| Title | : | With No Strings Attached |
|---|---|---|
| Author | : | Randall Garrett |
| Release | : | 1987-01-01 |
| Kind | : | ebook |
| Genre | : | Short Stories, Books, Fiction & Literature |
| Size | : | 117161 |
| With No Strings Attached is a Fiction Short Story Book. 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 hardly bigger than a foot locker, and that the rest of the battery hadn't been used at all. |
