She cast off, reached for the moderator-rod control and pulled it hard.
“Gee,” he gasped, “you’ll sink us!” and dashed for the controls. You had seconds before the worm-gears turned, the cadmium rods withdrew from their slots, the reactor seethed and sent boiling metal cycling through the turbine—
He slammed down manual levers that threw off the fore and aft mooring lines, spun the wheel, bracing himself, and saw Lee Falcaro go down to the deck in a tangle, the .45 flying from her hand and skidding across the knurled plastic planking. But by then the turbine was screaming an alarm to the whole base and they were cutting white water through the buoy-marked gap in the harbor net.
Lee Falcaro got to her feet. “I’m not proud of myself,” she said to him. “But she told me to take care of you.”
He said grimly: “We could have gone straight to the wharf without that little layover to pick you up. Take the wheel.”
“Charles, I—”
He snarled at her.
“Take the wheel.”
She did, and he went aft to stare through the darkness. The harbor lights were twinkling pin-points; then his eyes misted so he could not see them at all. He didn’t give a damn if a dozen corvettes were already slicing the bay in pursuit. He had failed.
CHAPTER XVI
It was a dank fog-shrouded morning. Sometime during the night the quill of the dead reckoner had traced its fine red line over the 30th meridian. Roughly half-way, Charles Orsino thought, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. But the line was straight as a string for the last four hours of their run. The damn girl must have fallen asleep on watch. He glared at her in the bow and broke open a ration. Blandly oblivious to the glare, she said: “Good morning.”
Charles swallowed a mouthful of chocolate, half-chewed, and choked on it. He reached hastily for water and found the tall plastic column of the ion-exchange apparatus empty. “Damn it,” he snarled, “why didn’t you refill this thing when you emptied it? And why didn’t you zig-zag overnight? You’re utterly irresponsible.” He hurled the bucket overside, hauled it up and slopped seawater into the apparatus. Now there’d be a good twenty minutes before a man-sized drink accumulated.
“Just a minute,” she told him steadily. “Let’s straighten this out. I haven’t had any water on the night watch so I didn’t have any occasion to refill the tube. You must have taken the last of the water with your dinner. And as for the zig-zag, you said we should run a straightaway now and then to mix it up. I decided that last night was as good a time as any.”
He took a minute drink from the reservoir, stalling. There was something—yes; he had meant to refill the apparatus after his dinner ration. And he had told her to give it a few hours of straightaway some night.…
He said formally: “You’re quite right on both counts. I apologize.” He bit into a ration.
“That’s not good enough,” she said. “I’m not going to have you tell me you’re sorry and then go scowling and sulking about the boat. In fact I don’t like your behavior at all.”
He said, enormously angry: “Oh, you don’t do you?” and hated her, the world and himself for the stupid inadequacy of the comeback.
“No. I don’t. I’m seriously worried. I’m afraid the conditioning you got didn’t fall away completely when they swore you in. You’ve been acting irrationally and inconsistently.”
“What about you?” he snapped. “You got conditioned too.”
“That’s right,” she said. “That’s another reason why you’re worrying me. I find impulses in myself that have no business there. I simply seem to do a better job of controlling them than you’re doing. For instance: we’ve been quarreling and at cross-purposes ever since you and Martha picked me up. That couldn’t be unless I were contributing to the friction.”
The wheel was fixed; she took a step or two aft and said professorially: “I’ve never had trouble getting along with people. I’ve had differences, of course, and at times I’ve allowed myself displays of temper when it was necessary to assert myself. But I find that you upset me; that for some reason or other your opinion on a matter is important to me, that if it differs with mine there should be a reconciliation.”
He put down the ration and said wonderingly: “Do you know, that’s the way I feel about you? And you think it’s the conditioning or—or something?” He took a couple of steps forward, hesitantly.
“Yes,” she said in a rather tremulous voice. “The conditioning or something. For instance, you’re inhibited. You haven’t made an indecent proposition to me, not even as a matter of courtesy. Not that I care, of course, but—” In stepping aft, she tripped over the water bucket and went down to the deck with a faint scream.
He said: “Here, let me help you.” He picked her up and didn’t let go.
“Thanks,” she said faintly. “The conditioning technique can’t be called faulty, but it has inherent limitations.…” She trailed off and he kissed her. She kissed back and said more faintly still: “Or it might be the drugs we used.… Oh, Charles, what took you so long?”
He said, brooding: “You’re way out of my class, you know. I’m just a bagman for the New York police. I wouldn’t even be that if it weren’t for Uncle Frank, and you’re a Falcaro. It’s just barely thinkable that I could make a pass at you. I guess that held me off and I didn’t want to admit it so I got mad at you instead. Hell, I could have swum back to the base and made a damned fool of myself trying to find Grinnel, but down inside I knew better. The kid’s gone.”
“We’ll make a psychologist of you yet,” she said.
“Psychologist? Why? You’re joking.”
“No. It’s not a joke. You’ll like psychology, darling. You can’t go on playing polo forever, you know.”
Darling! What was he getting into? Old man Gilby was four-goal at sixty, wasn’t he? Good God, was he hooked into marriage at twenty-three? Was she married already? Did she know or care whether he was? Had she been promiscuous? Would she continue to be? He’d never know; that was the one thing you never asked; your only comfort, if you needed comfort, was that she could never dream of asking you. What went on here? Let me out!
It went through his mind in a single panicky flash and then he said: “The hell with it,” and kissed her again.
She wanted to know: “The hell with what, darling?”
“Everything. Tell me about psychology. I can’t go on playing polo forever.”
It was an hour before she got around to telling him about psychology: “The neglect has been criminal—and inexplicable. For about a century it’s been assumed that psychology is a dead fallacy. Why?”
“All right,” he said amiably, playing with a lock of her hair. “Why?”
“Lieberman,” she said. “Lieberman of Johns-Hopkins. He was one of the old-line topological psychology men—don’t let the lingo throw you, Charles; it’s just the name of a system. He wrote an attack on the mengenlehre psychology school—point-sets of emotions, class-inclusions of reactions and so on. He blasted them to bits by proving that their constructs didn’t correspond to the emotions and reactions of random-sampled populations. And then came the pay-off: he tried the same acid test on his own school’s constructs and found out that they didn’t correspond either. It didn’t frighten him; he was a scientist. He published, and then the jig was up. Everybody, from full professors to undergraduate students went down the roster of the schools of psychology and wrecked them so comprehensively that the field was as dead as palmistry in twenty years. The miracle is that it hadn’t happened before. The flaws were so glaring! Textbooks of the older kind solemnly described syndromes, psychoses, neuroses that simply couldn’t be found in the real world! And that’s the way it was all the way down the line.”
“So where does that leave us?” Charles demanded. “Is it or isn’t it a science?”
“It is,” she said simply. “Lieberman and
his followers went too far. It became a kind of hysteria. The experimenters must have been too eager. They misread results, they misinterpreted statistics, they misunderstood the claims of a school and knocked down not its true claims but straw-man claims they had set up themselves.”
“But—psychology!” Charles protested, obscurely embarrassed at the thought that man’s mind was subject to scientific study—not because he knew the first thing about it, but because everybody knew psychology was phony.
She shrugged. “I can’t help it. We were doing physiology of the sensory organs, trying to settle the oldie about focusing the eye, and I got to grubbing around the pre-Lieberman texts looking for light in the darkness. Some of it sounded so—not sensible, but positive that I ran off one of Lieberman’s population checks. And the old boy had been dead wrong. Mengenlehre constructs correspond quite nicely to the actual way people’s minds work. I kept checking and the schools that were destroyed as hopelessly fallacious a century ago checked out, some closely and some not so closely, as good descriptions of the way the mind works. Some have predictive value. I used mengenlehre psychology algorithms to compute the conditioning on you and me, including the trigger release. It worked. You see, Charles? We’re on the rim of something tremendous!”
“When did this Lieberman flourish?”
“I don’t have the exact dates in my head. The breakup of the schools corresponded roughly with the lifetime of John G. Falcaro.”
That pin-pointed it rather well. John G. succeeded Rafael, who succeeded Amadeo Falcaro, first leader of the Syndic in revolt. Under John G., the hard-won freedom was enjoyed, the bulging store-houses were joyously emptied, craft union rules went joyously out the window and builders worked, the dollar went to an all-time high and there was an all-time number of dollars in circulation. It had been an exhuberant time still fondly remembered; just the time for over-enthusiastic rebels against a fusty scholasticism to joyously smash old ways of thought without too much exercise of the conscience. It all checked out.
She started and he got to his feet. A hardly-noticed discomfort was becoming acute; the speedboat was pitching and rolling quite seriously, for the first time since their escape. “Dirty weather coming up,” he said. “We’ve been too damned lucky so far.” He thought, but didn’t remark, that there was much to worry about in the fact that there seemed to have been no pursuit. The meager resources of the North American Navy wouldn’t be spent on chasing a single minor craft—not if the weather could be counted on to finish her off.
“I thought we were unsinkable?”
“In a way. Seal the boat and she’s unsinkable the way a corked bottle is. But the boat’s made up of a lot of bits and pieces that go together just so. Pound her for a few hours with waves and the bits and pieces give way. She doesn’t sink, but she doesn’t steam or steer either. I wish the Syndic had a fleet on the Atlantic.”
“Sorry,” she said. “The nearest fleet I know of is Mob ore boats on the great lakes and they aren’t likely to pick us up.”
The sea-search radar pinged and they flew to the screen. “Something at 273 degrees, about eight miles,” he said. “It can’t be pursuit. They couldn’t have any reason at all to circle around us and come at us from ahead.” He strained his eyes into the west and thought he could see a black speck on the gray.
Lee Falcaro tried a pair of binoculars and complained: “These things won’t work.”
“Not on a rolling, pitching platform they won’t—not with an optical lever eight miles long. I don’t suppose this boat would have a gyro-stabilized signal glass.” He spun the wheel to 180; they staggered and clung as the bow whipped about, searched and steadied on the new course. The mounting waves slammed them broadside-to and the rolling increased. They hardly noticed; their eyes were on the radarscope. Fogged as it was with sea return, they nevertheless could be sure after several minutes that the object had changed course to 135. Charles made a flying guess at her speed, read their own speed off and scribbled for a moment.
He said nothing, but spun the wheel to 225 and went back to the radarscope. The object changed course to 145. Charles scribbled again and said at last, flatly: “They’re running collision courses on us. Automatically computed, I suppose, from a radar. We’re through.”
He spun the wheel to 180 again, and studied the crawling green spark on the radarscope. “This way we give ’em the longest run for their money and can pray for a miracle. The only way we can use our speed to outrun them is to turn around and head back into Government Territory—which isn’t what we want. Relax, Lee. Maybe if the weather thickens they’ll lose us—no; not with radar.”
They sat together on a bunk, wordlessly, for hours while the spray dashed higher and the boat shivered to hammering waves. Briefly they saw the pursuer, three miles off, low, black and ugly, before fog closed in again.
At nightfall there was the close, triumphant roar of a big reaction turbine and a light stabbed through the fog, flooding the boat with blue-white radiance. A cliff-like black hull loomed alongside as a bull-horn roared at them: “Cut your engines and come about into the wind.”
Lee Falcaro read white-painted letters on the black hull: “Hon. James J. Regan, Chicago.” She turned to Charles and said wonderingly: “It’s an ore boat. From the Mob great lakes fleet.”
CHAPTER XVII
“Here?” Charles demanded. “Here?”
“No possible mistake,” she said, stunned. “When you’re a Falcaro you travel. I’ve seen ’em in Duluth, I’ve seen ’em in Quebec, I’ve seen ’em in Buffalo.”
The bull-horn voice roared again, dead in the shroud of fog; “Come into the wind and cut your engines or we’ll put a shell into you.”
Charles turned the wheel and wound in the moderator rod; the boat pitched like a splinter on the waves. There was a muffled double explosion and two grapnels crunched into the plastic hull, bow and stern. As the boat steadied, sharing the inertia of the ore ship, a dark figure leaped from the blue-white eye of the searchlight to their deck. And another. And another.
“Hello, Jim,” Lee Falcaro said almost inaudibly. “Haven’t met since Las Vegas, have we?”
The first boarder studied her cooly. He was built for football or any other form of mayhem. He ignored Charles completely. “Lee Falcaro as advised. Do you still think twenty reds means a black is bound to come up? You always were a fool, Lee. And now you’re in real trouble.”
“What’s going on, mister?” Charles snapped. “We’re Syndics and I presume you’re Mobsters. Don’t you recognize the treaty?”
The boarder turned to Charles inquiringly. “Some confusion,” he said. “Max Wyman? Charles Orsino? Or just some wild man from outback?”
“Orsino,” Charles said formally. “Second cousin of Edward Falcaro, under the guardianship of Francis W. Taylor.”
The boarder bowed slightly. “James Regan IV,” he said. “No need to list my connections. It would take too long and I feel no need to justify myself to a small-time dago chisler. Watch him gentlemen!”
Charles found his arms pinned by Regan’s two companions. There was a gun muzzle in his ribs.
Regan shouted to the ship and a ladder was let down. Lee Falcaro and Charles climbed it with guns at their backs. He said to her: “Who is that lunatic?” It did not even occur to him that the young man was who he claimed to be—the son of the Mob Territory opposite number of Edward Falcaro.
“He’s Regan,” she said. “And I don’t know who’s the lunatic, him or me. Charles, I’m sorry, terribly sorry, I got you into this.”
He managed to smile. “I volunteered,” he said.
“Enough talk,” Regan said, following them onto the deck. Dull-eyed sailors watched them incuriously, and there were a couple of anvil-jawed men with a stance and swagger Charles had come to know. Guardsmen—he would have staked his life on it. Guardsmen of the North American Government Navy—aboard a M
ob Territory ship and acting as if they were passengers or high-rated crewmen.
Regan smirked: “I’m on the horns of a dilemma. There are no accomodations that are quite right for you. There are storage compartments which are worse than you deserve and there are passenger quarters which are too good for you. I’m afraid it will have to be one of the compartments. Your consolation will be that it’s only a short run to Chicago.”
Chicago—headquarters for Mob Territory. The ore ship had been on a return trip to Chicago when alerted somehow by the Navy to intercept the fugitives. Why?
“Down there,” one of the men gestured briskly with a gun. They climbed down a ladder into a dark, oily cavern fitfully lit by a flash in Regan’s hand.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” Regan told them. “If you get a headache, don’t worry. We were carrying some avgas on the outward run.” The flash winked out and a door clanged on them.
“I can’t believe it,” Charles said. “That’s a top Mob man? Couldn’t you be mistaken?” He groped in the dark and found her. The place did reek of gasoline.
She clung to him and said: “Hold me, Charles.… Yes that’s Jimmy Regan.
“That’s what will become top man in the Mob. Jimmy’s a charmer at a Las Vegas Hotel. Jimmy’s a gourmet when he orders at the Pump Room and he’s trying to overawe you. Jimmy plays polo too, but he’s crippled three of his own team-mates because he’s not very good at it. I kept telling myself whenever I ran into him that he was just an accident, the Mob could survive him. But his father acts—funny. There’s something with them, there’s some—
“They roll out the carpet when you show up but the people around them are afraid of them. There’s a story I never believed—but I believe it now. What would happen if my uncle pulled out a pistol and began screaming and shot a waiter: Jimmy’s father did it, they tell me. And nothing happened except that the waiter was dragged away and everybody said it was a good thing Mr. Regan saw him reach for his gun and shot him first. Only the waiter didn’t have any gun.
The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth Page 32
