Prize Crew

By Gene Wolfe

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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Looks like 2004 is going to be a bumper year for Gene Wolfe. The author’s most recent novel, The Knight, the first in ‘The Book of the Wizard Knight’ series, appeared in January with the second volume—The Wizard—due in November. Meanwhile, June will see the publication of Gene’s new collection of short stories, Innocents Aboard. Never one to sit idle, Gene is also currently working on the third book in his ‘Soldier’ series, Soldier of Sidon. And then, of course, there’s also this...

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I just got back here after ninety-seven years TST and found out about what’s been depopulating, and I think I ought to tell you this stuff. Maybe Lang and Prescott have already. Only if they did, I don’t think you paid enough attention. Here goes.

We found that Miscreet ship abandoned three days after the battle—a light cruiser from the look of her, just drifting way out between suns. She hadn’t been hit, so it didn’t look like there had been any reason for the crew to bail out, but there was nobody on board as far as we could see, and the lifeboats were gone. So they put us on board to take her home. That’s Ensign Parker, Lang, Prescott, and me. Lang was our computer man, Prescott electrical. I’m a Machinist’s Mate. Parker was younger than any of us, which might be important. I don’t know. She was only a couple of years out of the academy was what everybody said.

All the guys on the Wake kept telling us how lucky we were to be going home, and we kept thinking, “Right. If we make it....“ because it was a Miscreet ship, and who could read the manuals? Or even bring them up on the screen?

Or stand the stink.

“Take it as it comes” is what I’ve always said. It’s what I’ve learned—the main thing—from fourteen SYs in the Navy. So I didn’t worry, knowing that all the worrying in the galaxy wouldn’t do a lick of good. But when that Miscreet airlock that looked like it was going to eat you shut behind us and Stachowski said on my phones they were pulling away, I felt like the bottom had dropped out. I was scared but too busy to stay scared long. We located places to store our rations and the flabbybags of water, and set up the recycler and turned it on. It had its own power supply, so that was one thing we didn’t have to worry about.

Just about the only thing. Ensign Parker and Lang found the bridge and started trying to get her under power, taking everything real slow and easy at first and putting out a signal to tell anybody that saw her she was Navy now. Prescott and I were supposed to inventory and make sketch maps of all decks.

Which we did. I won’t tell you everything we found, but one was the atmosphere regenerator. It was pretty simple, and before long we had it tuned to Terra, but it kept drifting, mostly sick and sweet. Another one was the machine shop. I stayed in there quite a while just looking around. There was a computermill, like you’d expect, but it was pretty easy to switch it to hand control. I made chips to get the hang of it and started trying to switch over the lathe.

Prescott came back and said he’d found the Miscreets’ living quarters, little one-guy cabins with beds, and did I want one. I said it might be better if we all bunked together, at least for the first few nights. He said to hell with that, come and have a look.

So I did.

They looked more human than I’d expected. The John was set level with the floor and had funny hoses, but you knew what it was. The bunk was too short and too wide, but I figured we’d be off if we ever got her into Terra orbit, so what the hell? I put a sheet of plastic over the bunk to keep in the stink and saw where I could tie my sack. I’ve slept worse. So I got my spacebag and threw it in the compartment next to Prescott’s, figuring if something hit the fan we could pound on the bulkhead. Only when I told him, he showed me how that was all storage, the funny pull-out boxes Miscreets use instead of drawers and cabinets.

Okay it was alien, but it wasn’t so alien that you couldn’t get used to it after a night or two, which I did. Naturally I didn’t spend much time in there. There was a hell of a lot to do, and whenever Ensign Parker was too busy to find jobs for us, we found plenty for ourselves. No problem.

Then she jumped. Maybe that had something to do with it. Or maybe we picked up something earlier, only I think really the Miscreets had, but I don’t know. We jumped and that big yellow star up close was Sol, and that bright one over there was Jupiter, and all of us felt like we’d made it and went around smiling a whole lot. Home!

Here I ought to backtrack and tell you we had put our names on the compartment doors with black spray paint Lang found. Nothing fancy. Starting at the end and heading for the companionway, it was Prescott, me, Lang, and Parker, all in a bunch.

She was a pretty good officer, and I ought to say that if I’m going to level with you. She was all business and no chickenshit, which is how I like them. You knew right off that you might never find out what the S and P in S.P. Parker stood for, and pretty soon you knew, too, that if you kept your flap shut and did your job there’d be no problem. Brown skin, black hair, neat and clean, a hundred and sixty centimeters or a little past. That’s funny to think about. Now, I mean. Now it’s funny.

So we jumped, like I said. That night I sacked out like always, but I woke up before my tick started and I was in a closet. That’s the way it seemed. There was room for the bed, and my sack over it, okay? Only there wasn’t a hell of a lot more, and I got the feeling that if I got out of the sack there wouldn’t be that much. I zipped out and got my everlight (the Miscreets aren’t big on lights) and looked around, and it was no dream. For me to put my right hand on one wall and my left on the other I had to bend my elbows. Pretty soon it hit me that it might be getting smaller all the time and I better bail out. I couldn’t hardly straighten up, it was that tight, but I did and got into my coverall. It didn’t seem to be getting smaller after that, so I got my boots.

Just then Lang beat on the door. I hollered okay and went out as soon as I had my boots on, and grabbed him and showed him my compartment.

“My gosh,” he said. Lang said things like gosh. “Mine’s twice that big. You oughta get another one.”

Well, I tried to tell him, but he wouldn’t believe me.

After that I had to take the watch, and if there’s anything lonelier than standing watch on a Miscreet ship, I don’t want to hear about it — man can only take so much. It’s quiet and it’s quiet and it’s quiet, and then a machine turns itself on somewhere way the hell away and you don’t know what it is or what it’s doing, and maybe it didn’t turn itself on after all. Maybe something did it. Or maybe it’s not a machine at all. There was one that sounded like a leopard coughing. Naturally I didn’t know then about this thing Terra’s got now. But I felt like I did and it was on the ship if you know what I mean.

You whistle and you sing the words you can remember, and you check all the numbers that you checked five minutes ago. But mostly you look out of ports at Sol and that blue dot close to it that’s so small you can’t hardly see it.

Pretty soon the numbers say it’ll be Prescott in half an hour, and you wonder how long it’ll take him to get dressed. A long time, probably, and maybe you ought to wake him up right now.

Then here’s Prescott, “Why the hell did you have to make so much noise?”

I said okay I whistled some and floated around, but you couldn’t have heard me down there.

“Whistled, hell,” says Prescott. “You were banging on everything. I figured everybody was awake but me, and you were tearing out the bulkhead to get at pipes or something.”

I told him he was crazy, and he told me I was. And after that I said go screw yourself and a lot more and went back to my compartment figuring I’d pack up my bag and move into another one.

You saw it coming, I bet. That’s right, there was nothing wrong with my compartment. Not one damn thing.

I packed up anyway and pushed along that corridor as far as you could go and took the one farthest from the bridge. Next day was next day and we worked like dogs, a lot of it Lang and me trying to figure out how to make the tools run our programs.

So after that I deserved to turn in and get a good night’s sleep, only I had first watch. About halfway through Prescott came up and bulwarked me. At zero g, you can’t just back your punch with your weight the way you would on Terra, you’ve got to brace your feet somehow. Prescott was pretty good at it, too. It took me maybe eight, ten tries before his nose got to bleeding. After that I had time to grab something. Which I did, and hit him with it. It was Ensign Parker’s coder, and it’s just a damn good thing they build them tough for the Navy.

Prescott quit fighting and backed off, and tried to stop his nose with his handkerchief and his sleeve. I poked my finger in his chest. I told him he was a son of a bitch, and he’d coldcocked me when I was on duty, and he’d pull ten in Sonyang for it if it took the rest of my life to get him sent up.

“You were down in your compartment,” Prescott said, “pounding on the bulkheads when you ought to have been on, and I’ll swear to that anytime, anywhere.”

I said the hell I was, and we went back and forth about it, and finally I got sense enough to tell him I wasn’t even bunking there anymore. After that we went to my new compartment, and I showed him how I had all my stuff stowed in there.

Then we went to look at my old one. And the doors said Prescott, blank, me, Lang, and Parker. Prescott said, “What the hell?” and I said what the hell, and we tried to open the blank door. It was locked on the inside, but we could hear something moving around in there. So he said, “What’ll you take to stand my watch with me?” I said, “With you? You ain’t got that much,” and went into my new compartment and dogged the door on the inside good, you bet.

Only I didn’t sleep a lot. For one thing, my jaw hurt and my ribs on the left side. For another, I kept thinking about the last Miscreet on the ship coming out of that door and going for Prescott. That was okay at first and got me to smiling again. Only after a while not so good.

Then I got to sleep.

He was fine in the morning, except for his nose. He told Ensign Parker he’d got going too fast trying to check out a funny noise in one of the green corridors that kept twisting, and run into the bulkhead. I know damned well she didn’t believe him, because I saw her sneak a look at my knuckles, but a good officer knows there’s times to ask and times not to, and she was a good officer like I said.

So that’s when I stepped in, and if you want to say all this is my fault, okay. That’s how I feel too. I told her there had been all this noise during the night, and Prescott thought it was me, but it wasn’t. And I said I thought I knew where it was coming from, only the door was locked and I hadn’t be able to get in there.

She said it had kept her awake some, and she’d been expecting one of us to knock on her door and tell her something was wrong. Only nobody had. Then she said to show her, and I took her down to Deck 3 where we had been bunking and showed her the blank door. She said someone had taken off the paint and repainted the signs. She said she knew she hadn’t moved and she was still in the same compartment she’d always had so it had been Prescott. He’d moved down one and painted his name on the new door and wiped the old name with some kind of stuff that would take off paint. Naturally Prescott said no way.

Ensign Parker tried the handle then, and it wasn’t locked for her. It opened real easy and she went in. It shut behind her, too, and we figured we’d better leave her alone in there if that was what she wanted.

She didn’t scream or anything, she just went inside and dogged the door. Or something did, because it wouldn’t open any more.

When she hadn’t come out after a couple of hours, Lang said the hell with it he was going to knock and make sure she was okay. He went down there, and when he came back he said there wasn’t any compartment like that. Just the four doors, all in a row, with our names painted on them. We said did you look in those? Lang said, “You bet I did. I knocked on her door, and when she didn’t answer I opened it. After that I looked in every darned compartment on the deck, and by gosh there wasn’t anybody in any of them.” After that we slept on the bridge, all three of us.

Well, we got her into Terra orbit and reported, and they put us under and questioned us a lot. You know how they do. After that they said they’d take care of it and returned us to duty.

So I shipped out again, and now I’m back, and from what I hear this thing has already cleaned out half of North America and nobody knows what to do. Everybody calls it the alien or the monster, and says it’s worse than the Miscreets. Okay, maybe it is, but I’ve got to tell you it’s no alien, and you’ve got to believe me on this one because I know. Maybe then we can do something. If the Navy will listen, maybe we can pull up her records and take care of it some way.

It isn’t an alien or a monster either.

It’s Ensign Parker.

Check out her file, her psych profile and all that, and maybe you can find something you can use. The way it looks to me, that’s Terra’s only hope. You can do it or not, I guess. Up to you. I told you, and now I’m shipping out again. Good luck.

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