See, what we really wanted was an ocean liner.
The rest of us probably would have been happy enough to stay in Lehigh
County, but Arthur was getting restless.
He was a terrible responsibility, in a way. I suppose there were a
hundred thousand people or so left in the country, and not more than
forty or fifty of them were like Arthur--I mean if you want to call a
man in a prosthetic tank a "person." But we all did. We'd got pretty
used to him. We'd shipped together in the war--and survived together,
as a few of the actual fighters did, those who were lucky enough to be
underwater or high in the air when the ICBMs landed--and as few
civilians did.
I mean there wasn't much chance for surviving, for anybody who
happened to be breathing the open air when it happened. I mean you can
do just so much about making a "clean" H-bomb, and if you cut out the
long-life fission products, the short-life ones get pretty deadly.
Anyway, there wasn't much damage, except of course that everybody was
dead. All the surface vessels lost their crews. All the population of
the cities were gone. And so then, when Arthur slipped on the
gangplank coming into Newport News and broke his fool neck, why, we
had the whole staff of the _Sea Sprite_ to work on him. I mean what
else did the surgeons have to do?
Of course, that was a long time ago.
But we'd stayed together. We headed for the farm country around
Allentown, Pennsylvania, because Arthur and Vern Engdahl claimed to
know it pretty well. I think maybe they had some hope of finding
family or friends, but naturally there wasn't any of that. And when
you got into the inland towns, there hadn't been much of an attempt to
clean them up. At least the big cities and the ports had been gone
over, in some spots anyway, by burial squads. Although when we finally
decided to move out and went to Philadelphia--
Well, let's be fair; there had been fighting around there after the
big fight. Anyway, that wasn't so very uncommon. That was one of the
reasons that for a long time--four or five years, at any rate--we
stayed away from big cities.
We holed up in a big farmhouse in Lehigh County. It had its own
generator from a little stream, and that took care of Arthur's power
needs; and the previous occupants had been just crazy about stashing
away food. There was enough to last a century, and that took care of
the two of us. We appreciated that. We even took the old folks out and
gave them a decent burial. I mean they'd all been in the family car,
so we just had to tow it to a gravel pit and push it in.
The place had its own well, with an electric pump and a hot-water
system--oh, it was nice. I was sorry to leave but, frankly, Arthur was
driving us nuts.
We never could make the television work--maybe there weren't any
stations near enough. But we pulled in a couple of radio stations
pretty well and Arthur got a big charge out of listening to them--see,
he could hear four or five at a time and I suppose that made him feel
better than the rest of us.
He heard that the big cities were cleaned up and every one of them
seemed to want immigrants--they were pleading, pleading all the time,
like the TV-set and vacuum-cleaner people used to in the old days;
they guaranteed we'd like it if we only came to live in Philly, or
Richmond, or Baltimore, or wherever. And I guess Arthur kind of hoped
we might find another pross. And then--well, Engdahl came up with this
idea of an ocean liner.
It figured. I mean you get out in the middle of the ocean and what's
the difference what it's like on land? And it especially appealed to
Arthur because he wanted to do some surface sailing. He never had when
he was real--I mean when he had arms and legs like anybody else. He'd
gone right into the undersea service the minute he got out of school.
And--well, sailing was what Arthur knew something about and I suppose
even a prosthetic man wants to feel useful. It was like Amy said: He
could be hooked up to an automated factory--
Or to a ship.
* * * * *
HQ for the Major's Temporary Military Government--that's what the sign
said--was on the 91st floor of the Empire State Building, and right
there that tells you something about the man. I mean you know how much
power it takes to run those elevators all the way up to the top? But
the Major must have liked being able to look down on everybody else.
Amy Bankhead conducted me to his office and sat me down to wait for
His Military Excellency to arrive. She filled me in on him, to some
degree. He'd been an absolute nothing before the war; but he had a
reserve commission in the Air Force, and when things began to look
sticky, they'd called him up and put him in a Missile Master control
point, underground somewhere up around Ossining.
He was the duty officer when it happened, and naturally he hadn't
noticed anything like an enemy aircraft, and naturally the
anti-missile missiles were still rusting in their racks all around the
city; but since the place had been operating on sealed ventilation,
the duty complement could stay there until the short half-life
radioisotopes wore themselves out.
And then the Major found out that he was not only in charge of the
fourteen men and women of his division at the center--he was ranking
United States Military Establishment officer farther than the eye
could see. So he beat it, fast as he could, for New York, because what
Army officer doesn't dream about being stationed in New York? And he
set up his Temporary Military Government--and that was nine years ago.
If there hadn't been plenty to go around, I don't suppose he would
have lasted a week--none of these city chiefs would have. But as
things were, he was in on the ground floor, and as newcomers trickled
into the city, his boys already had things nicely organized.
It was a soft touch.
* * * * *
Well, we were about a week getting settled in New York and things were
looking pretty good. Vern calmed me down by pointing out that, after
all, we had to sell Arthur, and hadn't we come out of it plenty okay?
And we had. There was no doubt about it. Not only did we have a fat
price for Arthur, which was useful because there were a lot of things
we would have to buy, but we both had jobs working for the Major.
Vern was his specialist in the care and feeding of Arthur and I was
his chief of office routine--and, as such, I delighted his fussy
little soul, because by adding what I remembered of Navy protocol to
what he was able to teach me of Army routine, we came up with as
snarled a mass of red tape as any field-grade officer in the whole
history of all armed forces had been able to accumulate. Oh, I tell
you, nobody sneezed in New York without a report being made out in
triplicate, with eight endorsements.
Of course there wasn't anybody to send them to, but that didn't stop
the Major. He said with determination: "Nobody's ever going to chew
_me_ out for non-compliance with regulations--even if I have to invent
the regulations myself!"
We set up in a bachelor apartment on Central Park South--the Major had
the penthouse; the whole building had been converted to barracks--and
the first chance we got, Vern snaffled some transportation and we set
out to find an ocean liner.
See, the thing was that an ocean liner isn't easy to steal. I mean
we'd scouted out the lay of the land before we ever entered the city
itself, and there were plenty of liners, but there wasn't one that
looked like we could just jump in and sail it away. For that we needed
an organization. Since we didn't have one, the best thing to do was
borrow the Major's.
Vern turned up with Amy Bankhead's MG, and he also turned up with Amy.
I can't say I was displeased, because I was beginning to like the
girl; but did you ever try to ride three people in the seats of an MG?
Well, the way to do it is by having one passenger sit in the other
passenger's lap, which would have been all right except that Amy
insisted on driving.
We headed downtown and over to the West Side. The Major's
Topographical Section--one former billboard artist--had prepared road
maps with little red-ink Xs marking the streets that were blocked,
which was most of the streets; but we charted a course that would take
us where we wanted to go. Thirty-fourth Street was open, and so was
Fifth Avenue all of its length, so we scooted down Fifth, crossed
over, got under the Elevated Highway and whined along uptown toward
the Fifties.
"There's one," cried Amy, pointing.
I was on Vern's lap, so I was making the notes. It was a Fruit Company
combination freighter-passenger vessel. I looked at Vern, and Vern
shrugged as best he could, so I wrote it down; but it wasn't exactly
what we wanted. No, not by a long shot.
* * * * *
Still, the thing to do was to survey our resources, and then we could
pick the one we liked best. We went all the way up to the end of the
big-ship docks, and then turned and came back down, all the way to the
Battery. It wasn't pleasure driving, exactly--half a dozen times we
had to get out the map and detour around impenetrable jams of stalled
and empty cars--or anyway, if they weren't exactly empty, the people
in them were no longer in shape to get out of our way. But we made it.
We counted sixteen ships in dock that looked as though they might do
for our purposes. We had to rule out the newer ones and the
reconverted jobs. I mean, after all, U-235 just lasts so long, and you
can steam around the world on a walnut-shell of it, or whatever it is,
but you can't store it. So we had to stick with the ships that were
powered with conventional fuel--and, on consideration, only oil at
that.
But that left sixteen, as I say. Some of them, though, had suffered
visibly from being left untended for nearly a decade, so that for our
purposes they might as well have been abandoned in the middle of the
Atlantic; we didn't have the equipment or ambition to do any great
amount of salvage work.
The _Empress of Britain_ would have been a pretty good bet, for instance,
except that it was lying at pretty nearly a forty-five-degree angle in
its berth. So was the _United States_, and so was the _Caronia_. The
_Stockholm_ was straight enough, but I took a good look, and only one
tier of portholes was showing above the water--evidently it had
settled nice and even, but it was on the bottom all the same. Well,
that mud sucks with a fine tight grip, and we weren't going to try to
loosen it.
All in all, eleven of the sixteen ships were out of commission just
from what we could see driving by.
Vern and I looked at each other. We stood by the MG, while Amy
sprawled her legs over the side and waited for us to make up our
minds.
"Not good, Sam," said Vern, looking worried.
I said: "Well, that still leaves five. There's the _Vulcania_, the
_Cristobal_--"
"Too small."
"All right. The _Manhattan_, the _Liberte_ and the _Queen Elizabeth_."
Amy looked up, her eyes gleaming. "Where's the question?" she
demanded. "Naturally, it's the _Queen_."