The Dragon in the Sea (27 page)

Read The Dragon in the Sea Online

Authors: Frank Herbert

BOOK: The Dragon in the Sea
10.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“What'd that prove?”
“Whenever the skipper's asleep, your graphs flatten. Every time.”
Ramsey shrugged, remained silent.
“But I needed the clincher,” said Garcia. “Two times when the skipper hurt himself—a barked shin and one electric shock—I logged the exact time. The squiggles on a couple of your tapes go wild at exactly those moments.”
Ramsey recalled the tape gyrations, his own cautious questioning to elicit the reasons. “Clever.”
“Thank you, old chap. I thought so myself.”
“What's all this prove?”
Garcia raised his eyebrows. “It proves you're making
some kind of record of the skipper's internal chemistry. Only one type of fellow is that interested in why people tick.”
“Yes?”
“He's vulgarly referred to as a head thumper.”
In spite of himself, Ramsey grinned.
So I'm all washed up,
he thought.
So I'm in good company
.
“I don't believe I'm going to give you away yet,” said Garcia. “This show hasn't played itself out. I must remember to thank BuPsych, too, for one of the most entertaining cruises I've ever had.”
“I suppose you want into the act,” said Ramsey.
“Good heavens, no! I already have my part to play. Just one thing, old fellow. Don't sell our Captain Savvy Sparrow short.”
“Oh?”
“He's the director of this show. Whether you know it or not, he controls the script.”
Ramsey fought down the vague tuggings of disquiet. “Is that why you're not giving me away?”
“You obviously mean well,” said Garcia. His voice went lower, more harsh. “Now, give me my other shot and get the hell out of here! Your air of superiority is beginning to wear on me.”
Ramsey felt the hot blood suffusing his features. He took two quick breaths, surged to his feet.
Garcia deliberately turned over, spoke with his mouth muffled slightly by the pillow. “Left buttock this time, old thing. Try not to work your temper out on me while you're about it.”
Ramsey went to the pharmacy locker, returned with the hypo, administered the shot, replaced the hypo in its rack.
“That was very gentle,” said Garcia. “Good control.”
Ramsey walked across the room, stood over the cot. “What air of superiority?” he demanded.
Garcia rolled onto his back, grimaced, said, “I don't mind your dislike of me or Les, but by Heaven, you owe your life to—”
“That's enough!” barked Ramsey. “You talk about superior! Every damned one of you has been so superior it—”
“Oh, I say!” Garcia stared up at him. “We all have our soft spots. Evidently the junior ensign—”
“You've had your inning,” gritted Ramsey.
“So I have.” Garcia nodded. “Maybe you've just wanted to be one of the gang. In spite of—” He fell silent.
“In spite of what?”
“Your other job.”
“Maybe because of it,” said Ramsey.
Garcia digested this. “I never thought of that. But it makes sense. You psych boys must be pretty lonely. All your friends—outside the profession, that is—always on guard lest you pounce.”
Ramsey shoved his hands into his hip pockets. “Where'd you get this low opinion of psych?”
“Watching you operate, Doctor.”
Ramsey sniffed. “You've never seen me operate.” He kicked the stool closer to Garcia's cot, sat down. “You're going to talk shop.”
Garcia raised on one elbow. “Now see here, old thing, I really—”
“Your secret's showing,” said Ramsey.
Garcia's face went blank. “What … did … you … mean … by … that?”
“You act like a man under some contra-survival threat
greater than the fear of death. You keep making sacrificial gestures, as though you were seeking to excuse—” Ramsey fell silent, staring at Garcia.
“Well?”
“I never brought it into concrete focus before, Joe. Did you have anything to do with the death of that Security lieutenant?”
Garcia sank back onto his pillow. “No.”
“Even indirectly?”
“I didn't know a thing about him until we found him!”
Ramsey started to nod, then thought:
Wait a minute! That's not a direct answer. A clever evasion phrased like an answer.
He said, “Wouldn't an outright lie be preferable?”
Garcia stared at the ceiling, mouth held in a harsh line.
“Okay, we'll talk about something else, Joe.”
“Why don't you go talk by yourself?”
“You're such pleasant company I can't bear to leave. Tell me, Joe, outside of psych men who look through your sham wall of inadequate defenses—”
“Look, fellow!” Garcia turned his head on the pillow until he was staring directly at Ramsey. “So you came out after me when I was caught in the slug. That was your boyscout good deed for the day and I thanked you nicely when we got back, but—”
“Thanked me?”
“Oh, I forgot, you goofed with the detergent jet and had your hearing aid turned off. No matter. I was about to say that your gesture wasn't necessary. I could've cut myself out of the slug if the need arose. So we're—”
“What with?”
“Huh?”
“You stripped your pockets before getting into the lung
suit. Your knife was right there on the suit ledge when I got ready to go out. What were you going to cut yourself out with—the patch scraper?” Garcia's dark features grew pale.
“You're welcome,” said Ramsey.
“You've suddenly built your part up greater than it first appeared, Johnny. Who does your scripts?”
“It's just that you've never really seen me operate,” said Ramsey. “Now, I started to ask you a question. I'd like a straight answer and we'll call it even. Okay?”
Garcia smiled thinly. “Righto.”
“What is it about this service that really gripes a submariner?”
“Nothing gripes us,” said Garcia. “We love our work. There's really nothing in this whole wide world to compare with the subtugs. It has playing grab-tail with a panther pushed completely off the jolly map. Now, you take—”
“I'm serious, Joe. I'm looking for something that's bottled up way inside you. I think I know what it is, but I want to hear it from someone else. Someone like you who knows people and submarines. I think we've been looking in the wrong direction.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I'm not going to put the words in your mouth. I want to know what it is about this service that really burns your country ass—the thing you don't even talk about among yourselves?”
Again Garcia lifted himself on one elbow. He grimaced as he moved the arm which had received the earlier shots. “All right, Johnny boy. You deserve a straight answer for being such an observant chap—about knives and such. You saw how we shoved off?”
“Yes.”
“Sneaking off. You know—just routine.”
“That's Security.”
“Stuff Security. Do these fatheads imagine the EPs are ignorant of the location of our bases?”
Ramsey shook his head. “Well, Security can be sure the EPs know where
our
home base is. They can be sure if they got our squirt message, that is.”
“They should be sure without our message! This cops-and-robbers routine is an ache in the bustard. Air cover and sea patrol are the real reasons there aren't wolf packs waiting at the outlets of all five of our—”
“Five?”
“Five bases, Johnny. Every submariner knows about'em. The sub skippers know; so the men know. That's survival and Security can go blow that out its bloody bum—”
“I don't get you, Joe. Sorry.”
“Johnny, let's say you're the only man aboard able to operate the boat. The rest of us are all gowed up somehow or other. Say a pile flare-up. It's survival, Johnny, for you to know that the radiation medical center is at the other end of the Charleston short tunnel and that the tunnel opens into Charleston harbor just inside the mole and a hundred feet left.”
“I see what you mean. So we have five bases.”
“We used to have six. Then the EPs sabotaged one of our sub-cruisers and it blew while going down the tunnel—like we almost did. That's the Corpus Christi crater you've—”
“Wait a minute!” Ramsey shook his head. “That was an EP war rocket. It was aimed at—”
“Swamp mud! It won't wash, Johnny. That doesn't explain how the alleged war rocket pierced our ‘perfect' robo-slave defenses and hit smack on that tunnel.”
“What tunnel?”
“Johnny, I've been up that tunnel. So've a lot of other fellows in the sub service. Security may peddle its pap to somebody else, not to us. You can't tell me a rocket launched in Siberia can center on a hole in the ground in Texas—even by accident. That's stretching probability or accuracy.” He sank back onto his pillow.
“Let's grant your argument,” said Ramsey. “What's that have to do with my original question?”
“You still want to get way inside my head?”
“I'd like an answer to my original question.”
Garcia stared at the ceiling. “Right, Johnny. The answer you want goes something like this: there are men all through the services—not just the subs—who are so sick of war—year after year after year after year of war—so sick of living with fear constantly that almost anything else is preferable. Death? He's an old friend—a neighbor just beyond the bulkhead there. Lots of things become preferable. Fouling up the works, for instance, to let the other side win. Just so somebody wins and that puts a stop to the thing—the bloody, foolish, never-ending thing.” His voice trailed off and he turned, stared emptily at the bulkhead behind Ramsey.
“That's insane,” whispered Ramsey.
“Certainly it is,” said Garcia faintly. “But you're not going to argue that war is sane. We're human beings, whatever that means. If insanity is the pattern, that's us and you'll find damned little that's contradictory. Just little scratches of sanity where the blood runs through a different color.”
“Oh?”
“Like the skipper. You've seen him pray for the souls of
the men he kills. That's a scratch of sanity. You can feel it.” He turned a fierce glare on Ramsey. “Do you ever wonder what they're like—those other fellows? Perdition! They can't be so very much different from us. They have wives, kids, sweethearts, hopes, fears. I know as certainly as I know I'm here now that there are people over there who feel the same way about this stupid war as we do.” His voice rose. “Anything! Just to get this damnable thing over with! It's like a pain that's way inside your chest and it won't stop. It goes on and on and on and—”
“Easy, Joe.”
Garcia relaxed. “Okay.”
“That's battle pressure,” said Ramsey. “I was thinking of something else.” He hesitated. “No, maybe you were talking about the same thing.”
“Such as?”
“It has to do with death instincts, Joe.”
“Oh, and it's too deep for the likes of me.”
“I didn't say that.”
“You implied it, Johnny. Some more of your esoteric nonsense. I've had a normal amount of psych study. I've read the old masters and the new: Freud, Jung, Adler, Freeman, Losi, Komisaya. I went looking for answers and found doubletalk. I can speak the jargon.”
“So you know what a death instinct is.”
“Sure, Johnny. The EPs and us—we're moving blindly toward our mutual destruction. Is that what you wanted me to say?”
“I guess not. I had something else in mind. Maybe I'm wrong.”
“Or maybe I like to be blind, too.”
“Yes. We were on another track earlier, Joe. You didn't
answer. Are you ready to tell me if the EPs have ever approached you to do their dirty work?”
Garcia looked at him coldly. “I hope to see you in hell,” he said, enunciating the words precisely.
Ramsey got to his feet. “You've been a big help, Joe. But you're really supposed to be resting.” He pulled a light blanket from a wall hanger, threw it over Garcia, turned away and went to the door.
Garcia said, “Do you think I'm a sleeper”
Without turning, Ramsey said, “Would a sleeper have taken an overdose of radiation to keep us hidden from the EPs?”

Other books

Screams From the Balcony by Bukowski, Charles
First Love by Clymer, J.E.
Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 by STEPHEN E. AMBROSE, Karolina Harris, Union Pacific Museum Collection
Hunt at World's End by Gabriel Hunt
Hard Spell by Gustainis, Justin
Jacked Up by Erin McCarthy
Angel's Devil by Suzanne Enoch
El séptimo hijo by Orson Scott Card