July 11—We should be within sight of the anomaly by daybreak, and yet I am not sure we shall see anything. I have checked satellite imagery, radar, and even quantum stability levels, and I see nothing whatever out of the ordinary—and yet the Reality Disturbance Detector persists in indicating some unidentifiable perturbation of reality at a spot perhaps forty nautical miles from our present position. We are currently making seventeen knots. If the wind holds, I'm sure we should be close to the anomaly—if indeed there is one—by about six-thirty.

As for our location, I read it as latitude 48◦ 62' north, 127◦ 70' west. In other words, we are west of the continental shelf and past the range of sea mounts lying offshore of Vancouver. Sonar indicates a depth of 12,000 feet here. My charts of the sea floor show no sign of disturbance with the single exception of a circular, or nearly circular, depression about a mile in diameter, surrounded by what seem to be broken stony outcrops. Curiously, it is roughly below the site of the suspected anomaly—but the anomaly (if it is not an artifact of malfunctioning equipment) seems to lie on the surface.

I have repeatedly, almost obsessively, checked the weather forecasts, radar, and imagery—it wouldn't do for us to be caught this far out at sea in a small boat with children aboard. However, currently everything looks clear for scores of miles in all directions, with only a small low-pressure system bringing rain in from the north—but it will bypass us, making landfall in Alaska, hundreds of miles away—and aside from that, no threats anywhere near us.

However, it is always better to err on the side of caution in situations like this, so after I have a quick look at the suspected anomaly, we will change course and circle northward and then eastward again until we make landfall, and then coast along to the Straits of Juan de Fuca. We can make our leisurely way back to port and still have our excursion. Mabel has asked if we could do some fishing, and I told her not in these waters, not in the open sea. However, we well might spot some whales tomorrow, and she's very excited about that.

Mason is making scientific observations—he takes the surface temperature once an hour, and last night he logged some notations about meteors and identified Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, correctly pointing them out as clearly visible in the night sky. I also heard him lecturing Mabel about constellations, though she insisted that Cassiopeia looked more like "Irving the Tipsy Gnome."

I'm tempted to wake him early, because a faint green aurora is playing around the northern horizon right now, and I'm not sure he's ever seen one. However, we're likely to have a stronger display tomorrow night (a current solar flare will almost guarantee that), and we'll be farther north to see it, so I shall let him sleep. The young man does impress me—like me, he is a polymath, but unlike me, he is not hopelessly awkward socially.

And Mabel is—well, Mabel, and that's enough for anyone.

Dipper woke not with the sun, but with the drool-inducing smell of bacon cooking. He got out of his bunk, tapped on the bulkhead and asked, "Are you awake?"

"No," Mabel mumbled in a grumpy voice. "I'm in a coma. Wake me for dinner."

He squirmed out of the narrow bunk, put on yesterday's outfit—fresh water is limited on a small boat, and they didn't get showers every day out here and didn't do laundry—and made his way back to the galley, where Stan was humming as he cooked at the two-burner propane stove. "Hiya, knucklehead!" he said cheerfully. "Eggs an' bacon an' toast today."

Well—he was wearing khaki pants and a long-sleeved shirt, so the chances of stray Stan hair were minimal. "Sounds good," Dipper said.

"Want coffee?" Stan asked.

"Please!"

"Then get it yourself, I'm not the maid! Hah!"

Rolling his eyes, Dipper took a thick-walled mug from the tiny cabinet, lifted the coffee pot from its cage—it nested inside a wire basket that was bolted to a counter, to keep it from spilling—and poured three-quarters of a cup of coffee. Then he found the condensed milk in the ice chest and topped the mug up with that. It was different from real milk, and it made the coffee taste a little funny—but he was getting used to coffee now. "What time is it?" he asked, trying to stifle a yawn.

"Dunno exactly. Six-something. I should be on watch now, but Poindexter's all excited about tryin' to spot a mermaid or some crazy thing, so he took a double shift at the wheel. You an' Mabel are due on deck at eight. She up yet?"

"Not yet."

"Here ya go. Bacon and scrambled," Stan said, serving up a plate.

"Thanks, Grunkle Stan," Dipper said. The bacon was crunchy, but the eggs were a little overdone and rubbery—still, Stan had sliced in some cheese, and they tasted eggy and cheesy, so Dipper ate without complaint.

"Ya bring your vitamins?" Stan asked.

"Yeah, in my duffle."

"Be sure to take one," Stan said. "Just in case ya need an antidote to my cookin'."

When Dipper finished, he cleaned and dried his plate and cup and then Stan said, "Hey, Dip, I ate already. You want to take Ford's food up to him and then see if you can raise Mabel from the dead so's I can get her to shove some grub into her pie hole?"

"Sure," Dipper said. Stan cooked it, and Dipper took plate, fork, and mug of coffee, two sugars, no cream—trying hard not to drop or spill anything—up the short companionway and out onto a rolling deck.

Ford was at the wheel, though the boat was on autopilot. He was staring off into the distance through a pair of binoculars, but then he must have heard Dipper, because he looked around at him, his expression a little worried. "Mason! I'm glad you're here."

"I brought your breakfast," Dipper said.

"Yes, yes, fine." Ford took the mug of coffee and gulped at least half of it before wincing. "Hot!" He handed Dipper his long binoculars, a powerful Navy-surplus instrument. "Look ahead, just off the port bow at the horizon, and tell me if you see anything unusual. Anything at all."

Dipper awkwardly passed him his plate, then raised the binoculars, focused on the horizon, and started a slow sweep toward the bow. "Um . . . Nothing, really, just empty ocean . . . a few low clouds . . . whoa! Lightning?"

"Then I wasn't mistaken," Ford said.

"But—going upward from the clouds?"

"That part is admittedly unusual. However, I've read that meteorologists have confirmed the existence of rarely-seen electrical phenomena—red sprites, blue jets—that spring from the tops of cumulonimbus clouds and may extend to the very stratosphere. I suspect that's what we're seeing."

"Cumulonimbus? You mean storm clouds?" Dipper asked uneasily.

Ford nodded emphatically. "That's the truly odd part! Radar shows no storm activity, nor does satellite imagery. And the clouds there are not cumulonimbus, but stratus—maybe even just ocean fog! They certainly shouldn't have a high enough electrical charge to produce such brilliant lightning effects."

"Is it lightning?"

"If not, something nearly identical to it." Ford smiled and held up a small yellow transistor radio—it looked like a relic of the 1980s, and it probably was—and clicked it on. "Listen."

Dipper lowered his chin and tilted his head to concentrate. The radio hissed with static—but then a burst like a distant explosion crackled from the speaker. And another, and another. "What am I listening for?" he asked.

"Those little crashes. Those are sferics."

"What?"

Ford spelled the word. "Short flashes of lightning-generated electromagnetic radiation. An AM radio tuned to an empty spot on the dial—easy out here at sea—picks them up each time lightning discharges. An AM radio is one of the cheapest tornado detectors around! If it starts blasting a constant roar of sferics, get to cover because a tornado's approaching."

"But I don't see any—oops, there was one."

"Yes, and it all comes from right ahead. I say we explore! I don't think we're in danger of an actual lightning strike—the bolts seem to be cloud-to cloud or, actually, cloud-to-air—and they must be some strange atmospheric phenomenon."

"Well—if it's not dangerous—"

"Ah, well. I can't positively guarantee that there's no danger. Just as a precaution, bring me my lifejacket, take one to Stan and one to Mabel, and see that they put them on, please. And of course, wear one yourself."

"But if it gets bad—"

"I promise you I'll turn back long before it gets bad. And another bizarre thing about this is that the disturbance hasn't moved at all since I first detected it last night. It won't suddenly sweep down on us. We'll approach it, but keep a prudent distance." Ford grinned. "Who knows? We may get another joint scientific paper out of this!"

That decided Dipper. He hurried forward, got Mabel up—not an easy task—and told her to get dressed and to don her lifejacket. He put his own on—this one bright orange, filled with squarish packs of some buoyant foam—and then grabbed a pair of adult-sized ones. He more or less waddled forward and delivered one flotation jacket to Stan, who said, "What is this, a joke?"

"No, Ford says to put it on," Dipper said, taking the last lifejacket to Stanford.

"Thank you," Ford said, accepting it from him. "Take the wheel and hold her steady while I get into this."

Dipper did—though it wasn't hard. The Stan O' War II was under easy sail, the breeze lay steady, and the ocean was smooth. Even the clouds looked less important, more like wisps of steam than storm clouds. Stan emerged from the hatch. "What are you up to? Lifeboat drill?"

"Just being careful, Stanley," Ford replied, cinching the belt around the bulky lifejacket. "Get yours on too, please."

Mabel came out onto deck rubbing her eyes and looking weird in the orange jacket. "This totally clashes with what I was gonna wear," she complained. "I like the yellow ones better."

Dipper said, "Uh, Grunkle Ford—"

"We won't have to wear them for very long. We're almost to the periphery of the anomalous readings."

"Grunkle Ford!"

"I merely propose to get to the edge, close enough to observe any visible phenomenon, do a quick scan and then come about and make for waters closer to shore. We'll drop sail and—"

Stan yelled, "Holy moly! Wouldja look at that! Ford, what's goin' on?"

"Oh, my word!" Ford exclaimed. "Here, give me the wheel."

Dipper stepped aside. In front of the boat, the ocean . . . ended. Not against land—no shore, no beach, nothing. But the horizon suddenly stretched right there, right in front of the bow, and in another second it would be too late to—

"Turn around!" Stan bellowed, hauling on the wheel.

"I'm trying to!" Ford yelled, turning it in the same direction—to starboard, away from whatever void had opened.

The boat lurched sickeningly to the left, the deck tilting. Mabel yelped and grabbed one of the stays supporting the mast. Dipper grasped the brass rail, and Stan and Ford clung to the wheel housing. We're going to capsize! Dipper thought—but they didn't.

Instead, as though it were suddenly jet-propelled, the Stan O' War II leaped forward with astonishing speed. Yet dirty-yellow foam streamed forward even faster, streaks of it racing past them. The boat still listed at a 30-degree angle, making the deck steep. Instantly thick clouds engulfed them in darkness, and forks of lighting flashgunned the vessel in silent explosions of blazing light and showed—

A vast dark whirlpool, easily a mile in diameter, like the mouth of an enormous funnel. The boat was caught in it twenty feet down from the lip, impelled not by wind but by the rush of water. Mabel made a gagging sound, but nothing came up—

And Dipper, clinging to the port rail, looked down and down and farther down. The whirlpool narrowed and darkened into nothing—

"Hang on!" Ford shouted. "I'm starting the engine! We'll try to climb out of this!"

The engine coughed and roared, and the Stan O' War II moved even faster. It gained no headway. Although Ford revved the engine and angled the prow upward, the boat did not climb the wall of the whirlpool, instead rushing along nearly sideways. In fact, if anything it descended toward the center of the vortex—

"Ford, you idiot!" Stan bellowed. "We're goin' down!"

3

Later, Mabel said the whole experience was like being on the worst amusement park ride in Hell.

In the unbreakable grip of a rushing current, the boat slipped lower and lower in the whirling funnel of water—and the lower it sank, the faster it sped. By the time the deck was at a close to a vertical angle, it didn't matter so much—because the speed stuck them to the deck as firmly as gravity would have.

By then they were halfway down the narrowing vortex. Dipper's ears rang with the sound of the hissing, rushing water. Worse, everything was getting dark.

That was because overhead, heavy clouds clamped on the vast mouth of the whirlpool like a lid covering a seething pot—though right up until the Stan O' War II slipped over the edge, the clouds had looked no more threatening than a patchy fog just a few feet above the surface.

Lower still, and faster, and as the speed increased, so did everyone's disorientation and nausea—except for Mabel. First Stan, then Ford, and finally even Dipper lost their breakfast over the side. Ford switched on the twin searchlights, but they showed very little—just the streaked, ebony-black walls of rushing water.

At first the shattering noise was like the roar of a waterfall, but as they descended, it grew horribly louder, filling the whole world like a physical force, forcing them to shout to be heard. A gasping Ford worked with some of his instruments and bellowed, "It's a serious space-time anomaly! Not a complete dimensional rift, like Weirdmageddon, but something very strange and localized!"

"Real interesting!" Stan yelled back. "But how does that piece of trivia help us get outa here alive?"

"Knowledge is power!" Ford returned.

"Well, it ain't enough to light a flashlight bulb if ya ain't alive!" Stan shouted.

Then he seemed to notice the stricken faces of Dipper and Mabel and he said in a furious voice, "Figure out something to do, Poindexter! Think about the kids here. Worry about the scientific stuff later!"

Nothing could stop that slippage, and faster and yet faster they whirled. The G forces made Dipper feel at least twice as heavy as he was and made it difficult to breathe. Mabel sank down and sat on the deck, her back against the bulkhead. "We're not gonna make it this time, are we?" she asked.

"Don't know!" Dipper yelled.

She took his hand. "But we're together," she yelled. "Mystery Twins!"

He squeezed his sister's hand. "Yeah. When we get out of this, sibling hug with extra pats!"

"It's getting worse," she said as the boat began to spin around and around on its own axis, like a bottle on its side picking out someone to be kissed—or like Waddles when he was small enough to be "it" in a game of spin-the-pig. The vessel spun like a carousel struck by infernal lightning, so fast, so hard, that the centripetal force hurled everyone against the bulkheads and pinned them there—

Then absolute darkness.

And silence.

And then—

"What happened?" Mabel bawled. "Are we dead? There's supposed to be a light! I demand my light!"

"Huh?" Dipper asked, unable to understand her words though he sat right next to her. His ears were ringing. True, the boat had leveled out and everything seemed to have fallen quiet, if his eardrums hadn't been punctured.

"What! Happened!" Mabel screamed right into his ear, and he heard that.

"I don't know!" he yelled back into her ear.

He rose unsteadily to his feet—he felt back to his normal weight, at least—and groped across the pitch-dark deck. The boat rocked a little, but seemed to be floating normally. The engine was no longer running. Dipper blundered into someone. "Grunkle Ford?" he shouted as loud as he could.

"Guess again!" It was Stan, on his feet but leaning against the bulkhead, both hands braced on the rail. With a grunt, he straightened and Dipper felt him fumbling with something. "Just a minute. Where's the fershlugginer cord—there it is!" A red light came on—the signal light on the shoulder of his lifejacket—and in its feeble glow Dipper saw Ford still sitting on the deck and looking stunned.

Stan opened a chest and pulled out an electric lantern, which he switched on. "Ya all right, Brainiac?" he asked, squatting beside Ford.

"I'll have the muffins and anchovies, thank you," Ford replied. Then he shook his head. "Gah! Whoa, what just happened? I'm dizzy! Where are we?"

"Kinda hopin' you'd explain that, Captain," Stan said.

"Let me get the searchlights on again. The engine died," Ford said. He struggled to his feet with Stan's and Dipper's help, and then in the light of the lantern he fiddled with the controls. "Oh, no wonder. I didn't switch tanks, and the first one must be out of fuel. Here we go." He clicked switches and turned valves.

The engine coughed, then caught, and the beams of the searchlights shot out. They illuminated nothing but a black surface—it was as though they were navigating an ocean of oil. Rough oil, because the deck still rose and fell as though in a lightly chopping sea. The powerful lights were good for about a half-mile or so—but they showed nothing but that inky ocean.

"Are we still on earth?" Mabel asked, coming to stand beside them. "Ew, Dipper, you smell like barf!"

"I'll clean up as soon as I can!" Dipper said. He looked back over the stern transom. "Hey, there's another whirlpool behind us!"

It showed as a gray spot in the blackness, visibly rotating—but unlike the one they'd been caught in—

"Aw, it's a baby whirlpool!" Mabel said.

"Yeah, a lot smaller than ours. Looks about the size of our boat," Stan said.

"That's . . . extremely odd," Ford muttered, staring off into the distance. "It's turning in a clockwise direction."

"So?" Stan asked.

Dipper said, "Grunkle Stan, all whirlpools and hurricanes and so on in the northern hemisphere rotate counterclockwise."

"Even flushed toilets," Mabel said.

"Uh, no," Dipper told her. "That's a popular belief, but it's not true. The Coriolis effect controls big vortices like storms and whirlpools, but little ones like drains might go either way, depending on their orientation, how level they are, and other factors."

"Quite right," Ford said. "Hm. Where can we be? We can't have gone through the middle of the Earth and emerged in the Southern Hemisphere. I'm sure we would have noticed passing through a core of molten rock and iron."

"Yeah, that would be kinda hard to miss," Stan said. "Suppose we got teleported or something?"

"Doubtful," Ford said. "That would take a terrific amount of energy, and I think we would have noticed a manifestation of forces if our molecules had been beamed elsewhere."

"I beamed what was in my stomach elsewhere," Stan said.

"It's still morning, isn't it?" Mabel asked. "I mean, we couldn't have been in that whirlpool for twelve hours! I would've had to pee if we had!"

"Speak for yourself," Stan said, and Mabel and Dipper edged away from him.

"Anyone have the time?" Dipper asked.

"My watch says it's right around seven-thirty in the morning," Stan told him. "Huh. Sure looks like it's the middle of the night. But where are the stars?"

They all looked up. Nothing but blackness overhead.

"Maybe the sky is overcast," Ford offered. "Let's see if it's a low cloud cover." He swiveled one of the searchlights so it pointed straight up, past the mast.

Dipper didn't understand what he saw—a round patch of grayish-white light, yes, but not all that far above them. Yet it didn't look like cloud cover—in fact, it had a solid appearance, and wavery lines streaking through it. And there were—"Rocks?" he asked. "Those are rocks! Oh, my gosh, we're underground! We're in some kind of gigantic cave!"

"Cool!" Mabel said.

"No," Ford replied slowly. "I don't think that's possible. This is—beyond my experience. Look ahead."

He shined the beam of light forward. Again, Dipper had a hard time understanding what he saw—but then he realized it was an upward-curving wall of water, because the light penetrated it enough to give it a greenish tinge, and he saw the shadowy form of a whale pass by. They were sailing in a mile-wide bowl of ocean, but toward the edges the bowl curved gradually upward to meet the ceiling of the cave, or whatever it was.

"Hang on!" Ford said as the boat slipped up the curve.

"I'm feeling strange," Mabel said. "Like somebody's pulling on my head!"

Dipper glanced at her—and in truth, her hair was standing on end. He felt the sensation, too, as though he were being tugged up and down simultaneously. "This is like being in that tourist trap, the upside-down house," he said. He felt his cap moving and clapped his hand on it just in time.

Now the rocks and sand above them were closer and unmistakable.

And they weren't part of a cave ceiling at all.

In fact, they made up the sea floor.

And the Stan O' War II was, impossibly, sailing along upside-down.

4

"OK, Poindexter," Stan growled. "You always got an explanation for everything. So tell us ordinary ignoramuses—what th' heck is goin' on here?"

"I . . . don't know," Ford admitted, scratching his head and looking utterly baffled. "I've never read a thing about this kind of, well, I don't know, bubble in reality? And I've certainly never run across anything like this in my whole experience."

"I think we should go down and explore the ocean floor," Mabel said.

"Absent any other course of rational action, that might make sense," Ford said.

"I'm game," Stan said. "Anything to get us outa here and back to normal!"

"I can use the engines to hold us steady here," Ford said. "Well, for an hour or so. I don't want to use too much diesel fuel—we'll need it to get back home. Assuming we can find a way back!"

"Wait, wait, it might be a good idea to explore. Only how . . . do we get up there?" Dipper asked.

Mabel gave him an impatient look. "Uh . . . jump?"

"I'm not sure that would work," Ford told her. "And if it did, it's a fifty-foot drop from the top of the mast. Or rise. Or something. You'd break your neck!"

"Mabel," Dipper said, "come over here, over to the stern. OK, shoot your grappling hook straight up. Everyone watch out! Heads up!"

Mabel pulled out the grappling hook, stuck her tongue in the corner of her mouth, and fired the grapnel as nearly vertical as she could. It zoomed up . . . and stuck there, fifteen feet above the top of the mast, at the end of its line. "Cool!" Mabel said. "Like a helium grappling hook!"

Ford moved the searchlight and found the hook dangling weirdly in mid-air. "Clearly, the sea floor over us does exert a normal gravitational pull. What's countering it and giving us reverse gravity aboard the boat, well, that I cannot tell."

"Will that thing hold us?" Stan asked.

Mabel retracted the hook—and they had to scatter as it began to fall, but Mabel reeled it back fast enough to keep it from clonking anyone. "Nope," she said.

Dipper considered. "I think I have an idea," he said.

So he climbed the mast—the way Wendy had shown him, with Grunkle Stan's belt around him and his feet braced against the wood. A heavy thirty-pound test fishing line was tied to his own belt, at his waist, and Mabel unreeled it as Dipper ascended.

It got easier, because his weight seemed to diminish steadily and quickly as he got further up. He had a little difficulty where the radar dish and antennae were bolted to the mast, but at that point there were L-shaped cleats to stand on, and he managed to unbuckle the belt, move it higher past the electronics, and buckle it again one-handed. Then he went to stand on the topmost cleats, thirty feet above the deck.

"I can really feel an upward pull up here!" he called back to the deck. "I bet I don't weigh more than ten pounds!"

"This is our lightest anchor!" Ford yelled up. "Haul away!"

Dipper pulled up the fishing line—which Mabel had cut at the bottom. At first it was easy, until he was holding a heavier rope, and then it became harder, because a twenty-pound Danforth anchor was tied to the rope. Even that grew less of a burden as he hauled and the strange upward gravity began to pull. By the time he grasped the anchor, it weighed only two pounds or maybe even less.

"Watch out!" Dipper yelled. With the free part of the rope wound around a cleat, he swung the anchor around and around, like a lasso. "Get ready to duck if this doesn't work!" Dipper called down. "Here goes!" Stretching his arm as far as he could, Dipper hurled the anchor. For a dizzy moment it seemed to float indecisively—and then, at first slowly and then with gathering momentum, it plunged upward to the sea floor.

"Yay!" Mabel yelled from the deck.

Dipper unwound the twist of the rope from the cleat and pulled on the line. "It won't hold," he called down. "It's just dragging through, like the sand is completely dry and loose!"

However, Ford was an ingenious man. He had Dipper climb down, then Stan took his place and went up the mast. Stan hauled more weights up—the two thirty-pound anchors, then a fifty-pound one—and by pulling the line partly back and tying the weights on at intervals, he built up the total weight at the bottom—or top—to a hundred and thirty pounds.

"Oughta hold you two, anyhow!" Stan said as he came back down.

"Me first!" Mabel said.

"Uh, no," Dipper told her. "No offense, but I ought to go first."

Mabel blew a raspberry. "Whaaat? You had a hard time doing the rope climb in gym class!"

Feeling his face get hot, Dipper insisted, "But I did it! OK, I'll take a thinner cord with me. Mabel unreels it. Then you guys tie on some long stakes and a mallet, and I'll drive the stakes in and tie off the rope. If the stakes take a strong enough hold, anybody can make the climb."

That made sense. Again with a line tied to his belt, Dipper hauled himself upward, past the head of the mast—and soon he hit the spot where the pull toward the deck and the pull toward the sea floor canceled out, and he was, practically speaking, weightless. "Gotta turn around!" he yelled.

It was a little tricky, but with zero weight he managed it. Then, because even the fifty-pound weight was heavier than he currently was, he pulled himself downward. Before long he weighed a few pounds, and then it was a matter of climbing downward toward the upward—it was difficult to think of it—until he neared the sea floor and his weight felt back to normal.

He reeled in the cord and had to back away fast as two six-foot-long wooden stakes and a hand sledge hammer fell toward him. "Hang on!"

He stamped around the circle of illumination from the spotlight. "It's like a beach above the high-tide mark! Loose sand! Let me see if the stakes will hold!" The first one went in for eighteen inches and met no resistance. Then the ground below—above?—firmed up. He pounded with the hammer, each blow making the stake go in six more inches or so, then only two inches and then only one at a time. The last foot and a half were the hardest. He pulled at the stake—and it held firmly.

"I'm tying the rope off here," he said. "Let me drive in the other stake next to this one, and then you can test it!" He angled the second stake in the opposite direction to the first and drove it well in, too, and then secured the rope to both at once where they crossed.

"Comin' through!" Mabel shouted. She shinnied up, and then down, the rope and jumped off six feet in the air, landing flat on her face with a poof of sand. "And she sticks the landing!" she yelled, laughing and looking up. "P-too! P-too! Sand in my mouth!"

Above them, Ford and Stan seemed to be arguing. Then they saw Stan coming down hand over hand, upside-down to them. When he reached the zero-G point, he yelled, "Geeze Louise!" But he spun around and pulled himself down, grunting. When he stepped onto the sand, he said, "Let's secure this as a mooring line. Brainiac's gonna keep watch on the boat while we scout around. Nearly had to fight him for it. Here ya go." He handed around compact flashlights, the kind with brilliant high-intensity discharge bulbs.

After hammering the stakes in a little more he said, "That's solid, now," and then turned his flashlight on and waved it in a circle, pointing the beam up at the Stan O' War II. After a moment the spotlights died and the rumble of the engine cut off. "He's shut down the motor," Stan said. "We gotta conserve fuel. You knuckleheads ready? Let's have a look around. Stick together!"

They wandered over what looked like the bottom of the sea—but it was long dry, with the sand like that on a desert, though ripples from possibly ancient waves still showed. Now and then they found a shell or a complete fish skeleton. And then Mabel said, "Woohoo! Pirate treasure!" She dived for it and came up with a bright yellow coin. "This is probably worth millions of dollars!"

"Lemme take a look at that, Sweetie," Stan said. He held the coin on his palm, blew loose grains of sand off it, and studied it in the bright beam of his flashlight. "Huh."

Dipper craned to see. The gleaming coin seemed to be gold, and it bore a profile of a pudgy, puffy-faced man with leaves in his long hair. Around the portrait were the words "GEORGIVS-III DEI-GRATIA." Dipper asked, "What is it?"

"A guinea piece," Stan said thoughtfully.

"For buying guinea pigs?" Mabel asked excitedly. "I've always wanted a guinea pig!"

"You've always made me your guinea pig," Dipper reminded her. "Remember when you made me try your habanero vanilla pudding, without telling me what was in it?"

Mabel chuckled. "That was fun! Is this what they call a doubloon, Grunkle Stan?"

"Nah, it's British money, but old. This here is King George III, so this coin goes back to about the time of the American Revolution. Wonder how it got here!"

"Here's something else," Dipper said, picking up something white from the sand. "Huh. A broken pipe."

"Yeah, a clay tobacco pipe," Stan said, taking it. He sniffed. "Whew! Stinky tobaccy! Now, this is peculiar—somebody was smokin' it not long ago! Like within the last day!"

"Then somebody else is here!" Dipper said.

"Yeah, but where is here?"

Mabel flashed the beam of her light all around, over empty low hills of sand. "And where's the closest pet store? I want my guinea pig!"

"Guys," Dipper said, "it looks like there's a trail of footprints leading off that way—and we didn't make it!"

"Um . . . I think maybe we better get back to the rope," Stan said. "If there is somebody else around, no tellin' whether they'll be friendly or hostile."

They followed their own footprints back. "Tell ya what," Stan said. "You two climb back to the boat. I'll hang here and stand guard. Take the cord with you an' tell Ford I want the carbine, just in case. I'll hold the light for you."

Mabel took back the guinea piece before she climbed to the boat. For safekeeping, she popped it into her mouth.

"Don't swallow it!" Dipper warned.

"Ith thalty!" she said, her words slurred.

"Still!"

The rope, now mooring the boat, stretched taut, and she climbed it with arms and legs. They saw her reverse and then climb down—up, whatever—to the Stan O' War II. "Maybe whoever dropped the coin and the pipe found a way to get out of here," Dipper said. "Could be they've already left."

"Yeah, or maybe they're watchin' us from out there in the dark an' armed to th' teeth!" Stan said. "Go! And don't forget to send down the carbine!"

Dipper started to climb, but he hadn't gone ten feet before he heard an unfamiliar and frantic male voice: "I say, I say, I say! You fellows! Help!"

He jumped back down, not sticking the landing, but not hurting himself, and scrambling to his feet, he whipped out his compact but bright flashlight. He shone it around and gasped.

Stumbling out of the darkness toward them, sand spraying from every step of his bare feet, floundered a young man in knee-length breeches and a loose white shirt, with long tangled brown hair and a wild look in his eyes. "Help a fellow out!" he called again. "I'm stranded!"

"Who are you?" Stan yelled.

"Martin! Midshipman Martin of his Majesty's ship Discovery! I fell overboard during the gale today—yesterday—I don't know how long ago! And I've been lost on this bloody island for hours!"

He came close, his chest heaving for breath. "Are you—are you English? You're dressed most strangely."

"Americans," Stan said.

"Oh—colonials!"

"Wait, wait," Dipper said, rubbing his eyes. "Mr. Martin—what's the date?"

"The date? Today, you mean? Why, I believe it's—dear me, I'm not completely certain, because I fell overboard, you know, and it's so dark. However, I expect it may be—but I'm not certain, as I say—I think it must be in the early morning hours of March twenty-fourth?" His inflection made it a question, not a statement.

"What year?" Dipper asked.

The young man blinked his blue eyes. "Why—1778, of course!"

Stan grunted, "Wha?"

But Dipper groaned. It's going to be one of THOSE things, he thought.

5

"Curse this fog," the midshipman muttered, hugging himself.

"What fog?" Stan asked.

"Why—just look around, sir! Ever since I fell overboard and somehow made it to this barren island, the tempests have raged and nothing but fog, storm, and rain has befallen me! I lost my good jacket in the sea, and I am chilled to the very marrow!"

Mabel and Dipper exchanged a look. They saw no fog at all—merely darkness and, in the pools of their flashlights, sand. "Are you cold?" Mabel whispered.

"No. Well, not warm, but not cold, either."

Mabel spoke quietly to her brother: "Why's he feeling and seeing things different from us? Think he's just cuckoo bonkers?"

"Maybe not," Dipper whispered. "Maybe it's some property of this place. Some influence, I mean, that makes different people see and feel different things."

"OK, let's get you aboard!" Stan said, sweeping his light to illuminate the stakes and the rope.

"My word, sir, you have a powerful dark-lantern!"

"Yeah, dark-lantern. You know how to climb a rope, Midshipman Martin?"

"Yes, sir, but I scarcely think—"

"His Majesty ain't payin' you to think!" Stan bellowed. "Up that line double-quick, midshipman, or you'll feel the back of my hand!"

"Aye!" Martin said, and he scrambled up frantically.

Stan put his hand next to his mouth and bellowed. "Ahoy, Cap'n Pines! One castaway comin' aboard!"

"Wow, look at him go!" Mabel said. "How'd you do that, Grunkle Stan?"

"Meh, watched a lot of pirate movies in my younger days," Stan said with a shrug. "You two squirts next, and make sure Ford doesn't scare the livin' daylights outa this poor guy."

As Stan held the light on the rope, Dipper went first, with Mabel right beneath him. He heard her giggling. "What?"

"Just lookin' at your buns, Brobro!" Mabel chortled. "Wendy thinks you—"

"Can it, Mabel!" Dipper snapped.

Down—up?—on the ground, Stan laughed. "Can! I get it!"

Dipper didn't, but he climbed furiously and reversed himself midway with no trouble. Then he simply slid up—down?—to the deck. Martin stood sort of at attention, his hand at his chest clutching something invisible. He was stammering, "Jo -John M-Martin, Midshipman, HMS Discovery, sir!"

"Uh—at ease, Martin," Ford said, looking baffled. Martin just stared at him, bug-eyed and quivering.

Mabel slipped down the rope behind Dipper, and then Stan came swooping down. He snapped out, "As you were, Martin!"

And Martin finally relaxed.

Grinning, Stan turned to his brother and said, "Cap'n Pines, this is a castaway who told us he fell overboard from a British ship. Don't know what to do with him."

"A . . . British ship?" Ford asked. "Uh—welcome aboard the Stan O' War II, Martin."

"By your leave, Cap'n," Stan said. He turned to Martin. "All right, lad, despite the name of this sloop, we ain't a war vessel. Just merchantmen. Now, your ship was the—"

"The HMS Discovery, sir, commanded by Captain Charles Clerke, only he's been ill since Tahiti, so generally First Officer Burney is taking his place. Our ship's a consort to the HMS Resolution, Captain James Cook commanding, on a mission to find the Northwest Passage."

"The Northwest . . . Cook?" Ford asked, frowning as though he were listening to a Hindu radio station playing a rap song from Botswana.

Stan took him by the elbow and led him forward, then whispered, "It's some kinda cockamamie time mix-up, Sixer. He thinks it's March 1778, and he thinks we're in the middle of fog, rain, and storms. Also, he's freezin'."

"I see," Ford said. He turned and gestured to Dipper. "Midshipman, uh, Mason, take this man below and give him the pea jacket from my locker. Can't have him freezing."

"Aye, sir," Dipper said.

"What are we doing?" Mabel asked. "Playing pirates? I call Anne Bonney! She's my favorite!"

"Just ignore her," Dipper advised. "Come with me."

They went down to the galley, Dipper had Martin wait, and he brought the blue pea jacket to him. "This'll warm you up," he said.

"Thank you!" Martin got into the garment, though it was too big on him. "Do you think we might try to find my ship?"

"Uh—well, we'll ask the Captain. Uh—do you want any food?"

"I want to rest," the young man said with a tired groan. "Could I just sit here for a spell?"

"Sure."

Sighing gratefully, Martin slipped onto the bench that stood beside the folding table—currently folded out of sight—and then slumped over to one side, huddling in the jacket.

"I'll go have a word with Gr—I mean the Captain," Dipper said.

Back on deck, he heard Stan saying, "What? We should've just left him there?"

Ford was speaking over him: "Of course I wouldn't actually leave anyone to die—"

And Mabel, at the wheel was saying, "Avast, ye scurvy dogs! I be a man pirate and no female in masculine disguise, if that's what ye be thinkin', ah-harr!"

"Guys, guys," Dipper said.

Everyone glared at him and all three said, "What?" in perfect unison.

"Jinx!" Mabel shouted. "You both owe me a soda!"

"Come on, please," Dipper said. "Grunkle Ford, this—whatever it is, must be a—a time bubble? A time trap? Something that hauls in ships! What could do that?"

"I don't know!" Ford said. "Something that could violate or suspend the normal laws of space and time! I suppose it might be an interdimensional intrusion—though my instruments don't bear that out. Or perhaps some very powerful magic spell. Magic is so diffuse and various that it's difficult to identify with any confidence."

"Look, Martin thinks his ship's still somewhere around," Dipper said. "Do you think maybe if we put him back aboard it, that might, I don't know, break the spell?"

"Possibly," Ford admitted. "But I don't see how!"

"Hang on, hang on," Stan said. "Do we even want to do that? What if it does and we get snapped back to 1778 with him an' his ship? I don't wanna live in an era when the dollar hasn't even been invented yet!"

Mabel said, "But on the other hand, you could be a great Colonial scam artist, a psychic predicting the future that's already happened!"

"You're makin' my head hurt," Stan complained.

"Something else we need to think about," Dipper said. "My phone still shows the time as the same it was when we went into the whirlpool, and that's hours ago."

Ford checked his watch. "My watch has stopped at the same moment! Let me check—" He ducked below deck, came out a moment later, and said, "The chronometer's also frozen. Oh, and Martin is lying on the bench asleep."

"Time's stopped for us," Dipper said. "Mabel, are you hungry?"

"Are you kidding?" Mabel asked. "Am I hungry?" Then she looked puzzled. "Um—no. No, I'm not!"

"There ya go," Stan said. "Something's definitely screwed with the time! I haven't gone to the bathroom since we started down to this crazy place, so yeah, time's froze up."

"We're in suspension," Ford said. "And for Martin to be here too . . . we're somewhere that has no time in the ordinary sense."

"But we're walking and talking," Mabel pointed out. "And I can do this!" She reached into Dipper's waistband, grabbed the elastic band of his undershorts, and yanked hard.

"Hey! Cut it out!" Dipper yelled, writhing. "Mabel! A wedgie is not funny!"

"Yeah, it is!"

Even Ford smiled, and Stan was chuckling. "It's objectively funny, Dipper. But yeah, don't do that, Mabel. Not to your brother. T.K. would probably get off on it, though!"

"I'll try it!" Mabel said.

"IF!" Dipper shouted, tugging his underwear back into place. "If we get home again! Which we have to figure out how to do!"

"Maybe," Ford said slowly, "maybe we should cruise around and see if we spot Martin's ship. Or ships. I'm rusty on my maritime history, but I know that Captain Cook led three expeditions to the Pacific, and this was the last one. He explored the northwest coast of North America, including Alaska, and then went back southward to the Sandwich Islands—that's what he'd named them—"

"Ooh, a delicatessen island?" Mabel asked. "What do they got? Reubens? It's been a long time since I had one of those!"

Ford waited until she ran down, then patiently said, "The name was in honor of John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich, who was such an inveterate gambler—"

"My kinda guy!" Stan said.

"—yes, Stanley. Anyway, he got so wrapped up in a long card game that he missed a couple of meals and finally told his valet to bring him some cold meat between two pieces of bread. He invented that type of food and it was named after him. So no, the islands are not a delicatessen, but yes, they have something remotely to do with the bread type of sandwiches. Today they're called the Hawaiian Islands."

"I'd love to go to Hawaii," Mabel said. "Mom and Dad—"

"Focus, Mabel," Dipper begged. "Please!"

Ford resumed: "Well, Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands and the islanders were first friendly—"

"Hold on," Mabel said. "There were people on the islands when Cook discovered them? Didn't they discover the islands first?"

"Well, yes. I should have said Cook was the first European to discover the islands, which the Polynesians had of course already discovered and colonized."

"Yeah, give them some respect!" Mabel insisted.

"Anyway," Ford said, beginning to sound like Stan in a cranky mood, "after failing to discover the Northwest Passage—because there is none, Mabel!—Cook returned to Hawaii, where he got into a squabble with King Kalaniopuu over the islanders' stealing a boat—this was at Kealakekua Bay on Hawaii, which Americans usually call the Big Island today—"

"Those names are weird," Mabel said.

"No, they're not," Dipper told her. "They just sound that way because the Hawaiian language has only eight consonants and five vowels."

Mabel tilted her head like a bewildered puppy. "What, did they get their alphabet from a used Scrabble game they bought at a cheapo second-hand shop?"

"I give up," Ford said.

"No, no," Dipper told him. "Go on, Grunkle Ford. Didn't Captain Cook die in Hawaii?"

"He did indeed," Ford said. "Because he attempted to take the king hostage and hold him to exchange for the return of the stolen boat. One of the king's warriors attacked and killed him."

"Aw," Mabel said. "Maybe we don't want to send Martin back."

Ford looked up to the dark heavens, sighed, and added, "No, no, most of the men survived, though it was a very long voyage—from 1776 to 1780, to be exact. Even if Cook is fated to die, then the others of his crew still deserve a chance to return home. If we don't give them that chance, all of history could change in unimaginable ways."

"Yeah, and Time Baby would get all crabby and we don't want that," Mabel muttered. "OK, I guess we ought to try to put this guy back on his boat."

"I'll go untie the mooring line," Dipper said. "Then we can haul up the anchors and get underway."

It took a little doing—though Ford moved the boat forward a little so the line was at an angle, one of the anchors very nearly beaned Stan, who jumped back from the rail just in time as it came whizzing down—or up?—and splashed into the water just behind the transom. Then they had to pull the anchors up again, this time from the water instead of the sea floor.

Martin woke up and came on deck to watch as Dipper climbed the mast and lashed himself to it with Stan's belt, standing on the two braces, and kept a lookout, though he looked out on dense blackness, seeing nothing. They reversed their course and sailed slowly toward the center of the mile-wide bowl of water. Finally, though—it felt like two or three hours, though technically he supposed no time had passed—finally, Dipper saw some gleams of orange light off to starboard and called the information down to the deck.

Ford changed course to intercept the lights. Dipper made out that the orange glows came from lanterns on two ships, which were tossing and wallowing heavily, as though fighting a storm, even though the Stan O' War II navigated over calm water.

Ford tied a loud hailer to a line and Dipper hauled it up. When he could hear the swash of the sails on the other two ships, he switched the bullhorn on and bawled, "Ahoy, Discovery! Ahoy, Resolution!" His magnified voice boomed over the sea.

Faintly from the darkness came a man's shouting voice: "This is H.M.S. Resolution! What ship is that?"

"No ship! Just a boat!" Dipper called back. "We have one of your crew! A midshipman who fell overboard!"

"Martin?"

"Yes!"

"He is alive?"

"He is!"

"Approach!"

"Stand by!"

Dipper hurried down the mast. The binnacle light made Stan, at the wheel, look green and menacing. "I heard," he said. "You're goin' home, pal!"

But next to him, Martin, still swathed in the pea jacket, looked miserable. "Oh, Lord!" he groaned. "I'm in for it now! That was the sailing master. A right hard horse, he is! He'll have the flesh flogged off my back for this!"

"Nah, don't worry, kid, I'll have a word with him," Stan said.

"I think that would only make matters worse," Martin said.

"Hah! You don't know me," Stan told him.

"And you," Martin replied sadly, "don't know William Bligh!"

6

"William Bligh?" Dipper asked Ford softly. "As in the Mutiny on the Bounty? Captain Bligh?"

"I presume so," Ford whispered back. "Though as I recall, that incident happened a good deal later than Cook's last voyage."

"Come under our lee!" yelled the hoarse, angry voice from the British ship. Ford took the wheel from Stan and carefully edged the Stan O' War II close to the side of the ship away from the wind. Then from the deck, the voice ordered, "Come aboard, Mr. Martin! Whoever is in charge of that cockleshell, you come, too! The Captain will want a word with you!"

Martin sighed, doffed the jacket and handed it to Stan, and then, to Dipper's amazement, climbed straight up the side of the Resolution on a kind of ladder, a set of shallow cleats, really, built into the ship. Ford said, "Take the wheel, Stanley." Then he shouted up: "I'll need a man-rope! I'm not deep-water sailor!"

"Stand by."

A rope whipped over the side, and Ford grasped it. "Wish me luck," he said.

Using the rope more than the ladder, he climbed upward. At the last second, Dipper grabbed the rope, too, and hauled himself up, hand over hand—and with his palms burning from the effort, he tried hard not to think of climbing the rope in gym class.

At the top, Ford stepped onto the deck, and Dipper followed him a second later. A glaring yellowish light from the binnacle lantern showed them Mr. Martin hugging himself against what suddenly was an icy, sleet-ridden wind—and next to him, the man Dipper guessed was William Bligh, in a heavy blue jacket. Though a very young man, probably in his early twenties, Bligh was balding, with a frizz of damp hair sticking out around his ears and strands of it blowing in the wind. "Who's this boy?" Bligh asked grumpily.

Ford looked back, blinked, and said quickly, "My servant, sir. He always follows me everywhere."

Bligh gave Dipper a sneering glance. "A dog would do as much. Come, sir, stir yourself! The captain is waiting."

They went aft and down a ladder below decks, and Dipper's first thought upon experiencing the interior of an 18th century British three-master was Man, it stinks! It was worse than the locker room in the gym, worse than the pile of long-unwashed lucky socks that the track team had saved up to burn after the season ended (though Dipper had missed the bonfire—he preferred going to Gravity Falls), worse than Waddles had ever smelled on a humid day. Putrid sweat, old tar, stale urine, something like rotting potatoes, and other stenches competed to make him gag. He held his breath until Bligh stopped and tapped on a closed door.

"Yes?" came a voice from inside.

"Owner of a small boat and his brat to see you, Captain," Bligh said. "They found young Martin and returned him to us."

"Come in."

Dipper staggered—the deck was tilting and bouncing alarmingly in the British vessel's private stormy sea. Captain James Cook sat at a table. He had been writing in an oversized book with a quill pen. Dipper saw that he had a long, intelligent face with a prominent nose and a stern, no-nonsense set of his mouth. He wore a cream-colored waistcoat with brass buttons—his blue officer's coat hung on the back of his chair—and what looked like a gray-powdered wig. "And who are you, sir?" Cook asked, impatiently but with none of Bligh's sneer in his tone.

"Stanford Pines, Captain," Ford responded. "Owner of a small sloop."

"What the devil are you doing in these parts?" Cook asked.

Ford shrugged. "A little trading, a little fishing."

"You're Colonials, I gather?" Cook asked.

"Yes, in a way. My people were originally from New Jersey, but we relocated here many years ago."

"Curious, coming from a settled land into a howling wilderness!" Cook thought for a moment and then asked, "Did you know that the Atlantic Colonies have revolted against the Crown?"

"No, sir," Ford said. "Our colony here has never revolted."

"That's good. Then I suppose I do not have to consider you enemies and put you under arrest. Where exactly are your people?"

"Oh, inland some way. We're a peaceful group."

"Begging your pardon, Captain," Bligh interjected, "shall I clap Midshipman Martin in irons?"

"For what?" Cook asked.

"Desertion!" Bligh snapped.

Cook smiled thinly. "Sailing master, the young fellow fell overboard during a storm! I'd hardly call that desertion!"

"And," Ford added, "from the moment we found him, he was concerned only with getting back to his ship."

"A few good lashes would teach him not to fall," Bligh growled.

"He's a young gentleman," Cook responded. "We do not whip young gentlemen. Mr. Bligh, you and I came in through the hawse-hole—we both started out as mere seamen because we come of no great family. You are a very competent navigator and an excellent cartographer. If you learn to add to that a sense of forbearance and justice, you should go far in His Majesty's service. Martin may return to the Discovery as soon as weather permits. Dismissed, Mr. Bligh."

The young sailing master gave a stiff bow and left them. Cook turned back to Ford. "Now. Do you require assistance, sir? This is a long-lasting storm! Though only minutes seem to have passed since it hit us, sometimes it seems to me that years have gone by. Years, sir!"

Ford was staring at a reddish chunk of pitted stone, a rough ball about the size of Dipper's fist, on a stack of papers next to Cook's arm. "What? Uh, no, no assistance needed, sir. But may I ask—is that stone from Hawaii?"

"How do you know of the Island of Hawaii?" Cook asked with an air of a baffled man. "Why, I reached it on this very voyage, and the natives assured me no European had ever been there before!"

"We've heard of it in these parts," Ford said. "But if you please, Captain, did that chunk of stone come from Hawaii?"

"Yes, it did," Cook said. His expression became sour. "These Islanders are all thieves, sir! Eager for iron! Why, they'd pry the very nails from the timbers if we did not watch them! And yet an old woman became exceedingly angry when I took that stone as a memento—and a paperweight—but believe me, a mere stone is small enough repayment for the loss of chains, nails, and hammers pilfered from our stores!"

Ford murmured. "An old lady—I begin to understand! Pele."

Instantly, something strange happened.

Mabel waited as long as she could stand it. Then, when everything just—stopped—she decided she had to go. "Grunkle Stan," she said firmly, "I'm climbing up there! Uh—Grunkle Stan?"

But he, too, had stopped. The ocean was frozen—not literally, not turned to ice, but stuck in mid-wave. The sails of the big ship beside the Stan O' War II had been flapping, but now they, too, were still, like sails on a painted ship on a painted ocean, and no wind stirred. "Grunkle Stan?" Mabel asked. She nudged him. She might as well have nudged a statue. "Don't worry! I'll be back!"

She didn't trust those cleats built into the side of the ship, not even with a rope to help. But she did trust her grappling hook. She fired it, it caught on the rail of the ship, and she went up as if on an invisible elevator.

The deck lay in deep night, except for a few scattered lanterns whose flames looked as if they were made of glowing glass. Dimly in the darkness she could see sailors up in the rigging and on deck—but like Stan, they were all stuck, like mannequins in a weird nautical-supplies department store. She yelled, "Uh—anybody home?"

"Mabel?" It was faint, but she followed Dipper's voice back across the deck, down some steep steps, and to a closed door.

"You in there, Brobro?" she yelled, pounding.

"Yeah—uh, come in, I guess."

Mabel pushed the door open. "What?"

Dipper and Ford stood in front of a table, at which a man wearing a gray wig sat frozen, his mouth open as if on the verge of speech. At first Mabel didn't register the fourth person in the room—but then she saw an ancient-looking woman, exotic, white-haired, and wearing a sort of flame-colored sarong. Not only flame-colored, she noticed—it moved like flames, too, oranges and yellows and reds rolling up through it. "Neat dress!" she said.

"Madame Pele," Ford said, "this is my great-niece, Mabel, sister of Dipper. Mabel, this is Madame Pele, the Hawaiian spirit of fire."

"So be nice!" Dipper whispered.

"We have a problem," Madame Pele said in a voice that was neither angry nor sad, though it seemed to touch on both emotions. "I have been waiting for two centuries and more for someone with knowledge of the curse to pass this way and solve it." She smiled, her creased face looking like a relief map of a volcanic island. "By the way, do you have a cigarette? I'm dying for a smoke."

"Uh—" Ford said. "No. I've never smoked."

"That's all right. I have a cheroot. It will do." And suddenly the old woman held a thin black cigar between the first and second fingers of her right hand. "I suppose you have no matches, either."

"No, sorry," Ford said.

"There's always my way." She cupped her left hand—and the palm glowed red-hot, then white-hot. She lifted her hand to her face, touched the end of the cigar to the glowing spot on her palm—it lit her whole face a glowing red—and puffed. "That's better," she said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke. "You, Stanford Pines, know what must be done."

"He has to return the stone to the island of Hawaii," Ford said.

"Wait, I'm missing something here," Mabel said. "Lady, I don't want to be rude, but somebody tell me what the heck is going on!"

Madame Pele chuckled. "I like this one. She has a fiery spirit!"

"That's one way of putting it," Dipper mumbled.

"Child, do you know what a taboo is?"

Mabel snorted. "Yeah, that's the final boss in one of Dipper's video games!"

"That's spelled differently," Dipper told her. "A taboo is a decree that something is forbidden. It's like—a moral law."

"Correct," Pele said. "And one of the most serious taboos is that one cannot take sand, stone, or coral away from my islands! This man Cook was warned—I warned him myself—but in his arrogance, he stole a volcanic stone from my big island. He must be persuaded to return it, and even then, he must pay a price."

"So—let me understand, now, you created this—this nowhere to hold him until someone who could make it clear to him came along?" Ford asked.

Pele puffed on her cheroot. "Yes."

"Wait, wait," Mabel said. "Lady, this is 2014! He's been here, what, two hundred years and change? If we turn him loose, won't he like crumble into bones and stuff?"

Pele laughed softly. "You do not understand my power. He will be returned to his own time, to the same day when he was first brought here. You will be released in your time, to the same moment when you were pulled into the nowhere, as Stanford Pine puts it."

"Boy, Time Baby must hate you!" Mabel said, shaking her head.

Pele shrugged and made a face. "I admit, I do occasionally make him grumpy. He is a big baby about it."

"Well, yeah!" Mabel said. "High five, sistah!"

To Dipper's surprise, Pele smacked Mabel's hand with a ringing clap. Mabel shook her stinging hand. "I like you!" she said. "You high-five as hard as me!"

Ford had pushed his spectacles up and was rubbing his eyes. "Back on track, please. So, Madame Pele, why didn't you just appear and tell him what he had to do?"

"I told him once," Pele said, blowing a smoke ring. "I do not warn twice. A man much like Cook, inquiring, intelligent, and imaginative, had to come along. One who understood taboo and how to break the spell. You're it. Sorry for the inconvenience."

"Uh, wait, sorry, uh, Madame Pele," Dipper said, "but I have to ask: What if Ford can't persuade Captain Cook to go back to Hawaii with the stone?"

"Then you and your family will simply have to stay here in nowhere and nowhen for a few centuries until the right person does come along," Pele said with a smile.

"I knew there'd be a catch!" Dipper groaned.

"We'll persuade him!" Mabel said.

"I think you may need her help," Pele said to Ford.

"Yes!" Mabel crowed. "Leave it to Mabel!"

"Then I suggest you begin . . . now!" Pele said.

And like a puff of smoke dissolving in air, she vanished.

7

The instant that Pele vanished, Mabel jumped up onto Captain Cook's table. He began to speak: "These storms—great heavens, who are you?"

"Wooo!" Mabel moaned. "Listen, Captain Cook! Woooo! You must return to Hawaii!"

"Return—to the Sandwich Islands?" he asked, clearly confused.

"Whatever! Your mission there is not finished!"

"Mission? Mission? My mission is to discover the Northwest Pasage!"

Dipper began, "Mabel—"

Mabel overrode him: "MAYBE you think so, but you must go back, go back, and, uh, map all of the Sandwich Islands! Yes, you must! And, um, persuade the natives to give up their stealy-stealy ways!"

"Their—I'm afraid I don't—what are you, anyway, and how did you suddenly appear like that?"

"I am the Ghost of Voyages Yet to Be! I've been sent to tell you that only you can prevent theft among the natives! And forest fires, but that's just being careful in the wilderness. No, you must be an example! You have a stone from Hawaii! Go to the king of the islands and return it to him! That will make the natives stop stealing everything from British ships! Remember! Woooo! Wooo! Uh, Pele, little help here?"

The whole cabin flashed with brilliant orange light—and when it faded, time had stopped again. Cook leaned back in his chair, frozen, his mouth open in either astonishment or anger. Or perhaps acute indigestion, it was hard to tell. "Yes!" Mabel said, punching the air. "That's what I'm talkin' about! Let's fix this up and I'll get out of here and then Pele can start everything up again!"

Ford mumbled, "Uh, fix what up—?"

"First, this!" Mabel said. She grabbed the chunk of solidified lava and stuffed it inside Cook's vest. "Now to make sure—" she tore a blank page from the book in front of Cook.

"Hey!" Dipper said. "That's probably the ship's log!"

"It's a book, dum-dum!" Mabel said. "Sheesh, Dip, I think you need glasses! A log! You've been wandering in the woods too long . . . where's a ballpoint?"

"Uh, they write with feathers," Dipper said.

"Ew! Seems messy!"

"Here, here," Dipper said, taking a somewhat toothmarked pen from his inner pocket and handing it to her.

"Great!" She scrawled something on the torn-out sheet, folded it, and wrote on the outside: This is for Captain Cook's eyes only! TOP SECRET!

"You dotted the I's with little hearts," Dipper pointed out.

"That's OK. This'll creep him out! I told him to remember his mission and to hand the rock back to the king of Hawaii. When this note shows up out of nowhere, it should make him do what it says. This time stop probably won't last very long, so Mabel's out! Peace!" She blew them a kiss and ran through the doorway.

"What . . . was that?" Ford asked.

"I think she got it from Phineas and Ferb," Dipper said.

"Friends of hers?"

Dipper shrugged. "Who knows?"

"Perhaps before things begin to move again, we had better take our leave as well."

They made their way back to the deck, Ford swung himself over the side and slipped down the rope to where the Stan O' War II idled, and Dipper followed. Mabel was waiting for them. "Grunkle Stan's all seized up like Cook," she said. "When will Pele start time—oh, I guess she has."

Because suddenly the wind roared and pelted them with sleet, the boat rocked alarmingly, and the sails cracked overhead.

Ford yelled, "Get us out of here, Stanley!"

For a change, Stan didn't argue but throttled up—and in two seconds they were away from the ship, away from the storm, and nearly skimming over the dark, calm water.

"Well," Stan said from the helm, "that happened."

The ocean began to revolve, taking the boat with it in a huge circle. Dipper grabbed the rail. "Guys? I think the whirlpool's starting up again!"

"Wonderful!" Stan snarled.

"Crash positions, everybody!" Mabel yelled.

It was—almost—a repetition of their getting caught in the pool and spiraling down, except they moved in the opposite direction, clockwise instead of counter-clockwise. And after what felt like minutes of spinning, suddenly they were under a normal sky, in early daylight, and Ford, pinned against the gunwale again, gasped and said, "I think . . . it worked."

"Yeah. Kind of anticlimactic," Stanley said. "But at least we're back and in one peace an' healthy. Uh-oh!"

Then everyone but Mabel leaned over the rail and heaved.

Their second breakfast promised to stay down. Ford said, "The instruments show that the anomaly has dissipated. I presume that Mabel's suggestion to Cook resolved the situation."

"But how about us? Are we back in our own time and dimension and all that?" Stan asked.

Ford nodded. "I listened to radio traffic and checked the weather station and the time signal. Evidently we came back only a moment or two after the whirlpool took us down to the undersea cavern. Or bubble, or whatever it was."

Dipper sighed. "We should feel kinda guilty."

"Why?" Mabel asked. "I saved our butts! Hooray for the Voyage Ghost! Yayyy . . . "

Dipper looked at her. "Don't you know what happened when Cook went back to Hawaii?"

"Um—he got a fantastic tan?"

"Weren't you listening earlier?" Dipper asked. "Remember about the king of the islands and the stolen boat and—my gosh, Mabel, Captain Cook gets killed when he goes back to Hawaii!"

"Pele said he still had to be punished," Ford said kindly.

"Wait, wait," Stan said, frowning. "You ran into the soccer player down there?"

"I—don't follow you," Ford told him.

"Yeah, you were always a nerd. Look, Poindexter, Pelé was a great international soccer star back in the day. Brazilian. They called him Rei Pelé there, 'King Pelé,' but his real name is Edson . . . something or other, I forget—"

"This was a different Pele," Dipper told him quickly. "A woman, who's like the Hawaiian volcano goddess."

Mabel looked troubled. "I sent the captain back so they could kill him? Oh, man! Way to bring me down, Captain Buzzkill!"

"I'm Dr. Funtimes!" Dipper objected.

"Mabel," Ford said, "if it's any comfort, I think perhaps Captain Cook's time simply came on that return to Hawaii. It was fated to happen. You needn't blame yourself too much."

Mabel sighed philosophically. "Yeah, I guess by now he'd be dead anyway. Or stuck in that time bubble forever. You know, growing up is rotten! I mean every little thing you do has consequences!"

"Are we done with Pele?" Dipper asked.

"I hope so," Ford said.

"Well, we can get closer to home an' do a little deep-sea fishin' anyhow," Stan said.

"That'll be fun," Mabel decided, though Dipper noticed she spoke without her usual overflowing enthusiasm.

But she felt better as the day went on. And that was almost the end of it. However, not quite. After they'd come within sight of Vancouver Island again, though it lay faint on the distant eastern horizon, and after a day of offshore fishing, Dipper managed to get enough of a cell-phone signal to surf the web a little. He told Mabel what he learned from doing so.

Captain Cook did indeed return to the Hawaiian Islands, and he died at the hands of a native guarding King Kalaniʻōpuʻu, just as history said.

William Bligh went on to become Captain of the HMS Bounty—and the victim of a mutiny when he was too harsh with the crew. He survived, became the Governor of Australia—and then was kicked out of office in another mutiny. "I'm glad," Mabel said. "He was a grumpy-grump!"

John Martin survived the voyage, as did most of Cook's crew, but Dipper couldn't find any more information about him.

Then on the last morning before they returned to port, Mabel woke up and yelled, "What the hey!"

She came out of her bunk still in her sleep shirt. "Dipper, did you do this?" She gestured at the necklace of colorful flowers she wore.

"We all woke up with them on," Dipper said. "Except Grunkle Ford."

"I was standing my watch," Ford said, "when something tickled my neck. I realized that this lei had just appeared."

"Yeah, we all got lei'd," Stan said. "What? How come Ford's coughing and you guys are snickering? What did I say?"

"I've seen this on TV," Mabel said, holding out the beautiful floral necklace. "It's a traditional Hawaiian greeting, isn't it? Giving necklaces of flowers?"

"It's a way of saying aloha," Ford told her.

"Yeah, Pumpkin, that's a Hawaiian hello," Stan explained.

"And also a farewell," Dipper added.

"Huh. Maybe Pele was saying goodbye to us," Mabel said softly. "Anyhow, it's pretty, and it smells nice. You know what? I'm gonna save these, so everybody let me pack them when we get back in. I'll dry the flowers and keep them."

"Scrapbookportunity?" Dipper asked.

"Nah, Brobro. I'm gonna be like Captain Cook. One day—one day I'm gonna return these to Pele. Even if I have to go all the way to Hawaii to do it!"

"Sounds like a plan," Stan said with a grin. "Hope you make it, kiddo."

"You know what?" she asked, her voice upbeat again. "We could just turn the boat around and go there right now!"

But, for various reasons, including a desire not to die of thirst or hunger at sea, they decided not to. The leis went into Mabel's overnight bag, and the plans to go to Hawaii she tucked away in her dreams.

And then they headed back to port, where Dipper would discover a marvelous present for Wendy—ah, but that's all another story.

The End