The Last Ship (16 page)

The unspoken power the women were beginning to gain over us. Without the slightest effort on their part to acquire it. None necessary. Simply by their presence, nothing else. The knowledge, too, that every day that passed that power increased. And then I knew something more. They were aware of all of this in the most meticulous way, to the most refined exactitude, like a navigational fix accurate to the degree, minute, and second; with that sensory apparatus, so exquisitely calibrated, they possess that exceeded by far our best radar, our finest sonar gear.

So long in doing so, it now arrived in merciless brutality, revealing in all fullness every particular of the fearful prospect as does the great lightning the night ocean. In that naked and defenseless illumination I seemed to stand on the shore of a dark and unknown sea, looking at an unventured horizon; without the least idea in the world of how to proceed; knowing only the certainty of the most treacherous shoals ahead, whatever the course I decided upon; shoals, given the terrible mathematics of the matter, I could see no way whatsoever of either going over or around.

I looked across the sea. The waters, in a profound reach of blue, stretched far and away in the tranquillity that held everywhere. And yet something premonitory seemed to hang in the air, as if some elemental and unspecified peripeteia awaited us that all my unending anticipation of everything that might happen to us had yet failed to foresee; the very serenity, the pellucid emptiness, pressing down on me. I stood a moment more in the tense quiescence. Suddenly a sheer of wind came up, flapping the halyards, then faded away. The breathless stillness returned. Standing on the captain’s catwalk high above the sea, I felt an actual physical dizziness as though teetering on the very rim of the precipice.

P
erhaps, needing time, I had pretended dangerously that the problem did not even latently exist; of distinctions suddenly beginning to assert themselves where there had been none, not allowed. Refusing almost to recognize the apprehension which surely had for so long now been in me. Still, I was not so innocent as to believe the matter would never arise, in present circumstances, to think that Navy directives in these areas would forever and in every respect hold fast. It reposed always in a special vault of my soul, having taken up a permanent residence there, waiting patiently and in its turn, so I supposed, locked up, ready to be brought out and dealt with at a time of my choosing. Not that it did not, now and then, and more recently than formerly, pop out of that safekeeping, briefly but tormentingly, to confront me, fill me with foreboding, and to ask me what I was going to do about it. Each time knowing I was fathoms deep, no nearer to answering that question, solving that vast riddle, than when first I began to consider it. It was not even that I did not want it to happen. Quite the opposite; coming to know even before we raised the island, as in some epiphany that changes everything, not only that it would, but that it must; yes, that I had some kind of ultimate responsibility to see that it did. It was rather that I had my hands quite full, and so had wished to put it off until such time as other urgencies—food, finding a place for us, building thereon habitations—were attended to and I could give the matter something like the full attention I was certain it would require. But now that captain’s inner compass that I had learned long since on many seas to be guided by, and which seemed to function independently of myself, veered: It can wait no longer; time is running out. What if after all our strivings, our hardships met and overcome, our devotion to one another not without valor and the very limits of selflessness that might be expected of men . . . if after all that we should shipwreck on such secondary shoals as these! (I felt even an unreasoning anger at the women themselves, as if they had deliberately brought the matter on, when every known fact made clear that their guilt consisted solely of their being members of ship’s company.) The idea was intolerable. And at a time when our every resource, physical, mental, and emotional, was summoned for the task ahead, itself filled with every uncertainty, with far greater trials and vicissitudes sure to come than any we had thus far vanquished. Confront the matter now (said that guide), lest, given its nature, the failure to do so imperil all other plans. Turn men, until now brothers, shipmates, against one another. One could not but think in terms of unspeakable—impermissible—horrors. A house divided against itself: The old truth stands a thousandfold more certain for a ship, which has no exit, no place to escape from the divisiveness. The voice had begun to pound in my ears: Solve it by the authority that lies in you as a ship’s captain; the matter will only worsen and in exact step with the time you delay. And with final urgency: Nothing will work if that does not; if some way is not found. A taunt more than a voice. That great gulf of numbers: What solution, what arrangement, could there possibly be?

The matter now emerged from its hidden, rather cozy refuge, my mind having turned fervently to it through troubled days and awakened nights, a kind of unceasing anguish of incessant thinking, figuring . . . the combinations I came up with, the variety, in their infinity, of schemes, systems—solutions! All of them foolish. Knowing that I had no higher duty than to solve something I was in no way qualified to solve—but what man would be? What
man.
Suddenly the mind made a movement to dwell on certain general speculations, not for their originality or profundity, aware even as I did so that they were entirely banal reflections, matters obvious to anyone with a claim to thinking, but rather as one who had learned long since not just that there is a great deal of necessary banality in the Navy but that the realization of the fact, if one attended to it, not infrequently curiously shines a way through a difficulty, like the banal lighthouse standing on a shoal-ridden shore.

Knowing little about women, I had nonetheless over the years come to one conclusion as a truth. Women will stick together. Their bonds due to one another in their femaleness were as strong as anything I had seen. A thing absolutely their own, unique. Nothing like it is known in the general world of men. Standing together simply for the reason that they are women, nothing else, a supreme, a wonderfully functioning and unshakable instinct that binds them to the interests of womanhood. And where more than in this matter, their domain, their vocation: had not Nature decreed it so? The furtherest thing from my mind, therefore, should be to attempt to break up this invincible loyalty, as I first hastily thought. Rather that swift solidarity, with all its strengths, should be used. How stupid I had been not to have seen it! Perhaps it was that that Girard had been telling me all along.

Suddenly it all came together: I felt I knew the only way that might stand a remote chance of working. One, to be sure, filled with great hazard, with every difficulty the sea herself proffers in her endless moods, her cunning snares without number: these would be present also, aggressively so. Even so, I felt there was no other which would not lead us straight on a course fully capable of disintegrating us, foundering us as a ship founders. Thereafter always coming back to it, still with profound trepidations and misgivings, as the only way acceptable (what we called civilized), always returning as after a circumnavigational voyage round and round on some vast and infinitely baffling meridian—moral or practical, I hardly knew which, and scarcely cared so long as I could devise a method, any method, that would either subdue or accommodate that force in its immensity, that would
work,
stand a chance of working—to the one authority even a captain could not usurp, the only one not conferred on him, however sublimely confident he might be in his abilities in all other matters to arrange men’s lives for them. Only one source had that authority. And almost instanteously with it a decision, a first step. I would give this candidate one week of all the full attention I could manage within the other demands on me; and during that period observe discreetly, furtively: the men, the women, in a way I never had, a different way, as of different persons from those I had so long now commanded; different beings in the sense of now being ambushed by thoughts, prospects, possibilities, hitherto forbidden; spend it also reconnoitering the matter in its every aspect. Then if the idea firmed, came resolutely whole, I would speak with the Jesuit. Looking not for balm but for a species of concordat or even dispensation; even, via him, for Providence’s approval on top of mine. I did not disallow the possibility that my greatest trouble might come from this powerful quarter.

Simultaneous with the decision on this matter I made another. At the moment of execution of the other course I would begin at once the building of our habitations ashore. Before it was too late; before more restiveness—or worse—was permitted to form and magnify, even—such a possibility stood always just behind my shoulder, looking over it—reach a point beyond all control, the matter taken from my hands, with results no man could foretell.

Before proceeding I further needed to talk with Lieutenant (jg) Selmon.

 *  *  * 

We were in my cabin, the door closed. I waited a few moments and then spoke in tones only of reflection, studious, uncompulsive.

“We have picked up a certain amount ourselves, of course.”

“Yes, sir. Couldn’t be helped. Especially in that long passage through the dark and the cold. There’s a great deal we don’t know about it, as we’ve so often discussed. So I can only make a best guess, which is: not enough at one time, or cumulatively enough, to put us at risk. Chances I’d say considerably above fifty-fifty that we, or at least most of us, should be okay as far as our own lives are concerned.”

It seemed a curious phrase. I picked up on it.

“Our own lives?”

“Sir?”

At times Selmon had a touch of the
distrait,
the far-away-in-another-world about him. I found this quite normal, given that world. He must have drifted off momentarily into some part of it. My question brought him back.

“I was referring to, well . . . just speaking in general terms. I sometimes find myself speculating about that branch of it. The possibilities. The endless permutations! Almost a philosophical hobby of mine you might say. Nothing more. The genetics of the thing. Gamogenesis. Can be rather fascinating to someone like myself—being in the field, you know.” He laughed, slightly, almost with embarrassment. “Frankly, sir, taking some rather far-out hypothesis—wondering, for example, if I could produce a baby now and what it would be like. Whether or not I would want to take the chance. Whether it might be an altogether different result if I waited until whatever present level I’ve absorbed had gone down in me; or whether it is just the opposite: that the longer one waits the less the prospects for a favorable result. An ocean of unknowns . . .” He laughed again, sheepishly. “That mythical baby, for instance—figuring out the possibilities, the chances, the probabilities. Excuse the woolgathering, sir.”

“The chances? Go ahead. Let’s talk a little about your hobby.”

“Well, sir, there’s not very much to talk about. Very little was ever discovered for certain about it. Only the most elementary things really. For the simple reason that people hadn’t experienced it on enough of a scale to draw any hard conclusions. There simply wasn’t enough data—and no way to accumulate it. There are two questions essentially—we’re talking only about safe people, of course—safe themselves but having absorbed certain amounts. One is whether such people can reproduce at all. The other is: if so, what they might pass on.”

“You mean defects? Mutations?”

“It’s just possible, sir. But, of course, not in everybody.”

He paused a moment, in a concentration of analytical thought, mindful, I could sense, to exclude any amount of interfering sentiment, unhurried: all this a useful, perhaps urgent, mode in a profession accustomed to encountering as a matter of course the startling and often the forbidden. Some time since he had manifestly installed his own personal emotional dosimeter; seeing always to it that that private instrument, at least, remained steadily at a level nonperilous to his work; no major fluctuations permitted. He spoke with that deliberation now.

“That in any event was the best conclusion arrived at. No way to tell which was which. Nothing strange about that part of it, of course—I mean, scientifically speaking. People have always reacted differently to different . . . germs, viruses, whatever. Just in the same way, different individuals vary quite widely in their response to equivalent exposures. We know that much. In one, it might take very little to tip the scale, genetically speaking, what a given individual will pass on. Another individual might not be affected at all.”

“And no way to find out? Which is which I mean.”

“No, sir. Not without actually trying—experimenting, in individual cases. Of course there was scarcely any way to do that with human beings.”

A breeze, sweet and gentle, stirred through the open port. I looked out, then back at the young officer sitting across the desk from me.

“That would mean—is this correct—that every exposed individual, though unharmed himself, would fall into one of three categories. He, she, could not reproduce at all; could reproduce mutated offspring; could reproduce normal offspring?”

“That’s about it, sir. The best guess. To the extent of our knowledge. The rats in the laboratories told us that much. But even with them, it was hard to draw a precise line—that is to say, what exact dosage or accumulation put them in which of the three categories you mention. Far too much of a variance spectrum to speak in predictabilities. And, of course, people not being rats, it could be quite different with humans. They were able to calculate with a great deal of precision what dosages were lethal for the individual, what dosage was not lethal at the moment but put him at risk down the years, what dosage would be unlikely to cast any effect at all on his own years of living . . . That’s why we’re making it now, of course . . . But as to what that last one might pass on, or whether he could pass on anything, they never got very far. We have no way of knowing. Not surprising . . .” Then came that phrase that had become a byword to our lives, the ultimate in apothegms: “Considering we’re dealing with something that’s never happened before. But yes, that was the best guess they came up with, the nearest to anything solid: those three categories.”

“Let us say, for example, that the woman could reproduce normally and the man fell into one of the first two categories.”

“There would be a possibility of no fertilization or the risk of a mutated one. If the ‘best guess’ is right.”

“In any group of people, to find the ‘healthy’ man and the ‘healthy’ woman—assuming one of each was present at all—would involve both risk and experimentation. Using various combinations of the individuals. Is that correct?”

“A great deal of both, sir. Unless you just happened to luck out in the early going. Normal reproduction becoming ‘Russian roulette,’ they used to call it at the laboratories where they sent us—part of the RO course.”

“What a name for it.”

“All the studies we were shown!” he said in a rare exclamation. “Everybody was making a study, it seemed. Nearly all of them so futile, I always thought—so little data available, no way to accumulate it. Now and then one of them had a little sense to it. One of our own internal Navy studies, for instance—classified top secret, if you can believe it—concluding that submariners would be the next fathers of mankind—if there was to be mankind.”

“Absence of exposure? Sounds reasonable,” I said idly, my mind beginning to reach beyond these intellectual explorations.

In this reflective mood, I heard myself say something unexpected even to my own ears.

“Nature cares little for men. Would you agree, Mr. Selmon?”