Slave Ship (2 page)

But the Navy stopped them, by doing things the Navy way. And you don't kid an outfit that's doing the job for you.

Commander Lineback shoved me off on his exec, a full lieutenant named Kedrick. He was a pot-bellied little man, obviously over age in grade, but at least he seemed pretty Navy—in a harried, fuss-budget sort of way. He logged me in and complimented me on my arrival, and listened to my mild complaint about the helicopter pilot. "Forgot to pick you up, eh? And drinking on duty, eh?" He sighed. "Well, Miller, good men are hard to find." And he showed me to my quarters.

The BOQ at Project Mako was what once had been a third-rate beachfront vacation hotel. The walls were paper and the rooms were made for midgets, but the plumbing was crystal and chrome. There was a magnificent view of the ocean; I was admiring it when Kedrick said briskly: "Draw the curtains, man. It's getting dark!" I looked at him incredulously. "Blackout?" I asked. With radar and infravision, visible light made no particular difference to hostile vessels.

"Blackout," he said firmly. "Don't ask me why; but it's orders, something to do with the Glotch, I guess. Maybe they think the Caodais are sending it over by frogman—
they
need regular light."

I said humbly, "Excuse me, Mr. Kedrick, but what is the Glotch?"

"Good lord, man, how would I know? All I know is, people drop down dead. They say it's a Caodai secret weapon, and they call it the Glotch—heaven knows why. Is this the first you've heard of it?"

I hesitated. There hadn't been anything like that on
Spruance
, not even scuttlebutt. But I told him about the Air Force captain at the airport. He nodded.

"Sounds like it. Now you know as much as anybody else." He was looking tense, even for him. "We haven't had it here—Mako's a small station. But it's happened right in Boca before. One of the guards at the stockade, a couple of weeks ago, and a transient before that." He shrugged. "Not my problem," he said, dismissing it. He turned and paused in the doorway of my quarters, looking like nothing so much as a bellboy waiting for his tip. He said:

"The commander won't have time to talk to you about your duties here for a while, Miller. Matter of fact, I won't either. You'll get briefed in the morning—as much as you'll
get
briefed, that is. Until then, you'll have to cool your heels."

"That's all right, sir. It'll give me a chance to look around the station."

"The devil it will, Miller!" he said sharply. "Everything on the project is classified Top Secret and Need-to-Know. You'll get the word, when the time comes, from the commander, not before." He scowled at me as though I were a suspected pacifist. "Meanwhile," he said, "you're restricted to the BOQ, the wardroom and the headquarters area. And make sure you stay there."

Orders were orders, so I stayed there. With nothing to do. Back on the cruiser there had been plenty to do. I was posted to
Spruance
as a computer officer, since I'd majored in cybernetics; but as long as I was in a forward area I wanted to fight. They were glad to accommodate me. There is almost always a place for a man who wants to fight in a war, even a cold one.

I don't know why they called it a cold war anyhow; it seemed hot enough on
Spruance
. While I was aboard we had three confirmed Caodai kills—two merchantmen and a little surface corvette. Of course, they weren't officially Caodais; officially, they were "unidentified vessels in interdicted area." But it was funny how the Caodai patrols never sank any "unidentified" Asian or African shipping, any more than the U.N. fleet bothered the American. I suppose that if either side had intercepted a European ship it would have been quite a problem for the commander—if there had been any European ships for anybody to intercept.

They called it a cold war. But fourteen million of our men were hotting it up over in Europe, against twenty or so million of theirs. Our land casualties were comparatively low—in the low millions that is.

And no state of war.

There was just this one little thing: Our troops were killing theirs all the way from the Pyrenees to the White Sea in local "police actions."

Well, it really wasn't a war, not in the old-fashioned sense. For one thing, it wasn't country against country, the way it used to be when things were simple: It was confederation—the United Nations—against a Church Militant—the Caodais. They were a religion, not a nation; they happened to be a religion with troops and battle-wagons and fusion bombs, but a religion all the same. And how can you declare war against a religion?

Our ambassadors still maintained an uneasy residence in Nguyen-Yat-Hugo's court. Every day or so the ambassador would show up at Yat's giant Cambodian temple with a fresh note of protest over some fresh killing; and the answer was always "Gee, sorry, but you'd better take that to the Iranian (or Pakistani or Saudi-Arabian or Viet Namese) authorities, not us." And diplomatic relations went limpingly on. And so did a certain amount of trade, so you could tell that it wasn't really a w
ar
.

But the best way to tell that it wasn't a war was that the fusion bombs stayed nicely tucked into their satellite launchers, theirs and ours. Silly? Not so very silly, no—the bombs were all too able to end the "war" overnight, by ending everything.

So everybody played the same game, we and the Caodais, because everybody had the same powerful desire to keep the fusion bombs right where they were. The rules were fairly simple: No landings in force on the enemy continents (but islands were fair game). No attacks on enemy shipping in "open" waters (but sink anyone you like in interdicted areas—and interdict any waters that suit your fancy). But it was never called "war."

For some people it was a pretty high-stakes game. Not so much for me, you understand: though
Spruance
had been in a forward area, we'd never come up against anything as big as we were. But it was a mighty rough police operation for the ones who saw water hammer in when the depth bomb connected, the ones who took a hunk of gelignite in the navel, the ones who lost a wing at thirty thousand feet and found the escape hatch buckled.

But not for me. Especially not at Project Mako.

The next morning I waited hopefully at breakfast for someone to tell me to report for briefing, but nobody did.

It was raining, and everybody else seemed to have work to do, so I picked some books out of the shelf in the wardroom—Mahan and Jellicoe—and talked the mess boy out of some coffee. It never hurts to refresh yourself on classical tactics.

Commander Lineback came slouching through the wardroom just before lunch while I was reading
The
Grand
Fleet
. He gave me a strange look.

"Glad to see you're improving your mind." he said. "Everything going all right?"

"Well, yes, sir," I said, "except—"

"The briefing's postponed till this afternoon," he said, and was gone.

I was being treated like an interloper. I told myself that COMINCH didn't think I was an interloper; COMINCH, from the majesty of his five stars, had picked me out of
Spruance
and crash-prioritied me to this hole in the Florida swamp. Maybe Lieutenant-Commander Lineback didn't have time to bother with me, but I was a skilled and talented naval officer and not constitutionally fitted for being a bum. I had thirty-five sweeps to my own credit—ranging up to a hundred miles from
Spruance
in my little battery-powered scout torp—and though I didn't have any kills, I had an official assist on the corvette; I'd flushed it right into
Spruance
'
s
jaws.

After lunch everybody disappeared again, and I was tired of the wardroom. I put on my oilskins and wandered around the headquarters area, watching the big, warm drops smash the bougainvillaea blooms. It was kind of pretty, Florida was; I thought about maybe some day, my wife and I, coming here for a second honeymoon . . .

If I ever saw her again.

Maybe, I thought to myself urgently, walking a little faster, maybe if I put it to the commander right he'd let me go into town, and I could have a few drinks, perhaps even pop a couple.

But it wouldn't do any good. I'd tried drinking, and it didn't let me forget that my wife was a long, long way away. I kicked at the watery hibiscus morosely. It's tough enough to go to war and leave the girls behind you. But what about when they don't stay behind you?

"Moo-oo."

I looked up, startled.

I had been thinking, not watching where I was going. I had wandered along a shell-bordered walk, past a truck garden the enlisted men kept on the side, into a grove of coconut palms. And on the other side of the palms was a shack, and in the shack a cow was monotonously lowing.

The question was, was I still in the headquarters area?

I looked around me. Nobody had told me exactly what the headquarters area was, I reminded myself defensively. It wasn't my fault if I was outside it.

The shack had one curious feature, considering that a cow was lowing inside it: It had only a regular human-sized door. There were windows, but I couldn't see through them. But I could hear, all right.

That cow sounded unhappy—sick, perhaps, or wanting to be milked, though it was the middle of the afternoon. "Moo-oo," it went, and then, in a lower key with a sort of grunt at the end: "Moo-oo-oo." Then the first one again, and the second, in an alternation too regular to be believed.

Well, what could be more natural than to hear cattle lowing on a dairy farm? But the regularity bothered me, and so did the door; I walked closer. And the door opened in my face. Lieutenant Kedrick was standing there, turned away, talking to a hawk-faced j.g. whom I had seen at lunch. The j.g. was gesturing with a spool of recording tape; he saw me over Kedrick's shoulder and his expression changed.

Kedrick turned around. "Miller," he said.

I cleared my throat. "Aye-aye, sir," I said. He stepped out into the rain, staring at me. He hardly noticed the drops splattering off his slicker, he was so angry. "Miller," he said, "curse it, you were restricted to the area! Now, get back to your quarters and wait for the briefing."

I said, "Sir, I—"

"
On
the
double
,
Mr
.
Miller
!"

I saluted. "Yes, sir."

But why? It wasn't as though there was anything in sight that justified all that security. I suppose that everyone is familiar with dairy farms, and that's about all there was to see on Project Mako, I'd already seen enough to last me a lifetime; I had spent part of my teens doing summer work in upstate New York, where you can't throw a rock between Albany and Syracuse without hitting somebody's Holstein.

Of course, southern cattle aren't Holsteins, but they all operate about the same. Those at Project Mako (once called the Volusia County Dairymen's Co-op Center) were divided into two herds, one purebred Santa Gertrudis, the other Brahman-Friesian crossbreds. But the husbandry was the same. The milk sheds were the same; the forage was the same; the cattle themselves lowed and ate the same and were milked the same.

Project Mako's number two crop happened to be hybrid teosinte, the Mexican bush corn. Back in Cayuga County we mostly used potatoes for the secondary crop, but it didn't matter: You plant your potatoes, or corn, or anything you like in rows; you show the cattle your specimens of the money crop in its various stages of growth; and you turn them loose. The cattle eat the weeds and leave the crop. Their droppings fertilize the pasture, and the "weeds" make milk for you. They tell me the old folks used to do the same thing with geese and cotton. But it was just luck that geese didn't like the taste of cotton stalks; with cows, speaking their language, you could
tell
them what to eat and what to leave alone.

They weren't really weeds, of course. You don't want your cattle eating real weeds; best practice in Cayuga County, where I came from, was to sow a cover crop of one of the ladino grasses or hybrid clover, something that would stand up under heavy grazing. Naturally you don't want it to look too much like your money crop, either, since cows are not bright.

But what was top secret about that?

I relied on the briefing to explain all these questions to me, but the briefing was a huge disappointment.

The new draft of officers arrived while I was wandering around the Project, over a dozen of them; and we all assembled in the wardroom at 1600 hours. There was a Russian, the usual batch of American junior officers, Commander Lineback, and a civilian.

The civilian did the actual briefing. His name was Schwende, and Commander Lineback referred to him as "Doctor." Well, the briefing didn't amount to much; all Schwende said was that we were going to do research in communicating with animals. Why? He didn't say why. How?

There would be a few new wrinkles. Dairy farmers, as I have mentioned, had given orders to their cattle for some time. But we were going beyond cows and horses and pigs, beyond the order to lay off the cash crop and the demand to return to the barn for milking. We were going to
talk
to them.

"You'll make guesses," said the doctor (of animal husbandry, not medicine). "That's your privilege. Guess your heads off about what the Navy's going to do with animals.
But
keep
your
guesses
to
yourself
."

And that was the end of that, barring the handing out of individual assignments. Mine was to run a computer.

We were dismissed, and the new draft of officers reported to the dayroom to be assigned to quarters. All of the new ones were ensigns and j.g.'s, except for the Russian, He was some kind of senior lieutenant, but just what that amounted to I cannot say. It didn't matter in terms of command relationship, of course, because as a co-belligerent he was present only as a military observer. He was a Red Army man, not Navy, but he wore our naval undress whites, with only the Russian shoulder-bars to mark his rank.

And he was quartered with me.

A room to myself had been too good to last. I showed him to our room with only minor regrets for the loss of my solitude. In hesitant but good English he said: "Is very nice, Lieutenant. Which of the beds is yours?"