Slave Ship (7 page)

On
Spruance
, you didn't take your leave, because where were you going to go? The whole thing about a nuclear-powered submarine cruiser, after all, is that it doesn't need to get back to home base very often.
Spruance
had been cruising for a year when I joined her; she was still cruising when I left.

There had been a couple of times when, for a day or three days, we had touched at Bordeaux or Cork on some strategic errand, and some of us got to stretch our legs ashore. But—have you ever spent a festive evening in a heap of rubble?

Neither has anyone else.

But Miami Beach was festive enough to make up for all. My hotel was bright and shiny, though in the run-down district around Lincoln Road. The wonderful thing about spending a couple of days at the Beach is the pretty girls; for a wise Providence—perhaps a wise COMSOLANT—has put the WAAF hostess-training center right next door in Coral Gables. Biscayne Boulevard is lined with them, seven days a week, all the weeks of the year. Lord knows when the girls find time to study—or perhaps their social life at Biscayne Boulevard is a kind of extension course for the training center, because what else does an airline hostess have to know?

At any rate, they were there—as many as the reminiscing boys on
Spruance
had said, and as pretty. They were the sweetest looking, gayest laughing, homiest seeming things I had seen in seventeen months; and four out of ten of them, seen from a distance, had the same waved brownish hair and carefree walk as Elsie.

Elsie. It was more than two years since we had our last leave together. I stopped under a palm tree and looked, as inconspicuously as I could, at the picture in my wallet. She was almost a stranger. It hadn't been so bad on
Spruance
, where there were few women and there had always been the faint chance of commandoing Zanzibar.

But here in Miami, where everyone but me walked two-by-two, it was bad. I was lonesome.

Her and her cursed volunteering. I had told her and told her, long before her number came up: "When they get you, don't volunteer for
anything
." So naturally she had signed on the courier flight to Nhatrang in Indo-China, where the Caodai Headquarters were, and naturally the courier had wandered off course over Yemen, and naturally the Caodais niked him down. It wasn't Elsie they were interested in; the game they were after was the Air Marshal on whose staff she was a yeoman, a valuable hostage in some future exchange. And they got him. She was lucky she got out in time—and twice as lucky that they'd eventually shipped her to the big internment camp on Zanzibar, along with the marshal. But me, I was hardly lucky at all.

I had a large glass of fresh orange juice at a sidewalk cafe and talked with a WAAF at the next table. She was a very attractive blonde; she would have been fun to take out, if she had been Elsie.

I walked two blocks and had a guanabana sherbet at another sidewalk cafe, and talked with a WAAF sitting next to me at the counter. She was a very attractive brunette, but she wasn't Elsie either.

I considered a third sidewalk cafe featuring fresh papaya-pineapple drinks. But there is a limit to the amount of liquid I can stand sloshing around in my gut.

Glamorous Miami! I was prepared to sell it short, that hot afternoon.

It wasn't that Miami wasn't very nice. It was too nice for a lonely man. I was battling a sort of perverse, inanimate conspiracy against me on the part of the sun, the sky, the weather. If Elsie had been with me, I would have been happy.

But Elsie was not.

There was only one thing to do. I had been resisting doing it ever since I'd landed at Montauk, en route to Project Mako; I couldn't resist it any more.

I found a phone booth, and the classified book had what I wanted: Hartshorne & Giordano, F.C.C. Licensees, at an address near the Venetian Causeway.

The heading was TELEPATHISTS & ESPERS.

The girl at the desk was an enlisted WAVE. It surprised me, for the last time I had used an esper the whole outfit was aggressively civilian.

She said doubtfully, "Zanzibar? Zanzibar? That's Caodai territory."

"I know it is," I said patiently. "My wife is interned there."

She looked at me as though I were a pacifist or something, but she kept on filling out the forms. I gave her all the information she asked for, and she said:

"You're lucky. They say that all ESP communication will be pre-empted for military use the first of the month. Now, would you like this guaranteed or not?"

"Non-guaranteed," I said. The difference in the rate was considerable, and besides I'd had half a dozen previous rapports with Elsie. There wasn't any doubt in my mind that I'd get through, that is if she was still—

Never mind
that
, I told myself quickly, and listened to the WAVE. She was mumbling figures from a rate book and making marks on a pad.

"Eleven dollars and ninety-five cents, including tax," she said at last. "That's for three minutes." She spoke into an intercom, and nodded to me. "Mr. Giordano will see you now," she said.

Giordano was a beady-eyed little old man with curly white hair. "Six previous rapports," he said approvingly, studying my chart. "Well, ten cc ought to be enough for you. Will you roll up your sleeves, please?"

I looked away as the needle bit into my arm. It tingled; the hormone solution you take before an esper rapport seems to be distilled from wasp venom. "Thank you," he said, and I rolled down my sleeve as he sat down at his desk. He wasn't much like the last esper I'd gone to, back in Providence when Elsie was first interned; that particular one had worn a white tunic with a side-buttoned collar like a surgeon's, and he had been a phony from the word go. On, he put me in touch with Elsie all right, but there had been a gauzy shapelessness about the contact that had left me more unsatisfied when I left than when I came in.

This one had a fine businesslike air about him; he wore an ordinary Navy undress uniform with a Chief Warrant's pin in his collar. That's a more important factor in esping than most people realize. The Providence hookup had been the one real failure I had had with Elsie. "May I have the node, Lieutenant?" he asked.

The "node" was the photograph of Elsie from my wallet. He studied it approvingly. Why is it that the photograph one carries of a girl is always in a bathing suit? Is it that the more you can see of a subject, the more vividly the silver agglutinates bring her back? Or just that one carries a camera to the beach?

"Very nice," he said. "Now, how about your nodal experience?"

"Well," I said hesitantly, "how about this one? Just before the picture was taken, we had lunch on a terrace overlooking the beach. There was a band, and we danced."

"And you remember the tune the band was playing?" I nodded. "Good. One other thing, Lieutenant. Do you know what time it is in Zanzibar now?"

I snapped my fingers. "Oh, damn. She'll be asleep?"

He glanced at a chart and nodded. "It's around two in the morning there. Of course, you can get rapport even if she's asleep, you know, but she may not remember it in the morning or she may think it's a dream."

I said: "We'll try it." I could always try again the next day, I told myself; the money didn't matter.

"Lean back," he said gently, and the lights went out, all but a tiny, indirect one that softened the shadows but left nothing for the mind to fix on.

I felt the esper come into my mind. I know that some people find that an ordeal, like the dentist's pick prying into the bicuspid; for me it has always been a warming, protecting sort of coming-together. Perhaps it is because I've never esped anyone but Elsie, and it hasn't been a matter of exchanging data but of moods. Those who try to use espers for business calls, trying to pinpoint details in that cloudy contact, must find the whole process exasperating.

I heard, in the back of my mind, the slow whispers of the music, and I saw the beach-umbrellaed terrace where Elsie and I had danced. The esper was finding the range.

Elsie? I formed the name in my mind.

She was asleep, all right. But her voice from faraway, foggy but real: Darling.

In succession I formed the thoughts: I'm well. I'm lonesome. I love you.

And her answers: I'm well, but tired. I love you too. I want to see you.

Three minutes went very fast.

What had I accomplished?

Nothing, perhaps. Nothing that could have been put on a progress report. I .didn't know why Elsie was tired; I didn't know what she had had for dinner, or what the weather was in Zanzibar. I didn't even have a phrase or a gesture or a look to treasure; nothing that had been that clear. Esping is a form of communication, certainly, but of emotions rather than concepts. One speaks with sighs instead of syllables, and I don't know any answer to give to those who say you can get the same effect staring into the bubbles in your beer. For a moment I had been with Elsie in my mind. I couldn't touch her; I couldn't hear her, taste her, smell her or see her; but she was there. Was that worth slightly more than six cents a second, tax included?

It was worth anything in the world, for a man in my circumstances.

I paid the girl at the desk dreamily, and drifted out. I was halfway across the street before I heard her calling after me.

"Hey, Lieutenant! You forgot your hat." I took it from her, blinking. She said: "I hope things work out for you and your wife."

I thanked her and caught a bus back along the palm-lined boulevards.

All the depression was gone. All right, I hadn't touched Elsie—but I had been with her. How many times, after all, in our short married life together had I waked in the night and known, only known, that she was asleep beside me? I didn't have to wake her, or talk to her, or turn on the light and look at her; I knew she was there.

I got off the bus at Lincoln Road, still dreaming. It was dark, or nearly so, before I came to and realized that I had walked far past my hotel and I was hungry.

I looked around for a place to eat, but I was in an area of solid brass. COMSOLANT was only a block away, and the two nearest restaurants bore the discreet legend:
Flag
Officers
Only
.

I turned around and walked back toward my own area.

I wondered why it was so dark, and then realized that Miami Beach, like Project Mako, was blacked out. But it seemed blacker than a blackout could account for, and not in any understandable way. The lights were there, hidden behind their canvas shields from the possible enemy eyes at sea; not very many of them and not very bright, but they were there. The narrow slits in the shields over the street lamps cast enough light on the pavement for me to see where my feet were going. The cars that moved along the boulevards had their marker lights, dim and downward cast, but clear. And yet I was finding it hard to get my bearings.

Something was sawing at my mind.

It was the hormone shots, I thought, with a feeling of relief; I was still a little sensitive, perhaps, from the esping. What I needed was a good meal and to sit down for a while; it would make me as good as new.

But where was a restaurant?

Someone slid a burning pine splinter into the base of my neck. It hurt very much.

I must have yelled, because figures came running toward me. I couldn't see them very clearly, and not only because of the darkness; and I couldn't quite hear what they said, because something was whining and droning in my ears, or in my mind.

There was another stab at the base of my head, and one in my shoulders, like white-hot knives. I felt myself falling; something smacked across my face, and I knew it. was the pavement. But that pain was numbed and nothing, compared to the fire stabbing into my neck and shoulders.

Someone was tugging at my arm and roaring. I heard a police whistle and wondered why; and then I didn't wonder anything for a while. The world was black and silent; even the pain was gone.

VII

"—STILL ALIVE, for God's sake! Suppose we ought to let him sleep it off?"

I pushed someone's slapping hands away from me and opened one eye.

Ringed around me were half a dozen faces, looking down—a couple of nurses, a doctor or two, and a j.g. with a thin black mustache and an OOD band on his arm.

"Well," said the Officer of the Deck, "welcome back."

I tasted something awful in my mouth. "Wha—what happened?"

The faces were grave. "You got burned."

Apparently being burned was no laughing matter. I groggily made sense of what they were telling me.

Like the Air Force captain at the Boca Raton field, like the other mysterious victims I had heard whispers about—I had been burned. And it was true enough; they showed me a bright mirror above, and I could see the burns. My shoulders, the base of my neck, a thin line down my back; they were all brilliant scarlet, like a bad sunburn; and they hurt.

Something clicked in my fuzzy brain. "Oh," I said, "the Glotch."

But they had never heard of "the Glotch." Evidently the Boca Raton name for it was purely local, but the thing was the same, all right. They called it "getting burned"; the OOD, whose name was Barney Savidge, had heard it called "the Caodai horrors." But it was all the same thing, and all bad. "You're a lucky kid," said Lieutenant Savidge. "We picked you up and it looked like you were as dead as the rest of them. After all, only one out of a thous—"

"Savidge!" one of the medics said sharply.

The OOD looked guilty. "Sorry, sir," he said. "Anyway, Miller, you're lucky."

They wouldn't tell me much; apparently the Glotch was as hush-hush in Miami as it was in Boca Raton.

But it appeared I would live. They brought me coffee after they finished dressing my burns. I was in COMCARIB's naval hospital, and, although I had visions of being a celebrity for a day, the OOD cut me down to size. "It comes and goes," he said, looking apprehensively at the ship's surgeon out of earshot across the room. "It comes and goes, some days a whole bunch of casualties, some days none. Last night was one of the bad ones."