by David Poyer
Lohmeyer sat openmouthed. Vysotsky said, “Mr. Lohmeyer, why in God’s name didn’t you send the decon team out?”
“Uh, I was waiting for orders, XO.”
“Don’t wait on normal procedure! In future, just do it, and inform the officer of the deck they’re going out. If he has a problem with it, he’ll have to let you know.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The next chief, Narita, stood up. “I was inside the skin of the ship when Chief Bentley dumped the wintergreen into the intakes. I checked four interior spaces ten minutes after GQ went. I found fifteen people without Mark five masks on or with bad seals. Both gun crews and Aux-One personnel were deficient in putting on masks. Number three switchboard operator has a broken mask. Overall grade, unsat.”
Hell, Dan thought. Woollie was saying something about how this wasn’t for score yet, but the way the XO glared around, he was grading, even if FTG wasn’t. Leighty leaned back, looking detached.
Dan tuned back in to Schwartzchild. “The nuclear burst casualty and decontamination drill. Initial notification and water wash-down activation satisfactory. It took one hour for the external survey team to find the hot area on the Harpoon deck. One reason may be it isn’t on their route chart. The chart is supposed to show all vital equipment. Is Harpoon vital?”
“I’d say so,” said Vysotsky, staring at Dan. “Mr. Lenson, is the Harpoon a vital system?”
Clenching his teeth, he said, “It’ll be on the route chart tomorrow, sir.”
“First aid was not rendered to casualties. No attempt was made to help them until prompted by the observer. Forward decon team did not know assignments or procedures for decontamination. Forward decon station was unusable, with no supplies in place. Overall grade, unsat.”
“Chief Narita?”
“I observed from aft. Eleven men were caught on the weather decks when the blast went. Repair Three didn’t know how to rope off or scrub down a hot spot. You need to map out other routes to the decon station; you can’t carry wounded up thirty-foot ladders. The damage control officer did not know how to do a log-log of radiation decay. Overall grade aft, unsatisfactory.”
Lieutenant Woollie said, “The overall grade was unsatisfactory. Next was the casualty drill under conditions of nuclear contamination. Chief Bentley?”
“The after director casualty was troubleshot quickly and creatively. However, Petty Officer Fisher was sent for a part. He requested a battle route to supply but decided to take a shortcut over the weather decks. Chief Schwartzchild nailed him on the hot spot. So the part didn’t get to the casualty and it didn’t get fixed, and the overall grade is unsat.”
“Fuck,” Harper muttered beside him. “Are these guys for real? Fish would have gotten back fine. It was only—what, a hundred rads an hour up there?”
Vysotsky glared, and Dan elbowed Harper into silence. The warrant officer sank back sullenly.
“Attention on deck.” They rose as Leighty got up, nodded to Woollie, and left. Then he stuck his head back in. “Lieutenant Lenson, could I see you in my cabin, please.”
“TAKE a seat. Be right back,” said Leighty, disappearing. Dan squatted on the settee and looked blankly at the picture of the captain’s family. He had a knot in his stomach already.
Leighty came back in T-shirt and trou, combing wet hair. “It gets hot in that damn wardroom when the AC’s off,” he said.
“Yes, sir, it gets pretty ripe in there.”
“But if you leave it on, you can’t hear a word anybody says. Maybe I’m going deaf?”
“No, sir, it’s hard to hear in back even with the blowers off.” He’d expected Leighty to take the seat opposite, but instead the Captain settled beside him on the sofa. “I need to know what’s going on with the fire-control system, Dan. We’re doing air tracking tomorrow and live firing the day after. Will we be able to shoot without having it go crazy on us again?”
Outside, the 1MC announced: “Sweepers, sweepers, man your brooms. Give the ship a clean sweep-down fore and aft. Sweep down all lower decks, ladder backs, and passageways. Now, sweepers.”
Dan said, “Sir, my guys have been working on it eighteen hours a day. Dr. DOS has tried several things—”
“Who?”
“Mr. Shrobo. That’s what the guys call him. He seems to know what he’s doing, but apparently this is new to him, too.”
Leighty extended an arm along the back of the sofa, and Dan sat forward to avoid it. “So what is it? Operator problem, hardware problem, software?”
“Sir, we’re pretty certain it’s software. But Shrobo swears nothing that dicked up would have left FCDSSA.”
“Can it have happened in the supply system?”
“They don’t run the tape in the supply system. I don’t think they can. They have computers but not UYK-sevens.”
“So it happened here. Who has access to it? Only your guys, right?”
“Sir, it’s like this. The ETs and DSs fix the hardware when it’s down. The DSs put the tapes on and alter the software routines, usually with the menus, when they have to. The other rates actually operate the programs—the STGs the sonar programs, the FTs the fire-control modules, et cetera.”
“But it’s all in your department.”
“Well, no, sir. Dave Cannon’s people run navigation programs. The radiomen run the comm system. ACDADS is the first place we noticed the problem. But that doesn’t mean that’s the first system it hit, see that, sir? Only that it showed up there first.”
Dan felt a trickle down his back. It was hot in the captain’s cabin, too. Leighty’s foot, propped on his leg, was nearly touching him. The captain’s bare arm lay right against his back.
“Okay, tell me how we can shoot without the computers.”
“Can’t, sir. Not and have any chance of hitting anything.” Dan took out a pen and pulled a copy of the plan of the day toward him. He turned it over and drew a hierarchical diagram.
“Sir, you remember how it’s set up. ACDADS proper is just the controlling program. CDS processes the fire-control data. WDS directs the weapons systems to engage and destroy the target. All three have to be running in order to go to automatic mode. WDS is the only leg that can stand independently. We could fight the ship with just WDS, but we’d have to detect, track, and designate manually.” He looked at the diagram. “Shrobo may have something better to suggest. Can I get back to you after I discuss it with him?”
“Okay.” The captain reached out then and patted Dan’s leg, and Dan tensed. Yet it seemed innocent enough, the kind of thing any CO might do to encourage one of his men. He got up. “Uh, is that all, sir?”
“Almost. One last thing,” Leighty said, looking up at him. “The investigator spoke to me. Diehl. He mentioned a diary. Did Seaman Sanderling leave a diary?”
“A what?” said Dan. He knew it sounded stupid, but Leighty had blindsided him. He’d been thinking about the ACDADS, had that program loaded in his brain, didn’t have his Sanderling file ready to run at all.
“A diary,” Leighty said patiently. “He said Sanderling kept a diary, and that he was going to interview you tomorrow and find out what happened to it.” The captain gave it a beat, glancing at the clock as it chimed eight bells. “Have you got it?”
There it was, point-blank, and he’d played dumb long enough. He cleared his throat. “Yes, sir. I have it.”
“I didn’t see it on the inventory. Why not?”
“Sir, there were several things that weren’t on the inventory. You know the procedure. Certain things we don’t send home to the family.”
“Okay, but the presumption is that we destroy those items. Did you destroy the diary?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“I … Diaries are personal items, like letters. I didn’t want to just throw it away.”
“But you didn’t inventory it either. Which is it, Dan? Is it a personal item, in which case you inventory it, or is it something scurrilous, in which case you dest
roy it?”
“Neither, sir … or both.” He struggled in the vise Leighty was gradually closing on him.
“Okay,” said the captain. He jiggled one white shoe. “Neither, and both. So, are you going to turn it over to NIS?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Sit down. Go on—sit. Dan, I have the feeling we’re dancing around something here that maybe we both know but for some reason you don’t want to talk about. Why don’t you trot it out and we’ll at least have it on the table.”
Dan started to sit on the settee, hesitated, then took the chair opposite Leighty, with the coffee table between them. He rubbed his hands together. His palms were as wet as if he’d just taken them out of the sea.
“Okay, sir. Judging by the stuff we found, Sanderling was a homosexual. In the diary, he named you as one of his partners.”
The silence was suddenly deafening in the little cabin. Dan felt detached, unreal, as he waited for the captain’s response. For a moment, there wasn’t any, though. He added, thinking maybe the captain hadn’t heard him right, “He named you, sir. In the diary.”
“And you think that I’m homosexual, too,” said Leighty. “Which is why you kept it. Correct?”
Dan took a deep breath. “Sir, it’s not something I could rule out. Because of the diary, you see.”
“What if you knew that the accusation was false?”
“If I knew it was false? Then I’d destroy it,” Dan said.
“Okay,” said the captain. He got up and stood looking at the portrait of his family.
“Tell me, Dan, what is a homosexual? Can you answer that for me?”
“Well … I guess, it’s somebody who engages in homosexual acts.”
“How do you know someone engages in homosexual acts?”
“You see them?”
“Without actually witnessing it, I mean. Are they effeminate? Do they wear women’s clothing? Hold hands with other men? Wear earrings in the right ear? Tell me how we know, Mr. Lenson.”
“They tell you. That’s how you know.”
“Ah.” Leighty put his hands on his back and stretched, as if his spine hurt. “So a homosexual is someone who admits that he engages in such acts.”
“I guess so,” Dan said. Then he thought, What? “Sir, let’s cut through this ‘how do we know’ stuff, all right? I’m sorry to be blunt, but is what he says true? Were you his lover? Or partner, whatever?”
“That’s blunt all right. But maybe you’re right; maybe that’s the best way—cut through it,” said Leighty, still looking at the portrait. “Okay, I’ll answer it. I’m a family man. I love my wife. I love my children. I did not engage in homosexual acts with Benjamin Sanderling.”
Dan stood up, feeling his heart physically lighten. “Thank you, sir. That’s a relief—a big relief.”
“And now you’ll destroy it?”
“Yes, sir. That’s good enough for me.”
“Good,” said Leighty. He patted Dan’s shoulder, then put his hand on his back, steering him toward the door. “It’s going to be another long day tomorrow, so—”
“Yes, sir,” said Dan, shaking the proffered hand. “Thanks. This is really a load off my mind.”
AS he left the captain’s cabin, the 1MC intoned, “Now taps, taps. Lights out. All hands, turn into your own bunks. Maintain silence about the decks; the smoking lamp is out in all berthing spaces. Now taps.” The lights waned from white to red along the passageways. He felt tired but relieved. The channel ahead was narrow, but the fog had burned off and it lay marked and navigable. It hadn’t been a bad day, he thought. Not a bad day at all.
22
ARMS throbbing, Shrobo sidled warily through the passageways, glancing into doorways. His tall, awkward form lurched and zigzagged as the ship rolled around him, and he put a hand out to the bulkheads from time to time to stop himself from staggering.
He moved warily because from time to unpredictable time the whole ship became a madhouse. A bell would start ringing, and within seconds the passageways were jammed with running, shouting men in various stages of undress. Once he’d been climbing the stairs when it happened, and suddenly about twenty people had appeared from nowhere, all headed down while he was still trying to go up. The language had been shocking.
He mused on it as he drifted along, rubbing his arms. They felt numb from half an hour at the workout machines that the black technician, Matthew Williams, had introduced him to.
It wasn’t that the men didn’t accept him. When he went into the dining room, they made room for him, then stared in disbelief at his tray: raw vegetables and bread—the only things he figured weren’t loaded with nitrates and pesticides. When he went into sick bay for clean greens, they greeted him like a long-lost brother. But the Navy was a foreign country, a foreign language. He still wasn’t sure which was fore and aft and port and starboard—how did you know when you couldn’t even see the water? What about the strange things they kept saying over the public-address system? What was “material condition Yoke,” and what did all those whistles mean? He knew the difference between officer and enlisted, but where did chiefs fit in? They were older than most of the officers and seemed to know more, but they called even the youngest officers “sir.”
He recalled himself with a start and turned around. Lost again. The Kafkaesque corridors all looked the same: narrow, lined with complicated masses of pipes and wires, roofed with the horrible fluorescent lights. He snagged a passing sailor. The man had a shock of dirty blond hair in front, tapered close in back, and a Band-Aid on his nose. His thin shoulders were hunched under a short blue jacket; he sniffled as he stared at Shrobo. “Say, uh, can you tell me how to get back to the computer room?” Hank asked him.
“Go forward to frame two hundred, take the starboard ladder up to the oh-one level.”
“Thanks,” he said. “But which way is—”
“Forward? That way. Say, you’re that dude come to fix our computers, ain’tcha? They running yet?”
“Uh, not really. But we’re working on them.”
“I heard a you. Hey, welcome aboard. Glad to have ya.” The boy seized his hand before he could react, pumped it twice, then dropped it and disappeared around a corner. Hank looked at his hand, remembering the boy’s sniffle. His resistance was down anyway; lack of sleep and the omnipresent fluorescent light reduced immune system activity.
He went forward, trying to remember not to touch his lips or eyes with the hand he held out in front of him. The thought made his nose itch, of course. He twitched it like a beleaguered rabbit. Passing sailors eyed him strangely. Behind him, a speaker announced: “Now the seabag locker will be open for approximately twenty minutes.” Finally, he saw a rest room. A sailor looked up angrily from a swab and bucket but shrugged when he pointed to the sink. He squirted liquid soap and worked up a froth, staring into the mirror as his mind reverted once more to the problem.
He just couldn’t understand how you could ship perfectly functional taped programs, then have them degrade when they hit the ship’s computers. Things simply did not work that way. A computer was an incredibly complex but totally dumb machine that was capable of doing only what it was told. The program didn’t change. What was on the tape couldn’t change. And once it was used to program the computer, that couldn’t change, either.
But it did aboard Barrett. Was he dealing with some kind of computerized poltergeist? Something that transcended normal physical laws? Ridiculous. It had to be an error of some sort, an error of replication—
Then he stopped.
He looked at his hand, where the sniffling sailor had touched it. Slowly, he rinsed off the rest of the soap.
Why had he just washed his hands?
Because that was how rhinoviruses were passed.
Cold viruses.
Viruses were replicating molecules.
His mind shifted now to a discussion he’d participated in on Arpanet. Arpanet was a secure DOD-wide network of computers, interconnected i
n a wide area network. It serviced major defense labs and research facilities with electronic mail and file-transfer services. It also connected to mainframes in the academic and business world via a much larger network called Internet. Internet was the exchange media for a number of electronic forums and debates on the burning technical issues of the day. A typical query from a scientist seeking information or ideas, for example, could generate literally thousands of comments from all over the world.
What he remembered now was a debate about a new and rather sinister development beginning to plague university computer departments. A few malicious computer-science students, called “hackers,” had unleashed a new kind of mischief. They got their giggles from making computers do things they weren’t supposed to do, or getting into computers they weren’t supposed to have access to. At the cost of hours or days of intense, tedious work, the hacker could break into it, apparently thereby gaining some sort of rush or excitement. Using techniques born of the innate cleverness of the kind of people drawn to computers and programming, some didn’t stop with gaining access. Instead, they disrupted the system’s operation in a number of interesting and sometimes catastrophic ways.
He also recalled an Internet conversation with a doctoral candidate at USC, Berkeley, who was doing a dissertation on what he called “virtual disease emulators.” Their conversation had been theoretical, but the student had made some thought-provoking speculations about how a properly written program might be able to propagate itself—
“Hey, you okay?” a voice behind him asked. It was the sailor with the swab.
“Excuse me?”
“Said, you okay? You just standing there, like you froze or something.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Just thinking, thanks.”
WHEN he got back to the computer room, Dawson and Williams were looking at the new code for the weapons-assignment module. Their faces were appalled. Shrobo said, “What now?”