Slave Ship by Frederik Pohl

was dead, and he hadn't died easily. "The Glotch."
    "The Glotch," said Kedrick. "You were here before. Any ideas about this?"
    The only idea I had was to get away from that face—it reminded me of how close I had come, back in Miami. I said so.
    Lineback sighed heavily, and I could hear him scratching his long jaw in the darkness. "So they've spotted Mako," he said. "Somebody's going to catch bloody blue hell for this. Well, let's get him to the sick bay, you medics."
    I didn't stop in the wardroom; I went right to bed, but not immediately to sleep. Oswiak's face was too clear before me.
    It isn't that I'm particularly queasy. I've seen dead men more times than one, I've been close enough to dying myself, not only in Miami, not only in the action after the stockade break, but on Spruance .
    But Oswiak had been burned; and there is something especially repellent about a man who has died of burns, yards from anywhere, in the middle of a healthy, unsinged stand of crab grass. It wasn't natural; it wasn't decent.
    I swore at Semyon when he tried to wake me for breakfast, and slept right through until he came back to the room just before lunch. By then, of course, he knew as much as I did—he and all the rest of Project Mako, all the more because Commander Lineback had put out an order-of-the-day placing the whole subject under top secret classification. Naturally, that insured that every officer and rating on the project had to find out just what it was that was secret; but it made it possible for me to duck discussing it with Semyon, who had a somber interest in such matters.
    It wasn't much of a working day for me. I went down to my workroom after lunch, but I wasn't there half an hour when the usual rating appeared with the usual compliments-and-get-the-devil-down-here from Lineback.
    This time, for a novelty, he seemed almost sympathetic. "I've been talking to COMBARI," he said abruptly. "You're in trouble, Miller."
    "Yes, sir," I said.
    "That's nothing new, eh? Well, you're right; it's nothing new. I've had you on this carpet before about using Giordano to get in touch with your wife, and that's what you're in trouble about today. However, I'm sorry to say that you're in a little more trouble now."
    I said, "Yes, sir."
    "You damned young fool!" he exploded. "How does it feel to have killed a man, Miller?"
    That startled me. " Killed —"
    "Or the next thing to it. You saw him last night, Chief Oswiak, with his throat burned out."
    I screamed, "That's not fair , Commander! I—"
    " Shut up , Miller ." He got control of himself with a visible effort. "You didn't do anything on purpose, no. In fact, you don't do much on purpose ever, do you? You blunder into things. Like you blundered into this one—and killed off a CPO. Ah," he finished moodily, "the hell with it. I just called you in here to tell you what COMCARIB said. If those burns are a Caodai secret weapon—there's small doubt of it, Miller—there's evidence that they are linked with ESP transmission. From Project Mako, I guarantee, there has been absolutely no ESP transmission. Except once—not from here, but from Miami, when I didn't have my eyes on you for a moment; and that transmission was from you."
    There was more, but it didn't matter. He reamed me out and through and up and down; but it didn't hurt very much because I was numb. I did not enjoy the thought that, however stupidly and unwittingly, I had helped the Cow-dyes kill an American.
    "—there won't be any court-martial," he was finishing, and I focused on him again. "But you deserve it, Miller, and I want you to know that from here until you leave this base, I'm watching you."
    That seemed to be that. I said, "Yes, sir," automatically, and saluted, and turned to leave.
    But he wasn't quite finished. "One more thing," he said, his expression unreadable. "I picked up a piece of information that you might be interested in. You were on Spruance before you came here, weren't you?"
    "Yes, sir."
    "Then you