|
We slipped through the hull of the lead ship while Heisenberg spoke. We entered the ship in much the same manner as Martin had introduced me to the Bohr/Miller effect on the first day we met.
The ship we entered was of an older technology. Its interior was a maze of tunnels, tiny rooms; hallways lined with endless miles of pipes, wires, pull-cords, and mechanical shafts. The thing was certainly pre-light-pipe, pre-fiber-optics, and pre-LSI computer technology. Its walls and ceilings were painted, and the whole ship was dimly lit. The distinct coloring system that we noticed throughout the ship was indicative of an early age of color-coded orientation that had once been used in complex mazes.
Occasionally we came upon a water fountain in one of the hallways, that was dripping, which made the hallway appear like a shower in zero gravity. The ship's environment lacked the means of pulling the water droplets to the ground. The people, themselves, moved about ship with the use of magnetic shoes.
"Isn't that a beauty, this old crate?" said Heisenberg.
The ship also was ruled by an equally antiquated governmental system. The whip enforced a rule of law that was determined solely by the captain, producing a kind of order which was likewise determined by him. The captain, who we figured the most brightly uniformed individual to be, actually carried the whip with him. I couldn't believe what I saw, a real whip. We seemed to have strayed into the dark ages. And we saw the whip used. A soldier was brought before the 'king.' Apparently he was accused of something. There were arguments, limbs being waved into the air. Then the soldier bowed. His shirt was unzipped at the back. The 'king' added five lashes personally, to the man's many previous stripes. I could almost feel the pain, watching the soldier's face. "That bastard!" was all I could say when Heisenberg hushed me.
"No, the guy was lucky," Heisenberg whispered, and grinned. "Those Gorans," and he emphasized Gorans, "may be more human than you think. Under Hitler, a captain like this would likely have killed that man, and probably for much less."
"Why are you calling them Gorans?" I asked Heisenberg later.
"They remind me of Herman Goering and Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's buddies, and the gore that had become their trademark, the color of fascism."
"The fascism that the British Empire had hired Hitler for to destroy Russia," I interrupted Heisenberg. I sort of knew what he meant by focusing of fascism. I saw the gore. When a people are drained of their humanity by cultured insanity, fascism unfolds in the minds of those emptied people. The gore did no longer hurt them, but it hurt us. I felt the hurt. It was as if we had moved backwards in time, to the time of the fascist state of Hitler and those worse states on earth that came after Hitler where torture became the rule, and murder, lies, destruction, and endless war. Maybe, time, wasn't the right term to use in this case, with this being an invalid concept in the way Heisenberg understood things. Nonetheless the entire scene appeared as if it were a page like taken out of Earth's history, re-edited into a galactic setting.
By seeing the ship, by seeing it operate, I could only hope that we might be able to do something. Still, I could see no hope that the invasion of planet 'O' could be averted by us. There was no central control for anything that could cripple an entire ship, much less the entire fleet. Each gunner was on his own. Each one had his own missiles, and his own guidance system for the missiles. The guidance systems were crude. They were based on some primitive computer assisted video feedback process. Every gun station that we inspected had its own system. They all looked the same. There was a certain beauty in building battle wagons with this multiple redundancy that seemed to make them immune to any form of sabotage. Our ship's power plant had a singular redundancy compared to that, and that had failed on its own.
Next Page
|| - page index -
|| - chapter index -
|| - Exit -
||
 |
Stories about
Love
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
|
|
|