This story was published in Analog, February 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. 115 115 With No Strings Attached A man will always be willing to buy something he wants, and believes in, even if it is impossible, rather than something he believes is impossible. So ... sell him what he thinks he wants! David Gordon 116 116 The United States Submarine Ambitious Brill slid smoothly into her berth in the Brooklyn Navy Yard after far too many weeks at sea, as far as her crew were concerned. After all the necessary preliminaries had been waded through, the majority of that happy crew went ashore to enjoy a well-earned and long-anticipated leave in the depths of the brick-and-glass canyons of Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson. The trip had been uneventful, in so far as nothing really dangerous or exciting had happened. Nothing, indeed, that could even be called out-of-the-way—except that there was more brass aboard than usual, and that the entire trip had been made underwater with the exception of one surfacing for a careful position check, in order to make sure that the ship’s instruments gave the same position as the stars gave. They had. All was well. That is not to say that the crew of the Ambitious Brill were entirely satisfied in their own minds about certain questions that had been puzzling them. They weren’t. But they knew better than to ask questions, even among themselves. And they said nothing whatever when they got ashore. But even the novices among submarine crews know that while the nuclear-powered subs like George Washington, Patrick Henry, or Benjamin Franklin are perfectly capable of circumnavigating the globe without coming up for air, such performances are decidedly rare in a presumably Diesel-electric vessel such as the U.S.S. Ambitious Brill. And those few members of the crew who had seen what went on in the battery room were the most secretive and the most puzzled of all. They, and they alone, knew that some of the cells of the big battery that drove the ship’s electric motors had been removed to make room for a big, steel-clad box
Back
Top