Slave Ship (10 page)

"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 had, 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.

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.