Free Tramp Royale by Robert A. Heinlein Page B

decreed that they must be moved. Moved they were-by coal-burning steam shovel and scraper and mule and muscle and sweat. The Model-T Ford was brand new then and the bulldozer was yet to be born. Earthmoving machinery such as any county road department now owns would have seemed miraculous; they made do without.
    The banks are very close here and the jungle is almost in your lap. You sit in a deck chair or lean on the rail and let it flow past you, birds and snakes and waterfalls and giant blue butterflies. Once, some years ago, I found myself staring back at an eight-foot alligator, so close that I could see the stains on his teeth. I alert Ticky to watch for them, but we have no luck. One of the pilot crew aboard tells me that there are plenty of them still on the shores of the lake and that it has been necessary to fine people who hunt them for sport, then leave the carcasses to rot in the clean water of the lake.
    Back in the jungle here, only shouting distance away in places, is the old Gold Trail, peopled with the ghosts of the Indian slaves who died on the way. Once, twenty years earlier, I rode along a portion of it on a borrowed army horse. It was paved with stone and the jungle had not quite destroyed it, but had arched over it instead, forming a dusky tunnel, a place of enormous butterflies and midget deer and silence. The Isthmus was one of the world's major roadways long before the water bridge was cut through it.
    But nowadays the once-heartbreaking journey is soft and easy and no one dies on the way. Traffic lights control the shipping through the Cut, real traffic lights with red for stop and green for go. There are places where the pilot must hold back and give the traffic ahead a chance to clear; the lights tell him, just like those on Wilshire Boulevard. In addition to lights he has been briefed by the control officials ashore as to what ships to expect and where, since the enormous mass of a ship is not stopped by jamming a foot on a brake. The handling of a ship through the Canal is a piece of precision choreography. There are ranges, each a pair of giant targets, at dozens of places along the route; the pilot can sight along one range and know that he is lined up properly for the channel and sight along another at the same time and know to the yard just how far he has progressed along that reach of the channel and how soon he must turn.
    The reason for such precision is evident: in some places ships pass so closely that you expect their plates to scrape. Canal pilot is among the most highly skilled jobs in the Zone and is highly paid by civil service standards. But the job is done without swank. Almost all other countries dress their pilots in uniforms like those of naval officers, but the Gulf Shipper 's pilot was a young man in a slouch hat and casual sports clothes who carried his responsibilities with the relaxed ease of a truck driver.
    We passed through Pedro Miguel and Miraflores Locks in the late afternoon, with the same processes as in Gatun Locks save that we started each time high above the scenery, then sank into claustrophobic depths before being let out into a lower level. At dusk we dropped the pilot and steamed out into the waters of the Pacific, into the Gulf of Panama, with the lights of Panama City on our port hand. We picked our way through islands and submerged rocks and presently Captain Lee set course for Point Charambira above Buenaventura, Colombia.
     
    A drastic change comes over a ship as soon as it touches dock. The physical change can be easily described but the emotional change is far greater and harder to convey. For some days you have been in a little world, an enclave away from atom bombs and strikes and bills and auto accidents and traffic noises and strange people. Nothing is real but the ship and it is a place of no worries. You leave your stateroom door wide open, leave binoculars or cameras on deck chairs, dress as you please. No one hurries and no one worries. You