Slave Ship by Frederik Pohl Page B

thunderhead scowl, and I saw why. Over against the wall, decorously eating in the midst of the uproar, ignoring the band blaring in their ears and the chorus line kicking past their noses, sat Commander Lineback and a dowdy middle-aged WAVE j.g. "Even here he follows us!" hissed Semyon.
    "Don't mind him," I said. "Who's the woman?"
    Semyon pursed his lips. "You have never met the officer, his wife? A very charming lady—almost as charming as this who comes now!" He swiveled his chair around, eyes gleaming, completely forgetting about the commander and his lady. The feature stripper of the evening was making her appearance. She was new, but I had heard of her. She was actually a commissioned officer, which meant talent a good cut above the usual level of the Passion Pit, most of whose entertainers were lucky to hope to make CPO. I flagged a waiter and ordered beer—the best you could do in the Pit—and sat back to enjoy myself.
    But it was not to be. The three-piece "orchestra" had just begun the slow, deep-beat number that the stripper worked to when fireworks began going off outside. Sirens blared and search beams lashed the sky, and shots and signal rockets and more commotion than New Year's Eve in a madhouse. Semyon said something startled and violent in Russian, and we craned our necks to see out the window.
    Something was going on down at the beach, but we could not see precisely what. "Let us go look," Semyon proposed gleefully. "Perhaps they have caught a pacifist."
    "Pacifist. But I just ordered a beer, and the show—"
    "Logan, there is no show," he said severely. He was right; the stripper was standing at the window, staring out; the musicians were right behind her. It was more exciting outside the Passion Pit than in, at that. Half the population of the town seemed to be beating the waterfront. "Let us look!"
    He wasn't the only one with that idea. We joined the throng beating its way down to the scene of the excitement. It was a fine, warm night, smelling of hibiscus and decaying palms, not fitting for so much turmoil. "Pacifist, pacifist!" Semyon was bawling; and whether he was the first to have the idea or not I cannot say, but in a moment it seemed that the whole town was screaming, "Lynch the dirty pacifists! String 'em up!"
    It was a frightening exhibition of mob violence, erupting out of nothing, driving remorselessly to a bloody goal. I had seen a lynching like this one once before, back in New York, when ten square miles of countryside converged to dip one man by his heels into his own cistern. It turned out later that the original trouble has been over land and the man was no more a pacifist than you or I, only a queer, moody sort of recluse from the city; but that must have been little enough consolation to him when the rope broke. Not that I doubted that pacifists, and dangerous ones, really existed; but there had been no pacifist there in Barton.
    And there was none here. The crowd surged to the water's edge and stopped.
    In a writhing heap on a baggage cart, covered with a blanket, was a casualty of the cold war. An Army medical colonel was beside him, methodically injecting a series of drugs into an arm that was held by two sick-faced men. The injured man was unconscious and he wasn't screaming; but he was in pain.
    Someone in authority was questioning the colonel. The medic shrugged without looking up. "I don't know," he said. "Obstetrics is my specialty, but I think he'll be all right. No, I don't know what did it. He was on harbor patrol, es—"
    He looked up, and a curtain descended over his face. "You'll have to ask somebody else," he said shortly. He waved at the fireworks out over the water. "They've found something, that's all I know."
    They had found it, all right; there were more light Navy vessels, mostly high-speed hydrofoils, skimming over the water than I had seen since the Fleet exercises. The show went on for half an hour before we found out just what it was that they had