“Warship” is the very first SF story Martin ever tried to sell professionally. “Tried” being the operative word. It wasn’t until some years later when he showed the story to his friend George Guthridge—who saw something in it, and offered to rewrite it—that the story found a home in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Invulnerable, she is. Earth’s answer to Sarissa’s defiance of Earth authority, she carries fourteen lasercannon, dual solar guns, a belly filled with conventionally armed missiles. Self-repairing, computerized to a point approaching sentience, she has backup systems should any instruments prove defective—supervisory capacities should any of her crew of fifty-one prove derelict. She is powered by two Severs-stardrive engines.
She is
Graciously, gloriously she began her cruise homeward at five times lightspeed, her duralloy awash with starlight. Now she had stopped. Behind her, once reddened by Doppler shift, Sarissa’s sun is again gold.
He was the last of the crew, and his strength was waning. First Dutyman Lewis Akklar found solace in those facts, an emotion he felt but could not explain, something similar to what he once had felt toward the paintings of Degas and Renoir. He was sitting in the command chair, his eyes dull; now a smile creased his lips, turned the left corner of his mouth slightly upward. Back and forth, slowly back and forth he continued to swivel the chair. The smile broadened.
His legs were outstretched, and his pants, plastic and sweat-soaked, clung wetly to his legs. His face throbbed with heat; his temperature, he knew, was about 104 degrees. His hair—straight, black—was unkempt, and it occurred to him he needed a shave and shower, some sleep. That, too, he found ironic.
Except for the low humming of the instrument panel and an occasional click as a switch cut in, the bridge around him was empty.
On three sides the silent impersonal instruments winked their multicolored lights off and on in ever-changing patterns. Above him the viewscreen revealed its endless stars: an expanse of coldness and loneliness. He knew Sol was the bright yellow star in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Somehow he did not give a damn anymore.
So this was how it was to end. Belford, Petrovovich, Captain Doria, Lieutenant Judanya Kahr: all his friends and shipmates—killed by disease. Though capable of firing some of the most sophisticated weaponry ever installed in a spacecraft, the crew had not realized until too late for retaliation that the Sarissi emissaries had smuggled aboard a biological agent. Now only Ak-klaf, a clerk-holographer, remained.
Again he was conscious of the viewscreen. The galaxy seemed adazzle with pinpricks of light. Stars, knots in a salmon net, faces in a classroom: his mind had insisted upon those comparisons ever since he had volunteered for the international draft back home in the Republic of the Aleutians. Yet the loneliness he felt toward those images had preceded that induction by several years. It had been loneliness, he now knew—not wanderlust—which in mid- semester had taken him from those schoolchildren and set him upon the grease-blackened deck of the
He pressed a button in a console next to the chair. The door nearest the central control-panel hummed open. He rose, hands clutching the armrests to steady himself, and stumbled across the room, paused at the door—hands against the jamb. Then wild-eyed and smiling, he staggered down the dimly lit corridor.
“Judanya,” he said.
He pressed a wall button, a second door opened. Twenty sheeted figures, most on mattresses on the floor, lay within the small sickbay. Lieutenant Kahr was near the rear wall, an oxygen tent enclosing her, a sheet tucked neatly under her arms; she was the only one of the dead whose face was uncovered.
The oxygen tent crinkled when he folded back the side. He had been unable to force himself to close her eyelids; she gazed toward him unseeing, his form blackly mirrored within the pupils. With the back of his hand he touched her cold, cold cheek. Her lips were thin; her nose, sharply angular, made her face appear narrow. Except for a Mohawk-like mane of black hair, she was bald. The sight of her head slightly startled him; somehow he had thought death would overtake style, and her hair would grow back as long as it was when she had first boarded the ship two years earlier.
He combed the hair with his fingers. “Judanya,” he whispered. Light shone upon her forehead. He drew the sheet down over her breasts, her abdomen, down over her legs. He looked upon her as he had many times before: wanting her, not wanting her. Though she had sometimes slept with him, she had never loved him. Lengthy cohabitations between officers and enlisted had been discouraged, and she had refused to jeopardize her career for what she considered the insipid emotions he associated with sexuality; she needed orgasms, she had told him once, merely to relax. On his knees as though before an idol, he folded the sheet, overlay upon neat overlay, at her feet. Her pubic triangle looked at him. He bent forward and pressed his lips to her kneecap, his fingertips squeezing the back of her leg. “Judanya.” Tears welled. Back home, he knew, people were dying, laughing, loving. Such was the terror of it all, the terror and the loneliness he had felt within that crowded classroom back in Dutch Harbor: the knowledge that, whatever joy or sorrow he experienced, there existed emotions and happenings beyond his comprehension—people he could neither know nor touch nor even really imagine. Life would go on whether he was alive or not.
Unless, of course, the ship fell into Sarissi hands. Or if the members of an Earth ship contracted the disease and brought it home with them. Then all Earth would know of him, if only to hate. All would die. In a way—perhaps, he told himself, it was the fever—the notion appealed to him. Loneliness had brought him here; here, in death, his loneliness could end.
It was for Judanya—not for himself or humanity—that he would place the charges. For Judanya, who had been all duty and dispassion.
Judanya, who to him was the ship.
He left her, went to the armory for plastic explosives and an armload of looped fusewire, then returned to the control room. He flopped down in the command chair, so exhausted and feverish he could hardly breathe, and sat with his head in his hands. Finally, straightening, he sighed and lifted the vocoder from its cradle in the console. Except for his perfunctory remarks earlier in the day, the log had not been kept for weeks.
“Transcription of First Duty-man Lewis Akklar continuing at . . . ” He glanced at his watch. “Sixteen thirty-one hours. I have just come back from sickbay, having said good-by to my shipmates.”
He paused and for a few moments just sat staring at the blankness of the forward wall. At last he shook himself from his daydreams and resumed speaking.
“The computers analyzed the disease as some sort of virus. How the Sarissi smuggled the agent on board remains a mystery. We took all normal precautions against such a danger, including standard sterilization and quarantine procedures.
“The plague had an extremely long incubation period. The first outbreak was five weeks ago, nearly two months after we began the return trip to Earth. But once it struck, it spread rapidly, killing within a period of forty- eight hours after the first symptoms—fever and a rawness about the eyes—appeared. The reception delegation, including Captain Doria, died first.
“The med scanners failed to isolate the cause of the disease, or to devise a workable cure or preventative. Both of the ship’s doctors died early. Gradually all efforts to combat the disease ceased.”
He stopped suddenly and rubbed his left eye. The pain was growing worse. His hand went to the control panel, and the soft blue lighting dimmed to darkness.
