Ramsey felt a sudden wave of personal liking for Sparrow. He fought it down. I must remain clear-headed and objective, he told himself.
Sparrow moved to the left to get a clearer view of the pilot gauges. He studied them a moment, turned to Ramsey. "Has it ever occurred to you, Mr. Ramsey, that these Hell Diver subtugs are the closest thing to spaceships that mankind has developed? We're completely self-contained." He turned back to the control board. "And what do we do with our spaceships? We used them to hide under the liquid curtain of our planet. We use them to kill one another."
Ramsey thought: Here's a problem—a morbid imagination vocalized for the benefit of the crew. He said, "We use them in self- defense."
"Mankind has no defense for himself," said Sparrow.
Ramsey started to speak, stopped, thought: That's a Jungian concept. No man is proof against himself. He looked at Sparrow with a new respect.
"Our underground base," said Sparrow. "It's like a womb. And the marine tunnel. A birth canal if I ever saw one."
Ramsey thrust his hands into his pockets, clenched his fists. What is going on here? he asked himself. An idea like that should have originated with BuPsych. This man Sparrow is either teetering on the ragged edge or he's the sanest man I've ever met. He's absolutely right about that base and the tunnel and we've never spotted the analogy before. This bears on our problem. But how?
Sparrow said, "Joe, secure the tow board on automatic. I want you to go with Mr. Ramsey now and test out the new detection gear. It should be ranged on our first checkpoint." He looked to the big sonoran auto-nav chart on the forward bulkhead and the red dot showing their DR position. "Les, surface the peri-box and get a position reading."
"Right, Skipper."
Garcia closed the final switch on his board, turned to Ramsey. "Let's go, Junior."
Ramsey looked at Sparrow, a wish to be part of this crew uppermost in his mind. He said, "My friends call me Johnny."
Sparrow spoke to Garcia. "Joe, would you also initiate Mr. Ramsey into the idiosyncrasies of our atmospheric system? The carbonic anhydrase phase regulator would be a good place to start."
Ramsey felt the rejection of his first name like a slap, stiffened, ducked through the aft door and into the companionway.
Garcia followed, dogged the door behind them, turned, said, "You'd better know something about the subtug, Ramsey. A new hand is always known by his last name or anything else the crew feels like calling him until after the first combat. Some guys hope they never get called by their first name."
Ramsey cursed inwardly. Security had missed that point. It made him appear like a green hand. Then he thought: But this is a natural thing. A unit compulsive action by the crew. A bit of magic. Don't use the secret name of the new man lest the gods destroy him... and his companions.
In the control room, Bonnet turned to Sparrow, sniffed. He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, turned back to the control board. "He's green," he said.
"He appears willing, though," said Sparrow. "We can hope for the best."
Bonnett asked, "Aren't you worried about that last minute Security check-up on the guy?"
"Somewhat," said Sparrow.
"I can't help it," said Bonnett. "The guy—something about him—I dunno. He strikes me as a wrongo." Bonnett's shaggy brows drew down in thought.
"It could've been routine," said Sparrow. "You know the going over they gave us."
"I'm still going to keep an eye on him," said Bonnett.
"I've some paperwork," said Sparrow. "Steady as she goes. Call me before the first checkpoint."
"What's the watch schedule?" asked Bonnett.
"That's what I'm going to be working on," said Sparrow. "I want to set it up so I can spend some time with Ramsey while we're still in comparatively safe waters. I don't want him goofing when the chips are down."
Sparrow ducked for the aft door, went down the companionway and into the wardroom. The first thing that struck him as he entered was the color of the wardroom table cover—a cover and a color he had seen thousands of times.
Why is it that Navy wardrooms always have green table covers? he asked himself. Is it a little of the color of the growing land? Is it to remind us of home?
In the electronics shack, Garcia and Ramsey closed down the board after testing the detection gear.
"What now?" asked Ramsey.
"You'd better log a little sack time," said Garcia. "It's Les's watch. The skipper's probably setting up the schedule right now. You may be called next. Things are pretty loose the first day or so."
Ramsey nodded, said, "I am tired." He turned aft, said, "See you later."
Garcia's "Righto" floated after him.
Ramsey hurried to his room, dogged the door, dragged out the telemeter box, unlocked it, extracted the first record strips, sat back to examine them.
Pituitra and adrenaline high points showed early on the scrolls. Ramsey noted that one was before he arrived and the other coincided with the moment pressure was first bled into the hull.
The first tense moments, he thought. But that's normal.
He reeled the scrolls of telemeter tape forward to the moment the sabotage was discovered, double-checked the timed setting, scanned backward and forward across the area.
Nothing!
But that can't be!
Ramsey stared at the pattern of rivets on the bulkhead opposite him. The faint whispering of the drive seemed to grow louder. His hand on the blanket beside him felt every tuft, every thread. His nostrils sorted out the odors of the room: paint, oil, soap, ozone, perspiration, plastic...
Is it possible for a person to go through anxiety without glandular changes? he asked himself. Yes, under certain pathological circumstances, none of which fit Sparrow.
Ramsey remembered the sound of the captain's voice over the intercom during the period of stress: higher pitched, tense, clipped.
Again, Ramsey examined the tape. Could the telemeter be wrong?
He checked it. Functioning perfectly. Could there be disfunction in the mechanism within Sparrow's flesh? Then the other fluctuations would not have registered.
Ramsey leaned back, put a hand behind his head, thought through the problem. Two major possibilities suggested themselves: If Sparrow knew about the wiper-rag-oil-spray thing then he wouldn't be anxious. What if he planted the rag and set that luke-system petcock himself? He could've done it to disable the ship and stop the mission because he's lost his nerve or because he's a spy.
But there would've been other psychomotor indications which the telemeter would have registered.
This led to the other possibility: In moments of great stress Sparrow's automatic glandular functions are taken over by the higher cortical centers. That could tie in with the known paranoiac tendencies. There could be a systematic breakdown of normal function under stress: such a turning away from fear that the whole being believes there could be no danger.
Ramsey sat bolt upright: That would fit the pattern of Sparrow's religious attitude. An utter and complete faith would explain it. There had. been religious paranoiacs before. They'd even tried to hang the label on Christ. Ramsey frowned. But of course Schweitzer made the ones who tried to look like fools. Tore their arguments to shreds.
A sharp rap on Ramsey's door interrupted his thoughts. He slipped the tapes into the false bottom of the telemeter box, closed the lid, locked it.
Again the rap. "Ramsey?" Garcia's voice.
"Yes?"
"Ramsey, you'd better take a couple of anti-fatigue pills. You're scheduled for the next watch."
"Right. Thanks." Ramsey slipped the box under his desk, went to the door, opened it. The companionway was empty. He looked at Garcia's door across the companionway, stood there a moment, feeling the ship around him. A drop of moisture condensing from the overhead fell past his eyes. Abruptly, he had to fight off a sense of depression. He could almost feel the terrible pressure of water around him.
Do I know what it is to be truly af
raid? he asked himself.
CEASE FIRE
Snow slanted across the frozen marshland, driven in fitful gusts. It drifted in a low mound against the wooden Observation Post. The antennae of the Life Detector atop the OP swept back and forth in a rhythmic halfcircle like so many frozen sticks brittle with rime ice.
The snow hid all distance, distorted substance into gray shadows without definition. A suggestion of brightness to the north indicated the sun that hung low on the horizon even at midnight in this season.
Out of possible choices of a place for a world-shattering invention to be born, this did not appear in the running.
A rifle bullet spanged against an abandoned tank northeast of the OP, moaned away into the distance. The bullet only emphasized the loneliness, the isolation of the OP set far out ahead of the front lines of the Arctic battlefields of 1972. Behind the post to the south stretched the long reaches of the Canadian barren lands. An arm of the Arctic Ocean below Banks Island lay hidden in the early snow storm to the north.
One operator—drugged to shivering wakefulness—stood watch in the OP. The space around him was barely six feet in diameter, crammed with equipment, gridded screens glowing a pale green with spots that indicated living flesh: a covey of ptarmigan, a possible Arctic fox. Every grid point on the screens held an aiming code for mortar fire.
This site was designated “OP 114" by the Allied command. It was no place for the sensitive man who had found himself pushed, shunted and shamed into this position of terror. The fact that he did occupy OP 114 only testified to the terrible urgencies that governed this war.
Again a rifle bullet probed the abandoned tank. Corporal Larry Hulser—crouched over the OP's screens—tried to get a track on the bullet. It had seemed to come from the life-glow spot he had identified as probably an Arctic fox.
Much too small for a human, he thought. Or is it?
The green glow of the screens underlighted Hulser's dark face, swept shadows upward where they merged with his black hair. He chewed his lips, his eyes darting nervously with the fear he could never hide, the fear that made him the butt of every joke back at the barracks.
Hulser did not look like a man who could completely transform his society. He looked merely like an indefinite lump of humanity encased in a Life Detector shield, crouching in weird green shadows.
In the distant days of his youth, one of Hulser's chemistry professors had labeled him during a faculty tea: "A mystic— sure to fail in the modern world. "
The glow spot Hulser had identified as a fox shifted its position.
Should I call out the artillery? Hulser wondered. No. This could be the one they'd choose to investigate with a flying detector. And if the pilot identified the glow as a fox—Hulser cringed with the memory of the hazing he had taken on the wolf he'd reported two months earlier.
"Wolfie Hulser!"
I'm too old for this game, he thought. Thirty-eight is too old. If there were only some way to end—
Another rifle bullet spanged against the shattered tank. Hulser tried to crouch lower in the tiny wooden OP. The bullets were like questing fingers reaching out for unrecognized metal— to identify an OP. When the bullets found their mark, a single 200 mm. mortar shell followed, pinpointed by echophones. Or it could be as it had been with Breck Wingate, another observer.
Hulser shivered at the memory.
They had found Wingate hunched forward across his instruments, a neat hole through his chest from side to side just below the armpits. Wind had whistled through the wall of the OP from a single bullet hole beside Wingate. The enemy had found him and never known.
Hulser glanced up nervously at the plywood walls: all that shielded him from the searching bullets—a wood shell designed to absorb the metal seekers and send back the sound of a bullet hitting a snowdrift. A rolled wad of plot paper filled a bullet hole made on some other watch near the top of the dome.
Again Hulser shivered.
And again a bullet spanged against the broken tank. Then the ground rumbled and shook as a mortar shell zeroed the tank.
Discouraging us from using it as an OP, thought Hulser.
He punched the backtrack relay to give the mortar's position to his own artillery, but without much hope. The enemy was beginning to use the new “shift" shells that confused backtrack.
The phone beside his L-D screens glowed red. Hulser leaned into the cone of silence, answered: "OP 114. Hulser."
The voice was Sergeant Chamberlain's. "What was that mortar shooting at, Wolfie?"
Hulser gritted his teeth, explained about the tank.
Chamberlain's voice barked through the phone: "We shouldn't have to call for an explanation of these things! Are you sure you're awake and alert?"
"Yeah, Sarg."
"O.K. Keep your eyes open, Wolfie."
The red glow of the phone died.
Hulser trembled with rage. Wolfie!
He thought of Sergeant Mike Chamberlain: tall, overbearing, the irritating nasal twang in his voice. And he thought of what he'd like to do to Chamberlain's narrow, small-eyed face and its big nose. He considered calling back and asking for "Schnozzle" Chamberlain.
Hulser grinned tightly. That'd get him! And he'd have to wait another four hours before he could do anything about it.
But the thought of the certain consequences in arousing Chamberlain's anger wiped the grin from Hulser's face.
Something moved on his central screen. The fox. Or was it a fox? It moved across the frozen terrain toward the shattered tank, stopped halfway.
A fox investigating the strange odors of cordite and burned gas? he wondered. Or is it the enemy?
With this thought came near panic. If any living flesh above a certain minimum size—roughly fifty kilos—moved too close to an OP without the proper IFF, the hut and all in it exploded in a blinding flash of thermite: everything incinerated to prevent the enemy from capturing the observer's Life Detector shield.
Hulser studied the grid of his central screen. It reminded him of a game he'd played as a boy: two children across a room from one another, ruled graph paper hidden behind books in their laps. Each player's paper contained secretly marked squares: four in a row—a battleship, three in a row—a destroyer, two in a...
Again the glow on his screen moved toward the tank crater.
He stared at the grid intersection above the glowing spot, and far away in his mind a thought giggled at him: Call and tell 'em you have a battleship on your screen at 0-6-C. That'd get you a Section Eight right out of this man's army!
Out of the army!
His thoughts swerved abruptly to New Oakland, to Carol Jean. To think of her having our baby back there and—
Again the (fox?) moved toward the tank crater.
But his mind was hopelessly caught now in New Oakland. He thought of all the lonely years before Carol: to work five days a week at Planetary Chemicals... the library and endless pages of books (and another channel of his mind commented: You scattered your interests too widely!)... the tiny cubbyhole rooms of his apartment... the tasteless—
Now, the (fox?) darted up to the tank crater, skirted it.
Hulser's mind noted the movement, went right on with its reverie: Then Carol! Why couldn't we have found each other sooner? Just one month together and—
Another small glowing object came on the screen near the point where he'd seen the first one. It, too, darted toward the tank crater.
Hulser was back in the chill present, a deadly suspicion gnawing him: The enemy has a new type of shield, not as good as ours. It merely reduces image size!
Or is it a pair of foxes?
Indecision tore at him.
They could have a new shield, he thought. We don't have a corner on the scientific brains.
And a piece of his mind wandered off in the new direction— the war within the war: the struggle for equipment superiority. A new weapon—a new shield—a better weapon—a better shield. It was like a terrible ladder dripping with maimed
flesh.
They could have a new shield, his mind repeated.
And another corner of his mind began to think about the shields, the complex flicker-lattice that made human flesh transparent to—
Abruptly, he froze. In all clarity, every diagram in place, every equation, every formula complete—all spread out in his mind was the instrument he knew could end this war. Uncontrolled shivering took over his body. He swallowed in a dry throat.
His gaze stayed on the screen before him. The two glow spots joined, moved into the tank crater. Hulser bent into the cone of silence at his phone. "This is OP 114. I have two greenies at co-ordinates O-6-C-sub T-R. I think they're setting up an OP!"
"Are you sure?" It was Chamberlain's nasal twang.
"Of course I'm sure!"
"We'll see."
The phone went dead.
Hulser straightened, wet his lips with his tongue. Will they send a plane for a sky look? They don't really trust me.
A rending explosion at the tank crater answered him.
Immediately, a rattle of small arms fire sprang up from the enemy lines. Bullets quested through the gray snow.
It was an enemy OP! Now, they know we have an observer out here!
Another bullet found the dome of the OP.
Hulser stared at the hole in terror. What if they kill me? My idea will die with me! The war will go on and on and— He jerked toward the phone, screamed into it: "Get me out of here! Get me out of here! Get me out of here!"
When they found him, Hulser was still mumbling the five words.
Chamberlain's lanky form crouched before the OP's crawl hole. The three muffled figures behind him ignored the OP, their heads turning, eyes staring off into the snow, rifles at the ready. The enemy's small arms fire had stopped.
Another one's broke, thought Chamberlain. I thought shame might make him last a little while longer!
He dragged Hulser out into the snow, hissed: "What is it, you? Why'd you drag us out into this?"
Hulser swallowed, said, "Sarge, please believe me. I know how to detonate enemy explosives from a distance without even knowing where the explosives are. I can—"
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