The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Orsino did. The petty officer said something exasperated about the gunnery training bill and Orsino repeated his piece. They secured the gun and went below.

  Grinnel said, with apparent irrelevance: “You’re a rare bird, Wyman. You’re capable—and you’re uncommitted. Let’s go below. Stick with me.”

  * * * *

  He followed the fat little commander into the conning tower. Grinnel told an officer of some sort: “I’ll take the con, mister. Wyman here will take the radar watch.” He gave Orsino a look that choked off his protests. Presumably, Grinnel knew that he was ignorant of radar.

  The officer, looking baffled, said: “Yes, Commander.” A seaman pulled his head out of a face-fitting box and told Wyman: “It’s all yours, stranger.” Wyman cautiously put his face into the box and was confronted by meaningless blobs of green, numerals in the dark, and a couple of arrows to make confusion complete.

  He heard Grinnel say to the helmsman: “Get me a mug of joe, sailor. I’ll take the wheel.”

  “I’ll pass the word, sir.”

  “Nuts you’ll pass the word, sailor. Go get the coffee—and I want it now and not when some steward’s mate decides he’s ready to bring it.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Orsino heard him clatter down the ladder. Then his arm was gripped and Grinnel’s voice muttered in his ear: “When you hear me bitch about the coffee, sing out: ‘Aircraft 265, DX 3,000’. Good and loud. No, don’t stop looking. Repeat it.”

  Orsino said, his eyes crossing on double images of the meaningless, luminous blobs: “Aircraft 265, DX 3,000. Good and loud. When you bitch about the coffee.”

  “Right. Don’t forget it.”

  He heard the feet on the ladder again. “Coffee, sir.”

  “Thanks, sailor.” A long sip and then another. “I always said the pigboats drink the lousiest joe in the Navy.”

  “Aircraft 265, DX 3,000!” Orsino yelled.

  A thunderous alarm began to sound. “Take her down!” yelled Commander Grinnel.

  “Take her down, sir!” the helmsman echoed. “But sir, the skipper—”

  Orsino remembered him too then, dead asleep in his cot on the deck, the muscle twitching the left side of his face every few seconds.

  “God-damn it, those were aircraft! Take her down!”

  The luminous blobs and numbers and arrows swirled before Orsino’s eyes as the trim of the ship changed, hatches clanged to and water thundered into the ballast tanks. He staggered and caught himself as the deck angled sharply underfoot.

  He knew what Grinnel had meant by saying he was uncommitted, and he knew now that it was no longer true.

  He thought for a moment that he might be sick into the face-fitting box, but it passed.

  Minutes later, Grinnel was on the mike, his voice sounding metallically through the ship: “To all hands. To all hands. This is Commander Grinnel. We lost the skipper in that emergency dive—but you and I know that that’s the way he would have wanted it. As senior line officer aboard, I’m assuming command for the rest of the voyage. We will remain submerged until dark. Division officers report to the wardroom. That’s all.”

  He tapped Orsino on the shoulder. “Take off,” he said. Orsino realized that the green blobs—clouds, were they?—no longer showed, and recalled that radar didn’t work through water.

  He wasn’t in on the wardroom meeting, and wandered rather forlornly through the ship, incredibly jammed as it was with sleeping men, coffee-drinking men and booty. Half a dozen times he had to turn away close questioning about his radar experience and the appearance of the aircraft on the radar scope. Each time he managed it, with the feeling that one more question would have cooked his goose.

  The men weren’t sentimental about the skipper they had lost. Mostly they wondered how much of a cut Grinnel would allot them from the booty of Cape Cod.

  At last the word passed for “Wyman” to report to the captain’s cabin. He did, sweating after a fifteen-minute chat with a radar technician.

  Grinnel closed the door of the minute cabin and smirked at him. “You have trouble, Wyman?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’d have worse trouble if they found out for sure that you don’t know radar. I’d be in the clear. I could tell them you claimed to be a qualified radar man. That would make me out to be pretty gullible, but it would make you out to be a murderer. Who’s backing you, Wyman? Who told you to get rid of the skipper?”

  “Quite right, sir,” Orsino said. “You’ve really got me there.”

  “Glad you realize it, Wyman. I’ve got you and I can use you. It was a great bit of luck, the skipper corking off on deck. But I’ve always had a talent for improvisation. If you’re determined to be a leader, Wyman, nothing is more valuable. Do you know, I can relax with you? It’s a rare feeling. For once I can be certain that the man I’m talking to isn’t one of Loman’s stooges, or one of Clinch’s N.A.B.I. ferrets or anything else but what he says he is—

  “But that’s beside the point. I have something else to tell you. There are two sides to working for me, Wyman. One of them’s punishment if you get off the track. That’s been made clear to you. The other is reward if you stay on. I have plans, Wyman, that are large-scale. They simply eclipse the wildest hopes of Loman, Clinch, Baggot and the rest. And yet, they’re not wild. How’d you like to be on the inside when the North American Government returns to the mainland?”

  Orsino uttered an authentic gasp and Commander Grinnel looked satisfied.

  CHAPTER IX

  The submarine docked at an indescribably lovely bay in the south of Ireland. Orsino asked Grinnel whether the Irish didn’t object to this, and was met with a blank stare. It developed that the Irish consisted of a few hundred wild men in the woods—maybe a few thousand. The stupid shore-bound personnel couldn’t seem to clean them out. Grinnel didn’t know anything about them, and he cared less.

  Ireland appeared to be the naval base. The government proper was located on Iceland, vernal again after a long, climatic swing. The Canaries and Ascencion were outposts.

  Orsino had learned enough on the voyage to recognize the Government for what it was. It had happened before in history; Uncle Frank had pointed it out. Big-time Caribbean piracy had grown from very respectable origins. Gentlemen-skippers had been granted letters of marque and reprisal by warring governments, which made them a sort of contract navy. Periods of peace had found these privateers unwilling to give up their hard earned complicated profession and their investments in it. When they could no longer hoist the flag of England or France or Spain, they simply hoisted the Jolly Roger and went it alone.

  Confusing? Hell, yes! The famous Captain Kidd thought he was a gallant privateer and sailed trustingly into New York. Somewhere he had failed to touch third base; they shipped him to London for trial and hanged him as a pirate. The famous Henry Morgan had never been anything but a pirate and a super-pirate; as admiral of a private fleet he executed a brilliant amphibious operation and sacked the city of Panama. He was knighted, made governor of a fair-sized English island in the West Indies and died loved and respected by all.

  Charles Orsino found himself a member of a pirate band that called itself the North American Government.

  More difficult to learn were the ins and outs of pirate politics, which were hampered with an archaic, structurally-inappropriate nomenclature and body of tradition. Commander Grinnel was a Sociocrat, which meant that he was in the same gang as President Loman. The late sub commander had been a Constitutionist, which meant that he was allied with the currently-out “southern bloc.” The southern bloc did not consist of southerners at this stage of the North American Government’s history but of a clique that tended to include the engineers and maintenance men of the Government. That had been the reason for the sub commander’s erasure.

  The Constitutionists traditionally commanded pigboats and airc
raft while surface vessels and the shore establishments were in the hands of the Sociocrats—the fruit of some long-forgotten compromise.

  Commander Grinnel cheerfully explained to Charles that there was a crypto-Sociocrat naval officer primed and waiting to be appointed to the command of the sub. The Constitutionist gang would back him to the hilt and the Sociocrats would growl and finally assent. If, thereafter, the Constitutionists ever counted on the sub in a coup, they would be quickly disillusioned.

  There wasn’t much voting. Forty years before there had been a bad deadlock following the death by natural causes of President Powell after seventeen years in office. An ad hoc bipartisan conference called a session of the Senate and the Senate elected a new president.

  It was little information to be equipped with when you walked out into the brawling streets of New Portsmouth on shore leave.

  * * * *

  The town had an improvised look which was strange to Orsino. There was a sanitation reactor every hundred yards or so, but he mistrusted the look of the ground-level mains that led to it from, the houses. There were house flies from which he shied violently. Every other shack on the waterfront was a bar or a notch joint. He sampled the goods at one of the former and was shocked by the quality and price. He rolled out, his ears still ringing from the belt of raw booze; as half a dozen sweatered Guards rolled in, singing some esoteric song about their high morale and even higher venereal rate. A couple of them looked at him appraisingly, as though they wondered what kind of a noise he’d make if they jumped on his stomach real hard, and he hurried away from them.

  The other entertainment facilities of the waterfront were flatly ruled out by a quick inspection of the wares. He didn’t know what to make of them. Joints back in Syndic Territory if you were a man, made sense. You went to learn the ropes, or because you were afraid of getting mixed up in something intense when you didn’t want to, or because you wanted a change, or because you were too busy, lazy or shy to chase skirts on your own. If you were a woman and not too particular, a couple of years in a joint left you with a considerable amount of money and some interesting memories which you were under no obligation to discuss with your husbands or husband.

  But the sloppy beasts who called to him from the windows of the joints here on the waterfront, left him puzzled and disgusted. He reflected, strolling up Washington Street with eyes straight ahead, that women must be in short supply if they could make a living—or that the male citizens of the Government had no taste.

  A whiff from one of those questionable sewer mains sent him reeling. He ducked into another saloon in self-defense and leaned groggily against the bar. A pretty brunette demanded: “What’ll you have?”

  “Gin, please.” He peeled a ten off the roll Grinnel had given him. When the girl poured his gin he looked at her and found her fair. In all innocence, he asked her a question, as he might have asked a barmaid back home. She could have answered, “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,” or “What’s in it for me?”

  Instead she called him a lousy bastard, picked up a beer mug and was about to shatter it on his head when a hand caught her and a voice warned: “Hold it, Mabel! This guy’s off my ship.

  “He’s just out of the States; he doesn’t know any better. You know what it’s like over there.”

  Mabel snarled: “You better wise him up, then, friend. He can’t go around talking like that to decent women.” She slapped down another glass, poured gin and flounced down the bar.

  Charles gulped his gin and turned shakily to his deliverer, a little reactor specialist he had seen on the sub once or twice. “Thanks,” he said feeling inadequate. “Maybe you better wise me up. All I said was, ‘Darling, do you—’”

  The reactor man held up his hand. “That’s enough,” he said. “You don’t talk that way over here unless you want your scalp parted.”

  Charles, buzzing a little with the gin, protested hotly: “But what’s the harm? All she had to say was no; I wasn’t going to throw her down on the floor!”

  It was all very confusing.

  A shrug. “I heard about things in the States—Wyman, isn’t it? I guess I didn’t really believe it. You mean I could go up to any woman and just ask her how’s about it?”

  “Within reason, yes.”

  “And do they?”

  “Some do, some don’t—like here.”

  “Like hell, like here! Last liberty—” and the reactor man told him a long, confusing story about how he had picked up this pig, how she had dangled it in front of him for one solid week while he managed to spend three hundred and eighty-six dollars on her, and how finally she had bawled that she couldn’t, she just hated herself but she couldn’t do anything like that and bang went the door in his face, leaving him to finish out the evening in a notch joint.

  “Good God!” Charles said, appalled. “Was she out of her mind?”

  “No,” the reactor man said glumly, “but I must have been. I should of got her drunk and raped her the first night.”

  Charles was fully conscious that values were different here. Choking down something like nausea, he asked carefully: “Is there much rape?”

  The little man signalled for another gin and downed it. “I guess so. Once when I was a kid a dame gave me this line about her cousin raped her when she was little so she was frigid. I had more ambition then, so I said: ‘Then this won’t be anything new to you, baby,’ I popped her on the button—”

  “I’ve got to go now,” Charles said, walking straight out of the saloon. He was beginning to understand the sloppy beasts in the windows of the notch joint and why men could bring themselves to settle for nothing better. He was also overwhelmed by a great wave of home sickness.

  The ugly pattern was beginning to emerge. Prudery, rape, frigidity, intrigue for power—and assassination? Beyond the one hint, Grinnel had said nothing that affected Syndic Territory.

  But nothing would be more logical than for this band of brigands to lust after the riches of the continent.

  Back of the waterfront were shipfitting shops and living quarters. Work was being done by a puzzling combination of mechanization and musclepower. In one open shed he saw a lathe-hand turning a gunbarrel out of a forging; the lathe was driven by one of those standard 18-inch ehrenhaft rotors Max Wyman knew so well. But a vertical drillpress next to it—Orsino blinked. Two men, sweating and panting, were turning a stubborn vertical drum as tall as they were, and a belt drive from the drum whirled the drill bit as it sank into a hunk of bronze. The men were in rags, dirty rags. And it came to Orsino with a stunning shock when he realized what the dull, clanking things were that swung from their wrists. They were chained to the handles of the wheel.

  He walked on, almost dazed, comprehending now some cryptic remarks that had been passed aboard the sub.

  “No Frog has staying power. Give a Limey his beef once a day and he’ll outsweat a Frog.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t whip a Limey. They just go bad when you whip a Limey.”

  “They just get sullen for awhile. But let me tell you, friend, don’t ever whip a Spig. You whip a Spig, he’ll wait twenty years if he has to but he’ll get you, right between the ribs.”

  “If a Spig wants to be boiled, I should worry.”

  It had been broken up in laughter.

  Boiled! Could such things be?

  Sixteen ragged, filth-crusted sub-humans were creeping down the road, each straining at a rope. An inch at a time, they were dragging a skid loaded with one huge turbine gear whose tiny herringbone teeth caught the afternoon sun.

  The Government had reactors, the Government had vehicles—why this? He slowly realized that the Government’s metal and machinery and atomic power went into its warships; that there was none left over for consumers, and the uses of peace. The Government had degenerated into a dawn-age monster, specialized all to teeth and claws and muscles to drive them with. The Gov
ernment was now, whatever it had been, a graceless, humorless incarnate ferocity. Whatever lightness or joy survived was the meaningless vestigial twitching of an obsolete organ.

  Somewhere a child began to bawl and Charles was surprised to feel a profound pity welling up in him. Like a sedentary man who after a workout aches in muscles he never knew he owned, Charles was discovering that he had emotions which had never been poignantly evoked by the bland passage of the hours in Syndic Territory.

  Poor little bastard, he thought, growing up in this hellhole. I don’t know what having slaves to kick around will do to you, but I don’t see how you can grow up a human being. I don’t know what fear of love will do to you—make you a cheat? Or a graceful rutting animal with a choice only between graceless rutting violence and a stinking scuffle with a flabby and abstracted stranger in a strange unloved room? We have our guns to play with and they’re good toys, but I don’t know what kind of monster you’ll become when they give you a gun to live with and violence for a god.

  Reiner was right, he thought unhappily. We’ve got to do something about this mess.

  A man and a woman were struggling in an alley as he passed. Old habit almost made him walk on, but this wasn’t the playful business of ripping clothes as practiced during hilarious moments in Mob Territory. It was a grim and silent struggle—

  The man wore the sweater of the Guards. Nevertheless, Charles walked into the alley and tore him away from the woman; or rather, he yanked at the man’s rock-like arm and the man, in surprise, let go of the woman and spun to face him.

  “Beat it,” Charles said to the woman, not looking around. He saw from the corner of his eye that she was staying right there.

  The man’s hand was on his sheath knife. He told Charles: “Get lost. Now. You don’t mess with the Guards.”

  Charles felt his knees quivering, which was good. He knew from many a chukker of polo that it meant that he was strung to the breaking point, ready to explode into action. “Pull that knife,” he said, “and the next thing you know you’ll be eating it.”