"... things like sawed tree-trunks, shells you call them ... a pile of them ... he looks at them and he thinks they're going bad and they ought to be used soon ... under a wooden roof they are ... a thin man with death on his face and hate in his heart ... he wears blue and gold ... he sticks the gold, you call a coat's wrist the cuff, he sticks the cuff under the nose of a fellow and yells his hate out and the fellow feels ready to strangle on blood ... it's about a boat that sank ... this fellow, he's a fat little man and he kills and kills, he'd kill the man if he could...."
A picket boat steamed by the coast twice a day, north after dawn and south before sunset. They had to watch out for it; it swept the coast with powerful glasses.
"... it's the man with the bellyache again but now he's sleepy ... he's cursing the skipper ... sure there's nothing on the coast to trouble us ... eight good men aboard and that one bastard of a skipper...."
Sometimes it jumped erratically, like an optical lever disturbed by the weight of a hair.
"... board over the door painted with a circle, a zig-zag on its side, an up-and-down line ... they call it office of intelligent navels ... the lumber camp ... machine goes chug-rip, chug-rip ... and the place where they cut metal like wood on machines that spin around ... a deathly-sick little fellow loaded down and chained ... fell on his face, he can't get up, his bowels are water, his muscles are stiff, like dry branches and he's afraid ... they curse him, they beat him, they take him to a machine that spins ... they ... they—they—"
She sat bolt upright, screaming. Her eyes didn't see Charles. He drew back one hand and slammed it across her cheek in a slap that reverberated like a pistol shot. Her head rocked to the blow and her eyes snapped back from infinity-focus.
She never told Charles what they had done to the sick slave in the machine shop, and he never asked her.
Without writing equipment, for crutches, Charles doubted profoundly that he'd be able to hang onto any of the material she supplied. He surprised himself; his memory developed with exercise.
The shadowy ranks of the New Portsmouth personnel became solider daily in his mind; the chronically-fatigued ordnance-man whose mainspring was to get by with the smallest possible effort; the sex-obsessed little man in Intelligence who lived only for the brothels where he selected older women—women who looked like his mother; the human weasel in BuShips who was impotent in bed and a lacerating tyrant in the office; the admiral who knew he was dying and hated his juniors proportionately to their youth and health.
And—