Slave Ship

by Frederik Pohl

  "Terrible," he agreed.

  "And no chance in the world of ever getting anywhere near her. Semyon," I said sincerely, "that's the worst thing. At least when I was on the cruiser there was always the chance—"

  "Lieutenant Miller?"

  It was a runner from the commander's staff, peering at us through the moonlight, "Yes?"

  Commander's compliments," he said breathlessly, "and will you report to him at the milk shed—on the double?"

  "Oh-oh," said Semyon. We looked at each other. What was Lineback doing back at the milk shed?

  There was only one way to find out. We went back to the shed—perhaps not exactly on the double, but near enough to it so that we were both breathing hard.

  Lineback, the vet and a couple of other officers were a circle of bobbing torches in the darkness—not in the shed, but behind it, gathered around—a sick cow? Something on the ground, anyway. I couldn't quite see.

  Kedrick flashed his light in my face. "Miller," he said, "take a look." For once he wasn't fussy, he wasn't an old maid. His torch shone on what was on the ground.

  It wasn't a cow, it was a man. Or at any rate—it had been.

  "Oswiak," I said. But it wasn't easy to recognize him; the chin, the throat, one whole side of the jawline, all were horribly burned and tortured. He was dead, and he hadn't died easily. "The Glotch."

  "The Glotch," said Kedrick. "You were here before. Any ideas about this?"

  The only idea I had was to get away from that face—it reminded me of how close I had come, back in Miami. I said so.

  Lineback sighed heavily, and I could hear him scratching his long jaw in the darkness. "So they've spotted Mako," he said. "Somebody's going to catch bloody blue hell for this. Well, let's get him to the sick bay, you medics."

  I didn't stop in the wardroom; I went right to bed, but not immediately to sleep. Oswiak's face was too clear before me.

  It isn't that I'm particularly queasy. I've seen dead men more times than one, I've been close enough to dying myself, not only in Miami, not only in the action after the stockade break, but on Spruance.

  But Oswiak had been burned; and there is something especially repellent about a man who has died of burns, yards from anywhere, in the middle of a healthy, unsinged stand of crab grass. It wasn't natural; it wasn't decent.

  I swore at Semyon when he tried to wake me for breakfast, and slept right through until he came back to the room just before lunch. By then, of course, he knew as much as I did—he and all the rest of Project Mako, all the more because Commander Lineback had put out an order-of-the-day placing the whole subject under top secret classification. Naturally, that insured that every officer and rating on the project had to find out just what it was that was secret; but it made it possible for me to duck discussing it with Semyon, who had a somber interest in such matters.

  It wasn't much of a working day for me. I went down to my workroom after lunch, but I wasn't there half an hour when the usual rating appeared with the usual compliments-and-get-the-devil-down-here from Lineback.

  This time, for a novelty, he seemed almost sympathetic. "I've been talking to COMBARI," he said abruptly. "You're in trouble, Miller."

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  "That's nothing new, eh? Well, you're right; it's nothing new. I've had you on this carpet before about using Giordano to get in touch with your wife, and that's what you're in trouble about today. However, I'm sorry to say that you're in a little more trouble now."

  I said, "Yes, sir."

  "You damned young fool!" he exploded. "How does it feel to have killed a man, Miller?"

  That startled me. "Killed—"

  "Or the next thing to it. You saw him last night, Chief Oswiak, with his throat burned out."

  I screamed, "That's not fair, Commander! I—"

  "Shut up, Miller." He got control of himself with a visible effort. "You didn't do anything on purpose, no. In fact, you don't do much on purpose ever, do you? You blunder into things. Like you blundered into this one—and killed off a CPO. Ah," he finished moodily, "the hell with it. I just called you in here to tell you what COMCARIB said. If those burns are a Caodai secret weapon—there's small doubt of it, Miller—there's evidence that they are linked with ESP transmission. From Project Mako, I guarantee, there has been absolutely no ESP transmission. Except once—not from here, but from Miami, when I didn't have my eyes on you for a moment; and that transmission was from you."

  There was more, but it didn't matter. He reamed me out and through and up and down; but it didn't hurt very much because I was numb. I did not enjoy the thought that, however stupidly and unwittingly, I had helped the Cow-dyes kill an American.

  "—there won't be any court-martial," he was finishing, and I focused on him again. "But you deserve it, Miller, and I want you to know that from here until you leave this base, I'm watching you."

  That seemed to be that. I said, "Yes, sir," automatically, and saluted, and turned to leave.

  But he wasn't quite finished. "One more thing," he said, his expression unreadable. "I picked up a piece of information that you might be interested in. You were on Spruance before you came here, weren't you?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Then you might be interested to know that this burning gizmo the Caodais have has just been tested out on a submerged vessel. The Caodais are probably pretty happy, because according to a burst transmission COMCARIB intercepted it works. The whole engineering section of the sub died at once, and the sub hasn't been heard from since." He looked at me levelly. "It was Spruance, Miller."

  I had thought I was numb, but I wasn't quite numb enough. I was out in the anteroom, ignoring Giordano sitting there reproachfully, waiting for his own turn under the lash, before it occurred to me to wonder if I had saluted.

  Spruance was sunk.

  And I was tending cows and pushing buttons in a featherbed project ashore.

  IX

  THERE HAD BEEN big doings down in the bay for a couple of weeks, but we had been warned to keep our noses out of it. Something had been floated in on a moonlit night, guarded by a patrol boat, convoyed by two little Diesel tugs; and a huge tarpaulin tent had been erected over it, and Navy mechanics had been hammering at it day and night. They weren't our own mechanics; they were flown in in shifts, and flown out again, even for mess.

  Semyon and I strolled down one evening after work, but a husky seaman with a rifle leaned out of a cluster of palmettos and chased us. We didn't argue; I heard the snick of the bolt on his rifle, and we turned around and went home. "Very silly procedure," Semyon said angrily. "They might have shot us!"

  "I think they would have," I said. The seaman had looked very businesslike.

  "Barbarous!" raged Semyon. "In Irkutsk such a thing would not be. Ah, Logan, you Americans have not yet learned the proper conduct of a war. In Krasnoye Army when I was a cadet at the Suvorov Academy—"

  "I've heard," I said. "And what is Krasnoye Army doing today?"

  "Oh, granted." Semyon agreed cheerfully. "You beat the ears from us; we lost. True. But, Logan, we lost so well!"

  "Let's go into town," I said disgustedly. We took a copter to Boca Raton and wandered around at loose ends. "Let's go to the Passion Pit," Semyon suggested eagerly.

  "Why not?" It wasn't my idea of a big evening, but I admittedly didn't have any better ideas to suggest. Besides, I had been a long time away from Elsie, but not quite long enough to be looking for another girl; and in spite of its .name the Passion Pit was about the most innocuous spot in town. They didn't even have a license; if you wanted to get high in the Passion Pit, you brought your own.

  We paid our admission fee, stood still while the attendant stamped our foreheads with fluorescent ink—so that we could walk in and out, if we wished, without being able to crash the place unpaid; the UV spotlight at the door showed who had paid his admission, and who was merely hopeful of getting in for free—and sat down to watch the floor show. "We should have brought a couple of shots," Semyon gr
umbled. "It is not fun, just sitting here. If I wish to see cows cavort, there are plenty at Proj—"

  "Shut up." It wasn't only that I wanted to keep him from mentioning Project Mako by name, though we'd had pretty stiff orders about that; but the chorus girls were near enough to hear, and one of them was glaring at us.

  "All right. But we should have brought a couple of shots."

  I shrugged. Semyon didn't pop and I didn't drink—we'd had arguments about it—but there wasn't any sense discussing it with him. Anyway, the Pit was filling up and if we went out for a shot we wouldn't be likely to get our seats back.

  The Passion Pit wasn't anything like a pit, really; it was on the beach, looking out over the ocean; it was only the size of it and the way the crowd acted on a busy night that gave it its name. I suppose seventy-five people could have fitted into it comfortably. On a dull Monday it usually held a hundred. The tables were more than merely close, they almost touched each other, and where you fitted in your chairs was your own problem.

  Semyon nudged me and pointed. He had a thunderhead scowl, and I saw why. Over against the wall, decorously eating in the midst of the uproar, ignoring the band blaring in their ears and the chorus line kicking past their noses, sat Commander Lineback and a dowdy middle-aged WAVE j.g. "Even here he follows us!" hissed Semyon.

  "Don't mind him," I said. "Who's the woman?"

  Semyon pursed his lips. "You have never met the officer, his wife? A very charming lady—almost as charming as this who comes now!" He swiveled his chair around, eyes gleaming, completely forgetting about the commander and his lady. The feature stripper of the evening was making her appearance. She was new, but I had heard of her. She was actually a commissioned officer, which meant talent a good cut above the usual level of the Passion Pit, most of whose entertainers were lucky to hope to make CPO. I flagged a waiter and ordered beer—the best you could do in the Pit—and sat back to enjoy myself.

  But it was not to be. The three-piece "orchestra" had just begun the slow, deep-beat number that the stripper worked to when fireworks began going off outside. Sirens blared and search beams lashed the sky, and shots and signal rockets and more commotion than New Year's Eve in a madhouse. Semyon said something startled and violent in Russian, and we craned our necks to see out the window.

  Something was going on down at the beach, but we could not see precisely what. "Let us go look," Semyon proposed gleefully. "Perhaps they have caught a pacifist."

  "Pacifist. But I just ordered a beer, and the show—"

  "Logan, there is no show," he said severely. He was right; the stripper was standing at the window, staring out; the musicians were right behind her. It was more exciting outside the Passion Pit than in, at that. Half the population of the town seemed to be beating the waterfront. "Let us look!"

  He wasn't the only one with that idea. We joined the throng beating its way down to the scene of the excitement. It was a fine, warm night, smelling of hibiscus and decaying palms, not fitting for so much turmoil. "Pacifist, pacifist!" Semyon was bawling; and whether he was the first to have the idea or not I cannot say, but in a moment it seemed that the whole town was screaming, "Lynch the dirty pacifists! String 'em up!"

  It was a frightening exhibition of mob violence, erupting out of nothing, driving remorselessly to a bloody goal. I had seen a lynching like this one once before, back in New York, when ten square miles of countryside converged to dip one man by his heels into his own cistern. It turned out later that the original trouble has been over land and the man was no more a pacifist than you or I, only a queer, moody sort of recluse from the city; but that must have been little enough consolation to him when the rope broke. Not that I doubted that pacifists, and dangerous ones, really existed; but there had been no pacifist there in Barton.

  And there was none here. The crowd surged to the water's edge and stopped.

  In a writhing heap on a baggage cart, covered with a blanket, was a casualty of the cold war. An Army medical colonel was beside him, methodically injecting a series of drugs into an arm that was held by two sick-faced men. The injured man was unconscious and he wasn't screaming; but he was in pain.

  Someone in authority was questioning the colonel. The medic shrugged without looking up. "I don't know," he said. "Obstetrics is my specialty, but I think he'll be all right. No, I don't know what did it. He was on harbor patrol, es—"

  He looked up, and a curtain descended over his face. "You'll have to ask somebody else," he said shortly. He waved at the fireworks out over the water. "They've found something, that's all I know."

  They had found it, all right; there were more light Navy vessels, mostly high-speed hydrofoils, skimming over the water than I had seen since the Fleet exercises. The show went on for half an hour before we found out just what it was that they had discovered.

  They brought him in on an airscrew hydrofoil, zooming up to the landing, stopping short as the screws were reversed, sinking down on the foils to its hull lines just at the dock—a real hot-pilot operation. Semyon and I had pulled rank to get onto the landing itself, and we were right there when the hydrofoil's crew handed him up.

  He was a little fellow, not more than five-two or thereabouts, brown skinned and olive eyed. He was dead. He wore breathing gear and frog flippers on his feet, and around his waist was a whole assembly line of weapons and equipment.

  It was the first Caodai I had ever seen dead in that way. But it was not the first body I had seen, pitted and scarred, looking like the bottom man on a pile of football players, run over by a team with white-hot cleats on their shoes; and when I saw the wounds on the Caodai frogman's back and neck I knew what had been wrong with the injured man at the waterfront. He had lived, but the Caodai had not, any more than the CPO at Mako had.

  Secret weapon? But if the Caodais owned it, how had it destroyed one of their own men?

  We never did go back to the Passion Pit; it didn't seem like a good idea any more. We went home and to bed; and the next morning Commander Lineback had me in his office again.

  "I saw you on the raft last night, Miller," he began heavily, and I braced myself for what might be coming. He passed a hand over his face. "I don't know, boy," he said querulously. "I don't think there's anything wrong with you. Heaven knows I don't think you're a Cow-dye spy or anything like that, but why is it that whenever anything goes wrong you're right on the scene?"

  I said, "Sir, Lieutenant Timiyazev and I were in the Pa—"

  "I know. I saw you." He shook his head and said kindly: "Look, Miller, will you just try to stay out of trouble for a while? I've got work for you."

  "Yes, sir, but—"

  "Forget it." He pressed a button and a rating came in with what looked like an old-fashioned pilot's helmet, one of those close fitting things with earflaps that the old open-cockpit boys wore as a badge of office, except that this one seemed to be woven of shiny aluminum. "Try it on," the commander invited. "It's for you."

  I put it on without comment; it squeezed my ears a little, but it wasn't too bad. Lineback half smiled. "It doesn't do much for your looks," he observed. "We'll see if it helps keep you alive."

  "Alive, sir?"

  He said, "You saw that Cow-dye last night."

  I swallowed, and looked at the helmet again, turning it over in my hands. "Put it back on," he ordered sharply. "Until further notice you'll wear it twenty-four hours a day, every day, all day. That's an order."

  I put it back on. "Why me, sir?" I asked.

  The commander lit a cigarette and waved out the match. "I think I told you that the weapon is linked with ESP. You've been esp-sensitized. Every victim so far has been sensitized. COMCARIB thinks that means that if you haven't been sensitized, you aren't susceptible to the Cow-dye weapon—whatever it is. You'll find a lot of them on the project, starting today; you're the first."

  "Thanks," I said. He only glanced at me, and I added, "Sir."

  He said mildly, "You did see that Cow-dye, didn't you?"

  I ha
d, and if the aluminum hat would keep me from looking like him, I would wear the aluminum hat. But something was bothering me. I said, "If it's a Caodai weapon, sir, how come it hit him?"

  Lineback shrugged. "Maybe COMCARIB knows, but if so they haven't seen fit to inform me. All I know is that a seaman on harbor patrol—an esper, as it happened—reported detecting Cow-dye ESP off the shore. He alerted the harbor patrol, and before they got on the scent he was slugged with—with whatever it is. Radiation, I suppose. They say he'll live, by the way. I imagine the weapon backfired. They couldn't find any trace of a gun or anything like that. Maybe it was portable, and the Cow-dye dropped it when he was hurt. Anyway, they're dragging—in five hundred feet of water, so don't hold your breath till they find anything." Lineback shook himself. "Enough of this conversation," he said. "I said I've got work for you."

  I assumed a posture of attention. "Yes, sir!" I said, trying to look as military as possible.

  A new batch of bright animal sayings to process through the computer, I thought, or perhaps some pleasant little additional duty with the thermometers. If I had to take that sort of thing to stay in the Navy I would take it; but at least I would try to be shipshape about it. I leaned forward and picked up the sealed orders Lineback flipped across the desk to me.

  But it wasn't like that at all. I opened them and stared in utter disbelief.

  I was ordered to assume command of a sea-going fighting ship!

  For a moment I felt as though I were in the real honest-to-John-Paul-Jones Navy again.

  But only for a moment, because when Semyon and I raced down to examine my new command we discovered that there had been a few little modifications. MHV Weems was a deep-sea heavy monitor, 6,000 tons displacement, nuclear-powered, armed with 20 homing-torpedo tubes and damned little else. Weems was an elderly lady by the time COMCARIB turned her over to me, but monitors of her class had served well and damagingly to the enemy in a great many actions, and she still could have been a command worth having—especially for a j.g.