Slave Ship

by Frederik Pohl

  However, COMCARIB's engineers had performed a sort of crude hysterectomy on the old girl. She didn't look much different, under the tarpaulin tent, but her torpedo racks were empty, the tubes were plugged with steel disks, and far-reaching changes had been made in her propulsion system. For one thing, four inches of sheathing had been stripped from her reactor. It made a nice economy in weight—Weems, from a lumbering snail of a vessel, could now in theory lope along as lightly as a corvette—but it had the one drawback that everybody inside her hull was subject to a gentle wash of radiation all the time the reactor was going.

  Semyon looked at me with the roundest of eyes. "Logan," he gasped, "are they making a kamikaze of you?"

  "Of us," I said, grimly enjoying myself. "You're part of my crew."

  "I am not," he yelped. "In Krasnoye Army is never—"

  "It's all right," I assured him. "Relax! In the first place, this old wagon isn't going anywhere; in the second place, if it did, and you and I went with it, we would live up forward in a sealed whaleboat. When the reactor was on, we'd be behind a six-inch bulkhead; the only communication we would have with the main compartments would be over the intercoms."

  He meditated. "Otchi khorashaw," he announced. "Is all right." He patted the heavy tube-loading gear, still in place because it was too clumsy to take out. "Is not bad, this Weems," he said thoughtfully. "And you are commander. I congratulate you, Logan."

  We toured the ship like midshipmen on their first training cruise. Semyon was delighted with the happy combination of sea and shore duty; we would spend our working days on Weems, sleep in our quarters ashore, have our evenings free for the Passion Pit. He had it all figured out . . .

  Almost all.

  The whaleboat which would nominally be our quarters was comfortable enough, though not large; it was similar in design to the scout torpedoes I had piloted when I was attached to Spruance, but not as fast and not armed. Its whole function was to get a part of the crew away in case the monitor was crippled or breached. There were quarters for three: A "captain's cabin"—mine—the principal distinction of which was a curtain to draw across the bunk; and two uncurtained bunks fitted around the main drive shaft. It would be a little cramped on an extended cruise; but livable.

  Something was troubling Semyon. We tramped aft from the sealing hatch to the whaleboat, and he cast puzzled looks at the main control board, the fire control panel, the complicated fighting gear of a deep-sea monitor. COMCARIB's engineers had been busiest here. Most of the panel had been made fully automatic, run off a modified baby computer; what little could not be automatized had been redesigned. Push buttons had been replaced with big, soft-handled throw switches. Infinite-range microverniers had been ripped out, and simple on-off two-position toggles put in their place. There could be little grace or flexibility in operating Weems with the new controls; power ahead would be "Full" or "Dead Stop"; rudder would be hard right or amidships.

  But it would go.

  Semyon started to ask me a question a couple of times, but frowned and stopped himself each time. It was only when we came to where the crew quarters should have been that he exploded. "Logan," he said accusingly, "there is something here which is not right! Where are the bunks, Logan? What is this canvas on the floor, Logan? Why is there no galley on this Weems, Logan?"

  I nodded. "You can figure it out," I told him. "You realize this whole area of the ship would be awash with radiation in action."

  "Of course! That is why I ask, Logan!"

  I said: "Everything simple, even a child could operate it. Maybe less than a child, even, Semyon." He was staring at me. I said swiftly: "Now perhaps you know what Project Mako was all about."

  I held out the orders and he took them unbelievingly. He stared, blinked, read again; then he looked up at me. They say Russians are very emotional; perhaps that is why his eyes seemed dark and almost wet.

  His voice was strained. "We are Judases, you and I," he choked. "Those poor animals!"

  X

  JUDASES WE PERHAPS WERE, but the animals didn't seem to mind. We drew a full complement for Weems: three dogs, including Josie, two small apes, and a seal. The seal was not physically present—she stayed in the pool up in the Project area; but if Weems or anything like Weems ever put to sea, she would go along.

  On an actual strike it wouldn't be both the dogs and the apes, but one group or the other; in our dry run one of our principal missions was to find out which could operate a submarine better. The apes had manual dexterity, which was helpful; but in the sheaf of preliminary studies Lineback threw at me it turned out that the dogs had more tolerance for low-level radioactivity, which might be more important. The reactor was not completely bare, of course; it still had a stripping of some light metal around it, filtering out gamma radiation and some of the other by-products. But neutrons, for instance, floated right through! With the light sheathing, being within range of the reactor meant slow, not sudden, death. And, of course, for the first part of the time the subject was dying of radiation poisoning he wouldn't know it; being an animal, he wouldn't ever know it, until he dropped dead—but that might take weeks.

  The seal was somebody's bright idea, and I could see that she might be the most useful of all. Imagine a seal, trained to follow orders, carrying a leechbomb to a cruising Caodai ship. It wasn't that they couldn't detect her—but supposing they did detect her, what would they do about it? They weren't going to blow every fish, whale and dolphin that came within range of their sonars out of the water, and our seal would look like any other seal, except for what she carried. It was extremely doubtful that they could recognize what she carried in time to do them much good.

  Working with the seal, in fact, was child's play. All we had to do was to run through enough of a vocabulary to explain to her that if she swam to the object that was shown to her and pushed the big metal disk she would get a fish—and prove it to her with a couple of fish.

  She would be one surprised seal when she pushed the big metal disk in an actual operation.

  Semyon got a fit of the giggles every time he saw me trying to take a shower with my little aluminum helmet on my head. On Lineback's orders, I kept my mouth shut about what it was for; but as Lineback had promised, they began cropping up all over the base before long. Kedrick was the second man to turn up with one; then three or four of the other .officers, including the WAVEs; then the enlisted personnel—apparently on the principle that they were comparatively expendable. My own WAVE appeared at the keyboard of the computer one morning with a feminine-styled model perched on the back of her head. It was smaller than mine—apparently a later issue—which, considering that mine was no more than three or four days old, indicated a pretty high priority in project development. Evidently the burns were causing more trouble than the newspapers reported.

  And by then, of course, the reason for the helmets was an open secret. Semyon's feelings were hurt. "I have not enough brain, then?" he asked bitingly. "The Orientals cannot vector in the little brain of Semyon Timiyazev, the son of a disciple of Pavlov? Hah!" He was moody about it for days, until we got a shipment of helmets of a new size and shape. Then he was utterly crushed: The new helmets were for our dogs!

  I tried to explain to him that it was a matter of ESP sensitivity, not intellect; that our work with the dogs might have made them susceptible. But you cannot tell a Russian anything once he gets an idea fixed in his brain; and for some little time after that Semyon was of no use to Project Mako; all he could do was stare at the dogs and sigh.

  But the work proceeded.

  I pushed myself pretty hard, because along about the time I got my first command I got a letter from the Red Cross. "Lieutenant, Miller," they said, "we regret to inform you in answer to your request of 28 June that we are unable to establish contact with Elsie NMI Miller, Signalman 2/C, last known to be interned at AORD S-14, Zanzibar, due to current security restrictions in force. Application has been made for permission for a Red Cross representative to visit her
for the purpose of ascertaining her welfare, in line with your request. However, we must inform you that there is a backlog in excess of fourteen hundred such applications. None have been granted."

  So I pushed myself hard, and the animals and Semyon harder still.

  The hull of the Weems began to smell a little bit like an old goat barn. "Trained, these animals," Semyon complained bitterly. "They are not even house-broken."

  But that had little to do with their military occupational specialty. The chimpanzees were named Clara and Kay, both females, both young and friendly; they caught on to what we wanted of them quickly enough. It was a spectacular sight to see Semyon, vocabulary sheets in his hand, chattering and posturing at the apes, but it got results. I found out very quickly that there wasn't any such thing as a conversation with an ape. You could stand there and tell it the chimpanzee symbols for, "Loud noise. Hurry. Grab-that-thing. Pull," and it would merely look at you, head cocked far over on one side, brown ape eyes staring vacantly. And then it would scratch and scamper away. But then the crash-dive bell would sound, and Clara or Kay would leap up from her flea hunt and jerk open the manual, main-tank valve as skillfully as any twenty-year submariner. I don't mean to say that they never talked back—often they would object and complain and tell us that they wanted a banana or a shiny ball or a handful of meal worms. But there was little consecutivity in their responses.

  The dogs were another matter entirely. Their main problem was garrulousness; you would explain to them, say, a complicated course-correction maneuver, and they would bark, growl and semaphore the whole thing back to you. And they wouldn't repeat it just once; they would tell you the whole procedure two or three times, and then come up and put their forepaws on your legs and mention a couple of the high spots, and tell you about the fire control drill they had done the day before, with emphasis on how High-Shiny-Lever was not the same as Little-Thick-Lever, even though both of them had to be pulled sharply outward. Semyon was astonished. "Oh that Mamushka should not see!" he moaned. "Observe, Logan! They chat like diplomat's wives!"

  It was true enough; when we left them in a simulated abandon-ship, retreating to the whaleboat and communicating with the animals in Weems proper only through the telecom, they chattered at each other. Since a very large proportion of canine vocabulary is aromatic, that contributed to the soggy state of Weems's interior. Fortunately, those sections of their vocabulary—though of paramount interest to the dogs—had nothing to do with ship handling, so it wasn't necessary for us to duplicate them.

  The biggest hitch in communicating from the whale-boat was that we were living a lie, and we knew it. It was all very well to dry-run the animals from the whaleboat, in communication by means of the telecom, but in actual combat we would not be so fortunate. Water bars microwaves; communication is possible, but only by sonar beam, and that presents a real challenge to a telecom.

  But not one which COMCARIB refused. Early one morning the engineers were back, ripping out all our communication equipment and replacing it with something complicated and new. Semyon and I sat on the shore, playing with Josie's puppies and waiting, and the whole business was installed in an hour.

  The engineer from COMCARIB mopped his brow and explained it to us. "Oof," he said, sweating. "It's a sonar-vision installation, and Flag Section thinks it ought to do for whatever kind of lashup you guys have got here."

  He looked puzzledly at Josie and at Semyon and shrugged "Anyway, it'll give you a two-way picture. But not instantaneous; it's got a slow rate of scan, and you can transmit about one full image every two seconds. There's a little bell that rings when your picture is taken. The phosphors in the picture tube are—"

  From there on it got deep, but I understood. Instead of radio waves, which the sea would stop, this thing beamed sound waves, which the sea carried beautifully; but because of the slow speed of sound waves, apparently, we were confined to transmitting a series of stills instead of a movie.

  When I pounded it through Semyon's head, after the engineers had left, he glowered at me. "But the essence, Logan," he complained, "the essence of the vocabulary is motion and—"

  I patted him on the head. "Back to the computers," I said, as kindly as I could.

  Well, we worked it out, and if we didn't have perfect rapport with the animals, there were compensations—with practice they got almost good enough to shiphandle by themselves anyhow.

  The image in the sonarvision screen wasn't terribly sharp, but by turning up the gain we got a patchy sort of vivid light-and-dark silhouette that looked awful to me, but which the dogs and apes had no trouble recognizing. The only thing was, they couldn't seem to grasp the notion that the picture of Semyon was the same as the person of Semyon; they would take orders from Semyon in person, but the semaphoring stills only puzzled them.

  We ran picture recognition tests for two whole days, and Josie was the first of the dogs to begin to get the idea. I pointed to Semyon and announced his name; I pointed to the photo of Semyon the signal lab had made for us, as contrasty as the screen image, and named it, and Josie got up on her hind feet and leaped over to the photo and licked it. It was like winning the Battle of the Atlantic.

  "Good girl," I said in English, because by the time we got the dogs they had already naturally acquired ten or twenty loan words, like any other reasonably intelligent mutt. And, in Dog: "Now. This one. Do."

  It was a photo of a cow. Josie stared at it thoughtfully for a moment and then pronounced "Big—." Well, never mind what the Dog word for "cow" is. But she got it. I ran through a couple of dozen pictures, and she called every one; and when I came to a photo of her puppies she called each name and, barking the look-at-me symbol, rolled over on her back to display her swollen milk glands.

  I took a break, scratching the back of Josie's neck and smoking a cigarette. She said the low, half-voice whine for "Bad smell" once, but only as a comment, not a reproof, and she nudged my cigarette case indulgently with her nose.

  I picked it up and opened it. Elsie's picture was inside the lid, taken two years before. I started to tell Josie that this was my wife, but somehow it didn't seem right, translated into Dog, and I contented myself with showing her the picture. She looked at it a little dubiously, tongue lolling out, one paw on my knee.

  I didn't think how odd that might look to anyone else until I heard Lineback's voice, scratchy with astonishment and scorn, from behind me saying: "What are you trying to do, Miller, make her jealous?"

  Lineback went through Weems like a homing torpedo through a tube, and in that one half-hour inspection there wasn't a thing that Semyon and I had been doing that he didn't touch on. He was wearing a sardonic expression when he began, but by the time he completed his tour and watched us put the animals through a couple of simple paces his face was serious and friendly. "Lieutenant Miller, Lieutenant Timiyazev," he said, "well done. Now I've got a hard question for you. Do you think you can make this thing work in combat?"

  Semyon swallowed audibly. I said quickly: "Certainly, . sir."

  Lineback looked at me thoughtfully. "You're pretty salty," he said, and I couldn't tell whether it was approbation or not. "Well, you may get the chance. You'll have orders tomorrow." He reached over to pat Sammy, our wirehair. Sammy glanced at Semyon, who told him:

  "Boss. All right here."

  Sammy whined. You could translate it as, "Well, if you say so"—and suffered Lineback to pat him. Lineback shook his head. "That business with your hands and the growl—you were talking to the pup?"

  "That is correct, Commander," said Semyon proudly. "I translate it like so—"

  "Never mind," said Lineback. "I don't know, it seems to me things were simpler before this thing got started." Sammy was acting ill at ease, so Lineback let him go. "Dogs usually like me," he said. "Been getting along with animals all my life. I suppose once they get in the habit of conversation with humans, it changes their attitudes a little."

  "That is so," Semyon said eagerly. "One picks up a little of cu
lture from the other; it is a phenomenon well known. You will find it in the papers of my mother, who worked with Pavlov."

  "No doubt," said Lineback drily, and got up to look for his hat. I got up with him; he had left the hat at A-Hatch and—

  "Sammy!" I yelled. The terrier, surprised in the act, looked around at me and whined, and reluctantly lowered his leg. I rescued the commander's hat, just in the nick of time.

  Commander Lineback, I will say for him, rose to the occasion. He looked at me for a speculative moment, then smiled slightly. "I see," he said impassively. "Well, you won't have to translate that for me. Good day, gentlemen."

  And he left, leaving Semyon and me staring at each other in horror and relief.

  XI

  SO WE FOUND ourselves on orders. It wasn't Lineback who handed us the orders. It was a special courier-officer from a higher command, and it wasn't even COMCARIB that wrote them, though it had COMCARIB's humble and instant endorsement. But the orders were signed "By command of COMINCH" himself, and the. courier was a full commander of the Line.

  Semyon was awed. "It is big, Logan," he said portentously. "Did you observe? He shares your tastes in hats."

  "I observed," I said. The commander had worn the aluminum skullcap under his regulation dress cap, a style which was becoming fashionable. We broke the seal on our orders, and read them hurriedly. They explained very little, only that we were detached from Project Mako as of 0800 the next morning, and were to proceed without delay to a port on the Florida Gulf coast for assignment. That was all my orders said. Semyon's had one extra paragraph—directing him to bring with him certain "experimental animals covered by References COMINCH KT-41-611-MAKO and COMINCH KJA-41-1845-MAKO, specifically one (1) bitch, two (2) dogs, two (2) apes, small, female, and one (1) seal.