The Last Ship (55 page)

“How do you explain it, Mr. Selmon?” I said where we stood on the bridge wing, looking down and point-blank into the town.

“A fluke of the winds, I’d say, sir. They brought it. Then they moved on.”

“But the people?”

He shrugged. “They managed to do something with themselves. When they found out what was happening to them I’d say. Just left, maybe. In their boats . . . I don’t see any boats . . .”

His voice trailed away. He stepped inside, looked at his repeater, stepped back.

“Sir, I’d say just about five minutes more here.”

I looked up the street; down on the hands lining the lifelines. They simply stood gazing at the town as at a curiosity. From high on the hill a shaft of sunlight flashed from the cross atop the church. I had once been to Mass there. I remembered that for the fact that they still did it in Latin, the priest either not having heard of Vatican II or ignoring it. It had been a kind of reassurance. I turned away.

“Take us out, Mr. Bartlett,” I said smartly to the OOD.

We proceeded through the South China Sea, the black monsters in the heavens still visible far off, hanging on, as though tracking us. We knew, of course, that they would move on us when the waters got narrower within the ganglion of lands in which we would soon be trapped. We braced ourselves for them.

W
e first began to notice their approach one morning passing through the waters of the Sunda Islands in the Malay Archipelago, at approximately 01°10' S. and 105°20' E., our position having just been checked by myself with Thurlow in the chartroom. I had stepped out onto the bridge wing and looked up into a sky free of clouds in our immediate vicinity, the same black masses standing far off as they had been for days; had looked routinely at the bridge thermometer which recorded a temperature of 74° F. Presently, high in the sky, bearing N. by N.W. from the ship, I noticed casually a few clouds make their entrance into the virgin blue. They were altocumulus but instead of being their characteristic flocculent white bore long brown and even black stripings. I proceeded about the ship’s business.

No day passes but that a mariner looks up at the sky fifty times, on one of possibly changing weather, many times that; that sky which tells so much to him who has eyes to see. Throughout the day the clouding increased, especially that altocumulus with its curious darkened aspect; more so now, full overcast never coming, the sun always shining down. So long accustomed to observing cloud formations, I had the peculiar sensation, making no sense as related to anything I had ever seen in the behavior of clouds, that the altocumulus had somehow been penetrated by some of that higher and distant black mass we had observed for such a considerable period now. It was as if strange combinations, mutations involving the very clouds, violating traditional performance, were underway in the heavens themselves. We had become accustomed to seeing new manifestations aplenty. Looking back, one was aware almost daily that the numerous prophets of events had missed entirely many of these; they had been as babes in forecasting what it would be like in actuality. (In fairness, one should add that the failure of their predictions fell principally on the underside; and that a number of them had spoken, using one of their favorite words to cover any possible oversights or failures to foresee, of unpredictable “synergisms.”) This one I felt was improbable. Nevertheless worry, in a certain discernment as to what was happening, with it a foreboding that seemed rooted in reality, a curious expectation that had been in me all along, had begun to penetrate my consciousness. The following morning saw simply more of the same. Around midday rains fell on the ship, not particularly heavy, but steady for an hour or so. Then stopped. Clouds remaining over us. I was standing on the port bridge wing around 1430 studying these when Selmon stepped through the pilot house door and approached me.

“Captain?”

“Yes, Mr. Selmon.”

“The clouds, sir. The rain.”

The language seemed idiotic. I knew Selmon was not.

“Yes, what about them?”

“I’ve been taking readings from the rainfall. It’s low-grade radioactive, sir.”

I looked at him steadily; feeling no great surprise; deep inside me, prepared for it.

“Those are nuclear clouds, sir.” He waited a moment, as if figuratively looking at a calendar. I had never known a man with a more systematic mind. “I’d say they’re arriving just about on schedule.”

It was almost as if he would have been disappointed had he made an error in his timetable.

 *  *  * 

We had learned long since: The winds were now become the true rulers of the universe. Indeed they had for some time, almost from the first, been dictating our actual course. They were the drivers of the high black mantles; of their progeny now descending on us. These had only been awaiting the whims of the winds. Now they came, prevailingly variant tenths of west, now due, now W. by N.W., now N.W. by W., not strong, Beauforts 2 and 3 usually, occasionally freshening to 5. They came bearing gifts. It was as if those singular clouds were pursuing us, that of course an illusion created by the fact that we were a solitary ship on the seas. As we proceeded S. by S.E., through the close waters, unavoidably on the short fuel-conserving course we were following being more and more surrounded by land, the skies fluctuated as to cloud cover. On some days more, some less, but whichever, all of them of that darker hue which to a mariner had always forecast rains. Only no rains fell. More significantly, this overcast becoming darker and by the day, seeming also to hover lower in the skies. And finally this happened: Even with no rain to parachute them down on the ship, Selmon began to pick up patches falling on her, minute at first, but not so much so as not to disclose to his instruments that they were radioactive. Now he constantly roamed the ship looking for them, obsessively. Increasingly, he had to look less diligently. Increasingly, he found not just patches but large swaths fastening themselves to ship’s surfaces; to weather decks, to stanchions, to boats, to the five-inch gun, the Phalanx, the missile launchers. The clouds dropping sprinkles of fallout, precipitations not of raindrops, but of dust and soot. And steadily their radioactive content rose.

Then an observable change: Very thin hazes, of a mistlike aspect at first, had begun to form like a delicate membrane across the sun itself, sometimes for an hour or two, then for a half day or so before full sunlight returned. Each renewal longer and of a more umbrageous character, constituting finally a kind of penumbra, rather like a species of partial eclipse. We found ourselves keeping our running lights on longer as day approached, turning them on sooner as night came on. Then another thing happened. The thermometer began to record drops, also slight initially, never precipitous, still to levels not to be expected in these waters. Thurlow, our navigation and meteorological officer, began tentatively to force this to my attention. Then one morning I came on deck to find a palpable chill in the air, along with a sun more obscured than previously by what could only be described as a kind of luminous dust. I had a look at the bridge thermometer. It read 48° F. In what appeared an obvious companion to the cover of contaminated cloud, the drop in temperature continued over the following days, slowly but on a steady downcurve. I had Thurlow check tables in our nautical and meteorology library. No such lows had ever been recorded in these latitudes. We continued on course.

The sun could still be seen or at least where it was, more clearly at times than at others. One day looking up I could observe that at the moment it hung in its dusky cloak at the zenith. A twilight gloom prevailed now at noonday. A strange and absolute stillness seemed to weigh down on us, on the ship, as if the stealthy luminous dust had brought with it not just its tenebrous shield but this bodeful and ominous soundlessness as well, broken only by the mildest of winds bearing N. by N.W. and whispering intermittently across us in mournful notes. The substance reached down now to a point not far above the ship’s masts, stopping short of the waters which stretched in a glassy motionless repose, mute like all else, to all horizons, these vertically foreshortened only by the lurking nigrescent shroud crouched above them. Stopping there, hanging, like an opaque window shade drawn to a precise level and no further, as if, having established a domain of obscuration vast and unchallenged over the heavens, it yet hesitated to take on the great sea itself.

At first, as we proceeded toward the Java Sea, the overcast still allowed leaks of sunlight through holes in the clouds. Soon, however, these were sealed and the overcast became solid. We had lost the sun. This was followed by a heavy, blackish layer of fog and haze consisting of roiling, turbid vapors that enshrouded the waters and rolled in swarthy, infinitely languid waves over the ship, obscuring even the lookouts for periods of time, as the ship made its creepingly slow encroachment into the noiseless veil, speed reduced to eight knots. Now at noonday one looked up and could barely see the gleam of the masthead light. I was much aware of a possible new danger of a high order, its first evidence appearing one morning when a huge hulk loomed up in the murk, the lookout Barker in the bow reporting on the sound-powered phone, “Ship dead ahead!” the officer of the deck Thurlow’s instant “Hard right rudder,” Porterfield’s instant execution in putting the wheel over. Through the swirling vapors we could see our port side slide by this monster—we could almost have reached out and touched her—a tanker of over a thousand feet she must have been. She was but the first. I was not too surprised, aware of the fact that we were moving through what had been the most traveled East-West sea-lanes in the world. I left standing orders for the ship to keep slowed down to a bare steerageway and ringed the ship with lookouts, our visibility on occasion reduced to not much more than a ship’s length even with our powerful searchlight aimed into the murk; myself keeping during this period to my chair on the starboard side of the bridge. I also further minutely instructed Porterfield and the other helmsmen. “You men. Steer like you never steered. Don’t wait for the command. Steer by seaman’s eye. If you see something, bring her over hard.” And finally I set a watch on the open bridge, Bixby and other signalmen ringing the church-sized ship’s bell, in a counterpoint with the foghorn, the two great alternating sounds blaring and tolling out spectrally over the ship and into the black haze entombing her. Porterfield during this stretch standing longer watches than anyone, saving us from collision more than once, having almost to be pulled away from the wheel when I could see his own exhaustion overtaking him. Still I was surprised at the numbers of the ships. Hulks of ships; every type of ship, it seemed, known to the seas; merchant vessels mostly, the occasional man-of-war, a couple of times a passenger liner. All looming suddenly, mute, darkened, out of the murk, they seemed to constitute some great ghostly fleet, of all flags, drifting rudderlessly as the waters took them. Far from any desire to approach them, much less board them, we were concentrating absolutely in avoiding them, not to ram them.

The sooty darkness becoming ever more impenetrable, the thermometer continued its steady fall. Thurlow’s research showed 62° F. as the lowest recorded reading on present latitude. One day around noon I came on the bridge, turned the flashlight on the thermometer, and saw a reading of 27° F. A rain began to fall out of that opaque blackness. It seemed to pelt soot and dirt against the ship; thick, penetrating rain. Flashing the strong light around, I could see the raindrops seeming to freeze solid the moment they touched the ship, covering everything, gun mounts, even lifelines, and creating a freezing slush on the weather decks. I looked up and saw icing beginning to attach itself to the mast and top hamper. I turned and sighted aft, directing the light there. Thin stalactites hung from the deck gear and antennas. The ship was gradually being wrapped in a skin of ice. We were three degrees below the equator.

Fortunately the cold was the least of our worries in the practical sense. One circumstance of immeasurable good fortune came to assist us. We were a cold-weather ship, rigged for some of the most frigid waters earth held, the Barents; the ship herself fitted with sophisticated deicing devices, which we now commenced to use, and with the best cold-weather clothing the Navy had been able to devise. The latter we had sometime back turned to, Girard’s supply department breaking out the Arctic gear. It was a godsend. Most of all, a ship’s company with much experience on deep-temperature seas; undisturbed by cold, by icing, knowing how to cope with them. Nor was there great surprise at this development. Again Selmon had prepared us. Sometimes I was alternately alarmed and irritated at the stolid, almost insouciant manner in which he had come to accept these new manifestations as being now in the normal state of affairs.

And so, grotesque figures in our Arctics, we entered the equatorial waters of the Java Sea.

Something far more ominous than the cold came to attack us. This was Selmon’s constant readings and the nature of their curve. For it was not long before they registered that the weather decks were unsafe for any period of time. Soon—by that time we were exactly, deliberately so, mid-sea between Jakarta on our starboard and Borneo on our port—they reached a level where it was dangerous to be topside at all.

 *  *  * 

Now, in brute force, that terrible substance began to lay siege to the ship herself. I instituted extreme measures. I sealed the ship and her personnel. All lookouts, all weather deck stations whatever stood down; all personnel kept below decks at all times, save only for the essential pilot house watch. Most fortunate of all, the
Nathan James,
considering the nature of her mission, had been constructed with just this possibility in mind; that is to say, that her fiercest enemy might turn out to be not the usual ones that threaten destroyers—submarines, mines, aircraft, other surface vessels armed with surface-to-surface missiles—but that other hostile force which was now attacking us. An overpressure system for protection against the ingress of CBR (chemical-biological-radiological) contamination; all incoming air filtered, more reliance placed on recirculating air inside the ship; internal air pressure maintained at a higher level than external pressure: the
Nathan James
class indeed being the first ships to have the complete system built in. Combined with the use of sealants which by deep research and experimentation had been brought to an extraordinary level of efficacy, these measures made the ship’s interiors as impervious to outside contamination as is a submerged submarine to seawater; men could live below decks with complete safety so long as they did not venture onto the weather decks; a partial exception being the pilot house watch, working in a space where glass “windshields” were essential to the conning of the ship. But even in the pilot house, using the same sealants, along with other protectants such as triple-paning, the builders were able to achieve a very high degree of impermeability to radiation, if not quite the perfect protection possible below. In addition I made bridge watches as small as consistent with the ship’s safety, also halving the length even of these to two hours in order to limit exposure; all bridge hands issued gas masks; all subject to a dosimeter reading from Selmon immediately on coming off watch; then to bathe immediately. They were not the only ones for this latter precaution. The ship herself we washed down frequently; the ship immersed in high fountains of water from the special device created also for ships of our original mission; the ship quite literally having herself a bath, the strong streams of water reaching everywhere topside meant to carry away all foreign material; the effectiveness of the system much diminished due to the contamination of the sea, nevertheless it might help marginally.