at
part up to Vern, since he claimed to be able to handle it.

It took him two weeks. First it was finding the tanker, then it was
locating a tug in shape to move, then it was finding someone to pilot
the tug. Then it was waiting for a clear and windless day--because the
pilot he found had got all his experience sailing Star boats on Long
Island Sound--and then it was easing the tanker out of Newark Bay,
into the channel, down to the pier in the North River--

Oh, it was work and no fooling. I enjoyed it very much, because I
didn't have to do it.

* * * * *

But I had enough to keep me busy at that. I found a man who claimed he
used to be a radio engineer. And if he was an engineer, I was Albert
Einstein's mother, but at least he knew which end of a soldering iron
was hot. There was no need for any great skill, since there weren't
going to be very many vessels to communicate with.

Things began to move.

The advantage of a ship like the _Queen_, for our purposes, was that
the thing was pretty well automated to start out with. I mean never
mind what the seafaring unions required in the way of flesh-and-blood
personnel. What it came down to was that one man in the bridge or
wheelhouse could pretty well make any part of the ship go or not go.

The engine-room telegraph wasn't hooked up to control the engines, no.
But the wiring diagram needed only a few little changes to get the
same effect, because where in the original concept a human being would
take a look at the repeater down in the engine room, nod wisely, and
push a button that would make the engines stop, start, or
whatever--why, all we had to do was cut out the middleman, so to
speak.

Our genius of the soldering iron replaced flesh and blood with some
wiring and, presto, we had centralized engine control.

The steering was even easier. Steering was a matter of electronic
control and servomotors to begin with. Windjammers in the old movies
might have a man lashed to the wheel whose muscle power turned the
rudder, but, believe me, a big superliner doesn't. The rudders weigh
as much as any old windjammer ever did from stem to stern; you have to
have motors to turn them; and it was only a matter of getting out the
old soldering iron again.

By the time we were through, we had every operational facility of the
_Queen_ hooked up to a single panel on the bridge.

Engdahl showed up with the oil tanker just about the time we go