I hate him,' Jimmy says. 'He used to be the doctor in a Siren cathouse.'
I know what that means. Money from the Madam to pass her girls, in advanced stages of one of the fifty-seven venereal diseases endemic in the Cities of the Red Night,
'Sometimes I wish it was one thing or the other. Tamaghis or the navy,' I complain. 'Six years in the navy and what did it get us? Give me Tamaghis. It beats swabbing decks and fucking clapper dry-cunt whores.'
'It does at that,' agrees Jimmy.
'What about Blum?'
'It's open war now between Krup and Hollywood.'
'Sounds like a scriptwriter's paradise.'
'It is and that's why they drafted you into the navy where they don't have to pay you anything but navy pay. Got you for a pop. Same way they got all of us.'
'So this ship is manned by the hanged.'
'Sure. That's how we all got shanghaied.'
'The Germans too?'
'Second generation. They are all artificial-insemination kids from one hanged father.'
I closed my eyes, feeling very relaxed and comfortable in Jimmy's body, and I could remember the little Michigan lake town. Fishing was the big thing then, carp and lake trout. At fourteen I ran away to join the navy with a forged birth certificate. Two years later they found it out and the President himself pardoned me—it was in all the papers. And I could remember this dream I kept having about a strange city with red light in the streets and then I was in a room naked and could see other people there naked too and suddenly they are all looking at me, I get a hard-on and go off and sometimes one of the faces lights up just as I start to shoot. And that was the first time I saw Jimmy Lee, long before I met him in the navy after my pardon. I was learning to be a radio operator and I'd gone to the radio room when this new kid with tech stripes looks up and smiles at me just like he did in the dream.
'We met—in a way, that is ... weren't you in the Double G the other night?'
I remembered a place I'd wandered into where everybody was looking at something I couldn't see. The way they were looking and a smell in the place got me hot and Jimmy looking at me like that, I was getting a hard-on now so I sat down to hide it and lit a cigarette.
Jimmy starts filling me in on the officers. He always knew who was what aboard ship. 'The Old Man's a real asshole and you can't smear it on too thick—tell him you want to be buried right in the same coffin with him when you die. Anyhoo, I think we're getting a new C.O. You see, this is a kook project with simulated space conditions and the old C.O. can't adjust. So they have called in someone called Krup von Nordenholz, a Nazi war criminal, I hear, but a space expert. So forget about the old C.O. Never butter a man on the way out or you can slip right out with him. Like to bunk with me? Just one other kid in the room, Jim Lewis. You'll like him and he'll like you, too....'
The investiture of the new C.O. was not unopposed and a period of chaos followed.
Stepping into the hall, I saw three naked boys swabbing the corridor, wriggling their asses and goosing each other. The old C.O., with the master-at-arms, bustles round a corner.
'This is disgraceful! Arrest these men!'
'Are we going to be popped, Commander?'
'Bare-ass in front of all our mates?'
'These men are obviously deranged. Call the medics. Reefer madness most likely. If it's dope they are to be transferred to the prison ward.'
