Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: Captain Peabody by Phillips Rog Barth Ernie Illustrator
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page
Ebook has 68 lines and 7063 words, and 2 pages
I pushed his head back and tried to put my thumb against his eyeball. He closed his eyes tightly and I forced his right eye open and pressed the ball of my thumb against the exposed eyeball.
"Not too much or it will make your eye bloodshot," I said, in hardly more than a whisper. "Evidence, you know. Who's going to believe that the Captain did such a thing? Not even the crew! Sure, they'll agree with you to keep from being beat up. That is, if you have any stomach for that sort of thing when I get through with you. I'm just beginning, you know."
I lifted my thumb from his eye and squeezed his nostrils together, watching the terror build up in him, watching his struggles, watching him grow weaker and weaker, and releasing him at the last moment before he lost consciousness, and watching his chest heave as he sucked in lungsful of air.
In ten minutes--or was it ten eternities?--he became a quivering mass of flesh.
I did things to him that left him too weak to move. At the end of half an hour I pulled the tape off his mouth and listened to him blubber. I took the tape off his ankles, and the belt off his wrists. I tortured him some more and he took it.
"And when I call for you over the intercom," I said, "if you don't come at once I have you for gross insubordination to your Captain. And if you so much as touch one member of the crew again I'll call you, boy. I'll call you."
Finally I let him go.
After he had gone I trembled like a leaf. Slowly a little bit of sanity returned to me, and with it a realization of what I had done. Nausea overcame me and I staggered into the washroom and got rid of my breakfast, then returned to my desk.
For hours I sat there while my mind picked up the threads of life and began functioning again. There was still the feeling that Resnick was omniscient, that he would be able to topple me into disgrace. But with it, gradually, came the realization that he wouldn't, that he couldn't.
I had used his own psychological weapons on him, building up in him a fear psychosis that he couldn't successfully fight. I had turned the tables.
I couldn't really believe it just yet, but I couldn't disbelieve it either. For the next three days I went about my customary routines with a calm exterior, waiting for the storm to break, but it never did.
Finally, to test it, I deliberately went on a tour of inspection through the ship, until I came to where Resnick was working, along with several others of the crew. As I entered the compartment and saw him look up, I saw the instinctive cringing that he couldn't help. In a flash of inspiration I saw that his sadism was a cover for his own cowardice, a compensation mechanism.
I knew then that I had won. After one long silent moment I turned my back on him and left the compartment.
As I walked by myself to the central tube and pulled myself up to the Captain's deck, for the first time I began to realize what being Captain meant. It means a lot of things, of course, but most of all it means facing up to one's command, being in charge.
David Markham remained with me as my orderly until I retired, and he is still with me. A few years after the incidents of this story I had an opportunity to get him a commission but he turned it down and refused to leave me. Sometimes I think he knows what happened in my office that day that I called Resnick in, but he has never given any hint whether he does or not.
You wonder that I am not ashamed to confess publicly to you that I was a coward? You shouldn't wonder. We are all cowards--or fools. I am not ashamed of the fact that once I was a coward. Bravery, in a way, consists in not being afraid of being afraid.
Just one thing remains in my story. When I reached North Marsport on that first leg of my first command, I was a Captain.
I have been one ever since.
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page