The Travelers by Keith Wayne McCoy
“The most intense journeys are never geographical.” From The Travelers, by Keith Wayne McCoy.

Science Fiction? Philosophy? Romance? Social Commentary? Or all of the above?
In this beautifully written novel McCoy takes us on an unexpectedly intense journey, both physical and emotional, with Guy, who’s working on a documentary about the old Queen Mary. The luxury liner turned troop transport in WWII, later brought war-brides from England to North America. Research inevitably thrusts Guy into the lives of the Bennetts—Jim and Jess. Jim was taken to war aboard Queen Mary, and later, with his bride, Jess, returned on the same ship.

As he witnesses, through their retelling, the story of their marriage and its ultimate failure, Guy feels like a voyeur, but can’t stop listening. Jim and Jess’s children came to them in a strange way—delivered during a storm by what seems like magic in mid-Atlantic, with the ship and all its electrical systems dead in the water. A naked woman appears, pleads in an unknown tongue but with unmistakable intent, for them to take her half-starved toddlers and raise them as their own. Her task completed, the woman then disappears.

Years later, as Guy interviews men and women who traveled and worked aboard the ship, a radio message, picked up by a US Navy sub, is passed on to Queen Mary, currently a tourist attraction berthed in Los Angeles and the site of Guy’s documentary film. Some consider it a prank , others think it’s an atmospheric anomaly, but there are those who aren’t so sure. When Guy learns that the sub was at the exact coordinates the stalled Queen Mary had been when the woman first appeared, he finds it curious, but not earth-shaking—until that same naked woman, now appropriately aged, appears before him aboard the present day Queen Mary.

The woman carries a nametag with the word Bennett on it, and to Guy, things begin to make a weird kind of sense. This is Jim’s nametag, which he gave to Jess as a token of his love during the war, and which Jess in turn gave to the naked woman before she was drawn away by some unknown force after giving up her children. Can her reappearance be connected to inexplicable radio signal apparently beamed from space? With the nametag as his only clue, Guy knows he must, somehow, get Jim and Bess to the geographical bearing recently sent, despite its being in mid-Atlantic. To do so, he must involve the military and the government, all of whom see this event as “First Contact”, though Guy believes the woman wants only the Bennetts and knowledge of her children.

Can parental love—which Guy never received—be so strong a woman will abandon her children on a strange world? Can it be strong enough to destroy a “perfect” marriage? What he learns makes him doubt his own determination “never to bring a child into this world.” His intransigence in that matter has cost him the woman he loves. Now, with his new insight, will he be able to redeem himself?