Free Sky Ghost by Mack Maloney Page B

rescuers asked him.
    The man from the water thought a moment.
    “I don’t know,” he lied. Actually he’d remembered his name sometime during the long night. But he suddenly didn’t want to tell these people anything.
    “Well, from now on, you’ll be known as Rower #1446798.”
    “Rower?” the man asked, confused.
    The rescuers indicated the ship nearest to them. It was a huge cruise liner, which had been rigged with sails, and two huge outboard engines on the stern. But it also had hundreds of holes on its lower hull, down near the water line, and from these holes hundreds of oars were sticking out.
    “Yes, a rower,” one of the rescuers said. “The Lord has obviously sent you to us. He knows we always need an extra pair of hands to row.”

Chapter 7
    Sing Sing Military Prison
    Two months later
    T HE CELL WAS 12 feet by eight feet. The ceiling was exactly seven feet and one-quarter inch high. The walls were made of plaster and stone. A single dim bulb hung over it all.
    There was a bunk, a chair, a toilet, a sink, and one window. The window faced east, which was good. The morning sun came through on occasion. There were no bars on the window; it was made of thick glass. This was good too, because at night it offered a clear view of the starry sky.
    The constellations Ursa Major, Pegasus, and Andromeda had been Hawk Hunter’s nightly companions for the past two months. They and dreams of blonds, redheads, brunets. But mostly blonds. Always young, always shapely, they had fed his dreams like ghosts every night since his incarceration.
    His hair was very long now, and so was his beard. But his appearance made no difference to him. He was in solitary confinement, segregated from the rest of the prison population. He didn’t see anyone other than the same two guards every day. He never went out to the exercise yard; he never went to the chow hall. His meals were brought to him. He washed his own clothes. He cleaned his own cell.
    In fact, the only time he left the lockup was to go to the prison library, and this was permitted just once a week. And then he could go only in the middle of the night, when there was no one else inside. He was allowed five minutes to pick out one book, the same two screws watching him at all times.
    It took him about two weeks to get over the shock that he was actually in prison and would be for a very long time. No one ever told him what the charges were. But that didn’t really matter. He had the three ancient officers and the wacky hypnotist to blame for this and every minute of every day for those first two weeks, he plotted ways to break out and find them and kill them. Hate and thoughts of revenge made his first fortnight in jail bearable.
    But eventually, those miserable feelings began to drain away, to be replaced by some a little less dire. He knew he had to make the most of this time in the clink, so he laid out some objectives for himself. The first was to find out exactly where he was.
    He had lived another life, somewhere else—this much he knew by now. This world he’d fallen into was a different place, but not a different time. This too he was sure of. But where was this? And how did he get here? And what were the differences between where he came from and this here and now? And how could he find out?
    His only choice was to reeducate himself. That’s why on his first trip to the library he took out a physics book, the only one on the shelves. The text was barely high school level, but he read it cover to cover and at its conclusion, he determined that wherever the hell he was, the same basic tenets of physics seem to apply. This came as a great relief.
    Next, he took out a huge book titled The Greats of Literature. Was western culture the same here as there? He read the whole thing. Shakespeare. Dickens. Joyce. Everything was as he remembered it. Then he read a book on the great philosophers. Confucius. Plato. Homer. All of them, just the same.
    Next came the