Slave Ship

by Frederik Pohl

  "Good-by, Semyon." I stood up.

  "—was terrible time, when Soviets of Russia were surrounded by hostile nations. Now, of course," he shrugged, "it is greatly different. We are friend to all, what of us the Orientals left. Do you find this a lesson to you, Logan?"

  He winked amiably at me, and I couldn't help smiling. It was hard to realize that his country and mine had torn each other apart for the salvage of the splinters not much over a decade before, when Semyon was a fresh eighteen-year-old junior officer, straight out of the Academy into the Yugoslav Push that had touched off the Short War. That was Semyon's first battle—against Marshal Tito's stubborn little army.

  And now he had named his dog in honor of his late enemy, the marshal, whose real name was Josip Broz.

  He was a nuisance, but it was with a little disappointment that I realized, later on, that he hadn't shown up for his three o'clock coffee break. And he didn't show up at four, and he was late, actually late, for dinner.

  "Oh, Logan," he explained sorrowfully, staring without appetite at the plate the mess attendant put before him. "Josip is sick. Could someone have hurt him, Logan? He is bleeding, and he will not let me come near. Poor little dog, perhaps he has been in a fight. Bloody, And he behaves oddly. I play with him and show him tricks, and he whines and hides under the desk and whines again." He began to chew.

  "Maybe you ought to call a vet."

  "I did! Of course I did. And they said, 'Terribly sorry, old man, but it will have to wait; we must scrub the catties' teeth for Commander Lineback first.' And poor Josip, he is in pain."

  It seemed a little silly, but it wasn't silly to Semyon. He was worried. He even decided to go back to the sheds after dinner—even talked Chief Oswiak into flying him down in the copter instead of waiting for the regular trip.

  As a consequence, he missed the excitement.

  The excitement occurred when the regular copter flight went down. I went along, preferring an evening with the computers to an evening loafing around the wardroom, and Oswiak spotted a running figure in the palmettos as we whirled overhead.

  It was not a place where anyone should have been running. We radioed back to Commander Lineback; another copter load of security troops came after us; and in less than ten minutes we landed, encircled, closed in on and recaptured eight Caodai escapees from the stockade, roasting the carcass of a pig over an oven fire.

  There were three more pig carcasses in the clearing; they must have worked like demons to get the animals driven off the research area while most of us were at dinner. The security guard hadn't noticed a thing—no doubt because the security guard, relaxed and happy with the sure knowledge that nobody would ever bother a place like Project Mako, was sound asleep under a palm.

  Lineback said ruefully: "I guess that's the end of the Pig section of the project. But what bothers me is the radio." It wasn't much of a radio; the sort of thing that prisoners somehow smuggle in, piece by piece; but it could easily have reached out past the horizon to where a Caodai ship might be lurking, barely awash.

  Somebody snickered, and Lineback turned on him sharply. "Belay that," he snarled. "Mako might be funny to you, and maybe it's even funny to me. But it isn't funny to COMINCH, because he classified it Most Secret, and he isn't going to like Caodais with radios roaming around it."

  "But, Commander," ventured Kedrick, "these guys were just looking for something to eat. They wouldn't have raided the pigs if they'd been after bigger stuff."

  "Tell COMINCH," said Lineback shortly. "In fact, that's an order—get it dispatched at once."

  Semyon wasn't exactly disappointed at missing the excitement, when I dropped in his section to tell him about it-he had other things on his mind. "Is very bad with Josip," he told me worriedly. "Look!"

  All I could see was a slack tail sticking out from under a chair. I said, not too tactfully: "You're lucky. The Pig section is worse off than you—the Caodais ate them up."

  I had his full attention. "What?" he demanded, and I had to tell him all about the Caodai escapees again. He kindled like a rocket.

  "Curse them!" he raved. "I see it, I see it! They come here to destroy us, Logan! They eat the pigs, they hurt my little dog, heaven only knows what damage they do to the other stock! Call Lineback, Logan! Get him here. No—give me that phone, I will do this myself!"

  And he did, he got Lineback there in a matter of minutes. It sounded preposterous, of course, to me and no doubt to Lineback. Still—the Caodais had been in the area, and it was at least something of a coincidence that one of our experimental animals should be in trouble just then. And Josip was in trouble. Seymon managed briefly to coax the dog into his lap, but Josip wasn't happy there. He looked up at us with eyes as big and unhappy as Semyon's. His hindquarters were matted with dried blood; his manner was frightened; he kept making the saddest little whining noises.

  I said uncertainly, "Maybe, maybe if we clean him up a little—"

  Well, we tried it. Semyon raced down to the head and came back with an armful of paper towels and a dish of water; but Josip wouldn't sit still for us to do it. He jerked convulsively, and moaned and scurried, whining fretfully, under a desk.

  By the time Lineback got there, Semyon had worked up a full storm against the Orientals, and he blasted his commanding officer with demands for the instant arrest of every Caodai within reach on grounds of espionage, sabotage and treason.

  "Easy, Timiyazev!" rapped Lineback. "What's the story?"

  "I am telling it you!" cried Semyon, "My dog has been sabotaged—wounded! Do not believe me, I am only a Russian, a dirty foreigner; do not take my word! But see for yourself!

  He gestured dramatically at the desk.

  Lineback looked at us worriedly for a moment. "Oh, hell," he sighed. "The things this Navy makes me do. You say the dog's back there?"

  "I say it!"

  Lineback reluctantly got down on his hands and knees, had a sudden thought, hesitated and looked at us. "Is he vicious?"

  "Josip? Vicious?" Semyon withered Lineback with an unbelieving look.

  "All right," said Lineback placatingly, and put his head down to the floor to look under the desk. He suddenly jerked his head up and stared at us; then bent again and reached underneath.

  "Do not hurt Josip!" Semyon warned sharply. "He is ill, he has been hurt—"

  Lineback's expression was unreadable. He pulled something out from under the desk and held it out to us.

  "Mouse!" gasped Semyon. "Poor Josip, he has caught a mouse!"

  Lineback shook his head slowly. Then he looked down it the little animal in his cupped hands.

  "Not exactly a mouse," he said at last. "It's what we :all a puppy. Josip has just given birth to it."

  VI

  THE NEXT MORNING Commander Lineback sent me down to Miami on orders to pick up equipment. What equipment?' Pigs, that's what equipment. Pigs to replace the pigs the Caodai escapees had eaten; and it seemed to me at first that this was Lineback's way of slapping my wrist for the nonsensical business of Josip's puppies, and then it seemed to me that it was his way of rewarding me for the faintly heroic business of the stockade break; and then I stopped worrying about why he was sending me, and took my blessings as they came. For after all, Miami was Miami.

  I checked in at a shiny big hotel and presented my orders. The room clerk said, "Glad to have you here, Lieutenant; hope you'll have a good time." He clapped his hands sharply for a bellboy.

  I mentioned, "Sergeant, I'm here on official business." He smiled.

  The bell captain was an Army corporal. He carried my Val-Pak up to a small but comfortable room and, without thinking about the Navy regulations concerning cash gratuities to military personnel, I gave him a quarter. He didn't give it back. Maybe the Army regulations are different.

  My room was thirty stories up, overlooking the ocean and the Gulf Stream. You could almost see the Stream—in fact, I'm not sure but what I did see it, a paler blue in the blue-violet of the inshore waters. You could s
ee quite a lot from my window. You could even see the sooty high-water mark along the white beaches, where the oil from sneak-raid torpedoed tankers had washed ashore.

  I changed into my dress greens, left my room key with the tech sergeant at the desk and headed for the headquarters of Commander, South Atlantic Theater.

  SP's in white leggings opened the door of my cab and saluted smartly. It was a hotel that made mine look like an outhouse; over its hibiscus-framed front doorway was the stainless-steel legend: COMSOLANT. The word was repeated on the white life preservers that hung from the railings of the walks, on the caps of the elevator operators and the armpatches of the SP's, and was even picked out in pastel tile on the deck around the swimming pool where I was instructed to report.

  A petty officer read my orders skeptically, scratched his head and sent one of the SP's to the far end of the pool. A hairy-bodied man in green trunks came back with the SP, toweling himself furiously. "Can't I have even a lunch break, Farragut?" he demanded. "What the devil is it now?"

  He read the orders and looked at me irritably. "Mako, Mako," he repeated. "What's Mako?"

  I looked quickly at the petty officer. "Classified, sir," I whispered.

  He barked, "What the devil isn't?" But he picked up a hush-phone from the petty officer's desk and spoke into it for a moment.

  He said: "You're early, Lieutenant. Your commander was distinctly told that the issue wouldn't be ready until Thursday."

  I said, "Sorry, sir."

  "Oh, not your fault." He gave me back my orders—limp and blurry where he'd dripped on them. "Come back then."

  I said: "What shall I do until then, sir?"

  He looked at me unbelievingly. "Man," he said, "this is Miami. Just be back here Thursday, that's all." And he dove wallowingly into the pool.

  So there I was, on my own in Miami. It had been, I counted, seventeen months since I had walked the streets of an American city with time to kill.

  On Spruance, you didn't take your leave, because where were you going to go? The whole thing about a nuclear-powered submarine cruiser, after all, is that it doesn't need to get back to home base very often. Spruance had been cruising for a year when I joined her; she was still cruising when I left.

  There had been a couple of times when, for a day or three days, we had touched at Bordeaux or Cork on some strategic errand, and some of us got to stretch our legs ashore. But—have you ever spent a festive evening in a heap of rubble?

  Neither has anyone else.

  But Miami Beach was festive enough to make up for all. My hotel was bright and shiny, though in the run-down district around Lincoln Road. The wonderful thing about spending a couple of days at the Beach is the pretty girls; for a wise Providence—perhaps a wise COMSOLANT—has put the WAAF hostess-training center right next door in Coral Gables. Biscayne Boulevard is lined with them, seven days a week, all the weeks of the year. Lord knows when the girls find time to study—or perhaps their social life at Biscayne Boulevard is a kind of extension course for the training center, because what else does an airline hostess have to know?

  At any rate, they were there—as many as the reminiscing boys on Spruance had said, and as pretty. They were the sweetest looking, gayest laughing, homiest seeming things I had seen in seventeen months; and four out of ten of them, seen from a distance, had the same waved brownish hair and carefree walk as Elsie.

  Elsie. It was more than two years since we had our last leave together. I stopped under a palm tree and looked, as inconspicuously as I could, at the picture in my wallet. She was almost a stranger. It hadn't been so bad on Spruance, where there were few women and there had always been the faint chance of commandoing Zanzibar.

  But here in Miami, where everyone but me walked two-by-two, it was bad. I was lonesome.

  Her and her cursed volunteering. I had told her and told her, long before her number came up: "When they get you, don't volunteer for anything." So naturally she had signed on the courier flight to Nhatrang in Indo-China, where the Caodai Headquarters were, and naturally the courier had wandered off course over Yemen, and naturally the Caodais niked him down. It wasn't Elsie they were interested in; the game they were after was the Air Marshal on whose staff she was a yeoman, a valuable hostage in some future exchange. And they got him. She was lucky she got out in time—and twice as lucky that they'd eventually shipped her to the big internment camp on Zanzibar, along with the marshal. But me, I was hardly lucky at all.

  I had a large glass of fresh orange juice at a sidewalk cafe and talked with a WAAF at the next table. She was a very attractive blonde; she would have been fun to take out, if she had been Elsie.

  I walked two blocks and had a guanabana sherbet at another sidewalk cafe, and talked with a WAAF sitting next to me at the counter. She was a very attractive brunette, but she wasn't Elsie either.

  I considered a third sidewalk cafe featuring fresh papaya-pineapple drinks. But there is a limit to the amount of liquid I can stand sloshing around in my gut.

  Glamorous Miami! I was prepared to sell it short, that hot afternoon.

  It wasn't that Miami wasn't very nice. It was too nice for a lonely man. I was battling a sort of perverse, inanimate conspiracy against me on the part of the sun, the sky, the weather. If Elsie had been with me, I would have been happy.

  But Elsie was not.

  There was only one thing to do. I had been resisting doing it ever since I'd landed at Montauk, en route to Project Mako; I couldn't resist it any more.

  I found a phone booth, and the classified book had what I wanted: Hartshorne & Giordano, F.C.C. Licensees, at an address near the Venetian Causeway.

  The heading was TELEPATHISTS & ESPERS.

  The girl at the desk was an enlisted WAVE. It surprised me, for the last time I had used an esper the whole outfit was aggressively civilian.

  She said doubtfully, "Zanzibar? Zanzibar? That's Caodai territory."

  "I know it is," I said patiently. "My wife is interned there."

  She looked at me as though I were a pacifist or something, but she kept on filling out the forms. I gave her all the information she asked for, and she said:

  "You're lucky. They say that all ESP communication will be pre-empted for military use the first of the month. Now, would you like this guaranteed or not?"

  "Non-guaranteed," I said. The difference in the rate was considerable, and besides I'd had half a dozen previous rapports with Elsie. There wasn't any doubt in my mind that I'd get through, that is if she was still—

  Never mind that, I told myself quickly, and listened to the WAVE. She was mumbling figures from a rate book and making marks on a pad.

  "Eleven dollars and ninety-five cents, including tax," she said at last. "That's for three minutes." She spoke into an intercom, and nodded to me. "Mr. Giordano will see you now," she said.

  Giordano was a beady-eyed little old man with curly white hair. "Six previous rapports," he said approvingly, studying my chart. "Well, ten cc ought to be enough for you. Will you roll up your sleeves, please?"

  I looked away as the needle bit into my arm. It tingled; the hormone solution you take before an esper rapport seems to be distilled from wasp venom. "Thank you," he said, and I rolled down my sleeve as he sat down at his desk. He wasn't much like the last esper I'd gone to, back in Providence when Elsie was first interned; that particular one had worn a white tunic with a side-buttoned collar like a surgeon's, and he had been a phony from the word go. On, he put me in touch with Elsie all right, but there had been a gauzy shapelessness about the contact that had left me more unsatisfied when I left than when I came in.

  This one had a fine businesslike air about him; he wore an ordinary Navy undress uniform with a Chief Warrant's pin in his collar. That's a more important factor in esping than most people realize. The Providence hookup had been the one real failure I had had with Elsie. "May I have the node, Lieutenant?" he asked.

  The "node" was the photograph of Elsie from my wallet. He studied it approving
ly. Why is it that the photograph one carries of a girl is always in a bathing suit? Is it that the more you can see of a subject, the more vividly the silver agglutinates bring her back? Or just that one carries a camera to the beach?

  "Very nice," he said. "Now, how about your nodal experience?"

  "Well," I said hesitantly, "how about this one? Just before the picture was taken, we had lunch on a terrace overlooking the beach. There was a band, and we danced."

  "And you remember the tune the band was playing?" I nodded. "Good. One other thing, Lieutenant. Do you know what time it is in Zanzibar now?"

  I snapped my fingers. "Oh, damn. She'll be asleep?"

  He glanced at a chart and nodded. "It's around two in the morning there. Of course, you can get rapport even if she's asleep, you know, but she may not remember it in the morning or she may think it's a dream."

  I said: "We'll try it." I could always try again the next day, I told myself; the money didn't matter.

  "Lean back," he said gently, and the lights went out, all but a tiny, indirect one that softened the shadows but left nothing for the mind to fix on.

  I felt the esper come into my mind. I know that some people find that an ordeal, like the dentist's pick prying into the bicuspid; for me it has always been a warming, protecting sort of coming-together. Perhaps it is because I've never esped anyone but Elsie, and it hasn't been a matter of exchanging data but of moods. Those who try to use espers for business calls, trying to pinpoint details in that cloudy contact, must find the whole process exasperating.

  I heard, in the back of my mind, the slow whispers of the music, and I saw the beach-umbrellaed terrace where Elsie and I had danced. The esper was finding the range.

  Elsie? I formed the name in my mind.

  She was asleep, all right. But her voice from faraway, foggy but real: Darling.

  In succession I formed the thoughts: I'm well. I'm lonesome. I love you.