Slave Ship

by Frederik Pohl

  Nguyen said heavily, "Correct."

  Semyon cut in, '"You could at least tell us what is happening, old man. There is no secret about that."

  Nguyen closed his eyes, "The end of the world is happening. Your ship attacked us in our own waters. We retaliated. Your people retaliated against our retaliation—"

  "The satellite bombs?"

  "You have seen one of them," said Nguyen-Yat-Hugo. "You must realize that our bombs are falling too."

  Nina whimpered, "But why? You must have known it was the end for all of us!"

  Semyon raged: "Couldn't you wait, old man? Your weapon was too slow, was it? The burning and killing did not satisfy you, you must unleash the satellite bombs—"

  Nguyen said hoarsely, "A moment. Our weapon? What weapon is that?"

  "I do not know your name for it," Semyon said in contemptuous tones. "We call it the Glotch; it is a burning fire that strikes the head and neck and—"

  He trailed off. The stern, stiff old face of Nguyen was cracking. "No," said Nguyen, shaking his head.

  It was incredible, but you couldn't doubt the expression on his face. I stammered, "It—it isn't your weapon?"

  "It is not," said Nguyen with passion. "The Caodai is on its knees beneath it!"

  We stared at each other. If it wasn't a Caodai weapon and Elsie confirmed that it had struck the Caodais as hard as us—and if it wasn't our own weapon, which it was not—

  Whose weapon was it?

  "Too late, too late!" whispered Nguyen, looking through our periscopic sights. We had surfaced, and the smoking coast of Madagascar was a mile or less away.

  "Maybe the damage is only local," I said. "Can you raise anyone on the radio, Nina?"

  She shook her head. "Everybody's jamming," she said briefly.

  "Fall-out negligible," Semyon reported from the aft lookout ports. "There must have been an offshore wind. One should not swim too long in these waters, though."

  I said to the pope of the Caodai: "If we find a spot on the coast where we can safely land, can you conduct us to a place where we can radio the U.N. forces?"

  He spread his hands, his face a mask. "I can try."

  "We haven't any other choice, Logan," Elsie reminded me. I noticed that her hand was in mine. Even if we could refuel this boat, we could scarcely navigate it back across the Atlantic."

  "Man your stations," I ordered. "Nguyen, I assume you haven't any hailing signal we could use for a safe-conduct? It would be a help, if a Caodai ship should spot us—" He shook his head.

  "Full speed south then," I said. "As long as the fuel holds out."

  It held out better than I had expected; we made nearly ten miles before the engines began to splutter. While we still had steerage way I spun the rudder wheel, and we slanted in on a sandy beach. There were concrete pillboxes and chevaux-de-frise, and God knows how many electronic and sonar alarms we triggered as we beached. But there apparently were very few Caodais at the filter centers that day, after the bombs had fallen. Our only real danger—from that particular source, at least—was that someone would notice we had landed on a radar remote, and send over a nike to home in on us to save the trouble of investigating.

  We ran away from the beach, as far as we could get before our breath ran out, in case a wandering patrol should happen by.

  "There is," said the pope, "a command post somewhere about. I consecrated it myself, two days ago."

  We sent one of the monkeys up a tree, but she either couldn't understand what we wanted, or her short simian vision didn't let her detect the building we had described. Semyon, cursing in Russian, tried climbing it himself. But we couldn't get high enough to see, any of us.

  "It is this way," said Nguyen strongly, and what could we do but follow his lead?

  And he led us right into a trap.

  There were Caodais all over the place. They swarmed from the command post like termites from a hill; there was a rattle of small arms fire, and rushing brown-skinned men in uniforms, and it was all over before we could move. For a moment when they jumped us I had old Nguyen in front of my gun, and I don't know why I didn't pull the trigger. "Treacherous beast," sobbed Semyon, "we trusted you and you betrayed us!" And I felt much the same.

  "No!" cried Nguyen, and he bellowed something at the Caodai soldiers. They gave him an argument. Apparently he wasn't recognized; but they took us all to the command post, and there was a long, complicated discussion in French too fast for my ears. Nina, following it as closely as she could, explained:

  "They don't know him. They think he's an impostor, and the fat one is all for shooting the lot of us. Now somebody's going to get a picture, and then—"

  They brought the picture—a ceremonial portrait draped in yellow bunting, as remote a likeness to the real man in its own prettifying way as the caricatures in our latrines had been in theirs.

  But it convinced them; and that was that. So all we had to do was arrange to use their radio, get in touch with the U.N. command in Washington, stop the war and clear up the mess.

  It was a tough assignment. All the more because we never got past Step One. Jamming loud and furious-jamming by the Caodais and jamming by us. There were no radio communications anywhere, period.

  XVIII

  NOT ONLY were we the ones who were trying to stop the war, it looked as though we had started it. For the naval action that Monmouth precipitated had spread. The Caodais had sunk her. A U.N. fleet had made a daring raid into interdicted waters to try to rescue her. In retaliation, the Caodais had raided the Caribbean again. In retaliation for that, a strike against Cebu. In retaliation for that—it had wound up with the satellite bombs.

  We looked at the situation map in the radio room, and it was like the end of the world. There had been at least eighty fusion bombs dropped.

  And a weary, jittery black radioman in a Caodai uniform was trying to get through with the message that might stop it all; but it was hopeless. He glanced at us and shrugged. "Je m'y perds, votre Sainteté," he said. "Je ne puis pas."

  Nguyen said heavily: "He cannot get through."

  A sous-tenente who spoke fair English cleared his throat and said: "Sir, perhaps if we have patience a time will come when we can get through. There have been breaks in the jamming; we received messages for nearly half an hour this morning."

  "No. There will be no more breaks—except as the stations are bombed off the air." He smiled wryly. "It is that which we wish to prevent."

  Semyon looked up from the animals. "Fantastic," he said, his eyes round. "It is not your weapon. It is not our weapon. But we bomb each other."

  Nina Willette was still an intelligence officer. She asked: "Have you really lost many to this burning thing? I suppose I can't call it the 'Caodai Horrors' any more."

  Nguyen hesitated only a moment. Then he rapped out: "More than seven hundred thousand. Nearly every one of our—what is your word—our telepathists; and a few others. And you?"

  It was Nina's turn to hesitate. Still, he had been frank with her, or had seemed to. "I'm not sure. But perhaps half a million."

  Half a million! Semyon and Elsie and I stared back and forth among ourselves. So many, I thought; how can there have been so many? But the more I thought, the more plausible it got. For even in my own small experience there had been half a dozen or more. Half a million; one out of every five hundred or so on the North American continent.

  Elsie, surprisingly, grinned; and in that moment she was my Elsie again. She took my hand. "No more calling up your wife just to see how she is, Logan. It's too expensive now—if this thing knocks off the espers, they'll raise their rates. Is it always espers?"

  "All," said Nguyen. "Nearly all professionals, and a few others who had recently been sensitized. And with you?"

  "I think so," said Nina. "You understand that it was a highly classified matter with us—but I think so."

  "So, you see?" Elsie clutched my hand. "From now on, esping will be purely on matters of the gravest importance—on matters�
��on—"

  She stared at me, then wordlessly at the useless radio.

  "On matters, she proclaims, of the gravest importance!" howled Semyon. "But surely! They cannot jam the telepathic waves, however hard they try. It is our way to reach America!"

  Our way to reach America.

  But we didn't have an esper at hand to do it.

  Nguyen sent scouts racing across the Madagascan littoral in all directions; and they came back with psychologists, with Caodai military communications men, with a mixed bag of assorted protesting black, brown and yellow men and women. But not an esper in the lot.

  Nguyen snapped: "If you had not killed them off—" He flushed. "My apology. If they had not died through this thing we both wish to combat, it would be easy. But there is scarcely a telepathist in all the lands of the Great Palace. Hardly even a man who was sensitized, much less an expert."

  Elsie looked at me and shook her head sharply. But all the same I cleared my throat and said:

  "I was sensitized only a few weeks ago."

  "I was sensitized last year," Nina Willette said suddenly.

  No one else said anything at all.

  Then Elsie burst out: "That's ridiculous, Logan! You're no esper, you only paid your money to use one. Good heavens, I was part of the same hookup, so if you—"

  "I was sending," I told her. "You were only receiving."

  She said desperately, "But Logan! It's dangerous; you heard what this man said; it's bad enough in America, but in Caodai territory esping is a quick way to die. Don't do it! Let that girl try—"

  Then she looked me in the eye and stopped. "I'm sorry, darling," she said after a moment.

  "I was sensitized more recently, dear," I mentioned to her.

  Wearily: "I know."

  "It, uh, it probably isn't really dangerous. I still have my helmet. I'll just take it off to see if I can reach some American esper. Then as soon as I've got through—"

  "I know." She reached up and kissed me, hard. Then she turned away. "Get on with it," she said over her shoulder . . .

  We talked to one of the psychologists Nguyen's patrols had rounded up, a faded tan-skinned man with a bulbous face and a thin black mustache, who claimed to know a little about the theory of ESP. The sous-tenente translated: "You cannot reach anyone except a trained esper or one with whom you have a had a—a—excuse, but what is the English word for rapport."

  "'Rapport.' Get on with it," said Nina impatiently.

  The sous-tenente pursed his lips. "Curious. Well then, you must try to reach someone with whom you have formerly been in contact. Preferably an esper, if there is one. Think of him, and of the place where you saw him last, and of the sounds and smell of the room; recreate it all in your mind. But do not linger on a single person, for perhaps he is dead. Try one as best you can; if no answer, try another. You comprehend?"

  "I comprehend," I said. "Let's go."

  We went to work.

  We took off our aluminum helmets—that I for one had lived in, slept in, even bathed in for weeks. We lay down on hard cots in a room of the command post, and they closed the door.

  And then we tried to telepath.

  It was a funny sensation—something like trying to flex the fingers on a third hand. I was straining muscles that didn't exist, reaching through the void with members I did not own, shouting with vocal chords that should have been in the base of my skull, and were not. In the hands of the esper it had been quick and easy. There was the gray wandering and the sense of touching, and there was a contact.

  Now—nothing. We lay there like a pair of idiots. Could we ever reach anyone? Ridiculous, I thought. Could a jellyfish solve quadratic equations? The brain tissue, whatever it was that held the ESP-power, simply did not exist in us; we were not espers.

  I belligerently followed directions, daring something to happen. I thought of Giordano and his office on the Venetian Causeway. Nothing.

  I thought of the smell of rotting palm trees and hibiscus, the warmth of the early summer Miami air, the way his breath had rasped as he was helping me reach Elsie . . .

  Nothing.

  All right, I said, I give up; I thought of another esper, the one in Providence . . .

  And I got Giordano.

  Peevishly: Who the hell are you? Don't you know this is dangerous?

  Not words, of course. I've explained that esping is not a matter of words. But an irritation, and a question, and a warning.

  I tried—as a blind castaway might try to spot a sail on the horizon—I tried, ineptly and without knowing whether I was succeeding, to convey what I had to say. The Giotch is not a Caodai weapon. It kills them as well as us. Tell the high command. Tell them to stop the bombs. The Caodai didn't start the war. They are dying as rapidly as we. Stop it, stop it, until we find out . . .

  Until, finally, an incredulousness from Giordano, an understanding, at last a belief, and a promise. I could almost see him, seated at his desk, not in Miami now but in some colder, drier place, staring at emptiness, conversing with me. He was nodding, promising . . .

  Bright yellow fireflies came between us.

  I shook my head, and the rapport was gone. No more Giordano; no more sense of touch.

  But the fireflies were still there. Fire lanced through the base of my neck. I yelled out loud, and clawed for the helmet I had dropped beside my cot. The pain was terrible, worse than that night along the drive at Miami Beach, worse than anything I had ever felt. I got the helmet and jammed it onto a head filled with hurting and flame. "Help!" I bawled; and I wondered if the door was really opening, if people were really bursting in, if that was really Elsie clutching me in her arms. My head rolled to one side, and I caught a glimpse of the cot next to mine. There was something there, something that had been a person; but it wasn't Nina Willette; not with blackness and horror where the pretty young face had been, not with the charred agony that was crisped into the expression. Nina Willette? Preposterous! It was a seared corpse, it couldn't be she!

  But it was, all the same. So I found out—more than a week later, when they dared take the needles out; when they had stopped enough of the pain and patched enough of the ruin around my head and neck, and began to think I might yet live—the only man in all the world who had survived not a single attack of whatever-it-was, but two.

  And Elsie was there.

  We didn't talk for a while; and then we talked. The war was over; I had after all got through, and so had Nina—before she died. It was good that we both made it, for they would scarcely have believed one. But you do not lie through ESP, and two of us could hardly be mistaken.

  So they had stopped the bombs, and the satellites hung silent in the sky. And the Caodais and we had begun to compare notes and to look for answers. Volunteers had offered themselves as sacrifice—some had died, sitting in darkened rooms with opened photographic shutters waiting to catch the track of whatever came flashing in as they esped; a few coughing their lungs out in improvised cloud chambers; a great many were surrounded by infinite varieties of scientific equipment that tasted and measured and felt.

  After a day I was well enough to walk about. The grafts from the skin bank were healing, and the damage to the nervous system was slight. And I had a visitor. I was in a naval hospital outside of what had been New Washington, and there Nguyen had flown to sign the Bethesda Compact. And he came to see me and to say, "Thank you."

  That was the greatest shock of all. "For what?" I demanded.

  Nguyen laughed silently. "We are in your debt, my Lieutenant," he said. "We have learned to get along together, the Caodai and the West, and that is good. And even more, through your work with the dogs and monkeys and seals, we have learned to get along with our animals. And only just in time, my Lieutenant. Only just in time."

  He was in earnest. "In time for what?" I asked.

  He said: "What you call the Glotch. It wasn't our weapon or yours. In fact, you see, it was not a weapon at all. Today the news is made: It is life."

 
I stared. "Life?"

  He nodded heavily. "Living things. Telepathic. Tiny. Below the threshold of visibility. They seek to communicate when they sense the subtle esper flow; and because their structure and ours cannot exist together—they die. And perhaps that could be borne, but we die too. As you know."

  "Life!" I breathed. "How on earth—"

  "Ah, no!" he cried. "Not on earth at all. Mars? I don't know—but not on earth, that is sure. And that is why we were only just in time. For now that we have learned to get along with each other—we start, this second, to learn to get along with Them. They have been attracted from outside, the scientists think, by our esping and our bombs. I doubt they will ever leave us alone again."

  "Mars!" I breathed. It was fantastic.

  And also, of course, wrong—but how thoroughly wrong we did not discover for some months after, until Venus once more swam into close approach to the earth.

  But that's another story.

  A NOTE ABOUT THIS BOOK

  IT IS NOT the business of a science-fiction writer to record matters of contemporary fact or scientific truths which have already been discovered. It is his business to take what is already known and, by extrapolating from it, draw as plausibly detailed a portrait as he can manage of what tomorrow's scientists may learn . . . and of what the human race in its day-to-day life may make of it all.

  Since not all of Slave Ship's scientific elements are "extrapolations," it seems worthwhile to set down a rough guide to which is which. To the best of the author's knowledge, no human being since Dr. Doolittle has been able to conduct a conversation on any abstract subject with any creature or thing other than another human being. However, animal languages do exist—not merely among the geniuses of the animal kingdom such as primates and dogs, but as far down among the phyla as one cares to go. The question, of course, turns upon the definition of the term "language." Bees have been clearly demonstrated to communicate with sets of signals, for example, If one allows only a "spoken" language, we turn to the frog, perhaps the lowest animal to have a voice at all: A species of frog from Santo Domingo owns at least one "word," a sort of pig-squeal alarm cry utterly different from its normal barking sound.