C M Kornbluth - Shark Ship

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Shark Ship

C. M. Kornbluth

Shark Ship

IT WAS THE SPRING SWARMING of the plankton; every man and woman and most of the children

aboard Grenville's Convoy had a job to do. As the seventy-five gigantic sailing ships plowed their two

degrees of theSouth Atlantic, the fluid that foamed beneath their cutwaters seethed also with life. In the

few weeks of the swarming, in the few meters of surface water where sunlight penetrated in sufficient

strength to trigger photosynthesis, microscopic spores burst into microscopic plants, were devoured by

minute animals which in turn were swept into the maws of barely visible sea monsters almost a tenth of an

inch from head to tail; these in turn were fiercely pursued and gobbled in shoals by the fierce little brit, the

tiny herring and shrimp that could turn a hundred miles of green water to molten silver before your eyes.

Through the silver ocean of the swarming the Convoy scudded and

tacked in great controlled zigs and zags, reaping the silver of the sea in the endlessly reeling bronze nets

each ship payed out behind.

The Commodore on Grenvllle did not sleep during the swarming; he and his staff dispatched cutters to

scout the swarms, hung on the meteorologists' words, digested the endless reports from the scout

vessels, and toiled through the night to prepare the dawn signal. The mainmast flags might tell the captains

"Convoy course five degrees right," or "Two degrees left," or only "Convoy course: no change." On those

dawn signals depended the life for the next six months of the million and a quarter souls of the Convoy. It

had not happened often, but it had happened that a succession of blunders reduced a Convoy's harvest

below the minimum necessary to sustain life. Derelicts were sometimes sighted and salvaged from such

convoys; strong-stomached men and women were needed for the first boarding and clearing away of

human debris. Cannibalism occurred, an obscene thing one had nightmares about.

The seventy-five captains had their own particular purgatory to endure throughout the harvest, the

Sail-Seine Equation. It was their job to balance the push on the sails and the drag of the ballooning seines

so that push exceeded drag by just the number of pounds that would keep the ship on course and in

station, given every conceivable variation of wind force and direction, temperature of water, consistency

of brit, and smoothness of hull. Once the catch was salted down it was customary for the captains to

converge on Grenville for a roaring feast by way of letdown.

Rank had its privileges. There was no such relief for the captains' Net Officers or their underlings in

Operations and Maintenance, or for their Food Officers, under whom served the Processing and

Stowage people. They merely worked, streaming the nets twenty-four hours a day, keeping them bellied

out with lines from mast and outriding gigs, keeping them spooling over the great drum amidships, tending

the blades that had to scrape the brit from the nets without damaging the nets, repairing the damage when

it did occur; and without interruption of the harvest, flash-cooking the part of the harvest to be cooked,

drying the part to be dried, pressing oil from the harvest as required, and stowing what was cooked and

dried and pressed where it would not spoil, where it would not alter the trim of the ship, where it would

not be pilfered by children. This went on for

weeks after the silver had gone thin and patchy against the green, and after the silver had altogether

vanished.

The routines of many were not changed at all by the swarming season. The blacksmiths, the sailmakers,

the carpenters, the water-tenders, to a degree the storekeepers, functioned as before, tending to the

fabric of the ship, renewing, replacing, reworking. The ships were things of brass, bronze, and unrusting

steel. Phosphor-bronze strands were woven into net, lines, and cables; cordage, masts, and hull were

metal; all were inspected daily by the First Officer and his men and women for the smallest pinhead of

corrosion. The smallest pinhead of corrosion could spread; it could send a ship to the bottom before it

had done spreading, as the chaplains were fond of reminding worshippers when the ships rigged for

church on Sundays. To keep the hellish red1 of iron rust and the sinister blue of copper rust from

invading, the squads of oilers were always on the move, with oil distilled from the catch. The sails and the

clothes alone could not be preserved; they wore out. It was for this that the felting machines down below

chopped wornout sails and clothing into new fibers and twisted and rolled them with kelp and with glue

from the catch into new felt for new sails and clothing.

While the plankton continued to swarm twice a year, Grenville's Convoy could continue to sail theSouth

Atlantic, from ten-mile limit to ten-mile limit. Not one of the seventy-five ships in the Convoy had an

anchor.

The Captain's Party that followed the end of Swarming 283 was slow getting underway. McBee, whose

ship was Port Squadron 19, said to Salter of Starboard Squadron 30: "To be frank, I'm too damned

exhausted to care whether I ever go to another party, but I didn't want to disappoint the Old Man."

The Commodore, trim and bronzed, not showing his eighty years, was across the great cabin from them

greeting new arrivals.

Salter said: "You'll feel differently after a good sleep. It was a great harvest, wasn't it? Enough weather

to make it tricky and interesting. Remember 276? That was the one that wore me out. A grind, going by

the book. But this time, on the fifteenth day my fore-topsail was going to go about noon, big rip in her,

but I needed her for my S-S balance. What to do? I broke out a balloon spinnaker— now wait a minute,

let me tell it first before you throw the book at

me—and pumped my fore trim tank out. Presto! No trouble; fore-topsail replaced in fifteen minutes."

McBee was horrified. "You could have lost your net!"

"My weatherman absolutely ruled out any sudden squalls."

"Weatherman. You could have lost your net!"

Salter studied him. "Saying that once was thoughtless, McBee. Saying it twice is insulting. Do you think

I'd gamble with twenty thousand lives?"

McBee passed his hands over his tired face. "I'm sorry," he said. "I told you I was exhausted. Of course

under special circumstances it can be a safe maneuver." He walked to a porthole for a glance at his own

ship, the nineteenth in the long echelon behind Grenville. Salter stared after him. "Losing one's net" was a

phrase that occurred in several proverbs; it stood for abysmal folly. In actuality a ship that lost its

phosphor-bronze wire mesh was doomed, and quickly. One could improvise with sails or try to jury-rig a

net out of the remaining rigging, but not well enough to feed twenty thousand hands, and no fewer than

that were needed for maintenance. Grenville's Convoy had met a derelict which lost its net back before

240; children still told horror stories about it, how the remnants of port and starboard watches, mad to a

man, were at war, a war of vicious night forays with knives and clubs.

Salter went to the bar and accepted from the Commodore's steward his first drink of the evening, a steel

tumbler of colorless fluid distilled from a fermented mash of sargassum weed. It was about forty per cent

alcohol and tasted pleasantly of iodides.

He looked up from his sip and his eyes widened. There was a man in captain's uniform talking with the

Commodore and he did not recognize his face. But there had been no promotions lately!

The Commodore saw him looking and beckoned him over. He saluted and then accepted the old man's

hand-clasp. "Captain Salter," the Commodore said, "my youngest and rashest, and my best harvester.

Salter, this is Captain Degerand of the White Fleet."

Salter frankly gawked. He knew perfectly well that Grenville's Convoy was far from sailing alone upon

the seas. On watch he had beheld distant sails from time to time. He was aware that cruising the

two-degree belt north of theirs was another convoy and that in the belt south of theirs was still another, in

fact that the seaborne population of the world was a constant one billion, eighty million.

But never had he expected to meet face to face any of them except the one and a quarter million who

sailed under Grenville's flag.

Degerand was younger than he, all deeply tanned skin and flashing pointed teeth. His uniform was

perfectly ordinary and very queer. He understood Salter's puzzled look. "It's woven cloth," he said. "The

White Fleet was launched several decades after Grenville's. By then they had machinery to reconstitute

fibers suitable for spinning and they equipped us with it. It's six of one and half a dozen of the other. I

think our sails may last longer than yours, but the looms require a lot of skilled labor when they break

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