Back | Next
Contents

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."

"You mean I wasn't the only one?"

"Hah! There were seven, Miller—last I heard." He stared at me thoughtfully. "The only difference between you and the other six is, you're alive."

It was a cheerful thought. "Well," I said, "thanks for everything and I guess I'll be getting along—"

"I guess you won't," he said sharply. "Maybe in the morning. They want to look you over—after all, you're supposed to be dead, you know. They want to find out how come you're not."

It wasn't so bad. They kept taking my temperature for a while, and feeling my pulse, and talking to each other in what doctors use for English. But Savidge, who didn't appear to be too overworked as OOD, dropped in every few minutes and we got fairly well acquainted; and along about three in the morning they decided I could go to sleep.

So I did; but I wouldn't say I slept well.

 

The hairy-bodied officer at COMSOLANT was in uniform this time, and he turned out to be a captain. "Miller," he said crisply, "I told you your stuff wasn't ready yet. Are you trying to rush me?"

"No sir, but—"

"But go away, Miller," he said persuasively. "Remember the famous motto of the Navy: 'Don't call me, I'll call you.' You're dismissed." And that was that.

I wandered down to COMCARIB and rousted Barney Savidge out of bed. He was bleary-eyed on three hours sleep after a night as Officer of the Deck, but he began to wake up with the third cup of wardroom coffee. "I'll tell you want we do," he began to plan. "We'll pick up a couple of WAAFs from the training center and run over to Tropical Park for the afternoon and—"

"I'm married, Barney."

He stared at me. "What?"

"I don't want to pick up a couple of WAAFs," I explained.

He scratched his head. "Well," he said after a moment, "we'll go over to Tropical Park by ourselves and—"

I said: "Barney, could we look around the base here? I've been out on a dairy—that is," I corrected myself hurriedly, remembering those bright red Most Secret stamps on my travel orders, "I've been out of touch with the Navy. Let's take a look at the ships." All he said was: "It takes all kinds."

COMCARIB is only a satellite of COMSOLANT, but the Caribbean fleet is big enough for anybody. There were forty men-of-war surfaced in Biscayne Bay, destroyers and carriers and a couple of Nimitz-class cruisers that brought a curious sensation to my throat. "Busy out there," I said, staring hungrily at the fighting ships nursing from the tankers.

"It's getting busier all the time, Logan," Barney said soberly. "See that bucket beyond the breakwater?" He was pointing at an ancient monitor, a harbor defense craft with plenty of punch but no range to speak of. Work barges were lashed to its sides and welders were slicing into a twisted, scarred mass of metal on its forward deck.

"Looks like it tangled with a can opener," I said.

"A Caodai can opener. That's Hadley, and it was down off the Keys when a Caodai sneak raid took a potshot at it. It got back; there were two last month that didn't."

I said uneasily, "Barney, have things been hotting up while I was at sea? All this business of getting burned and sneak raids right off our coast—it sounds bad."

Barney shrugged morosely. "Who knows? There isn't any war on."

"No, really," I insisted. "What's the score?"

"Who knows?" he repeated. "You can see for yourself, things are happening. Up until last year, COMCARIB had never lost a capital ship in coastal waters. Since then—well, never mind how many. But we've lost some. Are things getting worse all over, or is it just local? I don't know. We send out a squad of scout torpedoes three times a day, and I guess we average twenty contacts a week. By the time the big boys get to where the torpedoes have made a contact, there's nothing there, usually. Sometimes not even the scout. But you look in the papers and you find nothing about it, of course. Once in a while, maybe, there's a story about 'Unidentified vessel sighted off Miami Beach'—that's when you can see them from the top floor windows of the hotels. But that's all."

He flicked his cigarette into the water and grinned at me. "Now do we go to Tropical Park?" he demanded.

So we went, and I succeeded in losing forty-five dollars. It wasn't hard. I just bet my hunches. By the fourth race the T/5 at the five-dollar window got to know me and shook his head sadly when I bought my tickets; but I didn't mind much, because what I was thinking of was not horses and pari-mutuel betting but war and Elsie.

I sat out the sixth race in a canteen under the grandstand and read a newspaper. I could hear the crowd screaming and stamping overhead, but the newspaper thundered louder than they, if only you read between the lines. Eight-Year-Olds Face Student Draft. How long had we been putting school kids in uniform? Had it started while I was on Spruance? The age limits had been going lower and lower, that much I knew—but eight-year-olds? I tried to remember exactly when it was that they had called up the Boy Scouts and made them an integral, draft-manned part of the defense apparatus, with civil-defense functions and a coordinated pre-induction training program. Caodais Protest Ankara Looting, Threaten Reprisals Against Hostages. I read that one thoroughly. There had been trouble at the Caodai legislation in Turkey, and the Caodais appeared to think it was deliberately fomented. That much was simple enough, but the bit about hostages gave me a bad time.

Because I couldn't help remembering that one of the hostages was no mere statistic, but the girl I had married.

The nature of the trouble in Ankara was far from clear; sometimes it seemed to me that there had been an arson attempt, sometimes a mere hit and run burglary. It was sloppy reporting, and I read the item over a dozen times before I concluded that it didn't matter; if the Caodais were looking for a pretext to take their temper out on their hostages, anything at all would serve.

I found Barney in the crowd, right where I'd left him, and told him my burns were bothering me. It was true enough, at that; my whole neck was stiffening up; but what was bothering me most of all was life itself. I arranged to meet him again and caught the bus back to my hotel, so lost in my own ugly thoughts that I didn't pay any attention to the desk clerk's expression.

But what he handed me along with my room key jolted me out of my reverie. It was a mailgram from Project Mako: LEAVE CANCELED. RETURN PROJECT IMMEDIATELY. LINEBACK

 

 

Back | Next
Framed