[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

where: it would be posted in his file. He and Gori saluted, and retired
without tripping over anything - at that point Tim was mildly surprised to
find out his body worked as usual.
Curiosity returned on the way to their quarters. He looked sideways at
Gori. No help there. But who were the husky, skin-clad indigenes? They had to
be human, unless everything he'd been told about evolution was wrong. Why had
someone built a landing grid on an uncharted planet?
Who were the people in the Fleet uniforms, if they weren't from this ship?
Alone with Gori in their quarters, he had no one to ask. Gori said nothing,
simply called up the Fleet Regulations: XXIII Edition on screen, and
highlighted the passages the captain had mentioned. The computer spat out a
hardcopy, and Gori handed it to Tim. Duties, obligations, penalties
... he tried not to let it sink in, but it got past his defenses anyway.
Disobeying a captain's direct order in the presence of a hostile (or
Page 127
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
presumed hostile) force was grounds for anything the captain chose to do about
it, including summary execution. She could have left him there, left both of
them there, including innocent Gori, if she'd wanted to, and no one in Fleet
would have had a quibble.
For the first time, Tim thought about the stories he'd heard . . . why the
ship was so long in the repair yard, what kind of engagement that had been. A
colony plundered, while Sassinak did nothing, in hopes of catching more
pirates later. More than two or three people had died there; she had let them
die, to save others. He didn't like that a bit. Did she? The ones who'd talked
about it said not, but ... if she really cared, how could she? Men and women,
children, people of all sorts - rich, poor, in between - had died because she
didn't do what he had done -
she didn't come tearing in to save them.
Gradually, in the hollow silence between his bunk and Gori's, Tim began to
build a new vision of what the Fleet really was, and what his captain had
intended. What he had messed up, with his romantic and gallant nonsense. Those
people in the colony had died, so that Sassinak could trace their attackers to
powers behind them. Some of her crew had died, trying to save the children,
and then destroy a pirate base. This very voyage probably had something to do
with the same kind of trouble, and saving two lives just didn't mean that
much. If he himself had been killed before his rash act - and for the first
time he really faced that chilling possibility of not-being - it would have
done Fleet no harm, and possibly his captain some good.
When the chime rang for duty, Tim set off for his new job (cleaning sludge
from the filters) with an entirely new attitude. He fully intended to become
the reformed young officer the Fleet so needed, and for several hours worked
diligently. No more jokes, no more wild notions: sober reality. He recited the
regulations under his breath, just in case the captain should appear in this
smelly little hole.
In this mood of determined obedience to nature and nature's god in the person
of his captain, he didn't even smile when Jig Turner, partner in several
earlier escapades, appeared in the hatchway.
"I guess you know," said Turner.
"I know if I don't finish these filters, we'll be breathing this stink."
"This isn't bad - you should smell the planet's atmosphere." Turner lounged
against the bulkhead, patently idle, with the air of someone who desperately
wants to tell a secret.
"You've been out?" Despite himself, Tim couldn't fail to ask that.
"Well, no. Not out exactly, but we all smelled it when they brought the
injuries in. Worse than this . . . like organic lab." Turner leaned closer.
"Listen, Tim - did you really fire on that transport?"
"No! I put a tractor on the airsled, that's all."
"I wish you had blown it."
"I didn't have anything to blow it with. But why? The captain's mad enough
that I caught the sled."
"D'you know what that transport was?" Of course he didn't, and he shook his
head. Turner went on, lowering her voice. "Heavyworlders."
"So?"
"So think
, Tim. Heavyworlders, meatheads, in a transport - tried to tell the captain
they were answering a distress beacon, but it scans like a colony ship. To a
proscribed planet . . . which has heavyworlders on it already
."
"Huh?" He couldn't follow this. "The ones in the airsled?"
"No. The ones on the ground . . . near the transport, and getting the victims
out . . . you must have been watching, Tim, even you."
"I saw them, but they didn't look like heavyworlders . . . exactly." Now he
came to think of it, they had been big and well-muscled.
Page 128
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"It's a heavyworlder plot
," Turner went on quickly. "They wanted the planet - there was a mutiny, I
heard, in a scouting expedition, and the heavyworlders started eating raw
meat, and killed the others and ate them - "
"I don't believe it!" But he would, if he let himself think about it. Eating
one sentient being had to be the same as eating another: that's why the
prohibition. He'd had an aunt who wouldn't eat anything synthesized from
perennial plants, on the grounds that shrubs and trees might be sentient.
"The thing is, if one heavyworlder can mutiny, why not all? There's already
this bunch of them living free out there, eating meat and wearing skins -
what's to stop the ones on this ship from going crazy, too? Maybe it's the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]