The Passage (29 page)

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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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“Okay.” The captain reached out then and patted Dan's leg, and Dan tensed. Yet it seemed innocent enough, the kind of thing any CO might do to encourage one of his men. He got up. “Uh, is that all, sir?”
“Almost. One last thing,” Leighty said, looking up at him. “The investigator spoke to me. Diehl. He mentioned a diary. Did Seaman Sanderling leave a diary?”
“A what?” said Dan. He knew it sounded stupid, but Leighty had blindsided him. He'd been thinking about the ACDADS, had that program loaded in his brain, didn't have his Sanderling file ready to run at all.
“A diary,” Leighty said patiently. “He said Sanderling kept a diary, and that he was going to interview you tomorrow and find out what happened to it.” The captain gave it a beat, glancing at the clock as it chimed eight bells. “Have you got it?”
There it was, point-blank, and he'd played dumb long enough. He cleared his throat. “Yes, sir. I have it.”
“I didn't see it on the inventory. Why not?”
“Sir, there were several things that weren't on the inventory. You know the procedure. Certain things we don't send home to the family.”
“Okay, but the presumption is that we destroy those items. Did you destroy the diary?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“I … Diaries are personal items, like letters. I didn't want to just throw it away.”
“But you didn't inventory it either. Which is it, Dan? Is it a personal item, in which case you inventory it, or is it something scurrilous, in which case you destroy it?”
“Neither, sir … or both.” He struggled in the vise Leighty was gradually closing on him.
“Okay,” said the captain. He jiggled one white shoe. “Neither, and both. So, are you going to turn it over to NIS?”
“I don't know, sir.”
“Sit down. Go on—sit. Dan, I have the feeling we're dancing around something here that maybe we both know but for some reason you don't want to talk about. Why don't you trot it out and we'll at least have it on the table.”
Dan started to sit on the settee, hesitated, then took the chair opposite Leighty, with the coffee table between them. He rubbed his hands together. His palms were as wet as if he'd just taken them out of the sea.
“Okay, sir. Judging by the stuff we found, Sanderling was a homosexual. In the diary, he named you as one of his partners.”
The silence was suddenly deafening in the little cabin. Dan felt detached, unreal, as he waited for the captain's response. For a moment, there wasn't any, though. He added, thinking maybe the captain hadn't heard him right, “He named
you
, sir. In the diary.”
“And you think that I'm homosexual, too,” said Leighty. “Which is why you kept it. Correct?”
Dan took a deep breath. “Sir, it's not something I could rule out. Because of the diary, you see.”
“What if you knew that the accusation was false?”
“If I
knew
it was false? Then I'd destroy it,” Dan said.
“Okay,” said the captain. He got up and stood looking at the portrait of his family.
“Tell me, Dan, what
is
a homosexual? Can you answer that for me?”
“Well … I guess, it's somebody who engages in homosexual acts.”
“How do you know someone engages in homosexual acts?”
“You see them?”
“Without actually witnessing it, I mean. Are they effeminate? Do they wear women's clothing? Hold hands with other men? Wear earrings in the right ear? Tell me how we
know,
Mr. Lenson.”
“They tell you. That's how you know.”
“Ah.” Leighty put his hands on his back and stretched, as if his spine hurt. “So a homosexual is someone who admits that he engages in such acts.”
“I guess so,” Dan said. Then he thought, What? “Sir, let's cut through this ‘how do we know' stuff, all right? I'm sorry to be blunt, but is what he says true? Were you his lover? Or partner, whatever?”
“That's blunt all right. But maybe you're right; maybe that's the best way—cut through it,” said Leighty, still looking at the portrait. “Okay, I'll answer it. I'm a family man. I love my wife. I love my children. I did not engage in homosexual acts with Benjamin Sanderling.”
Dan stood up, feeling his heart physically lighten. “Thank you, sir. That's a relief—a
big
relief.”
“And now you'll destroy it?”
“Yes, sir. That's good enough for me.”
“Good,” said Leighty. He patted Dan's shoulder, then put his hand on his back, steering him toward the door. “It's going to be another long day tomorrow, so—”
“Yes, sir,” said Dan, shaking the proffered hand. “Thanks. This is really a load off my mind.”
 
 
AS he left the captain's cabin, the 1MC intoned, “Now taps, taps. Lights out. All hands, turn into your own bunks. Maintain silence about the decks; the smoking lamp is out in all berthing spaces. Now taps.” The lights waned from white to red along the passageways. He felt tired but relieved. The channel ahead was narrow, but the fog had burned off and it lay marked and navigable. It hadn't been a bad day, he thought. Not a bad day at all.
A
RMS throbbing, Shrobo sidled warily through the passageways, glancing into doorways. His tall, awkward form lurched and zigzagged as the ship rolled around him, and he put a hand out to the bulkheads from time to time to stop himself from staggering.
He moved warily because from time to unpredictable time the whole ship became a madhouse. A bell would start ringing, and within seconds the passageways were jammed with running, shouting men in various stages of undress. Once he'd been climbing the stairs when it happened, and suddenly about twenty people had appeared from nowhere, all headed down while he was still trying to go up. The language had been shocking.
He mused on it as he drifted along, rubbing his arms. They felt numb from half an hour at the workout machines that the black technician, Matthew Williams, had introduced him to.
It wasn't that the men didn't accept him. When he went into the dining room, they made room for him, then stared in disbelief at his tray: raw vegetables and bread—the only things he figured weren't loaded with nitrates and pesticides. When he went into sick bay for clean greens, they greeted him like a long-lost brother. But the Navy was a foreign country, a foreign language. He still wasn't sure which was fore and aft and port and starboard—how did you know when you couldn't even see the water? What about the strange things they kept saying over the public-address system? What was “material condition Yoke,” and what did all those whistles mean? He knew the difference between officer and enlisted, but where did chiefs fit in? They were older than most of the officers and seemed to know more, but they called even the youngest officers “sir.”
He recalled himself with a start and turned around. Lost again. The Kafkaesque corridors all looked the same: narrow, lined with
complicated masses of pipes and wires, roofed with the horrible fluorescent lights. He snagged a passing sailor. The man had a shock of dirty blond hair in front, tapered close in back, and a Band-Aid on his nose. His thin shoulders were hunched under a short blue jacket; he sniffled as he stared at Shrobo. “Say, uh, can you tell me how to get back to the computer room?” Hank asked him.
“Go forward to frame two hundred, take the starboard ladder up to the oh-one level.”
“Thanks,” he said. “But which way is—”
“Forward? That way. Say, you're that dude come to fix our computers, ain'tcha? They running yet?”
“Uh, not really. But we're working on them.”
“I heard a you. Hey, welcome aboard. Glad to have ya.” The boy seized his hand before he could react, pumped it twice, then dropped it and disappeared around a corner. Hank looked at his hand, remembering the boy's sniffle. His resistance was down anyway; lack of sleep and the omnipresent fluorescent light reduced immune system activity.
He went forward, trying to remember not to touch his lips or eyes with the hand he held out in front of him. The thought made his nose itch, of course. He twitched it like a beleaguered rabbit. Passing sailors eyed him strangely. Behind him, a speaker announced: “Now the seabag locker will be open for approximately twenty minutes.” Finally, he saw a rest room. A sailor looked up angrily from a swab and bucket but shrugged when he pointed to the sink. He squirted liquid soap and worked up a froth, staring into the mirror as his mind reverted once more to the problem.
He just couldn't understand how you could ship perfectly functional taped programs, then have them degrade when they hit the ship's computers. Things simply did not work that way. A computer was an incredibly complex but totally dumb machine that was capable of doing only what it was told. The program didn't change. What was on the tape couldn't change. And once it was used to program the computer,
that
couldn't change, either.
But it did aboard
Barrett.
Was he dealing with some kind of computerized poltergeist? Something that transcended normal physical laws? Ridiculous. It had to be an error of some sort, an error of replication—
Then he stopped.
He looked at his hand, where the sniffling sailor had touched it. Slowly, he rinsed off the rest of the soap.
Why had he just washed his hands?
Because that was how rhinoviruses were passed.
Cold viruses.
Viruses were replicating molecules.
His mind shifted now to a discussion he'd participated in on Arpanet.
Arpanet was a secure DOD-wide network of computers, interconnected in a wide area network. It serviced major defense labs and research facilities with electronic mail and file-transfer services. It also connected to mainframes in the academic and business world via a much larger network called Internet. Internet was the exchange media for a number of electronic forums and debates on the burning technical issues of the day. A typical query from a scientist seeking information or ideas, for example, could generate literally thousands of comments from all over the world.
What he remembered now was a debate about a new and rather sinister development beginning to plague university computer departments. A few malicious computer-science students, called “hackers,” had unleashed a new kind of mischief. They got their giggles from making computers do things they weren't supposed to do, or getting into computers they weren't supposed to have access to. At the cost of hours or days of intense, tedious work, the hacker could break into it, apparently thereby gaining some sort of rush or excitement. Using techniques born of the innate cleverness of the kind of people drawn to computers and programming, some didn't stop with gaining access. Instead, they disrupted the system's operation in a number of interesting and sometimes catastrophic ways.
He also recalled an Internet conversation with a doctoral candidate at USC, Berkeley, who was doing a dissertation on what he called “virtual disease emulators.” Their conversation had been theoretical, but the student had made some thought-provoking speculations about how a properly written program might be able to propagate itself—
“Hey, you okay?” a voice behind him asked. It was the sailor with the swab.
“Excuse me?”
“Said, you okay? You just standing there, like you froze or something.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Just thinking, thanks.”
 
 
WHEN he got back to the computer room, Dawson and Williams were looking at the new code for the weapons-assignment module. Their faces were appalled. Shrobo said, “What now?”
“It's lousy with it, Hank.”
“Bad code?”
“Are you kidding, bad? It's … garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage.” Williams turned a suspicious eye toward him. “And it's in the sections I already patched. We got gun shoots and tracking drills tomorrow. What are we gonna do? This ain't gonna cut it.”
“I know.” He sat down and took a breath, thinking about it. The more he thought, the more certain he felt. Everything fit—the good tapes that mysteriously went bad; the patched code that over time slowly degenerated back to noise; the origin of whatever it was in one module of the tape, but then, as they looked, gradually revealed itself in more and more segments, more and more cells, more and more modules. It was as if the very act of looking for it spread it.
“I think I have an idea what might be going on,” he said tentatively, looking up at the rows of flashing lights. “And you know what? I sure hope I turn out to be wrong.”

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