Free Slave Ship by Frederik Pohl

touch with the Navy. Let's take a look at the ships." All he said was: "It takes all kinds."
    COMCARIB is only a satellite of COMSOLANT, but the Caribbean fleet is big enough for anybody. There were forty men-of-war surfaced in Biscayne Bay, destroyers and carriers and a couple of Nimitz -class cruisers that brought a curious sensation to my throat. "Busy out there," I said, staring hungrily at the fighting ships nursing from the tankers.
    "It's getting busier all the time, Logan," Barney said soberly. "See that bucket beyond the breakwater?" He was pointing at an ancient monitor, a harbor defense craft with plenty of punch but no range to speak of. Work barges were lashed to its sides and welders were slicing into a twisted, scarred mass of metal on its forward deck.
    "Looks like it tangled with a can opener," I said.
    "A Caodai can opener. That's Hadley , and it was down off the Keys when a Caodai sneak raid took a potshot at it. It got back; there were two last month that didn't."
    I said uneasily, "Barney, have things been hotting up while I was at sea? All this business of getting burned and sneak raids right off our coast—it sounds bad."
    Barney shrugged morosely. "Who knows? There isn't any war on."
    "No, really," I insisted. "What's the score?"
    "Who knows?" he repeated. "You can see for yourself, things are happening. Up until last year, COMCARIB had never lost a capital ship in coastal waters. Since then—well, never mind how many. But we've lost some. Are things getting worse all over, or is it just local? I don't know. We send out a squad of scout torpedoes three times a day, and I guess we average twenty contacts a week. By the time the big boys get to where the torpedoes have made a contact, there's nothing there, usually. Sometimes not even the scout. But you look in the papers and you find nothing about it, of course. Once in a while, maybe, there's a story about 'Unidentified vessel sighted off Miami Beach'—that's when you can see them from the top floor windows of the hotels. But that's all."
    He flicked his cigarette into the water and grinned at me. "Now do we go to Tropical Park?" he demanded.
    So we went, and I succeeded in losing forty-five dollars. It wasn't hard. I just bet my hunches. By the fourth race the T/5 at the five-dollar window got to know me and shook his head sadly when I bought my tickets; but I didn't mind much, because what I was thinking of was not horses and pari-mutuel betting but war and Elsie.
    I sat out the sixth race in a canteen under the grandstand and read a newspaper. I could hear the crowd screaming and stamping overhead, but the newspaper thundered louder than they, if only you read between the lines. Eight-Year-Olds Face Student Draft . How long had we been putting school kids in uniform? Had it started while I was on Spruance ? The age limits had been going lower and lower, that much I knew—but eight-year-olds? I tried to remember exactly when it was that they had called up the Boy Scouts and made them an integral, draft-manned part of the defense apparatus, with civil-defense functions and a coordinated pre-induction training program. Caodais Protest Ankara Looting , Threaten Reprisals Against Hostages . I read that one thoroughly. There had been trouble at the Caodai legislation in Turkey, and the Caodais appeared to think it was deliberately fomented. That much was simple enough, but the bit about hostages gave me a bad time.
    Because I couldn't help remembering that one of the hostages was no mere statistic, but the girl I had married.
    The nature of the trouble in Ankara was far from clear; sometimes it seemed to me that there had been an arson attempt, sometimes a mere hit and run burglary. It was sloppy reporting, and I read the item over a dozen times before I concluded that it didn't matter; if the Caodais were looking for a pretext to take their temper out on their hostages, anything at all would serve.
    I found Barney in the crowd, right where I'd left