Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies and Others

Isaac was no longer mugging — he was astonished, as usual, by Heinlein’s total disregard for his feelings. Heinlein hustled him up the gangplank. “Get a move on. Ensign Hopper is waiting to show us around. He’ll introduce us to the officers in charge of the experiment.”

“Where’s Sprague? Can’t he go in my place? It was really his idea — he knows a lot more about this kind of stuff than I do. I’m a chemist, for Pete’s sake. The only military information I have is about dye markers.”

“Sprague’s monitoring the experiment from the base. We need you on the ship.” They’d reached the top of the gangplank. Heinlein looked around. “Where’s that ensign?”

An attractive woman in a WAVE uniform walked up to them. Isaac eyed her appreciatively: trim figure, mass of dark hair, great cheekbones, lovely face. A brunette version, he thought, of Sprague’s wife Catherine, who was without a doubt the most beautiful woman he had ever met. Isaac waggled his eyebrows. “Navy life suddenly looks a lot more attractive, Bob.” He was joking, of course, but he welcomed any distraction from the panic welling up in his chest.

The WAVE nodded to each of them in an official way. Since they were civilians, she didn’t salute. But she conveyed an unmistakable air of Naval authority in the making. “Mr. Heinlein? Mr. Asimov? I’m Ensign Hopper. I’ll be in charge of Project Rainbow.”

For once in his life, Heinlein’s legendary aplomb failed him. “Excuse me, Ensign, but…you’re going to be on board the ship? ” It was an unbreakable rule that the Navy did not allow women to serve on ships.

Ensign Hopper’s mouth twisted ironically. “They made me an honorary nurse.” Nurses were the exception to the unbreakable rule.

She turned away.

Isaac could hardly contain his laughter. “Well, Bob,” he said softly, so their new superior couldn’t hear. “I guess we know now what the Navy thinks of our idea. They put an ensign in charge.”

He started whistling again. But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

After just a few hours at sea, Bob Heinlein had come to realize that Ensign Hopper was, for a military woman, a remarkably unknown quantity.

“Mind your head, sir.”

Footsteps echoing, Bob and Asimov clambered down ladders and clattered along passageways and ducked through hatches still gray-gleaming with primer, led by Seaman First Class Kobinski, who looked to Bob all of twelve years old and as fresh as the ship’s paint.

“Summoned below decks by an ensign,” Asimov said.

“Stow it. The Ensign’s in charge of this project. If she says jump, we say ‘how high?’ This is the Navy, Isaac.”

“If I’ve been drafted, it’s news to me.”

Bob was happy to follow orders, even from a woman. Even if it brought his tendency toward seasickness to the fore, as had their interrupted assignment to check the insulation of the Tesla coils at the front of the ship.

Bob, in fact, was actively seeking to put himself entirely under someone’s command, and he wasn’t too particular about whose. He had written more than once to Ernest King, his commander aboard the Lexington, now chief of us naval operations. Admiral King knew Bob’s lungs were scarred from tuberculosis, but King knew grit, too, and intelligence, and leadership potential. It was only a matter of time: Bob would be back in action again.

In the meantime, it was good to be aboard a fast, state-of-the-art ship. The Eldridge was a Cannon -class destroyer escort, 1,230 tons, with the new gm twin-shaft diesel-electric drive. Twenty-one knots, easy. Bob had inspected the Eldridge ’s armament — the big three-inchers jutting proudly upward, the forty-millimeters in their metal pillboxes barnacled to the hull. He wanted to go below, to see the torpedo tubes with the new triple mounting. “Classified,” he was told. As if the whole damn cruise weren’t classified!

The Eldridge would make a fine command. It would carry 200 men at full complement. One commander, one brain, one will — and 200 bodies to effect that will.

“Mind your head, sir.”

They went down yet another empty corridor.

For this “unofficial” maiden cruise, which would be entered in no logbook, the ship carried far fewer than its normal complement of crew. Below decks felt like a house freshly built and furnished, then deserted. It was a weird atmosphere — spooky, even.

As a boy in Kansas City, Bob had been drawn to the sea and its mysteries. He’d read the tale of the brigantine Mary Celeste , discovered east of the Azores in 1872 with its galley fires still burning, its mess table laid for dinner, its crew and passengers nowhere to be seen. As he’d gotten older, he’d figured there was probably more to the story than the mystery, and he’d become more interested in the discipline of the Navy, in the structure of a command, in the intricacies of making hundreds of sailors function as a single effective force against the sea and against a common enemy. A few people overboard was a minor mystery, but a single powerful ship, functioning cleanly in peace and efficiently in battle, was a major triumph of human society.

His current surroundings had a certain Mary Celeste quality about them. But the ambience was not that of a vanished crew, but of a crew that had not yet filled its cabins. The wonder was not of what had happened, but of what was yet to come. Courage, cowardice, the essential business of men discovering the mettle of which they were made.

“Mind your head, sir.”

“Belay that, son.” This was not Bob’s first experience inside a ship, after all.

“Ensign Hopper? Here they are, ma’am.”

Bob and Asimov stepped over the threshold of a tiny room — what was it, a supply closet? — and, by entering, made it even tinier. Kobinski wisely waited outside. Hopper turned, hands on hips — she was one handsome woman, Bob realized anew — and smiled coldly. Lovely teeth, he thought.

“Are you gentlemen responsible for this?”

She gestured toward the wall of instruments behind her, an ungainly, patched-together, floor-to-ceiling mess of vacuum tubes, wires, capacitors, resistors, switches, gauges. Bob could see the blobby joins where components had been hastily soldered together and welded to the bulkhead.

“I’ve never seen this equipment before,” Asimov said. “Is it part of the experiment?”

“It is not . I noticed it just now as I was tracking wires around the ship, double-checking connections. It isn’t standard issue for a Cannon -class destroyer, I know that.”

Bob peered at the jungle of tubes and wires. “Whatever it is, it’s up and running. See those needles? They’re tracking toward the right, very slowly.”

Asimov shouldered alongside. “Hmm, so they are. What are they registering?”

“Dunno. No markings — just calibration lines.”

Hopper’s eyes were bright and hard as a hawk’s. “Two possibilities. One, the higher-ups have added some new wrinkles to your experiment without consulting us. Or two, the Tesla-coil project isn’t the only experiment the Navy is conducting aboard this ship.”

Asimov was visibly distressed. So much so that he forgot for the moment his overwhelming preoccupation with his own comfort. “But this will interfere with our experiment! How can we tell — ”

The lights flickered. There was a distant percussive noise, like a transformer blowing. The vibrations in the deck became jarringly intrusive — no longer the normal low-level trembling of the engines, but a rapid, foot-numbing pulsation. There was an acrid odor, like burning wires.