Mutiny (22 page)

 
Around The

Theodore Roosevelt

The bridge is the nerve center of the warship—but so much is automated, and so much can be accessed from any part of the ship, that the officer in charge of the bridge rarely has to be there in person. All communications come first to the bridge, but can instantly be transmitted to any other location on the ship.

Intraship communications can be strictly audio, but they are more likely to be holographic, with three-dimensional images accompanying the voices.

There's a mess hall, capable of seating up to twenty crew members. Since the ship carries fewer than sixty crew members and works on three shifts, there's no need for a bigger facility. The kitchen is able to prepare food not only for the human crewmen, but for the nonhumans as well.

The gunnery section is in charge of ten pulse cannons (which shoot powerful energy pulses), plus a few laser weapons. Their job is to keep the weapons functioning; the weapons are aimed by computers, not crewmen.

There is an infirmary, smaller than any military crew would like, and divided so that it can accommodate both human and nonhuman patients
.

There are two small science labs. Since this is a warship and not an exploratory vessel, they don't see much activity unless it directly pertains to the war or the enemy.

There is an officers' lounge. It is tiny and is where one can often find the officer in command of the bridge when nothing important is happening.

Space is at a premium. There is no gymnasium, no sauna, no game or recreation room, no library. (Well, actually, there
is
a library—but it's in the ship's main computer and is entirely electronic. Any crew member can access any book in the library on his own computer.) There is a very small exercise room.

The crew's quarters are on three levels, two designed for humans, one for nonhumans. The rooms are small, even for the senior officers.

There are no stairs, but there are five airlifts positioned around the ship. The one closest to the infirmary is large enough to accommodate a patient on an airsled.

There is no engine room, or rather, there is no traditional engine room. There is a heavily fortified lead-lined area that houses the engine, but no crew works it. The ship carries one master engineer, and he is needed only on those incredibly rare occasions that something goes wrong with the highly efficient drive mechanism. Since the ship runs on nuclear fuel, it is life-endangering to spend any length of time there, and only the master engineer and the senior officers are even permitted entry to the room.

The ship has a hydroponic garden to help produce oxygen, and it carries supplies of compressed oxygen—but since it can enter atmospheres without burning up, its usual procedure is to stop at friendly oxygen worlds every few weeks to replenish air and water supplies.

The gravity is artificial and regulated to operate at Earth Standard. Each room can vary, based on the occupant's needs and desires, in air content, gravity, and temperature.

Since there is no night or day in space—or, put another way, there is eternal night—the
Teddy R
is on an arbitrary twenty-four-hour day. Unlike everyone's favorite television show, it would be foolhardy to have the Captain, the First Officer, the Second Officer, the Chief Gunnery Officer, and the like all on duty at the same time. What if the ship comes under attack when they're all asleep and some inexperienced lieutenant is the ranking officer on duty? So the Captain is always in charge of one shift, the First Officer of another, and the Second Officer of a third. This is not to imply that the Captain won't be alerted in times of crisis, but it is simply more practical to always have a senior officer in charge of the ship whatever the time of day.

The
Teddy R
is an old ship and would have been decommissioned if the Republic were not at war, but it is in working order, capable of traveling at many multiples of the speed of light, firing formidable weapons with great accuracy, and defending itself against any ship of its class (but not the more powerful, modern battleships and dreadnoughts).

TEDDY ROOSEVELT—

The Man Behind

The Ship

President John F. Kennedy was widely quoted for a remark lie made when he was sitting down to dinner at the White I louse with a dozen eminent scientists and artists. "Gentlemen," said JFK, "this is the greatest assemblage of talent to sit at this table since Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

It's a fine, wise, witty remark—but JFK must have thought that Theodore Roosevelt ate every meal at local restaurants for the seven years of his presidency.

Why would I name a ship after Theodore Roosevelt? Because I consider him the most remarkable American in our long history.

Consider: As a boy he suffered from a debilitating case of asthma. Rather than give in to it, he began swimming and exercising every day and built himself up to where he was able to make the Harvard boxing team.

But he'd been making a name for himself before he went to Harvard. An avid naturalist to the day of his death, he was already considered one of America's leading ornithologists and taxidermists while still a teenager. Nor was his interest limited to nature. While at I Harvard he wrote what was considered the definitive treatise on naval warfare,
The Naval War of 1812.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, married Alice Hathaway, went to law school, found it boring, and discovered politics. When Teddy Roosevelt developed a new interest, he never did so in a halfhearted way—so at twenty-four he became the youngest man ever elected to the New York General Assembly, and he became minority leader a year later.

He might have remained in the State Assembly, but on February 14, 1884, not long after his twenty-fifth birthday, his beloved Alice and his mother died in the same house, twelve hours apart. He felt the need to get away, and he went west to become a rancher (and because he was Teddy Roosevelt, one ranch couldn't possibly contain him, so he bought two).

Not content to simply be a rancher, a sportsman, and a politician, he became a lawman as well, and, unarmed, hunted down and captured three armed killers in the Dakota Badlands during the fearsome blizzard that was known as the Winter of the Blue Snow.

He began building Sagamore Hill, the estate he made famous in Oyster Bay, New York, married Edith Carew, and started a second family. (Alice had died giving birth to his daughter, also named Alice. Edith promptly began producing sons—Kermit, Theodore Jr., Archie, and Quentin—as well as another daughter, Ethel.) In his spare time, he wrote a number of well-received books. Then, running short of money, he signed a contract to write a four-volume series,
The Winning of the West
; the first two volumes became immediate best-sellers. He was also an avid correspondent, and it's estimated that he wrote more than 150,000 letters during his lifetime.

He was now past thirty years of age, and he decided it was time to stop loafing and really get to work—so he took the job of police commissioner of the wildly corrupt City of New York, and to the amazement of even his staunchest supporters, he cleaned the place up. He became famous for his "midnight rambles" to make sure his officers were at their posts, and he was the first commissioner to insist that the entire police force take regular target practice.

He made things so uncomfortable for the rich and powerful (and corrupt) of New York that he was "kicked upstairs" and made assistant secretary of the navy in Washington. When the Spanish-American War broke out, he resigned his office, enlisted in the army, was given the rank of colonel, and assembled the most famous and romantic outfit ever to fight for the United States—the fabled Rough Riders, consisting of cowboys, Indians, professional athletes, and anyone else who impressed him. They went to Cuba, where Teddy himself led the charge up San Juan Hill in the face of machine-gun fire, and he came home the most famous man in the country.

Less than three months later he was elected governor of New York, a week after his fortieth birthday. His new duties didn't hinder his other interests, and he kept turning out books and studying wildlife.

Two years later they kicked him upstairs again, finding the one job where his reformer's zeal couldn't bother anyone: he was nominated for the vice presidency of the United States, and was elected soon afterward.

Ten months later President William McKinley was assassinated, and Roosevelt became the youngest-ever president of the United States, where he served for seven years.

What did he do as president?

Not much, by Rooseveltian standards. Enough for five presidents, by anyone else's standards. Consider:

• He created the National Park system.

• He broke the back of the trusts that had run the economy (and the nation) for their own benefit.

• He created the Panama Canal.

• He sent the navy on a trip around the world. When they left, America was a second-rate little country in the eyes of the world. By the time they returned we were a world power.

• He became the first president ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, when he put an end to the Russian-Japanese war.

• He mediated a dispute between Germany and France over Morocco, preserving Morocco's independence.

• To make sure that the trusts didn't reclaim their power after he was out of office, he created the Departments of Commerce and Labor.

Was there anything he couldn't do? Just one thing. As he explained when his daughter Alice was running wild through the White House, "I can run the country or I can control Alice. I cannot do both." (It was Alice who later said, concerning her father's love for the limelight, "He wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.")

When he left office in 1909, far from relaxing he packed his bags (and his rifles) and went on the first major safari ever put together, spending eleven months gathering specimens for the American and Smithsonian museums. He wrote his experiences up as
African Game Trails,
still considered one of the half-dozen most important books on the subject ever written.

When he returned to America, he concluded that his hand-chosen successor, President William Howard Taft, was doing a lousy job of running the country, so he decided to run for the presidency again in 1912. Though far and away the most popular man in the Republican Party, he was denied the nomination through a number of procedural moves. Most men would have licked their wounds and waited for 1916. Not Teddy. He formed the Progressive Party, known informally as the Bull Moose Party, and ran in 1912. It's thought that he was winning when a would-be assassin shot him in the chest while he was being driven to give a speech in Milwaukee. He refused all medical aid until he had delivered the speech (which ran ninety minutes!), then allowed himself to be taken to a hospital. The bullet would never be removed, and by the time Teddy was back on the campaign trail Woodrow Wilson had built an insurmountable lead. Roosevelt finished second, as President Taft ran a humiliating third, able to win only eight electoral votes.

So
now
did he relax?

You gotta be kidding, right? This is Teddy Roosevelt we're talking about. The Brazilian government asked him to explore a tributary of the Amazon known as the River of Doubt. He hadn't slowed down since he was a baby, he was in his fifties, he was walking around with a bullet in his chest, all logic said he'd earned a quiet retirement—so of course he said yes. "I had to go," he later wrote. "It was my last chance to be a boy again."

This trip didn't go as well as the safari. He came down with fever, he almost lost his leg, and indeed at one time he urged his party to leave him behind to die and to go ahead without him. They didn't, of course, and eventually he was well enough to continue the expedition and finish mapping the river, which was renamed the Rio Teodoro in his honor.

He came home, wrote yet another best-seller—
Through the Brazilian Wilderness
—and wrote another book on African animals, as well as more books on politics, but his health never fully recovered. He campaigned vigorously for our entrance into World War I, and it was generally thought that the presidency was his for the asking in 1920, but he died in his sleep on January 6, 1919, at the age of sixty—having crammed about seventeen lifetimes into those six decades.

And
that
, friends, is a
very
brief biography of the most remarkable of all Americans. I have actually used him in half a dozen science fiction stories, including three award nominees ("Bully!" "Over There," and "Redchapel"), and I certainly plan to use him again.

Name the ship after him? Hell, it's a wonder I didn't name the whole damned Navy after him.