The Fourth Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  “The General,” said Garrison dourly, “is one of those cases you read about in the history books, but they really belong to the psychiatrists. He’s an honest man. His honesty was the secret weapon behind the last revolution. It brought in the current regime.”

  He explained that the previous regime had stolen a little more openly than even a Latin-American electorate will stand for, and trafficked too brazenly in places and immunities from internal-revenue regulations. And at last someone in power actually tried to cover up a murder, with the assistance of authority. Then suddenly there was street fighting in the capital and rumblings in all the provinces. There was an excellent setup for a nasty civil war.

  “The General stopped it,” said Garrison without admiration. “He signed a manifesto and the government ran away. Because people believed the General was honest. They’d back him. Oh, of course there were counter-manifestoes, and a lot of bandits began to call themselves patriots defending legal government, and some people who thought themselves patriots probably found they’d become bandits overnight. So it was pretty bad for a while, but the people would back anybody the General backed, so that was that. But for a while there were too many bandits.”

  The card game was definitely breaking up. I heard a sound behind me, and there was the General’s wife, wavering irresolutely, but smiling anxiously in the moonlight. Garrison hastily said, “Perdoname,” and escaped into the pilot-house. I think he wanted to avoid being thanked. The Señora looked at me.

  “I—have to express my gratitude,” she said with an odd catch in her throat. “You have much experience, Señor, and it was needed.”

  She probably thought me a professional burglar, but there was nothing in her manner but graciousness.

  “I wished to help the poor young man,” she explained, her eyes searching my face, “because his wife was going to have a baby. He knows, now, that it was wrong for him to steal. So he will steal no more.”

  I agreed politely. This was no time for cynicism.

  “And naturally I feel most acutely for a young man who has done wrong.” She hesitated, and said, “Because of my son.”

  I bowed. I did not understand at all, but I bowed.

  “So sometimes—when my husband’s sense of duty forces him to actions which are harsh……” The Señora had a little trouble breathing. “Sometimes I do as I did tonight. I think my husband would forgive me, but he could not forgive himself. You see—”

  She saw her husband on the deck below. She smiled at him. It was a very tender smile, with compassion and affection and a very odd maternal quality in it. Somehow, it would make me very uncomfortable to know that a woman had smiled at me like that. Even though it was all tenderness. And then her uneasiness vanished.

  She said lightly, “There is a trivial thing I would like to do. There is a young man in New Orleans who may not communicate with his family. If you would be both kind and discreet and give him a message, it would be a great comfort to his parents.”

  “I will be in New Orleans within a month,” I said.

  Her eyes shone. They were very beautiful eyes. They shone out of all proportion to the favor she had asked. Her hand shook a little as she put a bit of paper in my hand.

  “Here is his name,” she told me. “At least, it is the name he uses. I have not the exact address, but there is information which will enable you to find him.”

  “There are, of course, such things as directories,” I said encouragingly.

  Her breath came fast. I had the feeling of one witnessing tragedy. But her expression was radiant.

  “Surely you will find him!” she said. “Oh, surely! But I beg you to be discreet! And—the message is simply that his mother has heard of his good fortune and his good conduct, and nightly gives thanks in her prayers for his safety. And—she loves him very much. You will give that message, Señor, discreetly?”

  “I Will give it,” I promised.

  She went away quickly.

  I smoked. Minutes later, Garrison came out again.

  “What’d she want?” he asked sourly. “Slopping over with gratitude?”

  “In a way,” I said noncommittally. I had a very queer feeling. “You were telling about the last revolution—”

  “About the bandits who were left over after it,” said Garrison in some distaste. “Some were thieves and some had backed the wrong crowd, and some—it was the sort of thing that always follows a revolution. But it was bad. They had to be cleaned up. So the General was given the job, with a special law passed by Congress for authority. Amnesty for all bandits who surrendered before a certain time. Summary execution for all caught red-handed after that date. Some surrendered. A lot didn’t. That was bad.”

  There was no one on the bow deck now but the General. The joviality had gone from his manner as if he’d taken off a mask. He sat heavily in his chair, staring at nothing.

  “They caught a dozen of them,” said Garrison in a low tone, “right at the gates of the capital. They’d just murdered a tavernkeeper and a cantinera—you might say a barmaid—rather horribly. No doubt about their guilt. And one of them was the General’s son.”

  “What’s that?” I demanded.

  “The General’s son was one of them,” said Garrison. “He’d always been one of those young men who instinctively despise everything their parents stand for. If the General had been a crook, his son might have wound up ah archbishop. But, anyhow, the officer who caught the gang wanted to know what to do about the General’s son.”

  I felt very queer indeed. Garrison took a deep breath.

  “That’s why I had to do as the Señora asked,” he said. “Dammit, nobody could refuse her! Because of her son, she wants to help other young fools who’re as inexcusable as he was. You can’t help helping her! Though how the devil she can keep on living with the General—”

  “What happened?”

  “I suppose he sweated blood,” said Garrison. “The request for special orders came direct to him. It was a bad fix for an honest man. If he did the natural thing, his reputation would be gone for-ever and the revolution he’d just made possible would be discredited. But on the other hand, the boy was his son-his only son. It took him eight hours to decide. I don’t know how he did it.”

  “Did what?” I demanded.

  “Sent back word that he couldn’t interfere with the law. So the boy was treated like all the rest. Stood up against a wall and shot.”

  I looked down at the heavy figure sitting alone in that glaring light. An unpleasant stirring of anger came to me.

  “Yes?” I said. “Sure about that?” I was thinking of the scrap of paper in my pocket and the message the General’s wife wanted me to give. “Maybe you’re right. But I’ve an idea—”

  “There’s no question about it,” said Garrison. His mouth twisted a little. “I didn’t believe it would happen, myself. Maybe, like everybody else, I wanted to catch the General in a little conniving just because he was known as an honest man. And I’d never seen an execution. I knew the boy. I’d tried to do him a favor once, and he sneered at me. So I went to see him shot. But when the firing squad leveled their rifles at him, his face had the most amazing expression of stark disbelief I’ve ever seen on any man’s face in my life! He still looked as if he didn’t believe it, when the guns went off.”

  THERE was a movement down in the pitiless glare of the lantern. The General got up. The light was savagely harsh. It was merciless. He looked very, very tired. He went slowly back toward his cabin. He did not look happy or jovial or at ease with himself, now that he was alone. But he was an honest man, and it occurred to me that he had a highly ironic reward for his integrity. Every human being in his country believed in him implicitly. But nobody smiled at him. Nobody but his wife, who was the only person he hadn’t been honest with. She could smile at him because she believed that there was a young man in New Orleans.

  But I knew better. I could understand to the fullest that expression of stark disbelief on a y
oung man’s face when the rifles of a firing squad came up for him. If he knew his mother loved him, and knew his father. …. I took a scrap of paper from my pocket and tore it to bits. I tossed the fragments overside. There was no use trying to find that young man. He wasn’t there. The General was honest.

  The Skipper

  “The westerly drift” (of the equatorial current) “will be found to extend considerably north of the equator … It is very swift in places … It has been recorded as attaining a velocity of more than 4 knots.” Pacific Islands Pilot, p. 45.

  HE FLOATED soggily in the water, but he was a skipper. More, he had been skipper of an Islands schooner which had traded in every small lagoon of the Carolines and Paumotus, and had gone to pieces only at the very tail end of the hurricane that now sped on westward. Nothing remained of the schooner, now. Water stretched out to the horizon in every direction. It was two hundred miles to the nearest speck of land. A sensible man would have stopped struggling long since. But this man was a skipper, even if now he commanded no more than an oar and his own body.

  He floated soggily. One does, with only an oar for buoyancy. That oar lay crosswise of his body, and his arms hung down on its other side. The waves lifted him heavily to their crests, as if to tantalize him with a sight of empty sea before dropping him into the steep troughs to dazzle his eyes with the green water which intended presently to swallow him.

  It seemed as if the sea were playing with the skipper, toying with him like a cat with a mouse, jesting in an unlovely maliciousness. Two hundred miles from the nearest speck of solid earth. An empty sea and a blazing sun. Hunger and thirst and exhaustion ahead. Death to follow when no more diversion could be had from the spectacle of his suffering. The sea seemed to gloat over the helpless figure, though his head lolled as if he were unconscious.

  Actually, he was asleep. His arms over the oar were deliberately and rather cleverly caught in his clothing so that even with all his muscles lax he would not let go. He could not.

  THE sea played with him. It had amused itself for many hours. Now, as if annoyed that he could sleep in spite of it, it set to work cunningly upon the oar. A twist of the wide blade. Another twist. Bit by bit and very gently, it edged the oar to one side. It took a long time, but the sea was very patient. Presently the oar slipped the last fraction of an inch which was needful, and the slight buoyancy no longer balanced. One end of the oar sank. The sleeping man’s head went under water.

  He struggled, only half awake until sea water filled his mouth when he would have gasped. He writhed frantically to loose his arms from the tangle in which he had engaged them. He came up again and swam in purposeful circles until he had located the oar once more. He clung to it, now, and blinked his eyes clear of sea water. When thoroughly awake, he glanced at the sun as if at a clock. Then he gazed intently as the sea lifted him upward. He did not try to sweep the horizon. He inspected one segment only, not of the edge of the world, but of the waves about him.

  Many times, in the next few minutes, he watched that one part of the sea. He saw a waste of tossing pinnacles which stretched on to infinity. Two or three times he glanced upward at the sun, as if to verify a direction. A little later he paddled to face in a new direction.

  Again he quested the waste of water, with a patience seemingly as invincible as that of the sea. It seemed as if he were deliberately restricting his search to one certain area and watching that area until the tossing, distant waves must have brought up to their tips any smallest floating object.

  Again he turned himself and watched. Again. But it was a long time before the mocking waves showed any other thing than the reflected glitter of the sun. Then it was but a speck, an irregularly-shaped dot of blackness tossed for a bare instant on a faraway wave peak.

  The skipper watched carefully, patiently. His eyes lifted to a floating, distant trace of scud to westward, the last trace of the storm which had made these waters chaos some few hours since. He hung motionless, his eyes fixed in the direction in which he had seen that speck of black.

  When he saw it again he glanced quickly at the sun to fix the direction. The sun was two hours high, now. He continued to watch. He saw the speck a third time.

  Then he began to move toward it. His progress was painfully slow. More, it was leisurely. He seemed not to exert himself unduly. He swung the oar lengthwise to his progress, and now he swam with something like indolence, and now he kicked fitfully with his feet alone, or paddled with one hand. He seemed in no hurry. He took much more than an hour to reach the thing he had seen, and when he was perhaps three quarters of the way he stopped and rested composedly and watched again. He changed his course a little, then, and went on.

  HE WAS not at all exhausted when he reached it, and he gave no sign of disappointment. It was the crushed and splintered half of a boat from his own schooner, now deep down on the ocean floor. It was shapeless. It was useless. The racked and twisted boards moved one upon another as the swells lifted and dropped them again. There was no more buoyancy in it than in the oar. But the skipper swam around it and inspected it meditatively.

  Something floated overhead and squawked. It swerved wildly aside as the skipper moved. The skipper glanced at it. It was a long-winged gull, such as fly hundreds of miles from shore. The skipper returned to the contemplation of the shattered half-boat. Every plank was crushed. The ribs were broken, and there was less than half a boat here, anyhow. Long, jagged splinters projected from the planking. With the movement of the waves, the planks separated and closed together again like pincer jaws.

  The skipper wedged his oar in one of those cracks and set to work. Quaintly, his purpose seemed to be destruction. Bracing himself, he dragged at this plank and that. One came away with a sickly, wettish, ripping sound. A second, then a third and fourth.

  IN HALF an hour the skipper had an assemblage of frayed, crushed, narrow planks. He assembled them into two bundles of uneven length. He tore painstakingly at his clothing, under water. He bound the two bundles into an untidy V. But only when he wedged his body into the narrow part did it become apparent that he had made a soggy, unimpressive source of buoyancy which was nevertheless better than the oar because he did not have to hold on to it. It would hold on to him. He did not have to entangle his arms anywhere to keep from letting go when he dozed.

  The skipper rested. Presently he was searching the waves again. But he saw nothing. Nothing but water and once a flight of shimmering small specks which he watched meditatively. They were flying fish. The skipper seemed merely to be waiting.

  “From 5° N. to 5° S. the equatorial current runs westward at the average rate of 43 miles a day.” Pacific Islands Pilot.(Supra.)

  The sun rose higher. Its rays grew warm, then hot. They beat down upon the skipper with a fierce intensity. The sea exposed him to the heat with a malicious delight. It was as if it delighted in tormenting the man it held in its power. Sun and thirst would wreck this man; would reduce him to babbling lunacy while the waves tossed him, showing him now wide wastes of empty sea, showing now only the translucent depths into which he would presently sink.

  But the skipper took long splinters from the crushed planks and wedged them into place in his bundles of planking. He writhed loose the shirt from his body. He spread it upon the half-inch splinters to form a sunshade. His manner was composed and intent. Already his eyes were slightly bloodshot from the continued irritation of salt water. Already, past doubt, he knew both hunger and thirst. Mildly, so far, but he would know them fully later on. Yet he showed no fear, no despair, though two hundred miles of empty sea lay between him and the nearest speck of land. He had been the skipper of an Islands schooner.

  “Near the … limits” (of the equatorial current) “the set is almost due west (true) … “ Pacific Islands Pilot.(Supra.)

  In the afternoon he dozed. During the night he slept much. He seemed to invite sleep, as if deliberately concerned with saving all his strength for a definite trial of endurance. But the sea was only amus
ed. Two hundred miles of open water, to a man floating upon shattered planks, was a sentence of death. The floats, themselves, merely guaranteed that his agony would be prolonged and hence satisfying to a malevolently playful ocean.

  NEXT morning the skipper’s eyes were definitely bloodshot. There were hollows under his eyes. The water was warm, of course. The equatorial current is bound to be warm, and the schooner had gone to pieces near its northern edge. He did not suffer from cold, but the long immersion in salt water was weakening. Bit by bit it would soak the strength from him. He was thirsty now, too. But his face was calm and his expression intent, though small cracks were starting at the edges of his lips.

  He watched the waves intently, beneath his absurd sunshade of a shirt. A long, a patient, a painstaking survey of one quarter of the sea. Then paddle-strokes, and another quarter of the sea came under his patient vigil. Once, on this day, he saw a small wisp of smoke far below the horizon. He watched it calmly for a length of time and then paddled about to survey a new quarter of the ocean. It was nearly an hour when he turned his head to look again at the trail of smoke. It was gone.

  The skipper showed no emotion. He splashed water on his sunshade and tried to sleep. It was difficult. Where the plank floats rubbed against his body there were blisters, and those blisters had broken. The salt irritated them hideously. He tore strips from the few cloths he had remaining and bound them about himself. They became cemented to place by the clotted blood, but not firmly. Still, at times he suffered no pain from them for twenty minutes and more at a time.

  It was nearly dark when he sighted another object floating on the water. It took him two hours to reach it. He rested more often, today, than he had done the day before. Exhaustion was one of his enemies. Hunger and thirst were two more. There were others, many others. But he found the floating object just before it became too dark for him to see anything at all. It was a round steel drum, just barely awash and badly rusted. When the man reached it, sharp things raked his flesh. Barnacles.