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<div id="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page8" title="8"> </a>
	<h1>The Knights of Arthur</h1>
	<p id="author">By FREDERIK POHL</p>
	<p id="illustrator">Illustrated by MARTIN</p>
	<p id="synopsis">With one suitcase as his domain, Arthur was
	desperately in need of armed henchmen … for
	his keys to a kingdom were typewriter keys!</p>
	<div id="illo1" class="illo">
		<img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php/etext:f:frederik-pohl-the-knights-of-arthur-illo1-sm.jpg" width="658" height="388" alt="An eyestalk coming from a case looks at a guy doing something with a screwdriver and a typewriter" />
	</div>

	<h2>I</h2>

	<p class="first_paragraph"><span class="first_word">There</span> was three of us—I
	mean if you count Arthur.
	We split up to avoid attracting
	attention. Engdahl just
	came in over the big bridge, but I
	had Arthur with me so I had to
	come the long way around.</p>

	<p>When I registered at the desk,
	I said I was from Chicago. You
	know how it is. If you say you’re
	from Philadelphia, it’s like saying
	you’re from St. Louis or
	Detroit—I mean <em>nobody</em> lives in
	Philadelphia any more. Shows
	how things change. A couple years
	ago, Philadelphia was all the
	fashion. But not now, and I
	wanted to make a good impression.</p>

	<p>I even tipped the bellboy a
	hundred and fifty dollars. I said:
	“Do me a favor. I’ve got my baggage
	booby-trapped—”</p>

	<p>“Natch,” he said, only mildly
	impressed by the bill and a half,
	even less impressed by me.</p>

	<p>“I mean <em>really</em> booby-trapped.
	Not just a burglar alarm. Besides
	the alarm, there’s a little surprise
	<!-- <a class="pagenum" id="page9" title="9"> </a> Original location of right side of Illo 1-->
	<a class="pagenum" id="page10" title="10"> </a>on a short fuse. So what I want
	you to do, if you hear the alarm go
	off, is come running. Right?”</p>

	<p>“And get my head blown off?”
	He slammed my bags onto the
	floor. “Mister, you can take your
	damn money and—”</p>

	<p>“Wait a minute, friend.” I passed
	over another hundred. “Please?
	It’s only a shaped charge. It won’t
	hurt anything except anybody who
	messes around, see? But I don’t
	want it to go off. So you come
	running when you hear the alarm
	and scare him away and—”</p>

	<p>“No!” But he was less positive.
	I gave him two hundred more and
	he said grudgingly: “All right. If
	I hear it. Say, what’s in there that’s
	worth all that trouble?”</p>

	<p>“Papers,” I lied.</p>

	<p>He leered. “Sure.”</p>

	<p>“No fooling, it’s just personal
	stuff. Not worth a penny to anybody
	but me, understand? So
	don’t get any ideas—”</p>

	<p>He said in an injured tone:
	“Mister, naturally the <em>staff</em> won’t
	bother your stuff. What kind of a
	hotel do you think this is?”</p>

	<p>“Of course, of course,” I said.
	But I knew he was lying, because
	I knew what kind of hotel it was.
	The staff was there only because
	being there gave them a chance
	to knock down more money than
	they could make any other way.
	What other kind of hotel was
	there?</p>

	<p>Anyway, the way to keep the
	staff on my side was by bribery,
	and when he left I figured I had
	him at least temporarily bought.
	He promised to keep an eye on
	the room and he would be on duty
	for four more hours—which gave
	me plenty of time for my errands.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">I made</span> sure Arthur was
	plugged in and cleaned myself
	up. They had water running—New
	York’s very good that way;
	they always have water running.
	It was even hot, or nearly hot. I
	let the shower splash over me for
	a while, because there was a lot
	of dust and dirt from the Bronx
	that I had to get off me. The way
	it looked, hardly anybody had
	been up that way since it happened.</p>

	<p>I dried myself, got dressed and
	looked out the window. We were
	fairly high up—fifteenth floor. I
	could see the Hudson and the big
	bridge up north of us. There was
	a huge cloud of smoke coming
	from somewhere near the bridge
	on the other side of the river, but
	outside of that everything looked
	normal. You would have thought
	there were people in all those
	houses. Even the streets looked
	pretty good, until you noticed that
	hardly any of the cars were moving.</p>

	<p>I opened the little bag and
	loaded my pockets with enough
	money to run my errands. At the
	door, I stopped and called over
	<a class="pagenum" id="page11" title="11"> </a>my shoulder to Arthur: “Don’t
	worry if I’m gone an hour or so.
	I’ll be back.”</p>

	<p>I didn’t wait for an answer.
	That would have been pointless
	under the circumstances.</p>

	<p>After Philadelphia, this place
	seemed to be bustling with activity.
	There were four or five
	people in the lobby and a couple
	of dozen more out in the street.</p>

	<p>I tarried at the desk for several
	reasons. In the first place, I was
	expecting Vern Engdahl to try to
	contact me and I didn’t want him
	messing with the luggage—not
	while Arthur might get nervous.
	So I told the desk clerk that in
	case anybody came inquiring for
	Mr. Schlaepfer, which was the
	name I was using—my real name
	being Sam Dunlap—he was to be
	told that on no account was he to
	go to my room but to wait in the
	lobby; and in any case I would
	be back in an hour.</p>

	<p>“Sure,” said the desk clerk,
	holding out his hand.</p>

	<p>I crossed it with paper. “One
	other thing,” I said. “I need to buy
	an electric typewriter and some
	other stuff. Where can I get
	them?”</p>

	<p>“PX,” he said promptly.</p>

	<p>“PX?”</p>

	<p>“What used to be Macy’s,” he
	explained. “You go out that door
	and turn right. It’s only about a
	block. You’ll see the sign.”</p>

	<p>“Thanks.” That cost me a hundred
	more, but it was worth it.
	After all, money wasn’t a problem—not
	when we had just come from
	Philadelphia.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">The</span> big sign read “PX,” but it
	wasn’t big enough to hide an
	older sign underneath that said
	“Macy’s.” I looked it over from
	across the street.</p>

	<p>Somebody had organized it
	pretty well. I had to admire them.
	I mean I don’t like New York—wouldn’t
	live there if you gave me
	the place—but it showed a sort of
	go-getting spirit. It was no easy
	job getting a full staff together to
	run a department store operation,
	when any city the size of New
	York must have a couple thousand
	stores. You know what I mean?
	It’s like running a hotel or anything
	else—how are you going to
	get people to work for you when
	they can just as easily walk down
	the street, find a vacant store and
	set up their own operation?</p>

	<p>But Macy’s was fully manned.
	There was a guard at every door
	and a walking patrol along the
	block-front between the entrances
	to make sure nobody broke in
	through the windows. They all
	wore green armbands and uniforms—well,
	lots of people wore
	uniforms.</p>

	<p>I walked over.</p>

	<p>“Afternoon,” I said affably to the
	guard. “I want to pick up some
	stuff. Typewriter, maybe a gun,
	<a class="pagenum" id="page12" title="12"> </a>you know. How do you work it
	here? Flat rate for all you can
	carry, prices marked on everything,
	or what is it?”</p>

	<p>He stared at me suspiciously.
	He was a monster; six inches taller
	than I, he must have weighed two
	hundred and fifty pounds. He
	didn’t look very smart, which
	might explain why he was working
	for somebody else these days. But
	he was smart enough for what he
	had to do.</p>

	<p>He demanded: “You new in
	town?”</p>

	<p>I nodded.</p>

	<p>He thought for a minute. “All
	right, buddy. Go on in. You pick
	out what you want, see? We’ll
	straighten out the price when you
	come out.”</p>

	<p>“Fair enough.” I started past
	him.</p>

	<p>He grabbed me by the arm. “No
	tricks,” he ordered. “You come
	out the same door you went in,
	understand?”</p>

	<p>“Sure,” I said, “if that’s the way
	you want it.”</p>

	<p>That figured—one way or another:
	either they got a commission,
	or, like everybody else, they
	lived on what they could knock
	down. I filed that for further consideration.</p>

	<p>Inside, the store smelled pretty
	bad. It wasn’t just rot, though there
	was plenty of that; it was musty
	and stale and old. It was dark, or
	nearly. About one light in twenty
	was turned on, in order to conserve
	power. Naturally the escalators
	and so on weren’t running
	at all.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">I passed</span> a counter with pencils
	and ball-point pens in a
	case. Most of them were gone—somebody
	hadn’t bothered to go
	around in back and had simply
	knocked the glass out—but I found
	one that worked and an old order
	pad to write on. Over by the
	elevators there was a store directory,
	so I went over and checked
	it, making a list of the departments
	worth visiting.</p>

	<p>Office Supplies would be the
	typewriter. Garden &amp; Home was a
	good bet—maybe I could find a
	little wheelbarrow to save carrying
	the typewriter in my arms.
	What I wanted was one of the
	big ones where all the keys are
	solenoid-operated instead of the
	cam-and-roller arrangement—that
	was all Arthur could operate. And
	those things were heavy, as I
	knew. That was why we had
	ditched the old one in the Bronx.</p>

	<p>Sporting Goods—that would be
	for a gun, if there were any left.
	Naturally, they were about the
	first to go after it happened, when
	<em>everybody</em> wanted a gun. I mean
	everybody who lived through it.
	I thought about clothes—it was
	pretty hot in New York—and
	decided I might as well take a
	look.</p>

	<p><a class="pagenum" id="page13" title="13"> </a>Typewriter, clothes, gun, wheelbarrow.
	I made one more note on
	the pad—try the tobacco counter,
	but I didn’t have much hope for
	that. They had used cigarettes for
	currency around this area for a
	while, until they got enough bank
	vaults open to supply big bills. It
	made cigarettes scarce.</p>

	<p>I turned away and noticed for
	the first time that one of the elevators
	was stopped on the main floor.
	The doors were closed, but they
	were glass doors, and although
	there wasn’t any light inside, I
	could see the elevator was full.
	There must have been thirty or
	forty people in the car when it
	happened.</p>

	<p>I’d been thinking that, if nothing
	else, these New Yorkers were
	pretty neat—I mean if you don’t
	count the Bronx. But here were
	thirty or forty skeletons that nobody
	had even bothered to clear
	away.</p>

	<p>You call that neat? Right in
	plain view on the ground floor,
	where everybody who came into
	the place would be sure to go—I
	mean if it had been on one of
	the upper floors, what difference
	would it have made?</p>

	<p>I began to wish we were out
	of the city. But naturally that
	would have to wait until we
	finished what we came here to do—otherwise,
	what was the point
	of coming all the way here in the
	first place?</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">The</span> tobacco counter was bare.
	I got the wheelbarrow easily
	enough—there were plenty of those,
	all sizes; I picked out a nice light
	red-and-yellow one with rubber-tired
	wheel. I rolled it over to
	Sporting Goods on the same floor,
	but that didn’t work out too well.
	I found a 30-30 with telescopic
	sights, only there weren’t any cartridges
	to fit it—or anything else. I
	took the gun anyway; Engdahl
	would probably have some extra
	ammunition.</p>

	<p>Men’s Clothing was a waste of
	time, too—I guess these New
	Yorkers were too lazy to do
	laundry. But I found the typewriter
	I wanted.</p>

	<p>I put the whole load into the
	wheelbarrow, along with a couple
	of odds and ends that caught my
	eye as I passed through Housewares,
	and I bumped as gently as
	I could down the shallow steps
	of the motionless escalator to the
	ground floor.</p>

	<p>I came down the back way,
	and that was a mistake. It led me
	right past the food department.
	Well, I don’t have to tell you what
	<em>that</em> was like, with all the exploded
	cans and the rats as big as poodles.
	But I found some cologne and
	soaked a handkerchief in it, and
	with that over my nose, and some
	fast footwork for the rats, I managed
	to get to one of the doors.</p>

	<p>It wasn’t the one I had come
	in, but that was all right. I sized
	<a class="pagenum" id="page14" title="14"> </a>up the guard. He looked smart
	enough for a little bargaining, but
	not too smart; and if I didn’t like
	his price, I could always remember
	that I was supposed to go out
	the other door.</p>

	<p>I said: “Psst!”</p>

	<p>When he turned around, I said
	rapidly: “Listen, this isn’t the way
	I came in, but if you want to do
	business, it’ll be the way I come
	out.”</p>

	<p>He thought for a second, and
	then he smiled craftily and said:
	“All right, come on.”</p>

	<p>Well, we haggled. The gun was
	the big thing—he wanted five
	thousand for that and he wouldn’t
	come down. The wheelbarrow he
	was willing to let go for five hundred.
	And the typewriter—he
	scowled at the typewriter as
	though it were contagious.</p>

	<p>“What you want that for?” he
	asked suspiciously. I shrugged.</p>

	<p>“Well—” he scratched his head—“a
	thousand?”</p>

	<p>I shook my head.</p>

	<p>“Five hundred?”</p>

	<p>I kept on shaking.</p>

	<p>“All right, all right,” he grumbled.
	“Look, you take the other
	things for six thousand—including
	what you got in your pockets that
	you don’t think I know about,
	see? And I’ll throw this in. How
	about it?”</p>

	<p>That was fine as far as I was
	concerned, but just on principle
	I pushed him a little further. “Forget
	it,” I said. “I’ll give you fifty
	bills for the lot, take it or leave
	it. Otherwise I’ll walk right down
	the street to Gimbel’s and—”</p>

	<p>He guffawed.</p>

	<p>“Whats the matter?” I demanded.</p>

	<p>“Pal,” he said, “you kill me.
	Stranger in town, hey? You can’t
	go anyplace but here.”</p>

	<p>“Why not?”</p>

	<p>“Account of there <em>ain’t</em> anyplace
	else. See, the chief here don’t like
	competition. So we don’t have to
	worry about anybody taking their
	trade elsewhere, like—we burned
	all the other places down.”</p>

	<p>That explained a couple of
	things. I counted out the money,
	loaded the stuff back in the wheelbarrow
	and headed for the Statler;
	but all the time I was counting
	and loading, I was talking to
	Big Brainless; and by the time I
	was actually on the way, I knew
	a little more about this “chief.”</p>

	<p>And that was kind of important,
	because he was the man we were
	going to have to know very well.</p>

	<h2>II</h2>

	<p class="first_paragraph"><span class="first_word">I locked</span> the door of the hotel
	room. Arthur was peeping out
	of the suitcase at me.</p>

	<p>I said: “I’m back. I got your
	typewriter.” He waved his eye at
	me.</p>

	<p>I took out the little kit of electricians’
	tools I carried, tipped the
	<a class="pagenum" id="page15" title="15"> </a>typewriter on its back and began
	sorting out leads. I cut them free
	from the keyboard, soldered on a
	ground wire, and began taping the
	leads to the strands of a yard of
	forty-ply multiplex cable.</p>

	<p>It was a slow and dull job. I
	didn’t have to worry about which
	solenoid lead went to which
	strand—Arthur could sort them
	out. But all the same it took an
	hour, pretty near, and I was getting
	hungry by the time I got the
	last connection taped. I shifted the
	typewriter so that both Arthur and
	I could see it, rolled in a sheet of
	paper and hooked the cable to
	Arthur’s receptors.</p>

	<p>Nothing happened.</p>

	<p>“Oh,” I said. “Excuse me,
	Arthur. I forgot to plug it in.”</p>

	<p>I found a wall socket. The typewriter
	began to hum and then it
	started to rattle and type:</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">DURA AUK UKOO RQK
	MWS AQB</p>

	<p>It stopped.</p>

	<p>“Come on, Arthur,” I ordered
	impatiently. “Sort them out, will
	you?”</p>

	<p>Laboriously it typed:</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">!!!</p>

	<p>Then, for a time, there was a
	clacking and thumping as he typed
	random letters, peeping out of the
	suitcase to see what he had typed,
	until the sheet I had put in was
	used up.</p>

	<p>I replaced it and waited, as patiently
	as I could, smoking one of
	the last of my cigarettes. After fifteen
	minutes or so, he had the hang
	of it pretty well. He typed:</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">YOU DAMQXXX DAMN
	FOOL WHUXXX WHY DID
	YOU LEAQNXXX LEAVE ME
	ALONE Q Q</p>

	<p>“Aw, Arthur,” I said. “Use your
	head, will you? I couldn’t carry
	that old typewriter of yours all
	the way down through the Bronx.
	It was getting pretty beat-up. Anyway,
	I’ve only got two hands—”</p>

	<p><span class="arthur_speak">YOU LOUSE,</span> it rattled, <span class="arthur_speak">ARE
	YOU TRYONXXX TRYING
	TO INSULT ME BECAUSE I
	DONT HAVE ANY Q Q</span></p>

	<p>“Arthur!” I said, shocked. “You
	know better than that!”</p>

	<p>The typewriter slammed its
	carriage back and forth ferociously
	a couple of times. Then he said:
	<span class="arthur_speak">ALL RIGHT SAM YOU KNOW
	YOUVE GOT ME BY THE
	THROAT SO YOU CAN DO
	ANYTHING YOU WANT TO
	WITH ME WHO CARES
	ABOUT MY FEELINGS ANYHOW</span></p>

	<p>“Please don’t take that attitude,”
	I coaxed.</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">WELL</p>

	<p>“Please?”</p>

	<p>He capitulated. <span class="arthur_speak">ALL RIGHT
	SAY HEARD ANYTHING
	FROM ENGDAHL Q Q</span></p>

	<p>“No.”</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">ISNT THAT JUST LIKE
	HIM Q Q CANT DEPEND ON
	THAT MAN HE WAS THE
	<a class="pagenum" id="page16" title="16"> </a>LOUSIEST ELECTRICIANS
	MATE ON THE SEA SPRITE
	AND HE ISNT MUCH BETTER
	NOW SAY SAM REMEMBER
	WHEN WE HAD TO GET
	HIM OUT OF THE JUG IN
	NEWPORT NEWS BECAUSE</p>

	<p>I settled back and relaxed. I
	might as well. That was the trouble
	with getting Arthur a new typewriter
	after a couple of days without
	one—he had so much garrulity
	stored up in his little brain, and
	the only person to spill it on was
	me.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">Apparently</span> I fell asleep.
	Well, I mean I must have, because
	I woke up. I had been
	dreaming I was on guard post outside
	the Yard at Portsmouth, and
	it was night, and I looked up and
	there was something up there, all
	silvery and bad. It was a missile—and
	that was silly, because you
	never see a missile. But this was
	a dream.</p>

	<p>And the thing burst, like a
	Roman candle flaring out, all sorts
	of comet-trails of light, and then
	the whole sky was full of bright
	and colored snow. Little tiny flakes
	of light coming down, a mist of
	light, radiation dropping like dew;
	and it was so pretty, and I took
	a deep breath. And my lungs
	burned out like slow fire, and I
	coughed myself to death with the
	explosions of the missile banging
	against my flaming ears….</p>

	<p>Well, it was a dream. It probably
	wasn’t like that at all—and if
	it had been, I wasn’t there to see
	it, because I was tucked away safe
	under a hundred and twenty
	fathoms of Atlantic water. All of
	us were on the <i>Sea Sprite</i>.</p>

	<p>But it was a bad dream and it
	bothered me, even when I woke up
	and found that the banging explosions
	of the missile were the
	noise of Arthur’s typewriter carriage
	crashing furiously back and
	forth.</p>


	<p>He peeped out of the suitcase
	and saw that I was awake. He demanded:
	<span class="arthur_speak">HOW CAN YOU FALL
	ASLEEP WHEN WERE IN A
	PLACE LIKE THIS Q Q ANYTHING
	COULD HAPPEN
	SAM I KNOW YOU DONT
	CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO
	ME BUT FOR YOUR OWN
	SAKE YOU SHOULDNT</span></p>

	<p>“Oh, dry up,” I said.</p>

	<p>Being awake, I remembered
	that I was hungry. There was still
	no sign of Engdahl or the others,
	but that wasn’t too surprising—they
	hadn’t known exactly when
	we would arrive. I wished I had
	thought to bring some food back
	to the room. It looked like long
	waiting and I wouldn’t want to
	leave Arthur alone again—after all,
	he was partly right.</p>

	<p>I thought of the telephone.</p>

	<p>On the off-chance that it might
	work, I picked it up. Amazing, a
	voice from the desk answered.</p>

	<p><a class="pagenum" id="page17" title="17"> </a>I crossed my fingers and said:
	“Room service?”</p>

	<p>And the voice answered amiably
	enough: “Hold on, buddy. I’ll see
	if they answer.”</p>

	<p>Clicking and a good long wait.
	Then a new voice said: “Whaddya
	want?”</p>

	<p>There was no sense pressing my
	luck by asking for anything like
	a complete meal. I would be lucky
	if I got a sandwich.</p>

	<p>I said: “Please, may I have a
	Spam sandwich on Rye Krisp and
	some coffee for Room Fifteen Forty-one?”</p>

	<p>“Please, you go to hell!” the
	voice snarled. “What do you think
	this is, some damn delicatessen?
	You want liquor, we’ll get you
	liquor. That’s what room service
	is for!”</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">I hung</span> up. What was the use
	of arguing? Arthur was clacking
	peevishly:</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">WHATS THE MATTER
	SAM YOU THINKING OF
	YOUR BELLY AGAIN Q Q</p>

	<p>“You would be if you—” I
	started, and then I stopped.
	Arthur’s feelings were delicate
	enough already. I mean suppose
	that all you had left of what you
	were born with was a brain in a
	kind of sardine can, wouldn’t you
	be sensitive? Well, Arthur was
	more sensitive than you would be,
	believe me. Of course, it was his
	own foolish fault—I mean you
	don’t get a prosthetic tank unless
	you die by accident, or something
	like that, because if it’s disease
	they usually can’t save even the
	brain.</p>

	<p>The phone rang again.</p>

	<p>It was the desk clerk. “Say, did
	you get what you wanted?” he
	asked chummily.</p>

	<p>“No.”</p>

	<p>“Oh. Too bad,” he said, but
	cheerfully. “Listen, buddy, I forgot
	to tell you before. That Miss
	Engdahl you were expecting, she’s
	on her way up.”</p>

	<p>I dropped the phone onto the
	cradle.</p>

	<p>“Arthur!” I yelled. “Keep quiet
	for a while—trouble!”</p>

	<p>He clacked once, and the typewriter
	shut itself off. I jumped
	for the door of the bathroom, cursing
	the fact that I didn’t have
	cartridges for the gun. Still, empty
	or not, it would have to do.</p>

	<p>I ducked behind the bathroom
	door, in the shadows, covering the
	hall door. Because there were two
	things wrong with what the desk
	clerk had told me. Vern Engdahl
	wasn’t a “miss,” to begin with;
	and whatever name he used when
	he came to call on me, it wouldn’t
	be Vern Engdahl.</p>

	<p>There was a knock on the door.
	I called: “Come in!”</p>

	<p>The door opened and the girl
	who called herself Vern Engdahl
	came in slowly, looking around. I
	stayed quiet and out of sight until
	<a class="pagenum" id="page18" title="18"> </a>she was all the way in. She didn’t
	seem to be armed; there wasn’t
	anyone with her.</p>

	<p>I stepped out, holding the gun
	on her. Her eyes opened wide and
	she seemed about to turn.</p>

	<p>“Hold it! Come on in, you. Close
	the door!”</p>

	<p>She did. She looked as though
	she were expecting me. I looked
	her over—medium pretty, not very
	tall, not very plump, not very old.
	I’d have guessed twenty or so, but
	that’s not my line of work; she
	could have been almost any age
	from seventeen on.</p>

	<p>The typewriter switched itself
	on and began to pound agitatedly.
	I crossed over toward her and
	paused to peer at what Arthur was
	yacking about: <span class="arthur_speak">SEARCH HER
	YOU DAMN FOOL MAYBE
	SHES GOT A GUN</span></p>

	<p>I ordered: “Shut up, Arthur.
	I’m <em>going</em> to search her. You! Turn
	around!”</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">She</span> shrugged and turned
	around, her hands in the air.
	Over her shoulder, she said:
	“You’re taking this all wrong, Sam.
	I came here to make a deal with
	you.”</p>

	<p>“Sure you did.”</p>

	<p>But her knowing my name was
	a blow, too. I mean what was the
	use of all that sneaking around if
	people in New York were going to
	know we were here?</p>

	<p>I walked up close behind her
	and patted what there was to pat.
	There didn’t seem to be a gun.</p>

	<p>“You tickle,” she complained.</p>

	<p>I took her pocketbook away
	from her and went through it. No
	gun. A lot of money—an <em>awful</em>
	lot of money. I mean there must
	have been two or three hundred
	thousand dollars. There was
	nothing with a name on it in the
	pocketbook.</p>

	<p>She said: “Can I put my hands
	down, Sam?”</p>

	<p>“In a minute.” I thought for a
	second and then decided to do it—you
	know, I just couldn’t afford to
	take chances. I cleared my throat
	and ordered: “Take off your
	clothes.”</p>

	<p>Her head jerked around and she
	stared at me. “<em>What?</em>”</p>

	<p>“Take them off. You heard me.”</p>

	<p>“Now wait a minute—” she began
	dangerously.</p>

	<p>I said: “Do what I tell you,
	hear? How do I know you haven’t
	got a knife tucked away?”</p>

	<p>She clenched her teeth. “Why,
	you dirty little man! What do you
	think—” Then she shrugged. She
	looked at me with contempt and
	said: “All right. What’s the difference?”</p>

	<p>Well, there was a considerable
	difference. She began to unzip and
	unbutton and wriggle, and pretty
	soon she was standing there in her
	underwear, looking at me as
	though I were a two-headed worm.
	It was interesting, but kind of embarrassing.
	<a class="pagenum" id="page19" title="19"> </a>I could see Arthur’s
	eye-stalk waving excitedly out of
	the opened suitcase.</p>

	<p>I picked up her skirt and blouse
	and shook them. I could feel myself
	blushing, and there didn’t seem
	to be anything in them.</p>

	<p>I growled: “Okay, I guess that’s
	enough. You can put your clothes
	back on now.”</p>

	<p>“Gee, thanks,” she said.</p>

	<p>She looked at me thoughtfully
	and then shook her head as if
	she’d never seen anything like me
	before and never hoped to again.
	Without another word, she began
	to get back into her clothes. I had
	to admire her poise. I mean she
	was perfectly calm about the whole
	thing. You’d have thought she was
	used to taking her clothes off in
	front of strange men.</p>

	<p>Well, for that matter, maybe she
	was; but it wasn’t any of my business.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">Arthur</span> was clacking distractedly,
	but I didn’t pay any
	attention to him. I demanded: “All
	right, now who are you and what
	do you want?”</p>

	<p>She pulled up a stocking and
	said: “You couldn’t have asked
	me that in the first place, could
	you? I’m Vern Eng—”</p>

	<p>“<em>Cut it out!</em>”</p>

	<p>She stared at me. “I was only
	going to say I’m Vern Engdahl’s
	partner. We’ve got a little business
	deal cooking and I wanted to talk
	to you about this proposition.”</p>

	<p>Arthur squawked: <span class="arthur_speak">WHATS
	ENGDAHL UP TO NOW Q Q
	SAM IM WARNING YOU I
	DONT LIKE THE LOOK OF
	THIS THIS WOMAN AND
	ENGDAHL ARE PROBABLY
	DOUBLECROSSING US</span></p>

	<p>I said: “All right, Arthur, relax.
	I’m taking care of things. Now
	start over, you. What’s your
	name?”</p>

	<p>She finished putting on her shoe
	and stood up. “Amy.”</p>

	<p>“Last name?”</p>

	<p>She shrugged and fished in her
	purse for a cigarette. “What does
	it matter? Mind if I sit down?”</p>

	<p>“Go ahead,” I rumbled. “But
	don’t stop talking!”</p>

	<p>“Oh,” she said, “we’ve got plenty
	of time to straighten things out.”
	She lit the cigarette and walked
	over to the chair by the window.
	On the way, she gave the luggage
	a good long look.</p>

	<p>Arthur’s eyestalk cowered back
	into the suitcase as she came close.
	She winked at me, grinned, bent
	down and peered inside.</p>

	<p>“My,” she said, “he’s a nice
	shiny one, isn’t he?”</p>

	<p>The typewriter began to clatter
	frantically. I didn’t even bother to
	look; I told him: “Arthur, if you
	can’t keep quiet, you have to expect
	people to know you’re there.”</p>

	<p>She sat down and crossed her
	legs. “Now then,” she said. “Frankly,
	he’s what I came to see you
	<a class="pagenum" id="page20" title="20"> </a>about. Vern told me you had a
	pross. I want to buy it.”</p>

	<p>The typewriter thrashed its carriage
	back and forth furiously.</p>

	<p>“Arthur isn’t for sale.”</p>

	<p>“No?” She leaned back. “Vern’s
	already sold me his interest, you
	know. And you don’t really have
	any choice. You see, I’m in charge
	of materiel procurement for the
	Major. If you want to sell your
	share, fine. If you don’t, why, we
	requisition it anyhow. Do you follow?”</p>

	<p>I was getting irritated—at
	Vern Engdahl, for whatever the
	hell he thought he was doing; but
	at her because she was handy. I
	shook my head.</p>

	<p>“Fifty thousand dollars? I mean
	for your interest?”</p>

	<p>“No.”</p>

	<p>“Seventy-five?”</p>

	<p>“No!”</p>

	<p>“Oh, come on now. A hundred
	thousand?”</p>

	<p>It wasn’t going to make any impression
	on her, but I tried to explain:
	“Arthur’s a friend of mine.
	He isn’t for sale.”</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">She </span>shook her head. “What’s
	the matter with you? Engdahl
	wasn’t like this. He sold his interest
	for forty thousand and was
	glad to get it.”</p>

	<p>Clatter-clatter-clatter from Arthur.
	I didn’t blame him for having
	hurt feelings that time.</p>

	<p>Amy said in a discouraged tone:
	“Why can’t people be reasonable?
	The Major doesn’t like it when
	people aren’t reasonable.”</p>

	<p>I lowered the gun and cleared
	my throat. “He doesn’t?” I asked,
	cuing her. I wanted to hear more
	about this Major, who seemed to
	have the city pretty well under his
	thumb.</p>

	<p>“No, he doesn’t.” She shook her
	head sorrowfully. She said in an
	accusing voice: “You out-of-towners
	don’t know what it’s like to
	try to run a city the size of New
	York. There are fifteen thousand
	people here, do you know that? It
	isn’t one of your hick towns. And
	it’s worry, worry, worry all the
	time, trying to keep things going.”</p>

	<p>“I bet,” I said sympathetically.
	“You’re, uh, pretty close to the
	Major?”</p>

	<p>She said stiffly: “I’m not married
	to him, if that’s what you
	mean. Though I’ve had my
	chances…. But you see how
	it is. Fifteen thousand people to
	run a place the size of New York!
	It’s forty men to operate the power
	station, and twenty-five on the
	PX, and thirty on the hotel here.
	And then there are the local groceries,
	and the Army, and the
	Coast Guard, and the Air Force—though,
	really, that’s only two men—and—Well,
	you get the picture.”</p>

	<p>“I certainly do. Look, what kind
	of a guy <em>is</em> the Major?”</p>

	<p>She shrugged. “A guy.”</p>

	<p>“I mean what does he like?”</p>

	<p><a class="pagenum" id="page21" title="21"> </a>“Women, mostly,” she said, her
	expression clouded. “Come on now.
	What about it?”</p>

	<p>I stalled. “What do you want
	Arthur for?”</p>

	<p>She gave me a disgusted look.
	“What do you think? To relieve
	the manpower shortage, naturally.
	There’s more work than there are
	men. Now if the Major could just
	get hold of a couple of prosthetics,
	like this thing here, why, he could
	put them in the big installations.
	This one used to be an engineer
	or something, Vern said.”</p>

	<p>“Well … <em>like</em> an engineer.”</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">Amy</span> shrugged. “So why couldn’t
	we connect him up with
	the power station? It’s been done.
	The Major knows that—he was in
	the Pentagon when they switched
	all the aircraft warning net over
	from computer to prosthetic control.
	So why couldn’t we do the
	same thing with our power station
	and release forty men for other assignments?
	This thing could work
	day, night, Sundays—what’s the
	difference when you’re just a brain
	in a sardine can?”</p>

	<p>Clatter-rattle-<em>bang</em>.</p>

	<p>She looked startled. “Oh. I forgot
	he was listening.”</p>

	<p>“No deal,” I said.</p>

	<p>She said: “A hundred and fifty
	thousand?”</p>

	<p>A hundred and fifty thousand
	dollars. I considered that for a
	while. Arthur clattered warningly.</p>

	<p>“Well,” I temporized, “I’d have
	to be sure he was getting into good
	hands—”</p>

	<p>The typewriter thrashed wildly.
	The sheet of paper fluttered out
	of the carriage. He’d used it up.
	Automatically I picked it up—it
	was covered with imprecations,
	self-pity and threats—and started
	to put a new one in.</p>

	<p>“No,” I said, bending over the
	typewriter, “I guess I couldn’t sell
	him. It just wouldn’t be right—”</p>

	<p>That was my mistake; it was
	the wrong time for me to say that,
	because I had taken my eyes off
	her.</p>

	<p>The room bent over and clouted
	me.</p>

	<p>I half turned, not more than a
	fraction conscious, and I saw this
	Amy girl, behind me, with the
	shoe still in her hand, raised to
	give me another blackjacking on
	the skull.</p>

	<p>The shoe came down, and it
	must have weighed more than it
	looked, and even the fractional bit
	of consciousness went crashing
	away.</p>

	<h2>III</h2>

	<p class="first_paragraph"><span class="first_word">I have</span> to tell you about Vern
	Engdahl. We were all from the
	<i>Sea Sprite</i>, of course—me and
	Vern and even Arthur. The thing
	about Vern is that he was the lowest-ranking
	one of us all—only an
	electricians’ mate third, I mean
	<a class="pagenum" id="page22" title="22"> </a>when anybody paid any attention
	to things like that—and yet he was
	pretty much doing the thinking
	for the rest of us. Coming to New
	York was his idea—he told us that
	was the only place we could get
	what we wanted.</p>

	<p>Well, as long as we were carrying
	Arthur along with us, we pretty
	much needed Vern, because he
	was the one who knew how to
	keep the lash-up going. You’ve got
	no idea what kind of pumps and
	plumbing go into a prosthetic tank
	until you’ve seen one opened up.
	And, naturally, Arthur didn’t want
	any breakdowns without somebody
	around to fix things up.</p>

	<p>The <i>Sea Sprite</i>, maybe you
	know, was one of the old liquid-sodium-reactor
	subs—too slow for
	combat duty, but as big as a barn,
	so they made it a hospital ship. We
	were cruising deep when the missiles
	hit, and, of course, when we
	came up, there wasn’t much for a
	hospital ship to do. I mean there
	isn’t any sense fooling around with
	anybody who’s taken a good deep
	breath of fallout.</p>

	<p>So we went back to Newport
	News to see what had happened.
	And we found out what had happened.
	And there wasn’t anything
	much to do except pay off the
	crew and let them go. But us
	three stuck together. Why not?
	It wasn’t as if we had any families
	to go back to any more.</p>

	<p>Vern just loved all this stuff—he’d
	been an Eagle Scout; maybe
	that had something to do with it—and
	he showed us how to boil
	drinking water and forage in the
	woods and all like that, because
	nobody in his right mind wanted
	to go near any kind of a town,
	until the cold weather set in, anyway.
	And it was always Vern,
	Vern, telling us what to do, ironing
	out our troubles.</p>

	<p>It worked out, except that there
	was this one thing. Vern had bright
	ideas. But he didn’t always tell us
	what they were.</p>

	<p>So I wasn’t so very surprised
	when I came to. I mean there I
	was, tied up, with this girl Amy
	standing over me, holding the gun
	like a club. Evidently she’d found
	out that there weren’t any cartridges.
	And in a couple of minutes
	there was a knock on the door,
	and she yelled, “Come in,” and in
	came Vern. And the man who was
	with him had to be somebody important,
	because there were eight
	or ten other men crowding in close
	behind.</p>

	<p>I didn’t need to look at the oak
	leaves on his shoulders to realize
	that here was the chief, the fellow
	who ran this town, the Major.</p>

	<p>It was just the kind of thing
	Vern <em>would</em> do.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">Vern</span> said, with the look on his
	face that made strange officers
	wonder why this poor persecuted
	man had been forced to spend so
	<a class="pagenum" id="page23" title="23"> </a>much time in the brig: “Now,
	Major, I’m sure we can straighten
	all this out. Would you mind leaving
	me alone with my friend here
	for a moment?”</p>

	<p>The Major teetered on his heels,
	thinking. He was a tall, youngish-bald
	type, with a long, worried,
	horselike face. He said: “Ah, do
	you think we should?”</p>

	<p>“I guarantee there’ll be no
	trouble, Major,” Vern promised.</p>

	<p>The Major pulled at his little
	mustache. “Very well,” he said.
	“Amy, you come along.”</p>

	<p>“We’ll be right here, Major,”
	Vern said reassuringly, escorting
	him to the door.</p>

	<p>“You bet you will,” said the
	Major, and tittered. “Ah, bring
	that gun along with you, Amy.
	And be sure this man knows that
	we have bullets.”</p>

	<p>They closed the door. Arthur
	had been cowering in his suitcase,
	but now his eyestalk peeped out
	and the rattling and clattering
	from that typewriter sounded like
	the Battle of the Bulge.</p>

	<p>I demanded: “Come on, Vern.
	What’s this all about?”</p>

	<p>Vern said: “How much did they
	offer you?”</p>

	<p>Clatter-bang-BANG. I peeked,
	and Arthur was saying: <span class="arthur_speak">WARNED
	YOU SAM THAT ENGDAHL
	WAS UP TO TRICKS PLEASE
	SAM PLEASE PLEASE
	PLEASE HIT HIM ON THE
	HEAD KNOCK HIM OUT HE
	MUST HAVE A GUN SO GET
	IT AND SHOOT OUR WAY
	OUT OF HERE</span></p>

	<p>“A hundred and fifty thousand
	dollars,” I said.</p>

	<p>Vern looked outraged. “I only
	got forty!”</p>

	<p>Arthur clattered: <span class="arthur_speak">VERN I APPEAL
	TO YOUR COMMON
	DECENCY WERE OLD SHIPMATES
	VERN REMEMBER
	ALL THE TIMES I</span></p>

	<p>“Still,” Vern mused, “it’s all
	common funds anyway, right?
	Arthur belongs to both of us.”</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">I DONT DONT DONT REPEAT
	DONT BELONG TO
	ANYBODY BUT ME</p>

	<p>“That’s true,” I said grudgingly.
	“But I carried him, remember.”</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">SAM WHATS THE MATTER
	WITH YOU Q Q I DONT
	LIKE THE EXPRESSION ON
	YOUR FACE LISTEN SAM
	YOU ARENT</p>

	<p>Vern said, “A hundred and fifty
	thousand, remember.”</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">THINKING OF SELLING</p>

	<p>“And of course we couldn’t get
	out of here,” Vern pointed out.
	“They’ve got us surrounded.”</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">ME TO THESE RATS Q Q
	SAM VERN PLEASE DONT
	SCARE ME</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">I said,</span> pointing to the fluttering
	paper in the rattling machine:
	“You’re worrying our friend.”</p>

	<p>Vern shrugged impatiently.</p>

	<p><span class="arthur_speak">I KNEW I SHOULDNT
	<a class="pagenum" id="page24" title="24"> </a>HAVE TRUSTED YOU</span>, Arthur
	wept. <span  class="arthur_speak">THATS ALL I MEAN TO
	YOU EH</span></p>

	<p>Vern said: “Well, Sam? Let’s
	take the cash and get this thing
	over with. After all, he <em>will</em> have
	the best of treatment.”</p>

	<p>It was a little like selling your
	sister into white slavery, but what
	else was there to do? Besides, I
	kind of trusted Vern.</p>

	<p>“All right,” I said.</p>

	<p>What Arthur said nearly
	scorched the paper.</p>

	<p>Vern helped pack Arthur up
	for moving. I mean it was just
	a matter of pulling the plugs out
	and making sure he had a fresh
	battery, but Vern wanted to supervise
	it himself. Because one of
	the little things Vern had up his
	sleeve was that he had found a
	spot for himself on the Major’s
	payroll. He was now the official
	Prosthetic (Human) Maintenance
	Department Chief.</p>

	<p>The Major said to me: “Ah,
	Dunlap. What sort of experience
	have you had?”</p>

	<p>“Experience?”</p>

	<p>“In the Navy. Your friend Engdahl
	suggested you might want to
	join us here.”</p>

	<p>“Oh. I see what you mean.” I
	shook my head. “Nothing that
	would do you any good, I’m afraid.
	I was a yeoman.”</p>

	<p>“Yeoman?”</p>

	<p>“Like a company clerk,” I explained.
	“I mean I kept records
	and cut orders and made out reports
	and all like that.”</p>

	<p>“Company clerk!” The eyes in
	the long horsy face gleamed. “Ah,
	you’re mistaken, Dunlap! Why,
	that’s <em>just</em> what we need. Our
	morning reports are in foul shape.
	Foul! Come over to HQ. Lieutenant
	Bankhead will give you a
	lift.”</p>

	<p>“Lieutenant Bankhead?”</p>

	<p>I got an elbow in my ribs for
	that. It was that girl Amy, standing
	alongside me. “I,” she said,
	“am Lieutenant Bankhead.”</p>

	<p>Well, I went along with her,
	leaving Engdahl and Arthur behind.
	But I must admit I wasn’t
	sure of my reception.</p>

	<p>Out in front of the hotel was a
	whole fleet of cars—three or four
	of them, at least. There was a big
	old Cadillac that looked like a
	gangsters’ car—thick glass in the
	windows, tires that looked like
	they belonged on a truck. I was
	willing to bet it was bulletproof
	and also that it belonged to the
	Major. I was right both times.
	There was a little MG with the
	top down, and a couple of light
	trucks. Every one of them was
	painted bright orange, and every
	one of them had the star-and-bar
	of the good old United States
	Army on its side.</p>

	<p>It took me back to old times—all
	but the unmilitary color. Amy
	led me to the MG and pointed.</p>

	<p>“Sit,” she said.</p>

	<p><a class="pagenum" id="page25" title="25"> </a>I sat. She got in the other side
	and we were off.</p>

	<p>It was a little uncomfortable on
	account of I wasn’t just sure
	whether I ought to apologize for
	making her take her clothes off.
	And then she tramped on the gas
	of that little car and I didn’t think
	much about being embarrassed or
	about her black lace lingerie. I was
	only thinking about one thing—how
	to stay alive long enough to
	get out of that car.</p>

	<h2>IV</h2>

	<p class="first_paragraph"><span class="first_word">See,</span> what we really wanted was
	an ocean liner.</p>

	<p>The rest of us probably would
	have been happy enough to stay
	in Lehigh County, but Arthur was
	getting restless.</p>

	<p>He was a terrible responsibility,
	in a way. I suppose there were a
	hundred thousand people or so
	left in the country, and not more
	than forty or fifty of them were
	like Arthur—I mean if you want
	to call a man in a prosthetic tank
	a “person.” But we all did. We’d
	got pretty used to him. We’d
	shipped together in the war—and
	survived together, as a few of the
	actual fighters did, those who were
	lucky enough to be underwater or
	high in the air when the ICBMs
	landed—and as few civilians did.</p>

	<p>I mean there wasn’t much
	chance for surviving, for anybody
	who happened to be breathing the
	open air when it happened. I mean
	you can do just so much about
	making a “clean” H-bomb, and
	if you cut out the long-life fission
	products, the short-life ones get
	pretty deadly.</p>

	<p>Anyway, there wasn’t much
	damage, except of course that
	everybody was dead. All the surface
	vessels lost their crews. All
	the population of the cities were
	gone. And so then, when Arthur
	slipped on the gangplank coming
	into Newport News and broke his
	fool neck, why, we had the whole
	staff of the <i>Sea Sprite</i> to work on
	him. I mean what else did the
	surgeons have to do?</p>

	<p>Of course, that was a long time
	ago.</p>

	<p>But we’d stayed together. We
	headed for the farm country
	around Allentown, Pennsylvania,
	because Arthur and Vern Engdahl
	claimed to know it pretty
	well. I think maybe they had some
	hope of finding family or friends,
	but naturally there wasn’t any of
	that. And when you got into the
	inland towns, there hadn’t been
	much of an attempt to clean them
	up. At least the big cities and the
	ports had been gone over, in some
	spots anyway, by burial squads.
	Although when we finally decided
	to move out and went to Philadelphia—</p>

	<p>Well, let’s be fair; there had
	been fighting around there after
	the big fight. Anyway, that wasn’t
	<a class="pagenum" id="page26" title="26"> </a>so very uncommon. That was one
	of the reasons that for a long time—four
	or five years, at any rate—we
	stayed away from big cities.</p>

	<p>We holed up in a big farmhouse
	in Lehigh County. It had its own
	generator from a little stream, and
	that took care of Arthur’s power
	needs; and the previous occupants
	had been just crazy about stashing
	away food. There was enough
	to last a century, and that took
	care of the two of us. We appreciated
	that. We even took the old
	folks out and gave them a decent
	burial. I mean they’d all been in
	the family car, so we just had to
	tow it to a gravel pit and push it
	in.</p>

	<p>The place had its own well, with
	an electric pump and a hot-water
	system—oh, it was nice. I was sorry
	to leave but, frankly, Arthur
	was driving us nuts.</p>

	<p>We never could make the television
	work—maybe there weren’t
	any stations near enough. But we
	pulled in a couple of radio stations
	pretty well and Arthur got a big
	charge out of listening to them—see,
	he could hear four or five at
	a time and I suppose that made
	him feel better than the rest of us.</p>

	<p>He heard that the big cities
	were cleaned up and every one of
	them seemed to want immigrants—they
	were pleading, pleading all
	the time, like the TV-set and
	vacuum-cleaner people used to in
	the old days; they guaranteed
	we’d like it if we only came to live
	in Philly, or Richmond, or Baltimore,
	or wherever. And I guess
	Arthur kind of hoped we might
	find another pross. And then—well,
	Engdahl came up with this idea
	of an ocean liner.</p>

	<p>It figured. I mean you get out
	in the middle of the ocean and
	what’s the difference what it’s like
	on land? And it especially appealed
	to Arthur because he
	wanted to do some surface sailing.
	He never had when he was real—I
	mean when he had arms and
	legs like anybody else. He’d gone
	right into the undersea service the
	minute he got out of school.</p>

	<p>And—well, sailing was what
	Arthur knew something about and
	I suppose even a prosthetic man
	wants to feel useful. It was like
	Amy said: He could be hooked
	up to an automated factory—</p>

	<p>Or to a ship.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak">HQ for the Major’s Temporary
	Military Government—that’s
	what the sign said—was on the
	91st floor of the Empire State
	Building, and right there that tells
	you something about the man. I
	mean you know how much power
	it takes to run those elevators all
	the way up to the top? But the
	Major must have liked being able
	to look down on everybody else.</p>

	<p>Amy Bankhead conducted me
	to his office and sat me down to
	wait for His Military Excellency
	<a class="pagenum" id="page27" title="27"> </a>to arrive. She filled me in on him,
	to some degree. He’d been an absolute
	nothing before the war; but
	he had a reserve commission in
	the Air Force, and when things
	began to look sticky, they’d called
	him up and put him in a Missile
	Master control point, underground
	somewhere up around Ossining.</p>

	<p>He was the duty officer when it
	happened, and naturally he hadn’t
	noticed anything like an enemy
	aircraft, and naturally the anti-missile
	missiles were still rusting
	in their racks all around the city;
	but since the place had been operating
	on sealed ventilation, the
	duty complement could stay there
	until the short half-life radioisotopes
	wore themselves out.</p>

	<p>And then the Major found out
	that he was not only in charge
	of the fourteen men and women of
	his division at the center—he was
	ranking United States Military Establishment
	officer farther than the
	eye could see. So he beat it, fast
	as he could, for New York, because
	what Army officer doesn’t
	dream about being stationed in
	New York? And he set up his
	Temporary Military Government—and
	that was nine years ago.</p>

	<p>If there hadn’t been plenty to
	go around, I don’t suppose he
	would have lasted a week—none
	of these city chiefs would have.
	But as things were, he was in on
	the ground floor, and as newcomers
	trickled into the city, his
	boys already had things nicely organized.</p>

	<p>It was a soft touch.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">Well</span>, we were about a week
	getting settled in New York
	and things were looking pretty
	good. Vern calmed me down by
	pointing out that, after all, we had
	to sell Arthur, and hadn’t we come
	out of it plenty okay?</p>

	<p>And we had. There was no
	doubt about it. Not only did we
	have a fat price for Arthur, which
	was useful because there were a
	lot of things we would have to buy,
	but we both had jobs working
	for the Major.</p>

	<p>Vern was his specialist in the
	care and feeding of Arthur and
	I was his chief of office routine—and,
	as such, I delighted his fussy
	little soul, because by adding what
	I remembered of Navy protocol
	to what he was able to teach me
	of Army routine, we came up with
	as snarled a mass of red tape as
	any field-grade officer in the whole
	history of all armed forces had
	been able to accumulate. Oh, I
	tell you, nobody sneezed in New
	York without a report being made
	out in triplicate, with eight endorsements.</p>

	<p>Of course there wasn’t anybody
	to send them to, but that didn’t
	stop the Major. He said with determination:
	“Nobody’s ever going
	to chew <em>me</em> out for non-compliance
	with regulations—even if I
	<a class="pagenum" id="page28" title="28"> </a>have to invent the regulations myself!”</p>

	<p>We set up in a bachelor apartment
	on Central Park South—the
	Major had the penthouse; the
	whole building had been converted
	to barracks—and the first chance
	we got, Vern snaffled some transportation
	and we set out to find
	an ocean liner.</p>

	<p>See, the thing was that an ocean
	liner isn’t easy to steal. I mean
	we’d scouted out the lay of the land
	before we ever entered the city
	itself, and there were plenty of
	liners, but there wasn’t one that
	looked like we could just jump in
	and sail it away. For that we
	needed an organization. Since we
	didn’t have one, the best thing to
	do was borrow the Major’s.</p>

	<p>Vern turned up with Amy Bankhead’s
	MG, and he also turned up
	with Amy. I can’t say I was displeased,
	because I was beginning
	to like the girl; but did you ever
	try to ride three people in the seats
	of an MG? Well, the way to do it
	is by having one passenger sit
	in the other passenger’s lap, which
	would have been all right except
	that Amy insisted on driving.</p>

	<p>We headed downtown and over
	to the West Side. The Major’s
	Topographical Section—one former
	billboard artist—had prepared road
	maps with little red-ink Xs marking
	the streets that were blocked,
	which was most of the streets; but
	we charted a course that would
	take us where we wanted to go.
	Thirty-fourth Street was open, and
	so was Fifth Avenue all of its
	length, so we scooted down Fifth,
	crossed over, got under the Elevated
	Highway and whined along
	uptown toward the Fifties.</p>

	<p>“There’s one,” cried Amy, pointing.</p>

	<p>I was on Vern’s lap, so I was
	making the notes. It was a Fruit
	Company combination freighter-passenger
	vessel. I looked at Vern,
	and Vern shrugged as best he
	could, so I wrote it down; but it
	wasn’t exactly what we wanted.
	No, not by a long shot.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">Still</span>, the thing to do was to
	survey our resources, and then
	we could pick the one we liked
	best. We went all the way up to
	the end of the big-ship docks, and
	then turned and came back down,
	all the way to the Battery. It
	wasn’t pleasure driving, exactly—half
	a dozen times we had to get
	out the map and detour around
	impenetrable jams of stalled and
	empty cars—or anyway, if they
	weren’t exactly empty, the people
	in them were no longer in shape
	to get out of our way. But we
	made it.</p>

	<p>We counted sixteen ships in
	dock that looked as though they
	might do for our purposes. We had
	to rule out the newer ones and
	the reconverted jobs. I mean, after
	all, U-235 just lasts so long, and
	<a class="pagenum" id="page29" title="29"> </a>you can steam around the world
	on a walnut-shell of it, or whatever
	it is, but you can’t store it.
	So we had to stick with the ships
	that were powered with conventional
	fuel—and, on consideration,
	only oil at that.</p>

	<p>But that left sixteen, as I say.
	Some of them, though, had suffered
	visibly from being left untended
	for nearly a decade, so that
	for our purposes they might as
	well have been abandoned in the
	middle of the Atlantic; we didn’t
	have the equipment or ambition
	to do any great amount of salvage
	work.</p>

	<p>The <i>Empress of Britain</i> would
	have been a pretty good bet, for
	instance, except that it was lying
	at pretty nearly a forty-five-degree
	angle in its berth. So was the
	<i>United States</i>, and so was the
	<i>Caronia</i>. The <i>Stockholm</i> was
	straight enough, but I took a good
	look, and only one tier of portholes
	was showing above the water—evidently
	it had settled nice and
	even, but it was on the bottom
	all the same. Well, that mud
	sucks with a fine tight grip, and
	we weren’t going to try to loosen
	it.</p>

	<p>All in all, eleven of the sixteen
	ships were out of commission just
	from what we could see driving
	by.</p>

	<p>Vern and I looked at each other.
	We stood by the MG, while Amy
	sprawled her legs over the side
	and waited for us to make up our
	minds.</p>

	<p>“Not good, Sam,” said Vern,
	looking worried.</p>

	<p>I said: “Well, that still leaves
	five. There’s the <i>Vulcania</i>, the
	<i>Cristobal</i>—”</p>

	<p>“Too small.”</p>

	<p>“All right. The <i>Manhattan</i>, the
	<i>Liberté</i> and the <i>Queen Elizabeth</i>.”</p>

	<p>Amy looked up, her eyes
	gleaming. “Where’s the question?”
	she demanded. “Naturally, it’s the
	<i>Queen</i>.”</p>

	<p>I tried to explain. “Please, Amy.
	Leave these things to us, will
	you?”</p>

	<p>“But the Major won’t settle for
	anything but the best!”</p>

	<p>“The <em>Major</em>?”</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">I glanced</span> at Vern, who
	wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Well,”
	I said, “look at the problems, Amy.
	First we have to check it over.
	Maybe it’s been burned out—how
	do we know? Maybe the channel
	isn’t even deep enough to float it
	any more—how do we know?
	Where are we going to get the oil
	for it?”</p>

	<p>“We’ll get the oil,” Amy said
	cheerfully.</p>

	<p>“And what if the channel isn’t
	deep enough?”</p>

	<p>“She’ll float,” Amy promised.
	“At high tide, anyway. Even if
	the channel hasn’t been dredged in
	ten years.”</p>

	<p>I shrugged and gave up. What
	<a class="pagenum" id="page30" title="30"> </a>was the use of arguing?</p>

	<p>We drove back to the <i>Queen
	Elizabeth</i> and I had to admit that
	there was a certain attraction
	about that big old dowager. We
	all got out and strolled down the
	pier, looking over as much as we
	could see.</p>

	<p>The pier had never been
	cleaned out. It bothered me a little—I
	mean I don’t like skeletons
	much—but Amy didn’t seem to
	mind. The <i>Queen</i> must have just
	docked when it happened, because
	you could still see bony queues,
	as though they were waiting for
	customs inspection.</p>

	<p>Some of the bags had been
	opened and the contents scattered
	around—naturally, somebody was
	bound to think of looting the
	<i>Queen</i>. But there were as many
	that hadn’t been touched as that
	had been opened, and the whole
	thing had the look of an amateur
	attempt. And that was all to the
	good, because the fewer persons
	who had boarded the <i>Queen</i> in the
	decade since it happened, the more
	chance of our finding it in usable
	shape.</p>

	<p>Amy saw a gangplank still up,
	and with cries of girlish glee ran
	aboard.</p>

	<p>I plucked at Vern’s sleeve.
	“You,” I said. “What’s this about
	what the <em>Major</em> won’t settle for
	less than?”</p>

	<p>He said: “Aw, Sam, I had to
	tell her something, didn’t I?”</p>

	<p>“But what about the Major—”</p>

	<p>He said patiently: “You don’t
	understand. It’s all part of my
	plan, see? The Major is the big
	thing here and he’s got a birthday
	coming up next month. Well, the
	way I put it to Amy, we’ll fix
	him up with a yacht as a birthday
	present, see? And, of course, when
	it’s all fixed up and ready to lift
	anchor—”</p>

	<p>I said doubtfully: “That’s the
	hard way, Vern. Why couldn’t we
	just sort of get steam up and take
	off?”</p>

	<p>He shook his head. “<em>That</em> is the
	hard way. This way we get all the
	help and supplies we need, understand?”</p>

	<p>I shrugged. That was the way
	it was, so what was the use of arguing?</p>

	<p>But there was one thing more
	on my mind. I said: “How come
	Amy’s so interested in making
	the Major happy?”</p>

	<p>Vern chortled. “Jealous, eh?”</p>

	<p>“I asked a question!”</p>

	<p>“Calm down, boy. It’s just that
	he’s in charge of things here so
	naturally she wants to keep in
	good with him.”</p>

	<p>I scowled. “I keep hearing
	stories about how the Major’s
	chief interest in life is women.
	You sure she isn’t ambitious to be
	one of them?”</p>

	<p>He said: “The reason she wants
	to keep him happy is so she <em>won’t</em>
	be one of them.”</p>

	<h2><a class="pagenum" id="page31" title="31"> </a>V</h2>

	<p class="first_paragraph"><span class="first_word">The</span> name of the place was
	Bayonne.</p>

	<p>Vern said: “One of them’s <em>got</em>
	to have oil, Sam. It <em>has</em> to.”</p>

	<p>“Sure,” I said.</p>

	<p>“There’s no question about it.
	Look, this is where the tankers
	came to discharge oil. They’d come
	in here, pump the oil into the refinery
	tanks and—”</p>

	<p>“Vern,” I said. “Let’s look, shall
	we?”</p>

	<p>He shrugged, and we hopped off
	the little outboard motorboat onto
	a landing stage. The tankers
	towered over us, rusty and screeching
	as the waves rubbed them
	against each other.</p>

	<p>There were fifty of them there
	at least, and we poked around
	them for hours. The hatches were
	rusted shut and unmanageable,
	but you could tell a lot by sniffing.
	Gasoline odor was out; smell
	of seaweed and dead fish was out;
	but the heavy, rank smell of fuel
	oil, that was what we were sniffing
	for. Crews had been aboard
	these ships when the missiles
	came, and crews were still aboard.</p>

	<p>Beyond the two-part superstructures
	of the tankers, the skyline
	of New York was visible. I
	looked up, sweating, and saw the
	Empire State Building and
	imagined Amy up there, looking
	out toward us.</p>

	<p>She knew we were here. It was
	her idea. She had scrounged up a
	naval engineer, or what she called
	a naval engineer—he had once been
	a stoker on a ferryboat. But he
	claimed he knew what he was
	talking about when he said the
	only thing the <i>Queen</i> needed to
	make ’er go was oil. And so we
	left him aboard to tinker and
	polish, with a couple of helpers
	Amy detached from the police
	force, and we tackled the oil
	problem.</p>

	<p>Which meant Bayonne. Which
	was where we were.</p>

	<p>It had to be a tanker with at
	least a fair portion of its cargo
	intact, because the <i>Queen</i> was a
	thirsty creature, drinking fuel not
	by the shot or gallon but by the
	ton.</p>

	<p>“Saaam! Sam <em>Dunlap</em>!”</p>

	<p>I looked up, startled. Five ships
	away, across the U of the mooring,
	Vern Engdahl was bellowing
	at me through cupped hands.</p>

	<p>“I found it!” he shouted. “Oil,
	lots of oil! Come look!”</p>

	<p>I clasped my hands over my
	head and looked around. It was a
	long way around to the tanker
	Vern was on, hopping from deck
	to deck, detouring around open
	stretches.</p>

	<p>I shouted: “I’ll get the boat!”</p>

	<p>He waved and climbed up on
	the rail of the ship, his feet dangling
	over, looking supremely happy
	and pleased with himself. He
	lit a cigarette, leaned back against
	<a class="pagenum" id="page32" title="32"> </a>the upward sweep of the rail and
	waited.</p>

	<p>It took me a little time to get
	back to the boat and a little more
	time than that to get the damn
	motor started. Vern! “Let’s not
	take that lousy little twelve horse-power,
	Sam,” he’d said reasonably.
	“The twenty-five’s more what
	we need!” And maybe it was, but
	none of the motors had been
	started in most of a decade, and
	the twenty-five was just that much
	harder to start now.</p>

	<p>I struggled over it, swearing,
	for twenty minutes or more.</p>

	<p>The tanker by whose side we
	had tied up began to swing toward
	me as the tide changed to outgoing.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">For</span> a moment there, I was
	counting seconds, expecting to
	have to make a jump for it before
	the big red steel flank squeezed
	the little outboard flat against the
	piles.</p>

	<p>But I got it started—just about
	in time. I squeezed out of the trap
	with not much more than a yard
	to spare and threaded my way
	into open water.</p>

	<p>There was a large, threatening
	sound, like an enormous slow
	cough.</p>

	<p>I rounded the stern of the last
	tanker between me and open
	water, and looked into the eye of
	a fire-breathing dragon.</p>

	<p>Vern and his cigarettes! The
	tanker was loose and ablaze, bearing
	down on me with the slow
	drift of the ebbing tide. From the
	hatches on the forward deck, two
	fountains of fire spurted up and
	out, like enormous nostrils spouting
	flame. The hawsers had been
	burned through, the ship was
	adrift, I was in its path—</p>

	<p>And so was the frantically
	splashing figure of Vern Engdahl,
	trying desperately to swim out of
	the way in the water before it.</p>

	<p>What kept it from blowing up
	in our faces I will never know,
	unless it was the pressure in the
	tanks forcing the flame out; but
	it didn’t. Not just then. Not until
	I had Engdahl aboard and we
	were out in the middle of the Hudson,
	staring back; and then it
	went up all right, all at once, like
	a missile or a volcano; and there
	had been fifty tankers in that one
	mooring, but there weren’t any
	any more, or not in shape for us
	to use.</p>

	<p>I looked at Engdahl.</p>

	<p>He said defensively: “Honest,
	Sam, I thought it was oil. It
	<em>smelled</em> like oil. How was I to
	know—”</p>

	<p>“Shut up,” I said.</p>

	<p>He shrugged, injured. “But it’s
	all right, Sam. No fooling. There
	are plenty of other tankers
	around. Plenty. Down toward the
	Amboys, maybe moored out in the
	channel. There must be. We’ll find
	them.”</p>

	<div id="illo2" class="illo"><a class="pagenum" id="page33" title="33">&nbsp;</a>
		<a href="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php/etext:f:frederik-pohl-the-knights-of-arthur-illo2.jpg"><img src="images/illo2-sm.jpg" width="393" height="556" alt="Two men in a small boat with billowing smoke in the distance." /></a>
	</div>

	<p><a class="pagenum" id="page34" title="34"> </a>“No,” I said. “<em>You</em> will.”</p>

	<p>And that was all I said, because
	I am forgiving by nature;
	but I thought a great deal more.</p>

	<p>Surprisingly, though, he did find
	a tanker with a full load, the
	very next day.</p>

	<p>It became a question of getting
	the tanker to the <i>Queen</i>. I left
	that part up to Vern, since he
	claimed to be able to handle it.</p>

	<p>It took him two weeks. First
	it was finding the tanker, then it
	was locating a tug in shape to
	move, then it was finding someone
	to pilot the tug. Then it was
	waiting for a clear and windless
	day—because the pilot he found
	had got all his experience sailing
	Star boats on Long Island Sound—and
	then it was easing the tanker
	out of Newark Bay, into the channel,
	down to the pier in the North
	River—</p>

	<p>Oh, it was work and no fooling.
	I enjoyed it very much, because
	I didn’t have to do it.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">But</span> I had enough to keep
	me busy at that. I found a
	man who claimed he used to be
	a radio engineer. And if he was an
	engineer, I was Albert Einstein’s
	mother, but at least he knew which
	end of a soldering iron was hot.
	There was no need for any great
	skill, since there weren’t going to
	be very many vessels to communicate
	with.</p>

	<p>Things began to move.</p>

	<p>The advantage of a ship like
	the <i>Queen</i>, for our purposes, was
	that the thing was pretty well automated
	to start out with. I mean
	never mind what the seafaring
	unions required in the way of
	flesh-and-blood personnel. What it
	came down to was that one man in
	the bridge or wheelhouse could
	pretty well make any part of the
	ship go or not go.</p>

	<p>The engine-room telegraph
	wasn’t hooked up to control the
	engines, no. But the wiring diagram
	needed only a few little
	changes to get the same effect,
	because where in the original concept
	a human being would take a
	look at the repeater down in the
	engine room, nod wisely, and push
	a button that would make the
	engines stop, start, or whatever—why,
	all we had to do was cut
	out the middleman, so to speak.</p>

	<p>Our genius of the soldering iron
	replaced flesh and blood with some
	wiring and, presto, we had centralized
	engine control.</p>

	<p>The steering was even easier.
	Steering was a matter of electronic
	control and servomotors to begin
	with. Windjammers in the old
	movies might have a man lashed
	to the wheel whose muscle power
	turned the rudder, but, believe me,
	a big superliner doesn’t. The rudders
	weigh as much as any old
	windjammer ever did from stem
	to stern; you have to have motors
	to turn them; and it was only a
	<a class="pagenum" id="page35" title="35"> </a>matter of getting out the old soldering
	iron again.</p>

	<p>By the time we were through,
	we had every operational facility
	of the <i>Queen</i> hooked up to a single
	panel on the bridge.</p>

	<p>Engdahl showed up with the oil
	tanker just about the time we got
	the wiring complete. We rigged up
	a pump and filled the bunkers till
	they were topped off full. We
	guessed, out of hope and ignorance,
	that there was enough in there to
	take us half a dozen times around
	the world at normal cruising speed,
	and maybe there was. Anyway,
	it didn’t matter, for surely we had
	enough to take us anywhere we
	wanted to go, and then there
	would be more.</p>

	<p>We crossed our fingers, turned
	our ex-ferry-stoker loose, pushed a
	button—</p>

	<p>Smoke came out of the stacks.</p>

	<p>The antique screws began to
	turn over. Astern, a sort of hump
	of muddy water appeared. The
	<i>Queen</i> quivered underfoot. The
	mooring hawsers creaked and sang.</p>

	<p>“Turn her off!” screamed Engdahl.
	“She’s headed for Times
	Square!”</p>

	<p>Well, that was an exaggeration,
	but not much of one; and there
	wasn’t any sense in stirring up
	the bottom mud. I pushed buttons
	and the screws stopped. I pushed
	another button, and the big engines
	quietly shut themselves off,
	and in a few moments the stacks
	stopped puffing their black smoke.</p>

	<p>The ship was alive.</p>

	<p>Solemnly Engdahl and I shook
	hands. We had the thing licked.
	All, that is, except for the one
	small problem of Arthur.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">The</span> thing about Arthur was
	they had put him to work.</p>

	<p>It was in the power station, just
	as Amy had said, and Arthur
	didn’t like it. The fact that he
	didn’t like it was a splendid reason
	for staying away from there, but
	I let my kind heart overrule my
	good sense and paid him a visit.</p>

	<p>It was way over on the East
	Side, miles and miles from any
	civilized area. I borrowed Amy’s
	MG, and borrowed Amy to go
	with it, and the two of us packed
	a picnic lunch and set out. There
	were reports of deer on Avenue
	A, so I brought a rifle, but we
	never saw one; and if you want
	my opinion, those reports were
	nothing but wishful thinking. I
	mean if people couldn’t survive,
	how could deer?</p>

	<p>We finally threaded our way
	through the clogged streets and
	parked in front of the power station.</p>

	<p>“There’s supposed to be a
	guard,” Amy said doubtfully.</p>

	<p>I looked. I looked pretty carefully,
	because if there was a guard,
	I wanted to see him. The Major’s
	orders were that vital defense installations—such
	as the power station,
	<a class="pagenum" id="page36" title="36"> </a>the PX and his own barracks
	building—were to be guarded
	against trespassers on a shoot-on-sight
	basis and I wanted to make
	sure that the guard knew we were
	privileged persons, with passes
	signed by the Major’s own hand.
	But we couldn’t find him. So we
	walked in through the big door,
	peered around, listened for the
	sounds of machinery and walked
	in that direction.</p>

	<p>And then we found him; he was
	sound asleep. Amy, looking indignant,
	shook him awake.</p>

	<p>“Is that how you guard military
	property?” she scolded. “Don’t
	you know the penalty for sleeping
	at your post?”</p>

	<p>The guard said something irritable
	and unhappy. I got her off
	his back with some difficulty, and
	we located Arthur.</p>

	<p>Picture a shiny four-gallon tomato
	can, with the label stripped
	off, hanging by wire from the
	flashing-light panels of an electric
	computer. That was Arthur. The
	shiny metal cylinder was his prosthetic
	tank; the wires were the
	leads that served him for fingers,
	ears and mouth; the glittering
	panel was the control center for
	the Consolidated Edison Eastside
	Power Plant No. 1.</p>

	<p>“Hi, Arthur,” I said, and a sudden
	ear-splitting thunderous hiss was
	his way of telling me that he knew
	I was there.</p>

	<p>I didn’t know exactly what it
	was he was trying to say and I
	didn’t want to; fortune spares me
	few painful moments, and I accept
	with gratitude the ones it does.
	The Major’s boys hadn’t bothered
	to bring Arthur’s typewriter along—I
	mean who cares what a generator-governor
	had to offer in the
	way of conversation?—so all he
	could do was blow off steam from
	the distant boilers.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">Well</span>, not quite all. Light
	flashed; a bucket conveyor
	began crashingly to dump loads of
	coal; and an alarm gong began to
	pound.</p>

	<p>“Please, Arthur,” I begged.
	“Shut up a minute and listen, will
	you?”</p>

	<p>More lights. The gong rapped
	half a dozen times sharply, and
	stopped.</p>

	<p>I said: “Arthur, you’ve got to
	trust Vern and me. We have this
	thing figured out now. We’ve got
	the <i>Queen Elizabeth</i>—”</p>

	<p>A shattering hiss of steam—meaning
	delight this time, I
	thought. Or anyway hoped.</p>

	<p>“—and its only a question of
	time until we can carry out the
	plan. Vern says to apologize for
	not looking in on you—” <em>hiss</em>—“but
	he’s been busy. And after all, you
	know it’s more important to get
	everything ready so you can get
	out of this place, right?”</p>

	<p>“Psst,” said Amy.</p>

	<p>She nodded briefly past my
	<a class="pagenum" id="page37" title="37"> </a>shoulder. I looked, and there was
	the guard, looking sleepy and surly
	and definitely suspicious.</p>

	<p>I said heartily: “So as soon as
	I fix it up with the Major, we’ll
	arrange for something better for
	you. Meanwhile, Arthur, you’re
	doing a capital job and I want you
	to know that all of us loyal New
	York citizens and public servants
	deeply appreciate—”</p>

	<p>Thundering crashes, bangs,
	gongs, hisses, and the scream of a
	steam whistle he’d found somewhere.</p>

	<p>Arthur was mad.</p>

	<p>“So long, Arthur,” I said, and
	we got out of there—just barely
	in time. At the door, we found that
	Arthur had reversed the coal
	scoops and a growing mound of
	it was pouring into the street where
	we’d left the MG parked. We got
	the car started just as the heap
	was beginning to reach the bumpers,
	and at that the paint would
	never again be the same.</p>

	<p>Oh, yes, he was mad. I could
	only hope that in the long run he
	would forgive us, since we were
	acting for his best interests, after
	all.</p>

	<p>Anyway, I <em>thought</em> we were.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">Still</span>, things worked out pretty
	well—especially between Amy
	and me. Engdahl had the theory
	that she had been dodging the
	Major so long that <em>anybody</em> looked
	good to her, which was hardly
	flattering. But she and I were
	getting along right well.</p>

	<p>She said worriedly: “The only
	thing, Sam, is that, frankly, the
	Major has just about made up his
	mind that he wants to marry me—”</p>

	<p>“He <em>is</em> married!” I yelped.</p>

	<p>“Naturally he’s married. He’s
	married to—so far—one hundred
	and nine women. He’s been hitting
	off a marriage a month for a good
	many years now and, to tell you
	the truth, I think he’s got the habit
	Anyway, he’s got his eye on me.”</p>

	<p>I demanded jealously: “Has he
	said anything?”</p>

	<p>She picked a sheet of onionskin
	paper out of her bag and handed
	it to me. It was marked <i>Top
	Secret</i>, and it really was, because
	it hadn’t gone through his regular
	office—I knew that because I was
	his regular office. It was only two
	lines of text and sloppily typed
	at that:</p>

	<blockquote>
		<p>Lt. Amy Bankhead will report
		to HQ at 1700 hours 1 July to
		carry out orders of the Commanding
		Officer.</p>
	</blockquote>

	<p>The first of July was only a
	week away. I handed the orders
	back to her.</p>

	<p>“And the orders of the Commanding
	Officer will be—” I
	wanted to know.</p>

	<p>She nodded. “You guessed it.”</p>

	<p>I said: “We’ll have to work
	fast.”</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><a class="pagenum" id="page38" title="38"> </a><span class="first_word">On</span> the thirtieth of June, we
	invited the Major to come
	aboard his palatial new yacht.</p>

	<p>“Ah, thank you,” he said gratefully.
	“A surprise? For my birthday?
	Ah, you loyal members of
	my command make up for all that
	I’ve lost—all of it!” He nearly
	wept.</p>

	<p>I said: “Sir, the pleasure is all
	ours,” and backed out of his presence.
	What’s more, I meant every
	word.</p>

	<p>It was a select party of slightly
	over a hundred. All of the wives
	were there, barring twenty or thirty
	who were in disfavor—still, that
	left over eighty. The Major
	brought half a dozen of his favorite
	officers. His bodyguard and our
	crew added up to a total of thirty
	men.</p>

	<p>We were set up to feed a hundred
	and fifty, and to provide
	liquor for twice that many, so it
	looked like a nice friendly brawl.
	I mean we had our radio operator
	handing out highballs as the guests
	stepped on board. The Major was
	touched and delighted; it was
	exactly the kind of party he liked.</p>

	<p>He came up the gangplank with
	his face one great beaming smile.
	“Eat! Drink!” he cried. “Ah, and
	be merry!” He stretched out his
	hands to Amy, standing by behind
	the radio op. “For tomorrow we
	wed,” he added, and sentimentally
	kissed his proposed bride.</p>

	<p>I cleared my throat. “How about
	inspecting the ship, Major?” I interrupted.</p>

	<p>“Plenty of time for that, my
	boy,” he said. “Plenty of time for
	that.” But he let go of Amy and
	looked around him. Well, it was
	worth looking at. Those Englishmen
	really knew how to build a
	luxury liner. God rest them.</p>

	<p>The girls began roaming around.</p>

	<p>It was a hot day and late afternoon,
	and the girls began discarding
	jackets and boleros, and that
	began to annoy the Major.</p>

	<p>“Ah, cover up there!” he ordered
	one of his wives. “You too
	there, what’s-your-name. Put that
	blouse back on!”</p>

	<p>It gave him something to think
	about. He was a very jealous man,
	Amy had said, and when you stop
	to think about it, a jealous man
	with a hundred and nine wives to
	be jealous of really has a job. Anyway,
	he was busy watching his
	wives and keeping his military
	cabinet and his bodyguard busy
	too, and that made him too busy
	to notice when I tipped the high
	sign to Vern and took off.</p>

	<h2>VI</h2>

	<p class="first_paragraph"><span class="first_word">In</span> Consolidated Edison’s big
	power plant, the guard was
	friendly. “I hear the Major’s over
	on your boat, pal. Big doings. Got
	a lot of the girls there, hey?”</p>

	<p>He bent, sniggering, to look at
	my pass.</p>

	<p><a class="pagenum" id="page39" title="39"> </a>“That’s right, pal,” I said, and
	slugged him.</p>

	<p>Arthur screamed at me with a
	shrill blast of steam as I came in.
	But only once. I wasn’t there for
	conversation. I began ripping apart
	his comfy little home of steel
	braces and copper wires, and it
	didn’t take much more than a
	minute before I had him free. And
	that was very fortunate because,
	although I had tied up the guard,
	I hadn’t done it very well, and it
	was just about the time I had
	Arthur’s steel case tucked under
	my arm that I heard a yelling and
	bellowing from down the stairs.</p>

	<p>The guard had got free.</p>

	<p>“Keep calm, Arthur!” I ordered
	sharply. “We’ll get out of this,
	don’t you worry!”</p>

	<p>But he wasn’t worried, or anyway
	didn’t show it, since he
	couldn’t. I was the one who was
	worried. I was up on the second
	floor of the plant, in the control
	center, with only one stairway going
	down that I knew about, and
	that one thoroughly guarded by
	a man with a grudge against me.
	Me, I had Arthur, and no weapon,
	and I hadn’t a doubt in the world
	that there were other guards
	around and that my friend would
	have them after me before long.</p>

	<p>Problem. I took a deep breath
	and swallowed and considered
	jumping out the window. But it
	wasn’t far enough to the ground.</p>

	<p>Feet pounded up the stairs,
	more than two of them. With
	Arthur dragging me down on one
	side, I hurried, fast as I could,
	along the steel galleries that surrounded
	the biggest boiler. It was
	a nice choice of alternatives—if I
	stayed quiet, they would find me;
	if I ran, they would hear me, and
	then find me.</p>

	<p>But ahead there was—what?
	Something. A flight of stairs, it
	looked like, going out and, yes, <em>up</em>.
	Up? But I was already on the
	second floor.</p>

	<p>“Hey, you!” somebody bellowed
	from behind me.</p>

	<p>I didn’t stop to consider. I ran.
	It wasn’t steps, not exactly; it was
	a chain of coal scoops on a long
	derrick arm, a moving bucket arrangement
	for unloading fuel from
	barges. It did go up, though, and
	more important it went <em>out</em>. The
	bucket arm was stretched across
	the clogged roadway below to a
	loading tower that hung over the
	water.</p>

	<p>If I could get there, I might
	be able to get down. If I could get
	down—yes, I could see it; there
	were three or four mahogany
	motor launches tied to the foot of
	the tower.</p>

	<p>And nobody around.</p>

	<p>I looked over my shoulder, and
	didn’t like what I saw, and scuttled
	up that chain of enormous
	buckets like a roach on a washboard,
	one hand for me and one
	hand for Arthur.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><a class="pagenum" id="page40" title="40"> </a><span class="first_word">Thank</span> heaven, I had a good
	lead on my pursuers—I needed
	it. I was on the bucket chain while
	they were still almost a city block
	behind me, along the galleries. I
	was halfway across the roadway,
	afraid to look down, before they
	reached the butt end of the chain.</p>

	<p>Clash-clatter. <em>Clank!</em> The bucket
	under me jerked and clattered and
	nearly threw me into the street.
	One of those jokers had turned on
	the conveyor! It was a good trick,
	all right, but not quite in time. I
	made a flying jump and I was on
	the tower.</p>

	<p>I didn’t stop to thumb my nose
	at them, but I thought of it.</p>

	<p>I was down those steel steps,
	breathing like a spouting whale,
	in a minute flat, and jumping out
	across the concrete, coal-smeared
	yard toward the moored launches.
	Quickly enough, I guess, but with
	nothing at all to spare, because although
	I hadn’t seen anyone
	there, there was a guard.</p>

	<p>He popped out of a doorway,
	blinking foolishly; and overhead
	the guards at the conveyor belt
	were screaming at him. It took him
	a second to figure out what was
	going on, and by that time I was
	in a launch, cast off the rope,
	kicked it free, and fumbled for
	the starting button.</p>

	<p>It took me several seconds to
	realize that a rope was required,
	that in fact there was no button;
	and by then I was floating yards
	away, but the pudgy pop-eyed
	guard was also in a launch, and he
	didn’t have to fumble. He knew.
	He got his motor started a fraction
	of a second before me, and
	there he was, coming at me, set
	to ram. Or so it looked.</p>

	<p>I wrenched at the wheel and
	brought the boat hard over; but
	he swerved too, at the last moment,
	and brought up something
	that looked a little like a spear
	and a little like a sickle and turned
	out to be a boathook. I ducked,
	just in time. It sizzled over my
	head as he swung and crashed
	against the windshield. Hunks of
	safety glass splashed out over the
	forward deck, but better that than
	my head.</p>

	<p>Boathooks, hey? I had a boathook
	too! If he didn’t have another
	weapon, I was perfectly willing
	to play; I’d been sitting and taking
	it long enough and I was very
	much attracted by the idea of
	fighting back. The guard recovered
	his balance, swore at me, fought
	the wheel around and came back.</p>

	<p>We both curved out toward the
	center of the East River in intersecting
	arcs. We closed. He
	swung first. I ducked—</p>

	<p>And from a crouch, while he
	was off balance, I caught him in
	the shoulder with the hook.</p>

	<p>He made a mighty splash.</p>

	<p>I throttled down the motor long
	enough to see that he was still conscious.</p>

	<p><a class="pagenum" id="page41" title="41"> </a>“<em lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Touché</em>, buster,” I said, and set
	course for the return trip down
	around the foot of Manhattan,
	back toward the <i>Queen</i>.</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">It</span> took a while, but that was
	all right; it gave everybody a
	nice long time to get plastered. I
	sneaked aboard, carrying Arthur,
	and turned him over to Vern. Then
	I rejoined the Major. He was
	making an inspection tour of the
	ship—what he called an inspection,
	after his fashion.</p>

	<p>He peered into the engine
	rooms and said: “Ah, fine.”</p>

	<p>He stared at the generators that
	were turning over and nodded
	when I explained we needed them
	for power for lights and everything
	and said: “Ah, of course.”</p>

	<p>He opened a couple of stateroom
	doors at random and said:
	“Ah, nice.”</p>

	<p>And he went up on the flying
	bridge with me and such of his
	officers as still could walk and
	said: “Ah.”</p>

	<p>Then he said in a totally different
	tone: “What the devil’s the
	matter over there?”</p>

	<p>He was staring east through the
	muggy haze. I saw right away
	what it was that was bothering him—easy,
	because I knew where to
	look. The power plant way over
	on the East Side was billowing
	smoke.</p>

	<p>“Where’s Vern Engdahl? That
	gadget of his isn’t working right!”</p>

	<p>“You mean Arthur?”</p>

	<p>“I mean that brain in a bottle.
	It’s Engdahl’s responsibility, you
	know!”</p>

	<p>Vern came up out of the wheelhouse
	and cleared his throat.
	“Major,” he said earnestly, “I
	think there’s some trouble over
	there. Maybe you ought to go
	look for yourself.”</p>

	<p>“Trouble?”</p>

	<p>“I, uh, hear there’ve been power
	failures,” Vern said lamely. “Don’t
	you think you ought to inspect it?
	I mean just in case there’s something
	serious?”</p>

	<p>The Major stared at him
	frostily, and then his mood
	changed. He took a drink from the
	glass in his hand, quickly finishing
	it off.</p>

	<p>“Ah,” he said, “hell with it.
	Why spoil a good party? If there
	are going to be power failures,
	why, let them be. That’s my
	motto!”</p>

	<p>Vern and I looked at each other.
	He shrugged slightly, meaning,
	well, we tried. And I shrugged
	slightly, meaning, what did you
	expect? And then he glanced upward,
	meaning, take a look at
	what’s there.</p>

	<p>But I didn’t really have to look
	because I heard what it was. In
	fact, I’d been hearing it for some
	time. It was the Major’s entire air
	force—two helicopters, swirling
	around us at an average altitude of
	a hundred feet or so. They showed
	<a class="pagenum" id="page42" title="42"> </a>up bright against the gathering
	clouds overhead, and I looked at
	them with considerable interest—partly
	because I considered it an
	even-money bet that one of them
	would be playing crumple-fender
	with our stacks, partly because I
	had an idea that they were not
	there solely for show.</p>

	<p>I said to the Major: “Chief,
	aren’t they coming a little close?
	I mean it’s <em>your</em> ship and all, but
	what if one of them takes a spill
	into the bridge while you’re here?”</p>

	<p>He grinned. “They know better,”
	he bragged. “Ah, besides, I want
	them close. I mean if anything
	went wrong.”</p>

	<p>I said, in a tone that showed as
	much deep hurt as I could
	manage: “Sir, what could go
	wrong?”</p>

	<p>“Oh, you know.” He patted my
	shoulder limply. “Ah, no offense?”
	he asked.</p>

	<p>I shook my head. “Well,” I said,
	“let’s go below.”</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">All</span> of it was done carefully,
	carefully as could be. The
	only thing was, we forgot about
	the typewriters. We got everybody,
	or as near as we could, into
	the Grand Salon where the food
	was, and right there on a table at
	the end of the hall was one of the
	typewriters clacking away. Vern
	had rigged them up with rolls of
	paper instead of sheets, and maybe
	that was ingenious, but it was
	also a headache just then. Because
	the typewriter was banging out:</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">LEFT FOUR THIRTEEN
	FOURTEEN AND TWENTYONE
	BOILERS WITH A FULL
	HEAD OF STEAM AND THE
	SAFETY VALVES LOCKED
	BOY I TELL YOU WHEN
	THOSE THINGS LET GO
	YOURE GOING TO HEAR A
	NOISE THATLL KNOCK
	YOUR HAT OFF</p>

	<p>The Major inquired politely:
	“Something to do with the ship?”</p>

	<p>“Oh, <em>that</em>,” said Vern. “Yeah.
	Just a little, uh, something to do
	with the ship. Say, Major, here’s
	the bar. Real scotch, see? Look
	at the label!”</p>

	<p>The Major glanced at him with
	faint contempt—well, he’d had the
	pick of the greatest collection of
	high-priced liquor stores in the
	world for ten years, so no wonder.
	But he allowed Vern to press a
	drink on him.</p>

	<p>And the typewriter kept rattling:</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">LOOKS LIKE RAIN ANY
	MINUTE NOW HOO BOY IM
	GLAD I WONT BE IN THOSE
	WHIRLYBIRDS WHEN THE
	STORM STARTS SAY VERN
	WHY DONT YOU EVER ANSWER
	ME Q Q ISNT IT
	ABOUT TIME TO TAKE
	OFF XXX I MEAN GET UNDER
	WEIGH Q Q</p>

	<p>Some of the “clerks, typists, domestic
	personnel and others”—that
	was the way they were listed on
	<a class="pagenum" id="page43" title="43"> </a>the T/O; it was only coincidence
	that the Major had married them
	all—were staring at the typewriter.</p>

	<p>“Drinks!” Vern called nervously.
	“Come on, girls! Drinks!”</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">The</span> Major poured himself a
	stiff shot and asked: “What <em>is</em>
	that thing? A teletype or something?”</p>

	<p>“That’s right,” Vern said, trailing
	after him as the Major wandered
	over to inspect it.</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">I GIVE THOSE BOILERS
	ABOUT TEN MORE MINUTES
	SAM WELL WHAT
	ABOUT IT Q Q READY TO
	SHOVE OFF Q Q</p>

	<p>The Major said, frowning faintly:
	“Ah, that reminds me of something.
	Now what is it?”</p>

	<p>“More scotch?” Vern cried.
	“Major, a little more scotch?”</p>

	<p>The Major ignored him, scowling.
	One of the “clerks, typists”
	said: “Honey, you know what it
	is? It’s like that pross you had,
	remember? It was on our wedding
	night, and you’d just got it, and
	you kept asking it to tell you
	limericks.”</p>

	<p>The Major snapped his fingers.
	“Knew I’d get it,” he glowed.
	Then abruptly he scowled again
	and turned to face Vern and me.
	“Say—” he began.</p>

	<p>I said weakly: “The boilers.”</p>

	<p>The Major stared at me, then
	glanced out the window. “What
	boilers?” he demanded. “It’s just
	a thunderstorm. Been building up
	all day. Now what about this? Is
	that thing—”</p>

	<p>But Vern was paying him no
	attention. “Thunderstorm?” he
	yelled. “Arthur, you listening? Are
	the helicopters gone?”</p>

	<p class="arthur_speak">YESYESYES</p>

	<p>“Then shove off, Arthur! Shove
	off!”</p>

	<p>The typewriter rattled and
	slammed madly.</p>

	<p>The Major yelled angrily:
	“Now listen to me, you! I’m
	asking you a question!”</p>

	<p>But we didn’t have to answer,
	because there was a thrumming
	and a throbbing underfoot, and
	then one of the “clerks, typists”
	screamed: “The dock!” She
	pointed at a porthole. “It’s
	moving!”</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">Well</span>, we got out of there—barely
	in time. And then it
	was up to Arthur. We had the
	whole ship to roam around in
	and there were plenty of places
	to hide. They had the whole ship
	to search. And Arthur was the
	whole ship.</p>

	<p>Because it was Arthur, all right,
	brought in and hooked up by
	Vern, attained to his greatest
	dream and ambition. He was skipper
	of a superliner, and more than
	any skipper had ever been—the
	ship was his body, as the prosthetic
	tank had never been; the keel his
	belly, the screws his feet, the engines
	<a class="pagenum" id="page44" title="44"> </a>his heart and lungs, and
	every moving part that could be
	hooked into central control his
	many, many hands.</p>

	<div id="illo3" class="illo">
		<img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php/etext:f:frederik-pohl-the-knights-of-arthur-illo3.jpg" width="860" height="342" alt="A suitcase with an eyestalk is wired into a big control panel; two men look on." />
		<a href="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php/etext:f:frederik-pohl-the-knights-of-arthur-illo3-left.jpg" class="img_link">Left side image</a>
		<a href="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php/etext:f:frederik-pohl-the-knights-of-arthur-illo3-right.jpg" class="img_link">Right side image</a>
	</div>

	<!-- Original location of left side of illo 3 -->

	<p>Search for us? They were
	lucky they could move at all!
	Fire Control washed them with
	salt water hoses, directed by Arthur’s
	brain. Watertight doors,
	proof against sinking, locked them
	away from us at Arthur’s whim.</p>

	<p>The big bull whistle overhead
	brayed like a clamoring Gabriel,
	and the ship’s bells tinkled and
	clanged. Arthur backed that enormous
	ship out of its berth like a
	racing scull on the Schuylkill. The
	four giant screws lashed the water
	into white foam, and then the thin
	mud they sucked up into tan; and
	the ship backed, swerved, lashed
	the water, stopped, and staggered
	crazily forward.</p>

	<p>Arthur brayed at the Statue of
	Liberty, tooted good-by to Staten
	Island, feinted a charge at Sandy
	Hook and really laid back his ears
	and raced once he got to deep
	<a class="pagenum" id="page45" title="45"> </a><!-- Original location of right side of illo 3 -->water past the moored lightship.</p>

	<p>We were off!</p>

	<p>Well, from there on, it was easy.
	We let Arthur have his fun with
	the Major and the bodyguards—and
	by the sodden, whimpering
	shape they were in when they
	came out, it must really have been
	fun for him. There were just the
	three of us and only Vern and I
	had guns—but Arthur had the
	<i>Queen Elizabeth</i>, and that put the
	odds on our side.</p>

	<p>We gave the Major a choice:
	row back to Coney Island—we
	offered him a boat, free of charge—or
	come along with us as cabin
	boy. He cast one dim-eyed look
	at the hundred and nine “clerks,
	typists” and at Amy, who would
	never be the hundred and tenth.</p>

	<p>And then he shrugged and,
	game loser, said: “Ah, why not?
	I’ll come along.”</p>

	<hr class="thoughtbreak" />

	<p class="post_thoughtbreak"><span class="first_word">And</span> why not, when you come
	to think of it? I mean ruling
	a city is nice and all that, but a
	<a class="pagenum" id="page46" title="46"> </a>sea voyage is a refreshing change.
	And while a hundred and nine to
	one is a respectable female-male
	ratio, still it must be wearing; and
	eighty to thirty isn’t so bad, either.
	At least, I guess that was what
	was in the Major’s mind. I know it
	was what was in mine.</p>

	<p>And I discovered that it was in
	Amy’s, for the first thing she did
	was to march me over to the typewriter
	and say: “You’ve had it,
	Sam. We’ll dispose with the wedding
	march—just get your friend
	Arthur here to marry us.”</p>

	<p>“Arthur?”</p>

	<p>“The captain,” she said. “We’re
	on the high seas and he’s empowered
	to perform marriages.”</p>

	<p>Vern looked at me and shrugged,
	meaning, you asked for this one,
	boy. And I looked at him and
	shrugged, meaning, it could be
	worse.</p>

	<p>And indeed it could. We’d got
	our ship; we’d got our ship’s company—because,
	naturally, there
	wasn’t any use stealing a big ship
	for just a couple of us. We’d had
	to manage to get a sizable colony
	aboard. That was the whole idea.</p>

	<p>The world, in fact, was ours. It
	could have been very much worse
	indeed, even though Arthur was
	laughing so hard as he performed
	the ceremony that he jammed up
	all his keys.</p>

</div>

<p class="attribution">—FREDERIK POHL</p>
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