Slave Ship (16 page)

And I got my look at it.

There were lights ahead. I was on the brink of the woods, facing a plowed-up open strip that surrounded a lighted, barbed-wire-enclosed compound—the prison camps, I supposed. There were Caodai guards emplaced about the fence, but not so close to me that I had to worry about them; their attention would certainly all he inward, toward the prisoners. But beyond the barbed wire, perhaps a quarter of a mile, there were two brightly lit, yellow brick towers.

So far, so good. I skirted the edge of the plowed ground and headed for the lighted towers. I was pretty lucky. I must have got a hundred yards farther along before they caught me.

XV

"WESTERN SWINE!" hissed the Caodai. "Stay and brood on your crimes, Western swine!"

It didn't seem fair for him to call me that; he was as white as I. Fair-haired and chunky, he might have been of Dutch ancestry, but the Caodais didn't care about that.

He threw me into a cell and marched his detail away. I was in a yellow-walled room underneath the twin-towered building I had seen alight.

Logan, old boy, I told myself, you've had it. Consider the facts: I was out of uniform in Caodai territory—that made me a spy. It was well known what the Caodais did to spies; there had been grim stories.

There was only bright spot. Nina and Semyon were still free. They knew I had been captured, so they would be careful Would being careful be enough? I didn't know, but, on thinking it over, I decided it wouldn't, because there simply was no precaution they could take that would counterbalance the fact that they
had
to penetrate the temple I was in.

I couldn't forget what the briefing officer had told us all, back on
Monmouth;
this expedition had to work, because the Caodais could not continue to be in possession of the secret of the Glotch.

"Western swine!"

My Dutch friend was at the door. He wasn't alone. A very dark Caodai, wearing a shoulder patch that looked like a rook in chess, brought in a case full of shiny things. Half a dozen other Caodais followed, and two of them grabbed me.

The dark one took a hypodermic needle out of the case.

"Wait a minute!" I said sharply. "You can't do this to me! I claim the protection of international law. You can execute me, but—ow!" He was mighty clumsy with that needle.

It tingled for a second, and then my whole upper arm and shoulder began to feel cold. Well, I knew what was coming next. Subtle Oriental poisons, for a start. Then brainwashing. Torture.

I said to myself, Good-by, Elsie. I was beginning to feel cold all over; the fair-skinned Caodai was standing over me, but he seemed very far away.

He took out a pad of paper. "Your name?" he demanded.

Name, rank and serial number. That was all, I reminded myself. I gave them to him as briskly and finally as I could: "Miller, Logan, lieutenant junior grade, X-SaT-32880515."

"How did you get here?"

I stiffened; it was beginning. But he would never find out about
Monmouth
and the whaleboat from me. "I refuse to answer," I said distinctly.

It took an effort. The yellow walls were swirling around me now; I no longer felt cold, I hardly felt anything at all. I could barely hear the Dutch Caodai saying, "Where are your companions?"

Which one? Semyon was in the whaleboat, I supposed, but Nina—I got a grip on myself. "No answer," I said.

I stared at him blearily, wondering what made a man like him turn renegade. Of course, when the Caodais overran the former Dutch colonies in the Indies they had picked up everyone who would join them—in that respect the Caodais were a perfect democracy. But still and all, a white renegade in Caodai uniform was hard to take.

"Atheistic Western swine," hissed the Caodai, "don't dare call
me
a renegade!"

Fantastic, I thought to myself drowsily, it's almost as if I were speaking my thoughts aloud.

I woke up with a jump. I had a sour, tinny taste in my mouth, and an unbelievable headache.

Nina Willette was shaking me. "You cracked! Miller, listen to me."

I blinked blearily at her. She said, with pity and reproach: "They worked you over, didn't they, Logan? But you shouldn't have cracked."

"Hey," I said, "hold it!" I sat up and tried to set her straight. "I gave them my name and rank and serial number, right? That's all. I didn't crack!"

"No?" She looked at me, and the pity was subtracted from her gaze, leaving only the reproach. "Then how did they know where I was?"

I said, "Be reasonable, Nina, they must have—"

"How did they know
my
name
?"

"My good God!" I whispered. "That needle. They must have shot me full of scopolamine . . ."

"Exactly, atheistic Western swine," said the blond Caodai, opening the door. "Exactly."

They were not gentle with us, but I hardly noticed. Truth serum! The psychic censors numbed, the questions answered—I must have spilled my guts for fair.

It was no comfort to reassure myself that it was not my fault. Because it was a lie. It
was
my fault; my fault for allowing myself to be captured, my fault for being there in the first place.

We were led out of the cell, Nina Willette and I, and up into the main workings of the twin-towered temple. Target Gamma! We were in the middle of it. If only we had some way of getting back to America with what we were seeing now!

And yet—and yet, coming blearily out of my fog of self-reproach, looking about me against the faint, almost vanished chance that I might some day be able to get back and report, what would I have said?

I could say: "We went through a long yellow corridor full of Caodais."

I could say: "They looked at us as though we were lepers."

But I couldn't say, for instance, that I had learned the secret of the weapon they called the Glotch, because there was no sign of anything like that anywhere around. An arsenal? I had thought we might be headed for something like that; but this didn't look like an arsenal. It. looked more like a hospital, or perhaps a medical library, than anything else I had ever encountered, and that wasn't really a matter of looks but of smell, the faint underlayer of ether and iodoform you find in medical places. There were no whirring machines or hidden industrial plants, only the whispering air and medicinal odor and white-and-pastel look, in the little rooms we caught glimpses of.

And for this we had sacrificed
Monmouth
.

We reached a high-ceilinged room where an old Caodai in a scarlet cloak stood frozen beside a bright globe.

"
Votre
Sainteté
," said the blond-haired Caodai, "
les
americains
."

Nina stiffened beside me. "The pope," she whispered, unbelieving.

It took me a moment to understand what she meant. Not the pontiff of Rome, no, but the supreme chief of the Caodais, who wore the same title: The old Caodai by the globe of the world was Nguyen-Yat-Hugo himself!

Picture the Devil come to life.

Remember what I had seen of old Nguyen. Latrine posters, showing him luring helpless U.N. soldiery into haunts of bawdy vice, his yellow face wicked and fierce, his long fingers clawed like a killer cat's.

But he was only a man.

If he was evil, it did not show in his face. He stood gravely watching us as we approached He was tall for an Indo-Chinese, old but not senile, his robes curious, but not ridiculous. I remembered the Caodais in their stockade north of Project Mako, and their fantastic paper figurines of this man. It was hard not to think of him as a figure of fun (Mardi gras masks and Jack-in-the-boxes), but in his presence it wasn't hard at all.

"You slime!"

Not evil but anger. He spoke to us, and he was raging. Nina, beside me, made a little choking sound. He lashed into us, cut us to ribbons. We were slime, wretches, unfit to live. We stood there and listened. What else could we do?

He finally rounded a period and stopped; and his face was as emotionless as before. He said something short and foreign to one of the Caodai priests—a middle-aged woman who looked like my mother's laundress—and we all waited for a second while the priest left and returned.

When she returned she brought another woman with her, a slight brown-haired woman in faded khaki. I stared at her curiously as she blinked in the light. It crossed my mind that she was no Caodai. She had the look of an American, though her dress might have been Caodai as much as anything else. She looked out of place here. I watched her, waiting for something to happen that would explain why she was here.

By-and-by I noticed that the Caodais were watching me.

And then I realized who the girl was.

Strange? That I should see my long-lost wife and not at once recognize her?

I suppose so; but I wasn't the only one that had to do a double-take; Elsie didn't quiver a muscle until I yelled her name.

There was a dizzy, slippery, sliding moment when everything around me crashed into new arrangements and meanings and I stood still, like an idiot, bawling her name and staring. And then I was running toward her and she toward me, and—

We shook hands.

Call it that, anyway. At least it was more that than a lovers' hug. We stopped inches apart and I reached out my hands toward hers. It was a strained, formal moment. Perhaps the strain would have passed and we would have been in each other's arms, but the Caodai chief stopped us. "Your wife," he said in a clear, savage voice. "Enjoy her for this moment, my Lieutenant. She may not live to the next."

I had dropped Elsie's hands, spun around and was halfway to him, in a single reflex, before the Caodai officers brought me up. They were between me and Nguyen, and their weapons were in their hands. I stopped. I said, "What the devil are you up to?"

"Up to?" he repeated bitterly. "No, Lieutenant; I want to know what you are up to, not I. Perhaps we could have pieced out our information from your subconscious, where we found your wife's name and the story of your interesting voyage here. But it would have taken time, and I do not have time."

I took a deep breath, and the officers slowly bolstered their guns. Nina was on one side of me and Elsie on the other. I said: "What do you want?"

"Information. Truthful answers, Lieutenant—for which I will pay, with your life and your wife's."

I glanced at Elsie and at Nina. Both of them were watching me, waiting for me to do something, waiting for my brilliant solution to an intolerable spot. But there wasn't any solution in me, search for it though I might. I looked around at the Caodai officers, at the implacable face of Nguyen-Yat-Hugo. The thing was bitterly ironic: the Caodai was demanding information from me, information that could hardly be of any real importance to the Caodai cause (for what did I have to say, past the minutiae of our voyage?), but which I knew I would die to keep from him. If our positions had changed their phase—if it were I who had the secret of what they called the Glotch, and he who had to learn it to live—then it might have made sense, both his insistence to learn, and my willingness to die, and have Nina and Elsie die, rather than tell. It didn't make sense; it was an outrageous perversion of human values for the three of us to suffer what was in prospect for the sake of concealing what little we had to conceal.

But that, as they say, was the way the little old ball bounced. I cleared my throat once and said to Nguyen-Yat-Hugo: "Go to hell!"

Well, the heavens didn't fall on us just then, though I had thought that they might. But I underestimated Nguyen.

All that happened was that he gave quick orders, and the three of us were marched out—separately. And there I was, in the yellow-walled room again. I knew what it was, of course; the softening up that makes the ultimate tearing apart so much easier. Leave the Americans alone, Nguyen had said to his officers; put them away and let them worry for a while; let them scare themselves to death by brooding on what's going to happen to them.

But I didn't think it was going to work.

I sat there, staring at the yellow walls and wondering which of the footsteps in the corridor outside was going to be my torturer's, and I coded up all the factors and played them through the computer inside my skull. Too bad that I had spilled Elsie's name and location in my drugged state so that Nguyen could have her flown here to torture me with. Too bad that Nina had been caught the same way. Too bad that no one could get word of what had happened to us to Semyon, back in the whale-boat. Too bad, all of it too bad; but those losses were already raked in, and there was no point to wishing the little steel ball had dropped in a different slot.

It would have been better, I concluded, if I were in this all by myself, but since I wasn't I would have to do the best I could with the circumstances I had to work with. No matter what happened, Nguyen would roast in his Caodai hell before I would tell him a single syllable of what he wanted to know. Not because it mattered what I told him (for I knew nothing, of course), nor because I was a hero (for I knew from the shuddering of my arms and legs I was not); but because that was the way the game was played.

And I wasn't going to get out alive anyhow.

That was the important thing to remember: I was going to die. No matter what Nguyen said, I was a spy, trapped in a spy's role, and the best I could hope for was a quick firing squad.

Once I had thought out all of the possibilities the computer that was my brain quickly rapped out my solution; it wasn't hard to see. Back at M.I.T., when I had learned computer operation and the mathematics that went with it, we had had a course in what they call Theory of Games. It hadn't kept me from dropping all of my loose change in each of the weekly poker nights; but it probably prolonged the process. Roughly it came to this: When things go well, play to win as much as you can; when things go poorly, play to lose as little. This was no spot for maximizing gains, there was no prospect of any gain worth having; it was a spot for minimizing losses, I couldn't hope to get us all freely and successfully away. But I could hope that, perhaps, I would be the only one to die. If I died, Nina would have to stand by herself—but was she any better off with me alive? And Elsie, on the other hand, was nothing to Nguyen. She had no information; she had not been trapped in espionage. Conceivably he might kill her out of pique—but not probably.