The Scrubs (16 page)

Oracle was getting bigger, a side effect of living off others.
 
Clelland glanced up at the hold’s bay door.
 
Oracle could only have been ten feet from the top.
 
Soon they would have to find a bigger ship.
 
The creature wasn’t the twenty-five ton mass they had found in a dormant volcano crater.

Christ knew what it was.
 
Oracle had tried to explain, but either it couldn’t articulate itself or Clelland couldn’t comprehend it.
 
Not that it mattered.
 
It was of use to the Allied cause.
 
Beyond that, Britain had no further interest.

It was a creature though.
 
The professor who examined Oracle at the discovery site, had said that it was alive and pronounced it as such.
 

“A creature is defined as an organism that possesses a mouth and an anus.”

Physically, that was all Oracle was—a gelatinous hillock of shit-brown flab with the ability to process food.
 
It possessed no eyes to see, or ears to hear and was incapable of movement.
 
But that wasn’t important.
 
What raised Oracle from biological curiosity was that it had intelligence.
 
It could communicate.
 

The downside was that Clelland was the only one who could understand.
 
The creature was to be shipped off to the British Museum, until Clelland realized that Oracle possessed the power to read men’s minds.
 
Distance wasn’t a problem.
 
Oracle could tune in anyone on the planet like a radio and listen to their thoughts.
 
Its gift made up for all its physical shortcomings and the creature became a military deity and Clelland, its interpreter.

“You were saying, Captain?” Oracle prompted with its sickly sweet voice.
 

“I need to know the location of the fuel dumps and the movements of the Japanese fleet in the Philippine Sea.”

Clelland didn’t know why he did it.
 
He always spoke to the spout at Oracle’s peak, the opening that consumed food.
 
Oracle didn’t have a face.
 
Clelland was astounded at his reliance on convention.
 
He relied on the visual, the creature on the mental.
 
He needed a face to talk to, but there wasn’t one, so he spoke to the next best thing, its mouth.
 
He wondered if Oracle could sense his presence.
 
The hairs as thick as straw and just as rasping that covered Oracle’s mass might have been able to detect rudimentary shapes.
 
His theory was further reinforced by the heavy concentration around its mouth.

“Let me see what I can find out,” Oracle said.

Oracle scanned.
 
The creature breathed in and out, much more deeply than when it communicated with Clelland.
 
It inflated, pushing Clelland back, then deflated.
 
The creature expanded by at least ten percent when in deep thought.
 
Its mouth opened and closed in time with its swelling and contracting bulk.

After several minutes, Oracle responded.
 
“I have the information you need.”

“Good.”
 
Clelland wasn’t overjoyed.
 
He didn’t much care for the information.
 
The price was too high.

Oracle relayed the information and Clelland made shorthand notes for his superiors.

“Will London be pleased?” Oracle asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m their best agent, aren’t I?”

“Yes.
 
Yes, you are, Oracle.”

“My information has the best mission success rate in the Allied forces, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.
 
Eighty percent.”

Always eighty percent.”
 
Oracle exhaled and its spout opened then closed.
 
“I wish it could be more.”

Clelland was shaking.
 
Oracle was tearing him apart.
 
It was hard to hold back the tears.
 
He insisted on showing Oracle was a brave front every time it teased him.
 
It was a futile gesture.
 
Oracle knew exactly how Clelland felt.
 
How much it all hurt.
 
How much he hated himself for being the one who had to deal with the informant.
 
Clelland covered his nose and mouth with his hand, holding in a cry.

“When do we arrive at Wotje Atoll?”

“Thirty-six hours.”
 
Clelland wiped away a tear and sniffed.

“Wasn’t Wotje Atoll one of my bad predictions?”

Clelland nodded to a creature that couldn’t see.

“Have they fought yet?”

“No.
 
Oh-five-hundred hours.”

“Do you think many will be killed?”

“You know it will be slaughter.”
 
Clelland’s words crawled out on barbed wire.
 
He fought the urge to scream.

“Do you blame me?”

“Does it matter?”

“Because London is happy with my successes and not to bothered by my failures?
 
Because nobody’s perfect?
  
Because no one can be right all of the time?”

Clelland was already walking away.
 
He had what he came for.
 
He didn’t have to listen to Oracle.
 
He wasn’t the creature’s friend or nursemaid.
 
He was just the message boy.

“I’ll relay your information to London.”

“I’ve given you five missions there.
 
One has to fail, to maintain my eighty percent success rate.
 
I’ll let you choose which one.”

“Bastard,” Clelland hissed under his breath.
 
He didn’t care that Oracle heard his thought before the word was out.

“Remember, Clelland.
 
We have a bargain.”

Clelland slammed the cargo hatch.
 
The resulting clang rebounded off the hull and bulkheads.

How could he forget?
 
The bargain came after a string of successes at the expense of Oracle’s health.
 
In the Vulture’s hold, the creature had been dying.
 
London told him to keep Oracle alive at any cost…any cost.
 
The problem was its diet.
 
The food they fed it, the cows, pigs and sheep, were killing it.
 
It needed what it had always needed, what it had survived on in the volcano’s crater and what it needed to thrive to read the enemy’s minds—people.

London wasn’t about to sacrifice people to the creature, but they did have plenty of dead. Clelland fed Oracle the carcasses of soldiers that fell in battle.
 
The families of the dead didn’t need to know the final sacrifice their loved ones had to make for King and country.

Nobody was perfect, except Oracle.
 
But the creature had to be wrong, or it would never eat.
 
The flow of dead was drying up.
 
London had told Clelland to do whatever it took to keep the information coming.
 
Oracle and Clelland made a deal.
 
Every fifth mission, Clelland sent London the wrong time, location or position.
 
Thousands of soldiers died unnecessarily, just so Oracle could eat.

He never shared their secret.
 
Who could he tell?
 
The Lord Mayor’s Bucket Boys would have hacked him and Oracle to pieces.
 
London would have turned a blind eye, uninterested.
 
The cost was small compared to the ten of thousands that lived.
 
Acceptable losses, as they liked to say.

“Our bargain, captain,” Oracle reminded Clelland, as the officer headed for the radio room.

Not that its reminder mattered.
 
Oracle was finished.
 
The Pacific theater was at an end.
 
The Yanks had the bomb and intended using it.
 
And Clelland had his transfer papers.
 
He was an artilleryman again.
 
His destination was number three on Oracle’s list.
 
He circled it as the mission to fail.

The End