Systemic Shock (32 page)

SSM's and, laid down like cordwood, bangalore torps. Munitions for land warfare, for maximum mobility; for a tiny unit living off the land while traversing it. The assault rifles boasted folding stocks. There must have been at least a hundred thousand rounds of 9-mm. ammo in beltpacs. How many other tiny subs had accompanied this one? Mills guessed perhaps a thousand, and missed by an order of magnitude.

Mills searched for air and food storage tanks. He was pressed inexorably toward the conclusion that, additives and concentrates aside, most of the food and all breathing oxygen were provided by the same subsystem. While he pondered, the young officer traced lines and circuits.

From his SCUBA survey Mills knew that the sub was propelled, incredibly, by a reaction engine. At great depth it would generate a hiss undecipherable by sonar. The problem, of course, was that the sub would require vast amounts of propellant. Unless the craft were staged with huge jettisonable tanks, it made no sense to Mills. A missing piece of puzzle nudged the elbow of his mind, was thrust aside.
Ridiculous
.

His instruments pinpointed a local source of radiation and, for a long hideous moment, Mills pondered the possibility that he stood before a fused fission device. But this part of the system was obviously linked to umbilicals for food, oxygen, and for—something else. Lines leading to small collector tanks, which fed the reaction engine.

Ridiculous
, he thought again. But the evidence was overwhelming; despite the gloomy predictions of the best western minds, Mills thought, he stood beside a plug-in unit that provided endless quantities of oxygen, hydrogen, simple sugars, to permit a small troop-carrying submarine to cross the Pacific without surfacing.

The key device was not a bomb—unless it was a social bomb. It was small enough to carry under his arm—and it used sea water as input mass. Mills stood before
a fusion
device; and it synthesized. Endlessly.

Boren Mills began to perspire.

During the disassembly, Mills found five occasions to apply quick-setting cyanoacrylate paste. These were occasions when mechanical detents seemed likely to spring up or down. He was to learn that only three of those detents were destruct mechanisms, and that the one electrical booby trap he did not find, had corroded harmlessly. At length he was sure that the tiny cornucopia lay disconnected. No, not quite sure. In any case, he could not haul it up from the little sub without being seen. Mills affixed a USN proprietary tag to the unit and, stowing tools in his beltpac, emerged from the craft.

"Let's get back to quarters," he said to the men. “Each of you will write a full report and, until our reports are in, this is absolutely Q-clearance stuff. Kim, you can help me word my input. You were down there first."

Kim Norton was the nearest thing to a friend that Mills could claim among the enlisted men. The others puzzled alone over their reports that night, confined to quarters, while Norton sat uncomfortable in officer country, alone with Mills.

"If this satisfies you, Sir, it does me," Norton said when their draft was complete. "I wasn't down in that tub for more than a few seconds anyhow."

"Why don't we drop the 'sir' crap for now," said Mills, knowing he sounded less than genuine. His smile didn't add much. He rushed on, crowning the moment with still another lie. ' "The truth is, I wish you
had
been down there. I tagged a piece of equipment to bring back—hell, Kim, I mentioned it in the report!"

"I wondered about that. How big?"

"Size of a small suitcase. I—just forgot. Can you imagine anything so stupid?"

Norton juggled the notion of stupidity in Mills, and dropped it with a shrug. "We can get it tomorrow," he offered.

"Of course, of course," Mills muttered, "but something just occurred to me."
While staring at those detents
.

When Norton failed to nibble at the bait, Mills arose and walked to the percolator at the far end of the room. He poured two cups, unobtrusively flicked on his pocket 'corder, and laid it near the percolator. Then he continued their talk. Presently Mills asked, "Did you see much down in the sub?"

"How could I, coughing my head off in the dark? No, Sir."

"My name is 'Boren', Kim. Relax. So you don't even recall the piece of equipment I tagged?"

"I told you before, uh, Boren:
no
," Norton said with a trace of irritation.

Now that he had something he needed, the Mills smile was genuine. He sat companionably near Norton on the table's edge. "Do you think you could recognize it if you saw it tonight?"

Norton was not happy with the idea until Mills hinted at a citation. But reassured that the officer would make the trip worth his while, Norton agreed to the midnight requisition.

When the rating had gone, Mills strode to the percolator and began to toy with the 'corder. It was only a few klicks from Kikepa Point to the derelict sub. What if there
was
an honest-to-God fission device, after all, connected to the fusion synthesizer? Well, at least Bonham Base on Kauai would suffer little damage. Mills indulged in this small patriotism, sipped coffee, and avoided looking toward the west. If he could not become a rich man, at least he could avoid blindness.

Two hours later, the synthesizer sat on the desk before Mills. It looked a bit like a cipher machine from an earlier war, fitted for intravenous feeding.

"Nothing to it, eh?" Mills extended his hand. "When all this is over, Kim, you'll be remembered." He swore Norton to secrecy and dismissed him. Then Mills generated a new report that made no mention of the synthesizer. He sealed the device in a desiccant-filled bag, placed that in another bag, then buried the treasure near the access road.

The next morning, Mills and his crew were again at the sub, ostensibly to take exact measurements and photographs for the salvage teams. Mills put two men to work examining the keel, stationed a third on deck to keep the forced-air unit cramming fresh air into the sub, then shifted his big shoulder-bag and went below. He took Kim Norton with him.

While Norton obediently listed loose personal articles in the crew compartment, Mills selected a package in his bag and placed it in the weapons storage locker. He then took the forage hatchet from his bag and carefully brained Kim Norton from behind. He returned to the storage locker to recheck the setting of the timer, then laid his pocket 'corder near the bangalore torpedoes and checked his watch as he flicked the 'corder switch.

Mills climbed outside empty-handed. "I forgot my fast film," he called down the hatch. "We'll have to get it from the cache on shore." While the three crewmen scurried to the small ACV moored by the hatch, he checked the time again, temporized by inspecting the forced-air unit, then called down the hatch again. "Taking the rest of the crew, Kim. We'll be gone fifteen minutes. Sure you don't want to go?"

There was the briefest of pauses before, "I told you before, uh, Boren no," said Norton's recorded voice with a trace of irritation.

"Suit yourself, love," Mills forced himself to say, choosing a phrase least likely to sound premeditated. "But keep your damned hands off those munitions." Then Lieutenant Boren Mills leaped into the ACV. They were nearly to their equipment cache when the submarine disintegrated with two distinct explosions.

Mills was absolved by the board of inquiry, though he assumed blame for leaving Radioman Second Class Norton behind. Fragments of the Chinese vessel were recovered, some of them quite large, none of them in condition to answer the Navy's most vexing questions. In time, fragments of similar vessels turned up.

The Navy file characterized the doomed fleet as an official curiosity, but opined that the craft must have had a huge tender, a mother ship. There was never any serious suggestion that the tiny craft were capable of running submerged from a thousand klicks up the Yangtze to the Oregon coast. The only evidence of that lay buried near Kikepa Point.

During the next two weeks, Mills found a suspicion confirmed: interservice rivalries could not match the complex intimacies of rivalry within the Department of the Navy. During the series of conferences provoked by his scholarship, Mills watched the maneuvering between his superiors in the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Public Information pundits of OPI, and the crusty staff of CNO who only wanted, as one rear admiral said, to cut the crap and convert some senators.

Day by day, hobnobbing with few ranks below full commander, Mills expounded on the persuasive uses of his new discipline and stressed the need for experimental work to prove his ideas. If transferred directly to the CNO staff he would chafe under the control of old men in Naval Ops. If he stayed in Intelligence, he might be hamstrung by their passion for watching the watchers. But the OPI was an aggregate, the Public Information career officers rattling and clanging against men who had been civilian media men a year previous, who would be civilians again a year or so hence. Here in media lay priceless connections and worthless bullshit; expertises so vague, so multifariously counterfeit, that a legitimate media theorist could help himself to a pretty piece of territory among them.

Mills maintained his studious mien, implied a 'natural' preference for his existing Intelligence connections, and steadily built a case for testing optimal control theory on segments of the public. He permitted himself to be persuaded that the best way to test his ideas lay with the feedback techniques already in use by the OPI. Besides, the OPI was fundamentally a service available to both Intelligence and Operations, both of which could profit from Mills's work as media control segued into social control.

By mid-July, Lt. Commander Boren Mills had seen the orders posting him to Sound Stage West. His floppy cassettes, his notes, even old textbooks were accorded special security and Mills made certain that his personal effects were packed in the same containers. In one container lay a souvenir for which he had a less than compelling cover story. It was hardly larger than a breadbox. He hoped he would not have to claim he had found it among the personal effects of Radioman Second Class Kimball Norton.

The revenues of Schleicher County, Texas were not wasted on air-conditioning the Eldorado jail. Quantrill had sweated off two kilos after three days in his shared cell. "Man's got a right to be with his helpmeet," he yelled, shaking the bars, the concrete walls mocking him with echoes.

"If you was a man," chuckled the husky scarred specimen who lay on the lower bunk, "you wouldn't'a let no half pint deputy bust you both."

"God's curse on 'em," Quantrill spat, then railed again at the bars. "God's curse on the gentile bastards!"

"I've had about enough of your noise," said his cellmate. "You and that hightits bitch in the women's wing—what's her name? Delight?"

"Delight," Quantrill yelled, his shoulder-length hair flying as he gripped the bars again. "Pray for deliverance, darlin'!"

From the opposite wing came an answering cry; a pitiable hopeless wail of female anguish. Sanger's voice, maintaining the guise of a young woman easily led.

The open-handed slap drove Quantrill's head against steel bars. "I'll give you deliverance if you don't shut up," said the man, fists on hips, no longer good-humored. "Them gentiles won't care if I beat some true religion into you."

Quantrill, huddling on his knees, hid his face and surreptitiously watched the man's feet. A reasonable amount of abuse, he could handle; but he could not pursue an assignment in the field with broken ribs. Snuffling, wishing he had the knack of weeping real tears on demand: “You sound like my pa."

"Maybe I am your pa," said the man, pleased with himself. "Your ma ever mention a Mitch Beasley?" Beasley eased himself back on his bunk.

"My ma didn't talk about men," said the youth querulously. "She was a good God-fearin' vessel—like my Delight. " He let the silence spread; turned and wiped his nose on his sleeve; let his eyes grow wide and full of ersatz trust. "You really do remind me of my pa," he said. "But pa wasn't no gentile. He was kind of a prophet."

"The hell you say," Beasley murmured.

"We liberated a lot of folks, pa and me," Quantrill insisted. "Andalotofwordly treasure, too. Why, the stuff we buried near Ozona would buy salvation for a dozen sinners."

Beasley, after a long thoughtful pause: "I might just want to meet your pa."

"Gone to his reward," Quantrill said, biting his lip, looking away.

Locusts buzzed in the hackberry tree outside the cell. Beasley's bunk creaked. After an endless thirty seconds: "What if I was to tell you they call me Prophet Beasley?"

Contact
. Quantrill had begun to think he'd wasted three more days on another false lead. He made his eyes wide again, came up to a kneeling position, his mouth slightly open. "I didn't think no jail could hold a true prophet," he said.

"Not in the fullness of time," Beasley intoned, studying the muscles of his heavy forearms as he stretched. The deep-chested voice lowered to accommodate the topic: "Maybe it was God's will brought us together, boy. You ever think about that?"

Quantrill gave a tentative nod, then clasped his hands and bowed over them. "Before you decide to leave, will you bless the union of me and my helpmeet?"

"It don't always work that way," Beasley said.

"Maybe—just
maybe
, God sent me as your earthly salvation."

Time to set the hook. "I'd have to think on it, pray on it. One thing sure, whatever happens me and Delight already said our vows before God."

"You sayin' you're purely stuck on that little hightits I seen joggin' around the exercise yard?"

Quantrill, head bowed: "We said our vows. I can't change that now."

"We'll see," said Beasley, and began to whistle a border tune through the gap in his front teeth. The youth retreated to the far corner of the cell, palms together, speaking in a near-whisper unintelligible from Beasley's bunk.