Slave Ship by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online Page A

can go to sleep without that!"
    "That's good," he said, squeezing the plunger. It worked fast; I saw him going out the door, and then, magically, he was turning around and coming back, only it wasn't the doctor any more. It was Elsie, just the way she had been the day we were married, lovely and desirable and all the wife a man could want. "Darling," I said to her, and she said many things to me. She bent and kissed me, and held me in her arms; and then all of a sudden her left eye blossomed out in a ripple of greenish light, and then her nose; and then she was awash from side to side with light, just like a sonar scope; and the rest of the dream was hardly pleasant at all.

V
     
     
    THE CAODAI OUTBREAK was contained, and by the next morning I was feeling fine.
    It was a taste of action and I welcomed it. I wasn't alone. Half the officers at Project Mako seemed to feel the way I had felt. They were Line officers, fighting officers; they hadn't asked to come here and didn't want to stay, and a touch of combat cheered all of us up. Even Lieutenant Kedrick, that cheerless old maid, gave me the morning off to convalesce—from the doctor's needle, not from my brush with Caodais—and he came in to see me, and actually smiled. "You've got a commendation coming, Miller," he said. "Maybe more."
    "Thanks. What happened?"
    "Oh—" He shrugged. "Who knows how the Cow-dyes run these things? I guess they thought they could catch us off guard and liberate a few prisoners. Isn't the first time, Miller."
    "Oh? I thought the mainland had never been touched."
    "Hah." He slapped at the paper I had been looking at, his face wrathful, "What do you call that?"
    I glanced at the paper; the headline said:
     
    UMP July Draft Call Put at 800,000;
    Manicurists, Bakers, Morticians Called
     
    I didn't quite see the relevance. I said: "Well, it is full mobilization, of course—"
    "I'm not talking about the draft! They got Winkler." Winkler? I glanced again and saw the story.
     
    General Sir Allardis Winkler, Military Attaché of the United Kingdom Government-in-exile, died at his home in Takoma Park, Maryland, last night of undetermined causes. General Winkler's body was discovered by a member of his family when—
     
    I looked at Kedrick wonderingly. "Was General Winkler a friend of yours?"
    "Man," he said severely, "don't you know what that is? Where've you been? It's the Glotch again. They got Winkler, just the way they got Senator Irvine last spring. Who's next, eh? That's what I want to know. Those damn Cow-dyes can pick us off, one by one, and we don't know dirt from dandruff how to stop them."
    I said, "Ah, Lieutenant, It doesn't say anything here about any Glotch."
    "Sure it doesn't! Expect them to print that ? Can't you tell when they're covering up?"
    I said humbly: "I've been out of touch, I guess."
    "Um." He looked at me. "Oh—yes. Sea duty. You might not have heard on sea duty. They don't have the Glotch much under water."
    "Not on Spruance , anyway."
    He nodded. "You're lucky. I bet if there's been one, there've been fifty pieces like that in the paper in the last six months. General Winkler dies of undetermined causes. Senator Irvine found dead in bed. District Mobilization Director Grossinger dead of 'stroke.' Stroke! Sure, the Cow-dyes struck him dead, that's what kind of 'stroke.' Knocks them over, screaming and burning. And not just big shots, but all kinds of people. Why—"
    Something was coming through to me, something that seemed familiar. I interrupted, "Lieutenant, I saw an Air Force captain a couple days ago that—"
    "Why, I bet there's thousands killed that we don't even hear about! There was a guard at the stockade three, four months ago. Nothing about him in the paper of course, but it was the Glotch all right. And the deputy mayor of Boca, they said it was a heart attack but—"
    "I wonder if this Air Force captain—"
    "—it was the Glotch, all right. They don't tell us about it, that's all. Why? Because they don't