The Knights of Arthur

by Frederik Pohl

  IV

  See, what we really wanted was an ocean liner.

  The rest of us probably would have been happy enough to stay in LehighCounty, but Arthur was getting restless.

  He was a terrible responsibility, in a way. I suppose there were ahundred thousand people or so left in the country, and not more thanforty or fifty of them were like Arthur--I mean if you want to call aman in a prosthetic tank a "person." But we all did. We'd got prettyused to him. We'd shipped together in the war--and survived together,as a few of the actual fighters did, those who were lucky enough to beunderwater or high in the air when the ICBMs landed--and as fewcivilians did.

  I mean there wasn't much chance for surviving, for anybody whohappened to be breathing the open air when it happened. I mean you cando just so much about making a "clean" H-bomb, and if you cut out thelong-life fission products, the short-life ones get pretty deadly.

  Anyway, there wasn't much damage, except of course that everybody wasdead. All the surface vessels lost their crews. All the population ofthe cities were gone. And so then, when Arthur slipped on thegangplank coming into Newport News and broke his fool neck, why, wehad the whole staff of the _Sea Sprite_ to work on him. I mean whatelse did the surgeons have to do?

  Of course, that was a long time ago.

  But we'd stayed together. We headed for the farm country aroundAllentown, Pennsylvania, because Arthur and Vern Engdahl claimed toknow it pretty well. I think maybe they had some hope of findingfamily or friends, but naturally there wasn't any of that. And whenyou got into the inland towns, there hadn't been much of an attempt toclean them up. At least the big cities and the ports had been goneover, in some spots anyway, by burial squads. Although when we finallydecided to move out and went to Philadelphia--

  Well, let's be fair; there had been fighting around there after thebig fight. Anyway, that wasn't so very uncommon. That was one of thereasons that for a long time--four or five years, at any rate--westayed away from big cities.

  We holed up in a big farmhouse in Lehigh County. It had its owngenerator from a little stream, and that took care of Arthur's powerneeds; and the previous occupants had been just crazy about stashingaway food. There was enough to last a century, and that took care ofthe two of us. We appreciated that. We even took the old folks out andgave them a decent burial. I mean they'd all been in the family car,so we just had to tow it to a gravel pit and push it in.

  The place had its own well, with an electric pump and a hot-watersystem--oh, it was nice. I was sorry to leave but, frankly, Arthur wasdriving us nuts.

  We never could make the television work--maybe there weren't anystations near enough. But we pulled in a couple of radio stationspretty well and Arthur got a big charge out of listening to them--see,he could hear four or five at a time and I suppose that made him feelbetter than the rest of us.

  He heard that the big cities were cleaned up and every one of themseemed to want immigrants--they were pleading, pleading all the time,like the TV-set and vacuum-cleaner people used to in the old days;they guaranteed we'd like it if we only came to live in Philly, orRichmond, or Baltimore, or wherever. And I guess Arthur kind of hopedwe might find another pross. And then--well, Engdahl came up with thisidea of an ocean liner.

  It figured. I mean you get out in the middle of the ocean and what'sthe difference what it's like on land? And it especially appealed toArthur because he wanted to do some surface sailing. He never had whenhe was real--I mean when he had arms and legs like anybody else. He'dgone right into the undersea service the minute he got out of school.

  And--well, sailing was what Arthur knew something about and I supposeeven a prosthetic man wants to feel useful. It was like Amy said: Hecould be hooked up to an automated factory--

  Or to a ship.

  * * * * *

  HQ for the Major's Temporary Military Government--that's what the signsaid--was on the 91st floor of the Empire State Building, and rightthere that tells you something about the man. I mean you know how muchpower it takes to run those elevators all the way up to the top? Butthe Major must have liked being able to look down on everybody else.

  Amy Bankhead conducted me to his office and sat me down to wait forHis Military Excellency to arrive. She filled me in on him, to somedegree. He'd been an absolute nothing before the war; but he had areserve commission in the Air Force, and when things began to looksticky, they'd called him up and put him in a Missile Master controlpoint, underground somewhere up around Ossining.

  He was the duty officer when it happened, and naturally he hadn'tnoticed anything like an enemy aircraft, and naturally theanti-missile missiles were still rusting in their racks all around thecity; but since the place had been operating on sealed ventilation,the duty complement could stay there until the short half-liferadioisotopes wore themselves out.

  And then the Major found out that he was not only in charge of thefourteen men and women of his division at the center--he was rankingUnited States Military Establishment officer farther than the eyecould see. So he beat it, fast as he could, for New York, because whatArmy officer doesn't dream about being stationed in New York? And heset up his Temporary Military Government--and that was nine years ago.

  If there hadn't been plenty to go around, I don't suppose he wouldhave lasted a week--none of these city chiefs would have. But asthings were, he was in on the ground floor, and as newcomers trickledinto the city, his boys already had things nicely organized.

  It was a soft touch.

  * * * * *

  Well, we were about a week getting settled in New York and things werelooking pretty good. Vern calmed me down by pointing out that, afterall, we had to sell Arthur, and hadn't we come out of it plenty okay?

  And we had. There was no doubt about it. Not only did we have a fatprice for Arthur, which was useful because there were a lot of thingswe would have to buy, but we both had jobs working for the Major.

  Vern was his specialist in the care and feeding of Arthur and I washis chief of office routine--and, as such, I delighted his fussylittle soul, because by adding what I remembered of Navy protocol towhat he was able to teach me of Army routine, we came up with assnarled a mass of red tape as any field-grade officer in the wholehistory of all armed forces had been able to accumulate. Oh, I tellyou, nobody sneezed in New York without a report being made out intriplicate, with eight endorsements.

  Of course there wasn't anybody to send them to, but that didn't stopthe Major. He said with determination: "Nobody's ever going to chew_me_ out for non-compliance with regulations--even if I have to inventthe regulations myself!"

  We set up in a bachelor apartment on Central Park South--the Major hadthe penthouse; the whole building had been converted to barracks--andthe first chance we got, Vern snaffled some transportation and we setout to find an ocean liner.

  See, the thing was that an ocean liner isn't easy to steal. I meanwe'd scouted out the lay of the land before we ever entered the cityitself, and there were plenty of liners, but there wasn't one thatlooked like we could just jump in and sail it away. For that we neededan organization. Since we didn't have one, the best thing to do wasborrow the Major's.

  Vern turned up with Amy Bankhead's MG, and he also turned up with Amy.I can't say I was displeased, because I was beginning to like thegirl; but did you ever try to ride three people in the seats of an MG?Well, the way to do it is by having one passenger sit in the otherpassenger's lap, which would have been all right except that Amyinsisted on driving.

  We headed downtown and over to the West Side. The Major'sTopographical Section--one former billboard artist--had prepared roadmaps with little red-ink Xs marking the streets that were blocked,which was most of the streets; but we charted a course that would takeus where we wanted to go. Thirty-fourth Street was open, and so wasFifth Avenue all of its length, so we scooted down Fifth, crossedover, got under the Elevated Highway and whined along uptown towardthe Fifties.

  "There's o
ne," cried Amy, pointing.

  I was on Vern's lap, so I was making the notes. It was a Fruit Companycombination freighter-passenger vessel. I looked at Vern, and Vernshrugged as best he could, so I wrote it down; but it wasn't exactlywhat we wanted. No, not by a long shot.

  * * * * *

  Still, the thing to do was to survey our resources, and then we couldpick the one we liked best. We went all the way up to the end of thebig-ship docks, and then turned and came back down, all the way to theBattery. It wasn't pleasure driving, exactly--half a dozen times wehad to get out the map and detour around impenetrable jams of stalledand empty cars--or anyway, if they weren't exactly empty, the peoplein them were no longer in shape to get out of our way. But we made it.

  We counted sixteen ships in dock that looked as though they might dofor our purposes. We had to rule out the newer ones and thereconverted jobs. I mean, after all, U-235 just lasts so long, and youcan steam around the world on a walnut-shell of it, or whatever it is,but you can't store it. So we had to stick with the ships that werepowered with conventional fuel--and, on consideration, only oil atthat.

  But that left sixteen, as I say. Some of them, though, had sufferedvisibly from being left untended for nearly a decade, so that for ourpurposes they might as well have been abandoned in the middle of theAtlantic; we didn't have the equipment or ambition to do any greatamount of salvage work.

  The _Empress of Britain_ would have been a pretty good bet, for instance,except that it was lying at pretty nearly a forty-five-degree angle inits berth. So was the _United States_, and so was the _Caronia_. The_Stockholm_ was straight enough, but I took a good look, and only onetier of portholes was showing above the water--evidently it hadsettled nice and even, but it was on the bottom all the same. Well,that mud sucks with a fine tight grip, and we weren't going to try toloosen it.

  All in all, eleven of the sixteen ships were out of commission justfrom what we could see driving by.

  Vern and I looked at each other. We stood by the MG, while Amysprawled her legs over the side and waited for us to make up ourminds.

  "Not good, Sam," said Vern, looking worried.

  I said: "Well, that still leaves five. There's the _Vulcania_, the_Cristobal_--"

  "Too small."

  "All right. The _Manhattan_, the _Liberte_ and the _Queen Elizabeth_."

  Amy looked up, her eyes gleaming. "Where's the question?" shedemanded. "Naturally, it's the _Queen_."

  I tried to explain. "Please, Amy. Leave these things to us, will you?"

  "But the Major won't settle for anything but the best!"

  "The _Major_?"

  * * * * *

  I glanced at Vern, who wouldn't meet my eyes. "Well," I said, "look atthe problems, Amy. First we have to check it over. Maybe it's beenburned out--how do we know? Maybe the channel isn't even deep enoughto float it any more--how do we know? Where are we going to get theoil for it?"

  "We'll get the oil," Amy said cheerfully.

  "And what if the channel isn't deep enough?"

  "She'll float," Amy promised. "At high tide, anyway. Even if thechannel hasn't been dredged in ten years."

  I shrugged and gave up. What was the use of arguing?

  We drove back to the _Queen Elizabeth_ and I had to admit that therewas a certain attraction about that big old dowager. We all got outand strolled down the pier, looking over as much as we could see.

  The pier had never been cleaned out. It bothered me a little--I mean Idon't like skeletons much--but Amy didn't seem to mind. The _Queen_must have just docked when it happened, because you could still seebony queues, as though they were waiting for customs inspection.

  Some of the bags had been opened and the contents scatteredaround--naturally, somebody was bound to think of looting the _Queen_.But there were as many that hadn't been touched as that had beenopened, and the whole thing had the look of an amateur attempt. Andthat was all to the good, because the fewer persons who had boardedthe _Queen_ in the decade since it happened, the more chance of ourfinding it in usable shape.

  Amy saw a gangplank still up, and with cries of girlish glee ranaboard.

  I plucked at Vern's sleeve. "You," I said. "What's this about what the_Major_ won't settle for less than?"

  He said: "Aw, Sam, I had to tell her something, didn't I?"

  "But what about the Major--"

  He said patiently: "You don't understand. It's all part of my plan,see? The Major is the big thing here and he's got a birthday coming upnext month. Well, the way I put it to Amy, we'll fix him up with ayacht as a birthday present, see? And, of course, when it's all fixedup and ready to lift anchor--"

  I said doubtfully: "That's the hard way, Vern. Why couldn't we justsort of get steam up and take off?"

  He shook his head. "_That_ is the hard way. This way we get all thehelp and supplies we need, understand?"

  I shrugged. That was the way it was, so what was the use of arguing?

  But there was one thing more on my mind. I said: "How come Amy's sointerested in making the Major happy?"

  Vern chortled. "Jealous, eh?"

  "I asked a question!"

  "Calm down, boy. It's just that he's in charge of things here sonaturally she wants to keep in good with him."

  I scowled. "I keep hearing stories about how the Major's chiefinterest in life is women. You sure she isn't ambitious to be one ofthem?"

  He said: "The reason she wants to keep him happy is so she _won't_ beone of them."