Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (38 page)

"Mr. Butler," Captain Scott called over his shoulder, "if your manifold social obligations will permit you to comply with my suggestions, would you care to stroll up to the screen for a moment?"

I glared at the back of his shaggy head and light blue fatigues. Then, very obviously, I strolled up to the screen beside Lieutenant Wisnowski, the astrogator. I heard Scott rub his teeth against each other, and Wisnowski twisted a quick grin at me.

There wasn't much on screen that meant anything to me. A fairly large disc of Earth, the moon approximately the same size, lots and lots of little lights that were stars or meteors or fireflies.

"What do you expect me to—" I began.

"This part," Wisnowski said, whirling a little doohickey with a handle. A section of the screen in front of me seemed to spread out, and the little white lights got thicker.

There was an odd something moving there, a something with an irregular shape and all kinds of protruding edges. Dark brown in color, it seemed to jerk itself along. I'd never seen anything quite like it before.

"Small asteroid? Meteor?"

"Neither," Scott told me. "It's not on any chart, and this area is mapped to twelve decimal places. The speed and movement—jerky movement, you notice—disqualify it as a solar body. Besides, it's been following us."

My mind danced to the Martians below. "Rescue party?"

"Hardly think so." The captain walked to the middle of the room, where Cummings sat alertly before his hundred switches. "Forty, five-nine, forty. The object has no discernible jets."

"Forty, five-nine, forty," Cummings mumbled through his wad of tobaccogum. He flipped three switches toward him, moved two others back. He peered at the slowly revolving "grampus" on the ceiling. "Forty, five-nine, forty. On arc."

"Well, if it has no jets, how can it be following us?" I asked reasonably. "I don't know how far off it is, but—"

"Over three hundred thousand miles." Captain Scott had returned to the visiscreen and was studying it intently. I was amazed at the look of worry on his old, space-pale face. "Much too far away for gravitation to be asserted, if that's what you can't understand, Mr. Butler.

"The
Sunstroke
may have been a large yacht, but it makes a very small naval vessel, and that thing is too tiny for any real attraction to exist. Yet it moves at approximately our number of gyros, and—see there, now!—it changes course with us."

Sure enough, it did. As the
Sunstroke
curved into its new arc, the celestial bodies on the screen seemed to slant away. All but our new little friend. One of its great uneven edges came round slowly, and the whole mass moved into relatively the same position on the screen it had held before.

"Lock the magnification, Mr. Wisnowski."

The astrogator pushed on the doohickey, and it clicked into permanent place. He and the captain hurried back to the chart table. The second officer, after an anxious look at the grampus, moved to the door and left the bridge. Not before another sidelong glance at the thing in the visiscreen. "I'll check battle stations, sir."

"Good. And you might sound a secondary alert. I called you to the bridge, Mr. Butler, because I believe this—whatever it is—is definitely related to your distinguished prisoners. Perhaps—"

"In that case, I insist you radio Earth immediately. Or a military base on the moon. They'll send whatever help—"

"Mr. Butler! You insist? You? Until such time as you can carry five red jets on your shoulders, I give all the orders on this ship!" He had whirled to face me angrily, his lips curved into each other. The old boy was mad down to his bottom gyro.

But I still had statements to make for publication. "You're master in all spatial matters," I told him, trying to imitate his bluster, "but I'm directly responsible to the War Crimes Tribunal and, through them, to the Solar Council for the safe delivery of these prisoners. Didungal is the only one of the four peritic tetrarchs we caught—"

"I don't care if he is the chief embezzling field-marshal in the whole blasted Terran Army, I still give all orders on this ship. I can prove that to you, if necessary, by throwing you into the brig, the real brig—not the fancy home away from home those lizards are enjoying.

"You have chosen to become a civilian, Mr. Butler—though you still prefer the uniform—and, as far as I'm concerned, you are merely a civilian employee of the government charged with seeing that three sensitive Martians don't catch colds or commit suicide. You take orders from me and my officers—is that clear?"

Deeply inhaling, I thought of pointing out that all of us "civilian employees" were the most frequently wounded and decorated men in the entire Third Corps, who had elected to take their discharges on Mars, and who had volunteered to guard the most vicious criminals of the Peritic War on their way home because no occupation troops could be spared. But—I grimaced, but didn't unzip.

"Good." Some of the sudden red lines in Scott's face faded to pink, and he picked a book off the chart table. "I won't use the radio—as you call it, in army slang—because of the
Jetsam
incident. You've heard of it? The
Jetsam
, a small scout operating off Deimos about a week before the armistice, reported via radarito that it was being followed by a strangely shaped object that matched its speed but seemed to maintain its distance.

"It broke in on its own message to announce that the object had accelerated since transmission started and was now approaching very rapidly. A moment later, the entire Deimos beachhead was shaken by a tremendous spacerip blast. Nothing of the
Jetsam
or its crew was ever found."

"M-m-m-m. Spacerip yet. Atomic channels aren't bad enough. So you won't use the radio—oops, radarito—because you're afraid it'll help set off this mine, or anyway excite it to increase its speed. But a mine doesn't make sense. If it's anything that new, the Martians haven't had time to plant it. They've cleared from this area since long before the Battle of the Southern Hemisphere."

"Not on this side of the moon," the captain pointed out. "There are still guerilla bands of Martians holding out in forgotten mountain forts on the moon. It may be a loose mine—or a new-fangled sort of proximity shell. It may be practically anything. It's probably a dud, in any case, but that doesn't make it less dangerous. It might be one of our own weapons. The Martians are essentially imitators. They haven't discovered a single scientific principle for themselves."

I smiled at him and shook my head. "Don't go falling for our propaganda, Captain. The Martians are, each and every one of them, better scientists than any five thousand humans. Just because they weren't interested in mechanics until we caressed their scales with all sorts of nasty weapons. Why, the gyrospeed drive your ship is using was copied from a Martian derelict in the war's first stages."

'I wasn't aware that was publicly accepted, Mr. Butler," he said, his thin body very erect in the blue uniform. "Mr. Wisnowski, how many gyros are we turning?"

"Five, I think."

"You think?"

"Five, I know," Wisnowski amended after a hasty glance from the grampus to his charts.

"Raise it to nine. I know it's over our limit, but tell the engine room we'll hold that acceleration only until we've shaken this dud, if it is a dud."

Captain Scott walked swiftly past me to the visiscreen and opened the book in his arms. He turned the metallic pages slowly, staring with desperate intentness first at the illustrations and then at the weird brown object in the magnified portion.

Wisnowski raised the engine room on the communicator and ordered the nine gyros. He closed the switch on their surprised yelps.

"Don't mind the old cometcatcher," he whispered. "He won't take any backtalk from even an ex-Army guy. It's a shame we have to have two separate services in the first place. Crazy jurisdictional squabbles in the middle of a war, whether a battle is deep-space or planet-based. It's silly and positively twentieth-century."

I agreed with him. "But the captain was way off base when he said I had to prevent my Martians from committing suicide. Catching colds yes; committing suicide, no. If a Martian could ever bring himself to voluntarily slither off into the great moist beyond, we'd have lost the war a month after Antarctica was gouged out.

"They've been civilized too long and enjoy life too much for that. They'd have stayed civilized, too, if we hadn't objected to their dreaming in their baths and insisted on showing them the delights of pugnaciousness. How their placidity used to annoy us!"

Wisnowski nodded. "Most soldiers I've talked to feel the same way. I remember how everyone was intrigued when the first two Martians were persuaded to attend an old-fashioned heavyweight fight at Madison Square Garden."

"Sure. We're responsible for changing an attitude a million years old. And then, the people we used to colonize Mars! The supermen philosophers of Germany and Japan we didn't have the nerve to kill after the second atomic war."

"Drop to six gyros," Captain Scott called. "This thing has increased its acceleration to match ours. I hope you're keeping an accurate account of all this in the rough log, Mr. Wisnowski."

"Yes sir, I am. Very accurate." Wisnowski blushed, passed the order down to the engine room and began to write very rapidly. I was glad I'd never served under such a commander. "Almost forgot about it completely," he whispered, after a while, his eyes glued to the log.

"My dad told me how the government sold the idea 'Let those brilliant but misguided men build a new life for themselves on a new world. They will help themselves become better in the struggle with this hostile planet—they will help humanity stretch its empire farther into space.' Empire—phtaaa!"

"Well, the only ones they helped with their muscle-man methods and garish ideas were the peritic Martians, who simply modified super with Martian instead of man. In thirty years, the Perites grew from an obnoxious little cult to a major political party. When Martian scientists began toying with weapons instead of new ways of making water spray off their scales, humanity just—"

"Nine gyros!" Scott yelled. "Get back to nine gyros!"

"Raise it to nine again," Wisnowski flashed into the communicator. "And no argument! What's up, sir?"

He ran to the captain's side; I scuttled after him. Scott pointed a shaking finger at the screen. The brown mass had grown larger. More details of its odd, broken shape could be seen. "Look at that! It increased its acceleration to match our limit, but when we cut to six, it stayed at nine. Now I'm sure it's a dud—some sort of naval proximity shell.

"There's nothing in the naval bulletin about it; just some vague notes like, 'It's believed the Martians have been attempting to develop an improved proximity fuse using a spacerip-type warhead, which will adjust its speed to that of the pursued object, making landing and deceleration impossible.' Of course, we can't think of deceleration if that ungodly pebble will stay at our maximum. But the desk-bound idiot writing the bulletin doesn't mention a countermeasure!"

"Probably had no idea what it was like." Wisnowski made faces at the screen. "Just wanted to let commanders know it might be around sometime. Then they're on their own."

Even Cummings had lifted his eyes from the hundred switches and was chewing his tobaccogum at the deadly missile uneasily. I couldn't understand all this crazy concern and decided to say so.

"The
Sunstroke
is fitted with atomic channels, isn't it? Why don't you just reach out and bop it one?"

"Mr. Butler," the captain enunciated in slow irritation, "you evidently haven't been out in deep space since the Battle of Deimos, if you think you can blast a late-model proximity shell. They are all adjusted to absorb sufficient power from the blast to reach the ship of origin in a fantastic spurt before they explode. No, we can't blast it; but we can't hold nine gyros for long, either! This has us where the hairs are long, short and middle-sized."

I remembered hearing about that new principle—temporary immunity and total absorption—they'd been building into the latest proximity shells, but I was so deep in underground operations around Grinda City at the time that I'd hardly bothered to file the information.

"But just a moment, Captain; this is a dud, isn't it? And a dud is a shell that hasn't exploded. So how can it—"

"A dud is a shell that hasn't exploded—yet. And in the case of a naval proximity shell, it's one that has failed to be attracted to a target, very possibly because it hasn't encountered one—yet. Mr. Wisnowski, what is your opinion?"

Wisnowski rolled his lower lip under his teeth and jabbed at his chin. I waited, more than a little anxious myself. This total absorption deal—that explained partially why radio couldn't be used, why we couldn't get away in lifeboats.

Any additional expenditure of energy would be used by the missile to increase its speed, already equal to the ship's maximum. It also meant that, since every man-made object in space radiated a certain amount of energy as it streaked through the vacuum, these nasty playthings must eventually catch their targets. But what did they use for jets?

"With your permission, sir," Wisnowski was saying, "I'd like to take a red herring out."

"Was hoping you'd say that, Mr. Wisnowski. We are well into the period for considering desperate measures. But I would never order a man into a red herring. If you hadn't volunteered, I myself—"

"Hold your lanyards," I told both of them. "We had red-herring maneuvering way back in Army basic. I'm supercargo on this wagon, just a valet to the Martians, so why shouldn't I carry the ball? I don't want to do anything that sounds like volunteering, but Wisnowski here has three wives, while I—"

"Haven't even got one. But you will have when you get back to civilian Terran jurisdiction—new law. With all the guys that got knocked off in the war, how do you think there will be a next human generation if people like you hang on to their individuality so hard? Anyway, Butler, you're on your way out of the service, and the captain would want this to be a strictly Navy job." He started out before I could get my formal protest exhaled.