“How could you be?”
“Too inept.” Garcia hesitated. “And besides, my wife is a cousin of Commander Gadsen of the Dolphin. Gad was very impressed by a fellow named Long John Ramsey from BuPsych who pulled them out of a nasty spot when their oxy system went sour. He says this man Ramsey improvised a special vampire gauge and pulled some stunts with anhydrase that weren’t in the books. Seemed to think this Ramsey saved their lives.”
“So you figured me for this same Ramsey.”
“Gad was extremely impressed by this Long John Ramsey except one thing: he said the redheaded bastard got on your nerves with his know-it-all attitude!”
“The world’s full of redheaded—”
“Uh, uh!” Garcia shook his head. “You’re BuPsych. Two things on this floating sewer pipe interest you more than anything else: the skipper and that black box in your room. So I opened the box.”
Ramsey forced himself to remain impassive. “And?”
An enigmatic grin captured Garcia’s features. “There’s a separate set of recording instruments in it keyed to the timelog. I copied four of your tapes, checked back on what we’d been doing.”
“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?”
“Maybe,” said Garcia. “If he didn’t like his job and was as tired of this war as I am.”
And that, thought Ramsey, is precisely the answer I was afraid of. He said. “Get some rest.”
“Bit players hamming up their parts,” said Garcia.
Ramsey stepped out into the companionway and it was a cold gray corridor suddenly—leading nowhere in either direction. He thought: My world’s gone completely schizoid. Security! Its job is to make us even more schizoid—to break down as many lines of communication as possible. He turned and looked back at Garcia on the cot. The engineering officer had turned on his side, facing the bulkhead. That’s why it’s so important to belong to Savvy Sparrow’s group. That’s the scratch of sanity.
And he remembered Heppner, the electronics officer who had gone mad. If you can’t belong and you can’t leave: What then?
The shape and substance of things began to reform in Ramsey’s mind. He turned up the companionway, went to the control deck. The room seemed to greet him as he stepped through the door: warmth, flashing of red and green lights, a sibilant whispering of power, a faint smell of ozone and oil riding on the background of living stink which no filters could completely eliminate.
Sparrow stood at the helm, an almost emaciated figure with rumpled clothes hanging loosely upon him. Ramsey was suddenly startled by the realization that Sparrow had lost weight when there didn’t seem to be any place from which he could lose it.
“How’s Joe?” Sparrow spoke without turning.
Saw my reflection in the dive-board glass, thought Ramsey. Nothing escapes him.
“He’s going to be all right,” said Ramsey. “His vein-counter shows negative absorption. He may lose a little hair, be nauseated for a while undoubtedly.”
“We ought to set him into Charleston,” said Sparrow. “The vein-counter doesn’t tell you what’s happening in the bone marrow. Not until it’s too late.”
“All the signs are good,” said Ramsey. “Calcium leaching out and being replaced by non-hot. Sulphate’s negative. He’s going to be okay.”
“Sure, Johnny. It’s just that I’ve sailed with him for a long time. I’d hate to lose him.”
“He knows it, Skipper.”
Sparrow turned, smiled, a strangely plaintive gesture. “I guess he does at that.”
And Ramsey thought: You can’t tell a man you love him—not if you’re a man. That’s a problem, too. We don’t have the right word—the one that leaves out sex.
He said, “Where’s Les?”
“Getting some rest. We hit the Arctic stream twenty minutes ago.”
Ramsey moved up to the search-board station, rested a hand on the wheel to external salvage air beside the board. His mind was full of moving thoughts. It was as though the conversation with Garcia had tapped a well—or had dropped head pressure and allowed what was underneath to come to the surface.
“Les will take the next watch in an hour,” said Sparrow. “I can handle her now. You come on in three hours. We’ll need a tighter schedule without Joe.”
“Aye, Skipper.”
He turned, went aft to his quarters, and was suddenly aware of a bone weariness. It was too much trouble to get out the telemeter and inspect its tapes. Besides, he knew what it would show: the iron-hard inner control that simulated normality. Or maybe it was normality. He fell asleep on the bunk without undressing.
The Ram bore southwest toward home waters, and the timelog reeled off the days. A monotonous succession of watches amidst the cold pipes, dials, wheels, levers, blinking lights, and telltale buzzers. The same faces and the same danger.
Even peril can grow boring.
A distant sound of propellers in an area where all such sounds mean hunter.
Wait and listen. Creep ahead a few knots. Wait and listen. Creep ahead a few knots. Wait and listen. The distant sound is gone. The Ram picks up speed while red-rimmed eyes watch the ranging and sonar gear.
Garcia was up and about on the fourth day—a man grown strangely morose and sullen when Ramsey was present.
Still the subtug moved steadily nearer to safety, towing the turgid slug: a prize wrested from death itself.
And a special tension—a new pressure—crept into the actions of the Ram’s crew. It was a tension that said: “We’re going to make it … We’re going to make it … We’re going to make it …
“Aren’t we?”
Ramsey, asleep in his bunk, wrestled with a silent nightmare in which Sparrow, Garcia, and Bonnett suddenly turned to face him—all with the features of mad Heppner.