Slave Ship

by Frederik Pohl

  S l a v e

  S h i p

  Frederik

  Pohl

  © 1957, by Frederik Pohl

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 56-13477

  SBN 345-24586-5-150

  First Printing: February, 1957

  Fourth Printing: October, 1975

  Cover Painting by Karl Swanson

  Printed in the United States of America

  BALLANTINE BOOKS

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  201 East 50th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

  I

  WE HAD a guided-missile scare on the flight down from Montauk, but it turned out to be one of our own. It came screaming in toward our line-of-flight, clearly visible through the windows of the transport plane, and you could hear a hundred and forty passengers taking a deep breath all at once. But its IFF radar recognized us. It veered off, spun around and went off hunting a Caodai—not that there were any around to find, as far as I knew.

  So we landed right on schedule. And there I was on the coast of Florida. Hating it.

  There wasn't any helicopter waiting. I arranged with the girl at the stationery stand—only a rating, but rather attractive—for the use of a phone, and called the number that was on my orders. A voice at the other end of the phone guessed, rather offhandedly, that they would get somebody down to meet me pretty soon; I claimed my baggage and sat back to wait for the helicopter.

  The waiting room was crowded, and it was a long wait. I had been up all night, ferrying ashore from my cruiser at its station on the picket line, waiting for transport at Montauk, then the long flight down. I began to doze off.

  Somebody shook my elbow.

  "You'll have to move, Lieutenant." It was a stocky marine with a shore patrol armband. "Prisoners coming through."

  "Oh . . . thank you." I got up and got out of the way. A transport had landed on the strip outside, and a file of short, wiry-looking Caodais was coming down the ramp, hands clasped atop their heads, armed SP guards covering them. I looked at them curiously. It was the first time I had seen the enemy in the flesh, and they didn't look much like the posters in the officers' heads at training camp. These looked a little too dark, I thought, to be from Indo-China proper. Perhaps from the satellite states in the Near East.

  "How'd you like to come up against those babies in a fight?" said an Air Force captain standing by my side.

  I looked at him. "I often have," I said, and went back to the telephone booth. I felt a little ashamed of myself snubbing him. Still, it was true enough—we had our share of engagements aboard Spruance, and these stateside heroes give me a pain.

  Project Mako's operations room was surprised. "You mean they didn't pick you up, Lieutenant?" a man's voice demanded incredulously. "Hold on."

  I held on, and after a while the voice returned. "Sorry, Lieutenant," it said breathlessly. "The pilot fouled up. Give him fifteen minutes."

  The waiting room was jammed with prisoners now, maybe a hundred of them. They were a quiet lot, for prisoners. There was roughly one Tommy-gun-carrying SP for every three unarmed Caodais, but even so it gave me a creepy feeling to be so close to them. Even in action, the closest I had ever been to a living Caodai aboard Spruance was a thousand yards of hundred-fathom water.

  The Air Force captain gave me an injured look from where he was gaping at the Caodais, so I walked in the other direction. It was the first time I had ever been in Florida, and from the observation deck of the airport I could see a skyline of palm trees and hibiscus, just as the travel booklets had promised, back in the days when there were travel booklets. Those were pretty remote days, I told myself—only three or four years ago, but I was a civilian then, and so was my wife. The whole country was civilian then, barring eight or ten million cadres. It was hard to remember—

  There was confusion and shouting behind me. "Grab him! No, stand back, you idiots—give him a chance to breathe! He's hurt!" I turned and reached for the sidearm that I wasn't carrying—an automatic reaction, because my first thought was that the prisoners were making a break.

  But it wasn't the prisoners.

  It was my friend from the wild blue yonder, and he was staggering and screaming, clutching the collar of his Air Force tunic. A couple of Navy men were trying to hold him but he didn't even know they were there. Whatever it was that was hurting him, it was hurting him very much.

  I started to run toward him, me and everybody else in sight. But it was a little late. He yelled something hoarse and loud, and fell over against the yeoman by his side; and you had only to look at him slumping to the floor to know that he was dead.

  I stood there for a moment, staring at him. He had a dreamer's face, a kid not more than twenty or so; but he would never reach twenty-one.

  In a moment the field medics were there and they carried him into an office, and everybody in sight asked the man at his side: "What happened? What did he do?"

  Nobody had any good answers. The loudest of the theories was that one of the Caodais had smuggled a gun in and pot-shot the captain; but the shore patrol was positive that that was impossible. Impossible, first, that they could have had guns; even more impossible that any of them could have leaned past the guards at the waiting room doors and fired without the guard noticing it.

  The only people who might have had any information—the Navy yeoman who had been beside him, and the medical officer from the field—were closeted inside the office, and there was an SP guard outside the closed office door who obviously didn't know anything and wouldn't tell you if he did.

  It was a pretty exciting introduction and it got even more exciting, in a way, a few moments later. There was a screeching siren outside and three Army officers wearing the Intelligence insignia came leaping up the steps two at a time. They disappeared into the closed office, and stayed there.

  That disposed of the faint possibility that it had been a natural death. I thought it was peculiar that they should have got Intelligence there in such a hurry. But I didn't know quite how peculiar it was.

  The helicopter from Project Mako finally picked me up. The pilot, a short old CPO, was only moderately apologetic: "I forgot," he said cheerfully. "Say, what's all the excitement?"

  I told him, overlooking the fact that he was in sloppy uniform and seemed a little extra careful not to breathe on me. "Killed him, hey?" he said, impressed. "You don't say!"

  But the copter looked shipshape enough, in its freshly painted Navy markings, and the Chief seemed to know what he was doing as he took off.

  We aimed at one of the towering cumulo-nimbus down the shore, a mountain of a cloud—boiling puffs of whipped cream piled over one another, the frayed thunderhead anvil teetering at the top. The CPO pointed at it with his chin and said:

  "Gonna have a storm, Lieutenant. We get one every afternoon about this time. But don't worry, Charley'll beat it in."

  That time I caught a whiff of his breath. I had been pretty sure he had been either drinking or popping. The breath told me which; you could have put ice cubes in it and served it at a cocktail party.

  It was unfortunate that the first rating I encountered from Mako was drunk on duty, or the next thing to it. One of the most difficult problems a junior officer faces is keeping to the right side of the thin borderline between an easy relationship with the enlisted men on one hand, and outright Asiatic lack of discipline on the other.

  I didn't want to start out on my new base by putting a man on report. I let it go, with some doubt in my mind. But the new base was beginning to sound strange—"farmhands"—and it seemed to me that I'd best get my bearings.

  Anyway, drunk or sober, he was flying the helicopter well enough.

  And he seemed a friendly type. He picked a batter
ed pair of glasses off the floor and handed them to me. "Prison camp." He pointed below. "Take a look if you want to, Lieutenant."

  They were good glasses, and we were only a few hundred feet up. I could see, very clearly, the scattered compounds inside the barbed wire, and the sentry towers all around. There seemed to be something going on inside the compound. A procession of a sort, with paper dragons and enormous paper figures. I spotted a dragon with a man's head, a paper Oriental temple, easily eight feet high, and all sorts of Mardi gras trimmings.

  "What's the celebration?" I asked. The Chief took a quick look through the glasses and returned them to me.

  "Ah, who knows?" he said genially. "They go on like that a lot. Did you see old Victor Hugo?"

  I stared. "Victor who?"

  "Hugo. The paper dragon there, with Victor Hugo's head on it," he explained. "See it? Victor Hugo's one of their saints, like. Funny, isn't it, Lieutenant? The guards give them the cardboard to make those things; it keeps the Cow-dyes out of trouble, I guess."

  Victor Hugo! I stared through the glasses, until the camp was out of sight. There they were—the enemy. The members of the religious cult that had stormed out of old Viet Nam and swept over most of three continents, and appeared to be about ready to take on a couple more.

  The CPO leaned back and stared at the clouds. He was motionless for so long that I began to wonder if he was asleep. But at some unremarked sign below he heeled the stick over and said:

  "Here's your new home, Lieutenant."

  I stared over the sill of the window. A cluster of buildings and what seemed to be pasture lands, groves of palm trees and more pasture.

  "It looks like a dairy farm," I offered.

  "Right on the button, Lieutenant," he agreed. But he winked. "Kind of a peculiar dairy farm, though. You'll find out."

  He cut the switch at the edge of a plowed field. There was no suggestion of securing the machine. We jumped out and left it, bags and all.

  "Come on, Lieutenant," he said. "I think the commander's in the milk shed."

  Milk shed! But that's what it was; I could see for myself. The Chief led the way toward a low, open-sided building. My feet were ankle deep in black soil.

  Three or four men in farmhand coveralls were putting a herd of cattle through a milking stall. My guide went up and spoke to one of them—a tall, rawboned redhead in ripped, soiled coveralls—while I looked around for the commander.

  The redhead said, "Thanks, Charley. Take his bags to the BOQ."

  He came toward me, mopping his face with a bandanna, and right at that point I got a considerable setback.

  This hayseed cowhand, whose lantern jaw was a clear week behind a shave, wore pinned to the lapel of his dirty coveralls the gold leaf of a lieutenant commander in the U. N. Navy.

  I said: "Lieutenant Logan Miller, sir. Reporting as ordered."

  "Welcome aboard, Miller," he said, sticking out his hand. "I'm Commander Lineback."

  Well, I did the best I could, lacking an OOD to report to, lacking colors to salute, lacking everything that made the colorful ritual of Navy reporting for duty.

  I asked myself a lot of questions, in that milk shed, while I was waiting at Commander Lineback's request for him to finish what he was doing. When finally he was done, and he walked with me to his headquarters office, he said what the CPO had said on the copter: "This used to be a dairy farm, Miller, and to a considerable extent it still is. But you'll find it's an unusual one." And he went on to explain the operation of the dairy farm—how they planted forage for-the cattle between rows of a cash crop, told the cattle what to eat and what to leave alone, how the cattle were far from bright and often had to be told eight or ten times before they understood.

  But, though I listened carefully, he never said what was unusual about that.

  II

  YOU HAVE to remember that I was fresh from the big-ship Navy in Caodai waters. Spruance was a 12,000 tonner, a heavy undersea cruiser with a complement of nine hundred officers and ratings, and you could shave in your reflection from its brightwork.

  Project Mako was . . . a dairy farm. And I was an officer of the Line.

  Take the way Lineback had said: "Glad to have you aboard." There wasn't anything wrong with the words, but he smiled, and it was the wrong kind of a smile. As though he was kidding the Navy.

  In three years I had learned that you do not, repeat do not, kid the Navy. It isn't a matter of flag-waving patriotism or anything like that, it's just good sense. The Navy was doing a man-sized job with the Caodais; if it hadn't been for the Navy, nothing in the world would have stopped them from opening up a beachhead somewhere along the coast of Guatemala, say, or Ecuador. They were used to jungles. Like the Japanese at Singapore, where the defending guns were firmly emplaced to face the only "possible" attack, the sea—and the Japs had struck from the blind land side and won—once the Cow-dyes got a toehold anywhere in the Americas they would plow their way right up and down the hemisphere. The jungle wouldn't stop them, and by then it would be a little late for the fusion bombs.

  But the Navy stopped them, by doing things the Navy way. And you don't kid an outfit that's doing the job for you.

  Commander Lineback shoved me off on his exec, a full lieutenant named Kedrick. He was a pot-bellied little man, obviously over age in grade, but at least he seemed pretty Navy—in a harried, fuss-budget sort of way. He logged me in and complimented me on my arrival, and listened to my mild complaint about the helicopter pilot. "Forgot to pick you up, eh? And drinking on duty, eh?" He sighed. "Well, Miller, good men are hard to find." And he showed me to my quarters.

  The BOQ at Project Mako was what once had been a third-rate beachfront vacation hotel. The walls were paper and the rooms were made for midgets, but the plumbing was crystal and chrome. There was a magnificent view of the ocean; I was admiring it when Kedrick said briskly: "Draw the curtains, man. It's getting dark!" I looked at him incredulously. "Blackout?" I asked. With radar and infravision, visible light made no particular difference to hostile vessels.

  "Blackout," he said firmly. "Don't ask me why; but it's orders, something to do with the Glotch, I guess. Maybe they think the Caodais are sending it over by frogman—they need regular light."

  I said humbly, "Excuse me, Mr. Kedrick, but what is the Glotch?"

  "Good lord, man, how would I know? All I know is, people drop down dead. They say it's a Caodai secret weapon, and they call it the Glotch—heaven knows why. Is this the first you've heard of it?"

  I hesitated. There hadn't been anything like that on Spruance, not even scuttlebutt. But I told him about the Air Force captain at the airport. He nodded.

  "Sounds like it. Now you know as much as anybody else." He was looking tense, even for him. "We haven't had it here—Mako's a small station. But it's happened right in Boca before. One of the guards at the stockade, a couple of weeks ago, and a transient before that." He shrugged. "Not my problem," he said, dismissing it. He turned and paused in the doorway of my quarters, looking like nothing so much as a bellboy waiting for his tip. He said:

  "The commander won't have time to talk to you about your duties here for a while, Miller. Matter of fact, I won't either. You'll get briefed in the morning—as much as you'll get briefed, that is. Until then, you'll have to cool your heels."

  "That's all right, sir. It'll give me a chance to look around the station."

  "The devil it will, Miller!" he said sharply. "Everything on the project is classified Top Secret and Need-to-Know. You'll get the word, when the time comes, from the commander, not before." He scowled at me as though I were a suspected pacifist. "Meanwhile," he said, "you're restricted to the BOQ, the wardroom and the headquarters area. And make sure you stay there."

  Orders were orders, so I stayed there. With nothing to do. Back on the cruiser there had been plenty to do. I was posted to Spruance as a computer officer, since I'd majored in cybernetics; but as long as I was in a forward area I wanted to fight. They were glad to accommodate m
e. There is almost always a place for a man who wants to fight in a war, even a cold one.

  I don't know why they called it a cold war anyhow; it seemed hot enough on Spruance. While I was aboard we had three confirmed Caodai kills—two merchantmen and a little surface corvette. Of course, they weren't officially Caodais; officially, they were "unidentified vessels in interdicted area." But it was funny how the Caodai patrols never sank any "unidentified" Asian or African shipping, any more than the U.N. fleet bothered the American. I suppose that if either side had intercepted a European ship it would have been quite a problem for the commander—if there had been any European ships for anybody to intercept.

  They called it a cold war. But fourteen million of our men were hotting it up over in Europe, against twenty or so million of theirs. Our land casualties were comparatively low—in the low millions that is.

  And no state of war.

  There was just this one little thing: Our troops were killing theirs all the way from the Pyrenees to the White Sea in local "police actions."

  Well, it really wasn't a war, not in the old-fashioned sense. For one thing, it wasn't country against country, the way it used to be when things were simple: It was confederation—the United Nations—against a Church Militant—the Caodais. They were a religion, not a nation; they happened to be a religion with troops and battle-wagons and fusion bombs, but a religion all the same. And how can you declare war against a religion?

  Our ambassadors still maintained an uneasy residence in Nguyen-Yat-Hugo's court. Every day or so the ambassador would show up at Yat's giant Cambodian temple with a fresh note of protest over some fresh killing; and the answer was always "Gee, sorry, but you'd better take that to the Iranian (or Pakistani or Saudi-Arabian or Viet Namese) authorities, not us." And diplomatic relations went limpingly on. And so did a certain amount of trade, so you could tell that it wasn't really a war.