A brief regret at an interrupted dream of Ohio flickered in the back of
the Captain's mind.
"What do you mean, you're not sure?" His voice was a little sharper
than he intended, a little more querulous than he had meant it to be. It
was, he thought, the voice of an old man, annoyed at having his sleep
disturbed.
[Illustration]
The younger man wasn't disturbed by the sharpness and the Captain's
estimation of McCandless went up another notch.
"Ten minutes ago CIC reported an object approaching us from the south at
an altitude of fifty miles."
Approaching from the south, the Captain thought. So it couldn't have
been from the _Josef_. And fifty ... miles ... up. That was two hundred
and fifty thousand feet. A guided missile, perhaps? But whose? There
were only friendly countries to the south.
"It's passed directly overhead," McCandless continued, consciously
trying to make his voice sound factual, "and continued in the direction
of _Josef_. It settled towards sea level, then stopped a mile up."
"Stopped, Lieutenant?"
"Yes, sir. It's hovering over the _Josef_ now." McCandless paused. When
he started again, his voice was shaking. It was funny he hadn't noticed
it before, the Captain thought. You could almost smell the fear in the
wheelhouse. "CIC estimated its speed overhead as being in excess of a
thousand miles an hour and its size about that of the _Josef_ itself."
The Captain felt the sweat gather on his temples and ran his hand half
angrily over his forehead and through his thinning silver hair. He was
too old a man to let fear affect him any more and he was too tired a man
to waste his energy mopping his forehead every few minutes in a gesture
that would show his feelings to the crew. Maybe it was only vanity, he
thought, but when your muscles went soft and started pushing back
against your belt and your hair turned gray and started a strategic
retreat, you tended to take more care of your reputation. It wasn't as
fragile as the rest of you, it didn't tarnish with the gold of your
braid or sag with your muscles. And he had enjoyed a reputation as a
fearless man of sound judgment.
"Did you order up a drone plane?"
McCandless nodded in the dark. "It went up a few minutes ago, sir. The
television picture should be coming in any moment."
It would be an infra-red picture, the Captain thought. It wouldn't show
too much, provided the plane could get close enough to get anything at
all, but it would show something.
"Have you made any evaluations, Lieutenant?"
He could feel the tenseness build up again in the compartment. Everybody
was listening intently, waiting for the first semi-official hint of what
had gotten them up in the middle of the night.
Then McCandless voiced what the Captain had already taken to be a
foregone conclusion.
"I think it's a spaceship, sir." McCandless waved at the stars beyond
the port. "From some place out there."
* * * * *
The picture started coming in at oh three hundred. The Captain and Davis
and McCandless clustered about the infra-red screen, watching the
shadowy picture build up.
It wasn't much of a picture, the Captain thought. It was vague and
indistinct and the drone plane was shooting the scene from too far away.
But he could make out the _Dzugashvili_, a gloomy shape that bulked huge
in the water, the planes clustered on its deck like small, black flies.
But that wasn't what interested him. He had seen restricted photographs
and complete descriptions and evaluations of the _Josef_'s fighting
capabilities before. What was of vastly more importance was the huge
structure that hovered above the _Josef_, a mile overhead. A structure
that blocked out the stars over a roughly rectangular area the same size
as the _Josef_ itself.
McCandless and Davis were still straining their eyes for details of the
alien ship by the time the Captain had glanced away and was formulating
policy. The picture was too vague, he thought. There was nothing that
could be seen that would tell you much about the ship. And if they were
correct in thinking it was a ... his mind hesitated at the thought ...
spaceship, then it would be impossible to tell whether certain features
were armament or not. And it would be futile to speculate on the
capabilities of that armament.
McCandless and Davis finished with their inspection of the screen and
turned to the Captain, waiting for orders.
"Recall the plane," the Captain said. "Send it out again at dawn. And
send a message to Radio Washington, giving them complete details. You
may relax GQ but keep the gunners at their posts and the pilots standing
by." The fantastic became far more real when you dealt with it
matter-of-factly, he thought.
He started for the hatch. "I'll expect you down for breakfast," he said
to Davis. "You, too, Lieutenant. You've been in on this from the start,
you know more than the rest of us."
Which was quite enough flattery for a young lieutenant in one day, he
thought. It was far more than he had ever received when he had been a
lieutenant.
Back in his stateroom, the Captain went directly to the small lavatory,
filled the washbowl, and plunged his face into the cold water. He was
getting old, he thought for the hundredth time that morning. Creeping
old age where you still awoke readily enough but found it more and more
difficult to keep awake. You couldn't rid yourself of the temptation of
going back to bed and dreaming again--dreaming, perhaps, of an Ohio town
that his own imagination had gilded and varnished and adorned until
sometimes he thought it existed only in his imagination and not in
reality at all.
He scrubbed at his face until a tingle of alertness came to it, then
went back to the main compartment. The steward had laid out the silver,
and Davis and McCandless were already there. Davis completely relaxed in
the atmosphere that could only exist between an Executive Officer and a
Captain. The Exec, as both he and the Captain well knew, was the only
man on board with whom the Captain could maintain a relationship that
was something other than professional. Not necessarily friendly but ...
more relaxed.
McCandless sat in the leather upholstered chair by the table, stiff and
self-conscious. The hope of the nation, the Captain thought. Provided
that they learned how to hate and to keep that hate alive as long as he
had kept his.
His own boy had been about McCandless' age, he thought suddenly.
"Well, what are you going to do?" Davis asked.
The Captain sat down at the table. The coffee was hot and he could smell
the eggs that the steward was frying in the small galley. He tucked in a
napkin at his neck. It was old-fashioned but practical, he thought. You
dribbled down the front, you didn't spill things in your lap.
"It isn't exactly up to me, Harry. It's up to Washington." He poured out
three cups of coffee and handed one to Davis and one to McCandless. The
Lieutenant clutched the cup in a deathlike grip, as if the ship were
doing forty-degree rolls and he might lose it any minute. "I asked you
up to breakfast to get your ideas on it. I have my own but on something
like this, anybody's ideas are as good as mine. Maybe better."
Davis frowned and rubbed the tip of his nose thoughtfully. "Well, it
looks to me, Bill, as if we have a situation here where an unknown ship
from somewhere--I'm not saying where--has investigated two ships on
maneuvers and finally chosen to hover over one, for what reasons we
don't know. To me it looks like the only things we can do is notify
Washington and stand by for orders."
Great God, the Captain thought, disgusted, there was nothing worse than
a Commander bucking for four stripes. A more cautious man didn't exist
on the face of the Earth nor, possibly, a more fearful one. Fear that
whatever decision you made would be the wrong one and the Promotion
Board would pass you by. So you carefully avoided making any decisions
at all. He had been the same way himself. You salved your lack of guts
with the knowledge that once you made captain, things would be different
and you could assert yourself, be the man you had always considered
yourself to be. Only once you became a captain things didn't change a
bit, because then you were trying to get the Promotion Board to
recommend you for Admiral. The only men in the Navy who had any guts
were the young men who didn't know any better and the old bastards who
had made Admiral and no longer had any ambition as far as rank went.
* * * * *