Starhunt: A Star Wolf Novel (22 page)

I agree with you that the incident should be hushed up as much as possible—it would not be good for general morale and the situation at home is such that an incident like this would not go down well at all.

By the way, please circulate a memo to all other F-class ships concerning the mechanical details of this incident. Point out the precautions necessary to prevent a repetition. For God’s sake, once is enough.

Stephen

I am suggesting that just as we psychoanalyze individuals to rid them of their neuroses, we do the same on a global level—that we psychoanalyze the characteristics and behavior patterns of the human species. I am suggesting that Homo sapiens needs to become self-aware as a race.

If we don’t the alternative is to rattle down through the cage of history, continuing to enact only our self-destructive games of blind aggression: the little aggressions of individual against individual, the medium-sized aggressions of group against group, the big aggressions of nation against nation, the massive aggressions of planet against planet—until finally, the race shatters and destroys itself in genetic chaos because it was too mixed in its schizoid games to look up and see that God is not a condition that all humans are born with, but one that all humans must aspire to earn.

—JARLES “FREE FALL” FERRIS,

Electric Philosophies

Korie sits alone in the galley; his usual place is in the corner, away from the noise and clatter of the serving counter. Generally the crew leaves him alone, keeps to the other side of the room as much as possible—

—except that this morning, Crewman Wolfe is coming back on duty; his one week’s restriction to quarters is ended. When he comes into the galley, it is with a smugness that he makes no effort to conceal; he fills his tray and purposely chooses a place at Korie’s table. With a smirk, he calls out, “Good morning, sir.” Across the room, one or two of the men watching him shake their heads.

Korie looks up at Wolfe and a sour frown crosses his features, but he returns his attention to the cup of coffee in front of him. Wolfe snickers, half to himself, half for the benefit of his audience. He slides his tray noisily across the table, makes a great production out of thumping and banging the various condiment containers; his presence is gratingly obvious.

Every bite Wolfe takes, every mouthful of food, crunches loud and annoying—it is as if Wolfe is saying, “You can’t touch me, sir; you can’t touch me.” He slurps at his coffee and he chews loudly on his toast.

Korie looks at him again. His expression is strained, almost on the verge of annoyance—anger. Wolfe returns the glance’ expectant, mocking, smug—

It is a conversation with words. Wolfe is saying,
I’m here, Mr. Korie, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And Mr. Korie is answering with his look,
You’d better watch yourself, Wolfe—you’d better not push too hard.

And Wolfe is replying, reiterating,
But I’m immune to you, now. Rogers won’t talk and I’m no longer confined to quarters and there’s nothing you can do about it.
And he says it all with a look and a smirk.

Abruptly Korie puts his coffee cup down, almost a little too hard. He stands and brushes at his tunic. For a moment, he looks down at the other, “What board are you going to be on, Wolfe?”

“Power six, sir.”

Coldly, Korie says, “I’ll be watching for it.” He turns and disappears into the ship’s head.

“You do that, sir.” Wolfe breathes to himself, and then wonders,
Now why did I do that? He wasn’t bothering me any.
He turns around and looks for the reaction of his shipmates, but at the moment, they seem to be looking elsewhere. He returns his attention to his food.

The clunk of a tray makes him look up. Rogers is just sitting down at the other end of the table. Wolfe leers sardonically. “Hey, little boy—” he calls. “How ya doin’? How’s your back?”

Rogers ignores him.

Wolfe calls, a little louder, “I hear you’ve been getting awfully chummy with Mr. Korie. I thought I told you that wasn’t a good idea.”

“No,” says Rogers, not looking up. “I’m not.”

“I didn’t hear you—what was that?”

Rogers concentrates on his soup.

“Hey Rogers—I’m talking to you.”

“I’m listening.” Another mouthful.

“But you’re not answering—”

“Hey, Wolfe!” Erlich, from the other side of the room.

Wolfe looks up. “Yeah?”

“You’re awfully loud.”

“I didn’t realize you were listening.”

“I’m not—you’re making too much noise.”

“I’ll lower my voice.”

“You’d do better to shut up.”

Wolfe turns back to his table, looks speculatively at Rogers. In a softer, but no less hostile tone, he says, “I hear you’re off the gravity board, these days. Tell me, how’s the radec business? Seen any good bogies lately? If you can find a few more, you’ll be Korie’s friend for life—”

He suddenly realizes that the room is silent. He looks up, sees the first officer standing in the door to the lavatory, still wiping his hands and looking thoughtfully at him. Korie glances scornfully at Rogers, then back to Wolfe.
“Carry on,”
he says. He tosses the towel into a disposal and exits.

Wolfe stares after him, then whistles softly. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Of course, the wicked people control the world—they deserve it.

—SOLOMON SHORT

When I was ten years old, one of my friends brought a Shaleenian kangaroo-cat to school one day. I remember the way it hopped around with quick, nervous leaps, peering at everything with its large, almost circular golden eyes.

One of the girls asked if it was a boy cat or a girl cat. Our instructor didn’t know; neither did the boy who had brought it; but the teacher made the mistake of asking, ‘How can we find out?’ Someone piped up, ‘We vote on it!’ The rest of the class chimed in with instant agreement and before I could voice my objection that some things can’t be voted on, the election was held. It was decided that the Shaleenian kangaroo-cat was a boy, and forthwith, it was named Davy Crockett.

Three months later, Davy Crockett had kittens. So much for democracy.

It seems to me that if the electoral process can be so wrong about such a simple thing, isn’t it possible for it to be very, very wrong on much more complex matters? We have this sacred cow in our society that what the majority of the people want is right—but is it?

Our populace isn’t really informed, not the majority of them—most people vote by the way they have been manipulated and by the way they have responded to that manipulation—they are working out their own patterns of wishful thinking on the social environment in which they live. Though a majority may choose a specific course of action or direction for itself, through the workings of a ‘representative government,’ they may be as mistaken about the correctness of such a choice as my classmates were about sex of that Shaleenian kangaroo-cat.

I’m not so sure that an elected government is necessarily the best.

—ROGER BURLINGAME

“All right, what’s your problem?” says Barak.

“I’d better tell it to you from the beginning,” answers Leen. “Then you can see if you agree with me.” They are in the tall, uneven area behind
the engine room, an area that seems both cramped and roomy—roomy because of its height, cramped because of the great number of pieces of equipment hanging from its walls and lashed to its floor. This is the ship’s workshop; most maintenance and repair functions are performed here. A massive synthesizer and its smaller cousin sit against one wall. Other plastic-working machines are spaced around the room. One whole side of the shop opens onto the life-shuttle maintenance deck, which also opens onto the large cargo hatch; at the moment those large doors are closed.

Chief Engineer Leen leads Astrogator Barak over to a worktable where parts of an intricate-looking device lay scattered across its plastic surface. “Remember, I was working on the Hilsen units? Well, I discovered something that made me start thinking. After I retuned the units, I opened them up again and looked at them a second time. That made me take another look at the phase adapters.”

“This one?” Barak indicates the device on the table.

“This is the one we burnt out.”

The astrogator pokes at it; but shakes his head. “Chief, it might as well be a ham sandwich sitting there; I wouldn’t know one end of it from the other.”

Leen waves that aside. “No matter, just let me tell you—I had just started to take this apart when Korie called me down to deflate the gym. I was so engrossed in what I was doing I hadn’t realized how close we were to the attack maneuver—that’s why I screwed up the gym, my mind wasn’t on it. I was still thinking about what I’d seen in the Hilsen units and what I suspected was in the adapter.”

“Uh huh—what did you find in the adapter?”

Leen takes a deep breath. “Look, do you know the way the adapter works?”

“Chief, I don’t even know how the warp works. I’m an astrogator.”

“Right. I forgot. Well, let me give you the two-minute cram course. You know the warp is a closed universe, right?”

“That much I’ve got.”

“Ever wonder how we see out of it?”

“Why, I thought—”

“We can’t, you know. Once we fold into warp, it’s like being on the inside of a big sphere, and the inner surface of it is a mirror. No matter what direction you look you’re only going to see yourself. It’s a closed, unbroken universe—you’ve heard the stories about a guy dropping a wrench over the side, only to have it come back from the opposite direction a couple of weeks later?”

Yeah—all right, how do we see out?”

“With the secondaries—they make the warp move by altering its shape within the stress field, but they also function like a window, through which we can look at the rest of the universe. Using the secondaries, we pick up vibrations off the stress field and the computers interpret them into the shimmers of the other ships’ warps or the gravitational masses of planets—it has to be a massive singularity for us to detect it in the stress field. Okay, turn off the secondaries, you close the window; what’s left—?”

“Only your own reflection, right?”

“Right—only very much distorted, spread out all over the inside of the warp. The only time we ever look at it is when we want to read the shape of our own warp; the rest of the time, the radec boys try and tune it out.”

“Yes, I know. They’ve had some problems with that recently—”

Leen looks at him sharply, “Then you know what I’m getting at?”

Barak shakes his head.

Leen goes on, “Anyway, I got curious when the Hilsen units kept slipping out of tune; those are the units that watchdog the secondaries and help us maintain shape. I figured they were getting some kind of feedback or vibration off the phase-handling system but where was the phase-handling getting it? That’s why I put MacHeath on the ‘monkey crew’—to find it. We needed to plug right into the generators because the systems analysis network is dead right there—I wanted him to monitor the phase adapters through a couple of maneuvers to see if that was the source of the vibration or not.”

“Was it?”

“I don’t know—and I’m not going to risk another man finding out.” He pokes at the adapter on the table. “That’s why I’ve taken this baby apart, but, uh—so far I haven’t found anything. You want to know what I think? We didn’t burn it out through any failure to compensate for inherent velocity—we watch that. It’s such a stupid and easy mistake to make that it’s on our check-lists seven times. I think we burnt this out because it
wasn’t able
to compensate. It wasn’t designed to operate with our present equipment, so the vibration is inherent in the way the pieces work together.
At prolonged bursts of high speed,
it’ll become magnified throughout the system.”

“Have you told Korie?”

“No.” Leen’s features are craggy and not unfriendly, but at the mention of the first officer’s name, his lips tighten.

“Why not?”

“Because of the phase adapter—you know where we got it?”

“Some parts depot or something—?”

“Uh-uh. Korie scavenged them off an F-class hulk. Remember the
Calvington
?”

“No.”

“No matter, but that’s the ship that Korie got these phase adapters off of. Uh, let me tell you about them. The
Calvington
was one generation before this ship—pre-Hilsen; she used Grier units instead—”

“Uh, Chief, you’re losing me.”

“Sorry. What I’m getting at is that these phase adapters are not necessarily complementary to our equipment. I had to jury-rig a lot of control systems. It was none too neat a job, but Korie wanted phase adapters—”

“I can understand that. I prefer a ship with a phase-handling system.”

“We don’t need ‘em, though.”

“Well—” Barak is skeptical on that. “It depends on your point of view. To go from one place to another, no, we don’t need them. We just fold into warp and go—but because we can’t maneuver our inherent velocity without phase adapters, we’re really not an independent ship. We’re at the mercy of tugs.”

“For the kind of patrolling we’re supposed to do,” asks Leen, “do phase adapters make a difference?”

Barak considers it. “Not really. DV base moves in a steady orbit. We kick off from it, go on patrol, stay in warp the whole time—when we come back, we only have to come up behind the base to unwarp and we’re still moving in the same direction and at the same velocity as when we started.”

“Right—so why do we have phase adapters?”

“So we can turn the ship in warp—”

“Because
Korie
wanted them!” Leen’s voice is suddenly loud.

Barak pauses after the other’s outburst; he says quietly, “We had the basic phase-handling system to start with, Chief. All it needed was some rebuilding and some new adapters.”

“But don’t you think that if Threebase had felt they were necessary, they would have given them to us?”

“I think that if they’d had a better ship, they would have given her to us; it’s no secret that the
Burlingame
was rescued from the scrap heap at the last minute.”