Slave Ship

by Frederik Pohl

  And her answers: I'm well, but tired. I love you too. I want to see you.

  Three minutes went very fast.

  What had I accomplished?

  Nothing, perhaps. Nothing that could have been put on a progress report. I .didn't know why Elsie was tired; I didn't know what she had had for dinner, or what the weather was in Zanzibar. I didn't even have a phrase or a gesture or a look to treasure; nothing that had been that clear. Esping is a form of communication, certainly, but of emotions rather than concepts. One speaks with sighs instead of syllables, and I don't know any answer to give to those who say you can get the same effect staring into the bubbles in your beer. For a moment I had been with Elsie in my mind. I couldn't touch her; I couldn't hear her, taste her, smell her or see her; but she was there. Was that worth slightly more than six cents a second, tax included?

  It was worth anything in the world, for a man in my circumstances.

  I paid the girl at the desk dreamily, and drifted out. I was halfway across the street before I heard her calling after me.

  "Hey, Lieutenant! You forgot your hat." I took it from her, blinking. She said: "I hope things work out for you and your wife."

  I thanked her and caught a bus back along the palm-lined boulevards.

  All the depression was gone. All right, I hadn't touched Elsie—but I had been with her. How many times, after all, in our short married life together had I waked in the night and known, only known, that she was asleep beside me? I didn't have to wake her, or talk to her, or turn on the light and look at her; I knew she was there.

  I got off the bus at Lincoln Road, still dreaming. It was dark, or nearly so, before I came to and realized that I had walked far past my hotel and I was hungry.

  I looked around for a place to eat, but I was in an area of solid brass. COMSOLANT was only a block away, and the two nearest restaurants bore the discreet legend: Flag Officers Only.

  I turned around and walked back toward my own area.

  I wondered why it was so dark, and then realized that Miami Beach, like Project Mako, was blacked out. But it seemed blacker than a blackout could account for, and not in any understandable way. The lights were there, hidden behind their canvas shields from the possible enemy eyes at sea; not very many of them and not very bright, but they were there. The narrow slits in the shields over the street lamps cast enough light on the pavement for me to see where my feet were going. The cars that moved along the boulevards had their marker lights, dim and downward cast, but clear. And yet I was finding it hard to get my bearings.

  Something was sawing at my mind.

  It was the hormone shots, I thought, with a feeling of relief; I was still a little sensitive, perhaps, from the esping. What I needed was a good meal and to sit down for a while; it would make me as good as new.

  But where was a restaurant?

  Someone slid a burning pine splinter into the base of my neck. It hurt very much.

  I must have yelled, because figures came running toward me. I couldn't see them very clearly, and not only because of the darkness; and I couldn't quite hear what they said, because something was whining and droning in my ears, or in my mind.

  There was another stab at the base of my head, and one in my shoulders, like white-hot knives. I felt myself falling; something smacked across my face, and I knew it. was the pavement. But that pain was numbed and nothing, compared to the fire stabbing into my neck and shoulders.

  Someone was tugging at my arm and roaring. I heard a police whistle and wondered why; and then I didn't wonder anything for a while. The world was black and silent; even the pain was gone.

  VII

  "—STILL ALIVE, for God's sake! Suppose we ought to let him sleep it off?"

  I pushed someone's slapping hands away from me and opened one eye.

  Ringed around me were half a dozen faces, looking down—a couple of nurses, a doctor or two, and a j.g. with a thin black mustache and an OOD band on his arm.

  "Well," said the Officer of the Deck, "welcome back."

  I tasted something awful in my mouth. "Wha—what happened?"

  The faces were grave. "You got burned."

  Apparently being burned was no laughing matter. I groggily made sense of what they were telling me.

  Like the Air Force captain at the Boca Raton field, like the other mysterious victims I had heard whispers about—I had been burned. And it was true enough; they showed me a bright mirror above, and I could see the burns. My shoulders, the base of my neck, a thin line down my back; they were all brilliant scarlet, like a bad sunburn; and they hurt.

  Something clicked in my fuzzy brain. "Oh," I said, "the Glotch."

  But they had never heard of "the Glotch." Evidently the Boca Raton name for it was purely local, but the thing was the same, all right. They called it "getting burned"; the OOD, whose name was Barney Savidge, had heard it called "the Caodai horrors." But it was all the same thing, and all bad. "You're a lucky kid," said Lieutenant Savidge. "We picked you up and it looked like you were as dead as the rest of them. After all, only one out of a thous—"

  "Savidge!" one of the medics said sharply.

  The OOD looked guilty. "Sorry, sir," he said. "Anyway, Miller, you're lucky."

  They wouldn't tell me much; apparently the Glotch was as hush-hush in Miami as it was in Boca Raton.

  But it appeared I would live. They brought me coffee after they finished dressing my burns. I was in COMCARIB's naval hospital, and, although I had visions of being a celebrity for a day, the OOD cut me down to size. "It comes and goes," he said, looking apprehensively at the ship's surgeon out of earshot across the room. "It comes and goes, some days a whole bunch of casualties, some days none. Last night was one of the bad ones."

  "You mean I wasn't the only one?"

  "Hah! There were seven, Miller—last I heard." He stared at me thoughtfully. "The only difference between you and the other six is, you're alive."

  It was a cheerful thought. "Well," I said, "thanks for everything and I guess I'll be getting along—"

  "I guess you won't," he said sharply. "Maybe in the morning. They want to look you over—after all, you're supposed to be dead, you know. They want to find out how come you're not."

  It wasn't so bad. They kept taking my temperature for a while, and feeling my pulse, and talking to each other in what doctors use for English. But Savidge, who didn't appear to be too overworked as OOD, dropped in every few minutes and we got fairly well acquainted; and along about three in the morning they decided I could go to sleep.

  So I did; but I wouldn't say I slept well.

  The hairy-bodied officer at COMSOLANT was in uniform this time, and he turned out to be a captain. "Miller," he said crisply, "I told you your stuff wasn't ready yet. Are you trying to rush me?"

  "No sir, but—"

  "But go away, Miller," he said persuasively. "Remember the famous motto of the Navy: 'Don't call me, I'll call you.' You're dismissed." And that was that.

  I wandered down to COMCARIB and rousted Barney Savidge out of bed. He was bleary-eyed on three hours sleep after a night as Officer of the Deck, but he began to wake up with the third cup of wardroom coffee. "I'll tell you want we do," he began to plan. "We'll pick up a couple of WAAFs from the training center and run over to Tropical Park for the afternoon and—"

  "I'm married, Barney."

  He stared at me. "What?"

  "I don't want to pick up a couple of WAAFs," I explained.

  He scratched his head. "Well," he said after a moment, "we'll go over to Tropical Park by ourselves and—"

  I said: "Barney, could we look around the base here? I've been out on a dairy—that is," I corrected myself hurriedly, remembering those bright red Most Secret stamps on my travel orders, "I've been out of touch with the Navy. Let's take a look at the ships." All he said was: "It takes all kinds."

  COMCARIB is only a satellite of COMSOLANT, but the Caribbean fleet is big enough for anybody. There were forty men-of-war surfaced in Biscayne
Bay, destroyers and carriers and a couple of Nimitz-class cruisers that brought a curious sensation to my throat. "Busy out there," I said, staring hungrily at the fighting ships nursing from the tankers.

  "It's getting busier all the time, Logan," Barney said soberly. "See that bucket beyond the breakwater?" He was pointing at an ancient monitor, a harbor defense craft with plenty of punch but no range to speak of. Work barges were lashed to its sides and welders were slicing into a twisted, scarred mass of metal on its forward deck.

  "Looks like it tangled with a can opener," I said.

  "A Caodai can opener. That's Hadley, and it was down off the Keys when a Caodai sneak raid took a potshot at it. It got back; there were two last month that didn't."

  I said uneasily, "Barney, have things been hotting up while I was at sea? All this business of getting burned and sneak raids right off our coast—it sounds bad."

  Barney shrugged morosely. "Who knows? There isn't any war on."

  "No, really," I insisted. "What's the score?"

  "Who knows?" he repeated. "You can see for yourself, things are happening. Up until last year, COMCARIB had never lost a capital ship in coastal waters. Since then—well, never mind how many. But we've lost some. Are things getting worse all over, or is it just local? I don't know. We send out a squad of scout torpedoes three times a day, and I guess we average twenty contacts a week. By the time the big boys get to where the torpedoes have made a contact, there's nothing there, usually. Sometimes not even the scout. But you look in the papers and you find nothing about it, of course. Once in a while, maybe, there's a story about 'Unidentified vessel sighted off Miami Beach'—that's when you can see them from the top floor windows of the hotels. But that's all."

  He flicked his cigarette into the water and grinned at me. "Now do we go to Tropical Park?" he demanded.

  So we went, and I succeeded in losing forty-five dollars. It wasn't hard. I just bet my hunches. By the fourth race the T/5 at the five-dollar window got to know me and shook his head sadly when I bought my tickets; but I didn't mind much, because what I was thinking of was not horses and pari-mutuel betting but war and Elsie.

  I sat out the sixth race in a canteen under the grandstand and read a newspaper. I could hear the crowd screaming and stamping overhead, but the newspaper thundered louder than they, if only you read between the lines. Eight-Year-Olds Face Student Draft. How long had we been putting school kids in uniform? Had it started while I was on Spruance? The age limits had been going lower and lower, that much I knew—but eight-year-olds? I tried to remember exactly when it was that they had called up the Boy Scouts and made them an integral, draft-manned part of the defense apparatus, with civil-defense functions and a coordinated pre-induction training program. Caodais Protest Ankara Looting, Threaten Reprisals Against Hostages. I read that one thoroughly. There had been trouble at the Caodai legislation in Turkey, and the Caodais appeared to think it was deliberately fomented. That much was simple enough, but the bit about hostages gave me a bad time.

  Because I couldn't help remembering that one of the hostages was no mere statistic, but the girl I had married.

  The nature of the trouble in Ankara was far from clear; sometimes it seemed to me that there had been an arson attempt, sometimes a mere hit and run burglary. It was sloppy reporting, and I read the item over a dozen times before I concluded that it didn't matter; if the Caodais were looking for a pretext to take their temper out on their hostages, anything at all would serve.

  I found Barney in the crowd, right where I'd left him, and told him my burns were bothering me. It was true enough, at that; my whole neck was stiffening up; but what was bothering me most of all was life itself. I arranged to meet him again and caught the bus back to my hotel, so lost in my own ugly thoughts that I didn't pay any attention to the desk clerk's expression.

  But what he handed me along with my room key jolted me out of my reverie. It was a mailgram from Project Mako: LEAVE CANCELED. RETURN PROJECT IMMEDIATELY. LINEBACK

  VIII

  KEDRICK FUSSED over me like a furious kitten. "Curse it, Miller, don't you know the first thing about military security? You've got your head crammed full of the top classified information in the country—and you have to blather it all over the world with an esper."

  I swallowed and said nothing at all. In truth, the attack on the beach had made me nearly forget about going to the esper.

  "Answer me!" shouted Kendrick.

  I hadn't heard the question. But that didn't make much difference. "I'm sorry, sir," I said.

  "Sorry!" Kedrick seemed to inflate with pent-up irritation. "Sorry! If you're sorry now, what will you be when a court-martial gets hold of you?"

  I stammered, "But I—I didn't say anything, sir. I just sort of, well, wanted to know how my wife was. You don't talk when you esp, you just—"

  "Knock it off," ordered Kedrick explosively. "You can tell all that to Commander Lineback. I can assure you, though, that he takes a dim view of you right at the moment."

  "Yes, sir."

  I appeared to be dismissed, so I started a rather stiff-armed salute. It attracted Kedrick's attention.

  "What the devil's the matter with your neck?" he demanded.

  I touched the bandages. "What you call the Glotch, sir," I said, and told him my adventure. It took a lot of the passion out of him. He was staring pensively at nothing when I finished.

  "Is that all, sir?" I said politely, after a moment.

  "What?" He roused himself and said heavily, "Oh, I guess so, Miller. This is a crazy business."

  "Yes, sir," I agreed.

  He seemed very tired all of a sudden, but he scratched his head and said: "You're dismissed. Have a drink or two and—"

  "I don't drink, sir," I said.

  "Well, pop a couple and get a night's sleep." He shook his head wearily. "Trouble!" he meditated. "The Glotch and the stockade getting set to explode and wet-nursed jaygees spilling their guts with espers—" He was talking to himself, not me. I saluted and hit the sack. I hadn't fully understood the reference to the stockade, but I didn't let worry keep me awake; I dreamed very happily of Elsie until the mess attendant tapped on my door at 0700.

  Lineback was broody after that. He was worried about the esper and the possibility of Caodai transmission from the little radio the escapees had, I suppose; but he was also rather strained in his relations with Semyon and me. You can't blame him. He came to his position as head of Project Mako by the animal-husbandry route, and he must have been astonished to find how little we animal experts knew about animals.

  I don't say it was punishment, but the next time the officers' extra-duty roster was posted, Semyon and I were prominent on it: To assist Project Veterinary Officer, it said after our names. Of course, "extra duty" is defined as that which you do after all your regular duties are well taken care of; that meant I spent the time from 0800 to 1600 running my RAGNAROK while Semyon worked with his dogs—including Josip, now renamed Josie, and her pups. Then, promptly after dinner, we reported to the veterinarian's office for a pleasant evening's relaxation. And the veterinarian handed us a small box of thermometers with which to perform our duties.

  It was, I told Semyon later on in the milk shed, a lousy way to fight a cold war.

  "Cattle!" complained Semyon. "If it could be only at least a dog, which I know well, you understand, and like. . . . But cattle! Shoo!" And we poked under the tails of resentful cows, though the cows were no more resentful than I. For all his grousing, Semyon was not unhappy with the job; so I turned the temperature-taking segment of it over to him, and myself took the daily check-chart to record his findings. It was, I reminded myself, important work; Lineback had said so himself, too important to entrust to an enlisted man. But it didn't seem like important work. I wondered what Elsie would think if she saw me squatting soberly on a bale of hay, while the world crept closer to the point of ignition. Elsie. I stared out at the brilliant white moon that, ten hours before, had been shining on Elsie, and I m
issed my wife very much. . . .

  "Logan! I have been talking to you!"

  "Sorry, Semyon." He was looking worried; he waved the thermometer at me.

  "Three of them, Logan! I examine three cattle, and they are hot. Epidemic, no? So I examine two more, and they are hot, too!"

  I looked at the chart—it was true, I had written it myself but had hardly noticed what I was writing. Semyon had taken the temperature of five cows, and they all hovered a bit over 100 degrees.

  I said: "It's not much of a fever, Semyon—"

  "Call Lineback."

  "But, listen, Semyon—"

  "Call Lineback."

  I called Lineback, getting him our of a pleasant bridge game at the club. "Sir, we've got some sick cattle here. They all have fevers, every one of them." And Semyon was chattering over my shoulder about the Orientals and secret germ weapons; Lineback sounded mad. But he promised to come right over.

  And he did, with the veterinary officer at his side. And that, children, is when I first learned that the normal temperature of a healthy cow is not 98-plus degrees, but 101.

  It was still a brilliant full moon as Semyon and I limped back to quarters, nursing our wounds; but I wasn't enjoying it. Commander Lineback had been pretty rough.

  "Ah, well," said Semyon philosophically, "at least we do not have that detail any more."

  I told him to shut up. But gradually I was soothed. The clouds, white and fleecy in the moonlight; a mutter of thunder from over the Gulf Stream; a gentle, warm wind—it was pleasant. I sighed. Semyon looked at me. "You are thinking of your wife?"

  "What?" I started to shake my head; but then I realized it was true—not with the top of my mind, no, but deep inside. "It's been a long time," I said.

  "Ah, perhaps. Two years, is it? That is not so terribly long."

  "It's long enough for me," I said shortly. "I wouldn't mind so much, if I were doing anything to shorten it." We walked along for a moment; but the night was no longer so pleasant. "The trouble is not hearing anything," I told him after a moment. "No letters. No more esping—Lineback'd put me in irons if I tried it again."