The Last Ship (58 page)

“I don’t think I betray vows, not naming names, to say—yes, in confession”—he had never before made reference to that personal resource—“some of them—it’s very difficult to put it, they didn’t put it any too explicitly themselves, due to, well . . . guilt. Catching up with them. That burden having become too great for them. Doing a lot of reading of the Bible, most of them. Some . . . in some of them . . . a fair probability I’d say . . . an act of penance . . . atonement . . . seeking thereby some kind of redemption . . . Of course, I had no idea they would carry it that far . . . until Bellows’ note . . . its allusion to that reason . . . after the fact . . .”

“Atonement!” I exploded the word; the concept itself seeming to unleash a kind of fury in me; perhaps near some sort of edge myself. “We’ve got enough to deal with without having to deal with
atonement.
For Christ’s sake, Father.”

A soft smile. “Captain, you have just pronounced almost the very words I responded with when they were made by hands. Except the last ones,” he said gently.

“Perhaps they’re reading the Bible too much,” I said.

“Shall I forbid them to do so, Captain?”

“All right, Doc.”

He had sat there like an undernourished Buddha. He hated religion and everything about it; quietly thought it was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated upon man; a close second, and what he considered its first cousin, a subdivision of his own profession, the whole field of psychiatry-psychoanalysis-psychology. He and the Jesuit were quite good friends.

“Well, I’m a doctor,” he said. “Or try to be. I can’t speak to the mumbo jumbo. I’d say they just arrived at the limits of their endurance. We all have one.”

“The hell we do, Doc.”

I waited, looking coldly around that circle. The doc shrugged. He was not being insubordinate. He simply knew that he, like the Jesuit, had a fairly long leash, by his captain’s preference; a leash, however, not without limitations.

“Fact is, I don’t think there’s any way of knowing.” He spoke dryly. “I take it everyone here is aware that, medically speaking, we’re sailing in uncharted waters. What we do know compared with what we don’t is like a thimble of sand to the beach. What it’ll do to people.”

“Can you speak some English, Doc?” I said.

“I’ll try, Skipper.” He took a breath. “Maybe something went wrong with their—well, mechanism. Something that may be happening just to them. Most things that happen to human beings happen to them varyingly—different tolerances, all of that. The other possibility exists, of course: Something that may be happening to all of us. And if it does, that it might take entirely different forms than—jumping ship.”

We all simply stared at him. No one spoke. Wondering, myself, surely the others as well, who could deal with such forces? I thought I had one small idea at least, pitiful as it might seem against them. I turned to the Jesuit, in my voice something like supplication.

“Father, I’m going to ask you to break a sacred vow. Could you give us the names of those who have told you, or in future tell you, anything to suggest they are thinking of going over the side—whether for reasons of ‘guilt’ or any other reason? So we can at least keep an eye on them?”

He found at once the fallacy in the proposal.

“Aside from breaking my sacred vows, as you say, I don’t know how long it would work. These are canny men. Sooner or later they’d find out what I’m doing and the confession box would dry up.”

I felt a captain’s impatience with this, with any verbiage that would get in the way of action, of doing something; tried to suppress it; hearing my voice still coming with a kind of feverish urgency.

“During that ‘later,’” I said, “maybe we’ll have talked some out of going over. Don’t you think the Lord will permit an exception to your regulations under the circumstances?” I could not keep it back. “Or do you think He has lost all interest in saving lives?”

Something snapped in me. Maybe Girard’s presence the strong reminder; I had a sense of her simply staring at me, in a combination—could I have imagined this?—of personal concern for myself and a hard and unyielding admiration of what I was about. I turned savagely on the Jesuit as if forcing some ruthless catechism upon him.

“You call yourself a priest. Do you realize that of those fifteen, three of them were women? And do you realize how few women we’re getting down to? And do you realize what that means?”

A shock seemed to fill the cabin. Then, voice unraised, a certain tone:

“You’re right, of course. Under the circumstances there isn’t time to ask Him about those exceptions to my vows. I’ll do it on my own. Up the line if He asks, I’ll tell Him I couldn’t get through to Him, there was a busy signal. Probably the case anyhow these days.”

He was a Jesuit.

I was about to dismiss them.

“Captain?”

“Yes, Miss Girard.”

She had a baffled look; spoke slowly, with great deliberation.

“Those three women. Salinas, Kramer, Stoughton, I don’t understand it. Of course, they were affected like all of us . . . but that they would do that: I still can’t believe it. That’s all I wanted to say.”

I looked at her for a moment, started to pursue it, ask a question, decided not.

“That’s it for now. Miss Girard, gentlemen.”

Almost simultaneously, something totally unexpected, trusting as we did in the ship’s inbuilt protective devices.

We had passed into the Flores Sea. One day I stepped once again from the pilot house out into that terrible murk, the atmosphere like a wall, opaque, impenetrable; the object of these occasional exercises to determine if I could see any suggestion of its lifting. How I longed to see a single star! Purpose also being to isolate myself with my thoughts, to try desperately to come up with some way through, anything. The firmament stood merciless, heartless, invisible: nothing, only the onslaught of those same vile vapors, that throbbing shroud. Suddenly out of it a snow began to fall. The thermometer—I had just checked it by flashlight—stood at twelve degrees above zero Fahrenheit; we were off a place called Diji, eight degrees below the equator. Sensing something strange, I held my hand out, held it out for a minute or so until enough of the snow had gathered in it; I turned my flashlight on that flattened palm. The snow was black. I felt like weeping. Instead I stood awhile under it in the absolute darkness, the snow thickening, hearing the faint wail of the wind like a dirge. With a vicious movement I wiped the horrible stuff away on my Arctics. I stepped back inside the pilot house, caught for a moment in a spasmatic coughing, from that squalid substance and from some unspeakable rage. I found Selmon staring straight at me; something almost hostile in his look.

“You shouldn’t stay out that long,” he said, quite sharply considering that he was speaking to his captain.

There was something so unnatural in the rebuke that, coming closer and seeing his hollowed face in the light of the repeater, pale as the complexion of a ghost, his eyes seeming to glisten wildly, I knew with a shock that alarm had at last reached that phlegmatic personality; a kind of desperation I had never seen there seeming to ooze out of him; something of a dark terror on it; knowing the man, registering an instant fear in myself.

“What is it?” I said.

“Captain, the bridge watch, all of them . . .” His voice, always steady, seemed to tremble a little in its hoarseness, as if some ravaging chill had seized him, or the substance itself had done so, and as if this itself was evidence for the dread thing he was saying. “Every hand standing watch here . . .” I became aware in a kind of horror that the present watchstanders were watching us intently, listening, they themselves, outlandish in their Arctics and gas masks, seeming bedazed with unspeakable fatigue, or with something else too terrible to think of . . . “These readings . . .” He looked down at his repeater, its dim glow reaching up just enough to reveal his specterlike face. “They are approaching unacceptable levels. Sir.”

 *  *  * 

They sat assembled in my cabin. Selmon, the doc, Thurlow, Melville, Girard.

“Captain, we have to get out of this,” the doc said. “Those men going overboard . . .”

“We can forget them,” Selmon said. He spoke brutally, in his voice a direct, relentless urgency I had never heard from him. “Let’s talk about those still aboard. The men are accumulating too much of it.”

He was speaking of the bridge watch. But that had been rotated among men able to stand any of its positions.

“We’re talking about forty-five men,” Thurlow said. “And we’re talking about the only men who know how to navigate and conn this ship. Watch officers, quartermasters, helmsmen, lee helmsmen. One-fourth of ship’s company.”

“How much farther on present course, Mr. Melville?” I had alerted him to make calculations. He had his clipboard; he looked at it; spoke with his usual precision, his impervious courtliness.

“Three thousand one hundred miles, sir.”

“Mr. Selmon?”

“The readings have been going up. Slowly, but steadily. We expected that. But the rate of the upcurve has increased—with it, the readings on all bridge watchstanders.”

“Doc?”

“We’ve had some mild cases of illness, as you know, sir. All temporary. Whether they were due in fact to minor, passing radiation sickness or to something else, there’s no way of telling. Everyone of them being a bridge watchstander suggests something. Effects becoming somewhat more severe. I wouldn’t like to see any worse cases of it.”

Selmon: “Three thousand more miles of it: On present course we’ll be passing near large land masses, all we’ve met the most contaminated spaces of all. If that rate continues . . . We don’t know enough about it. What men can absorb. Not that finely defined. But we know this: we’ll soon be into levels . . . lives will be at risk . . . which ones we can’t tell. Different tolerances as we also know. There’s no way of telling—take Porterfield’s tolerance—as opposed to Meyer’s . . .” she had been standing lee-helm watches. “And I do know this. We’re approaching margins we haven’t seen before. Three thousand more miles through this . . .” he said again. Stopped, spoke in his old quiet formality. “High risk, sir. At least for all watchstanders; for forty-five hands.” His voice dropped to an utter evenness, calm, this itself sending a chill through the cabin: “Everybody else below decks should make it.”

The coldness of that, from the least of alarmists: He did not mention that the forty-five included himself; included among others present Thurlow; myself. Doc and Melville, Girard, kept below, not at risk.

“The other course, Mr. Melville?”

“I’ve done the rough calculations, sir. It’ll take a month, thereabouts, off our fuel supply.”

“And off our food supplies as well,” Girard said.

The course through the Timor and Arafura seas and then along the northern coast of Australia had been originally chosen, as mentioned, as being the shortest one into the Pacific, along with the attraction of taking us through normally inhabited areas where we might find uncontaminated lands and human beings who would take us in. The Australians, particularly, I had kept thinking of. Any hope as to the latter objective having diminished considerably in the light of recent explorations only seemed to increase the prudence of the first and holding to it, its intent being to use the minimum of fuel in order to have as much as possible remaining to search our most promising prospects for habitability. Even going the short route, Melville had calculated that, arriving at our destination, we would have but two months remaining for that purpose. This we had viewed as an irreducible minimum. Now the other course, the one to take us out of the radioactivity threat, would halve that to one; diminish our search period desperately; to the peril point. Forty-five men. It was a terrible choice to have to make. To lose the fuel that might enable us to find a home; to arrive at that home with possibly so many of the crew lost, gone. A fourth of ship’s company. And the very men, as Thurlow had pointed out, who navigated the ship. But not just that. Myself. Selmon. Thurlow, who would normally succeed me. Who would succeed Thurlow? Who could replace Selmon? For that matter, myself. So great had my vanity become, I was not confident that any other could bring them through. I found myself reaching into the darkest depths.

“Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll have to take our chances with the fuel.”

 *  *  * 

At daybreak—one still in the gloom—Thurlow, Selmon, Melville and I stood by the chart table and plotted the new course. Taking the first breach in the Lesser Sunda Islands, our first chance to remove ourselves from these land-choked waters, we executed it by passing through the Selat Alor into the Indian Ocean. I opened us up, the overcast pursuing us for a period of slightly over twenty-four fours. Selmon took his new readings; very low, they allowed the men who had been imprisoned below decks to be released, brought topside, as men released from a dungeon. Then one morning we came on deck, all of ship’s company—only the engineroom watch below—and stood watching the huge vermilion ball rise majestically from waters of brilliant blue; as of a phenomenon we had never seen before; stood gazing in wonder, in a great hush, as it began its ancient transit across clear and windless skies of a softer azure; forgotten men brought here by an act of deliverance; sailors brought back to their own sure home, into the great security of the sea, the waters of salvation.

M
oving out into the Indian Ocean across the Wharton Basin, as far as could be from any land, we stood S. by S.W., proceeding across Broken Ridge straight down the hundredth longitude. Sailors accustomed at times to be as indifferent to the sea as a landsman might be of his backyard, the great ocean seemed now to us to be invested with magic properties. We were like men seeing for the first time the great beauty of the planet, what a lovely place earth was. Emerging from the long darkness and cold, released most of all out of that foul and pestilential air we had breathed so long into the full and magnanimous sunshine, the pure ocean air, we were men reprieved. We had come home, our natural home; and turned to the restorative sea for healing. How fortunate were we to be sailors! Standing, as sailors seldom do, simply gazing across the great blue blaze of it, the immense cleanness of the open sea we had almost forgotten, stretching in an undefiled plain to all horizons: What pure joy for a seaman to see a horizon! Looking up into that other azure, at that softly delicate sky of low latitudes. Everywhere on the weather decks, men and women who had seen neither sun nor stars for weeks basked with voluptuous torpor in the first, transcendent days, under the blessed rays corpse-colored bodies, shed of their Barents Arctics, beginning to take on tans, remaining thin, on short rations, nonetheless looking infinitely better to one another—we could hardly have looked worse; at night, bewitched by the second, reluctant to go below where prison had been, many brought mattresses topside to sleep under the great constellations, the stars, so long gone into hiding, now in their splendor seeming to hang low in the sky, seeming purposively, with intent to render succor, to ring the ship in radiant comfort, a tiara of them perched atop the ship’s mainmast. In the wonder of the cloudless skies, the caressing westerlies we soon encountered, familiar Venus sitting on the dark edge of the horizon, visible now to them not only many additional stars known to sailors, but others most of the crew had never set eyes on, stars, constellations, which held court only in southern climes: the great Southern Cross, Phoenix, Carina, Musca, bright Canopus.

As sailors, we gloried in this world of a new sea, in differences unknown to those who had never taken ship below the planet’s great dividing line, the equatorial barrier. Not just unviewed constellations but everything about it seemed changed: stars coursing around the Pole clockwise, the opposite to their northern-latitudes habits; the very winds blowing counterclockwise instead of clockwise as on north parallels. Thurlow and others knowing, of course, that the phenomena stayed the same, merely the observer’s point of view changing; an example, the moon looking upside down, the moon’s north pole being always north, but seen from the Northern Hemisphere it being at the moon’s top while from the Southern Hemisphere being at the bottom. The navigator took delight in explaining these simple matters to those of ship’s company unfamiliar with them. Most of all it was the sheer exhilaration, the ineffable bliss, of breathing uncontaminated air, and the purest air earth holds—that of the open sea. One found oneself consciously taking deep breaths of it. To save every possible drop of fuel, I cut our forward speed to eight knots, making us seem barely to move through the stilled seas parting ever so gently for the ship.

Sometimes, proceeding through that sweet ocean vastness, standing on the bridge wing and looking aft down the length of the ship at men on watch going about their work, men off watch lying somnolently in the sun, my thoughts stood relaxed, a contentment, something like exultation in me observing them. I had always, perhaps from living among sailors nearly all my life, had a higher opinion than some of the capacity of men as to courage, as to kindness, as to selflessness so profound as to be scarcely explicable. Looking down at them now, these opinions could not have been but greatly fortified. How well they had held up! In a sense they had never been more tested, either of these two groups, and which had been more so it would have been difficult for me to say. The pilot house watch, standing brutal watch shifts, navigating the ship through that awful murk, knowing, each man, each woman, that as they did so they were steadily absorbing into their bodies amounts of radiation, never knowing when its accumulation might reach a point to bring on a terrible sickness, or worse; never flinching from their duties, not one hand backing away from it, begging off, refusing duty. Or that greater portion of ship’s company which, while protected from these onslaughts, had had to live for those weeks in that prison below decks, hardly knowing where their ship was taking them, no assurance that they would ever come out of it. Both seemed to me to belong in those higher realms of fortitude, one might say valor.

 *  *  * 

Never truly removing itself from that corner of my mind it had permanently reserved, ceaselessly emitted the off-and-on signal of a buoy off soundings warning ships of some treacherous unseen hazard, telling me that even once into freer waters we had precious little fuel left for any search for habitable space before we should come forever dead in the sea. Our course had been arrived at after the most meticulous consultations with Thurlow and Melville, the indispensable Selmon, of course, always participating in these discussions, held, as considerations dictated, sometimes in my cabin, sometimes poring over charts in the chart room. We had determined to proceed at the strictest speed I have described straight down the longitude until we reached the fortieth parallel, and there to turn due east, following then a course which would take us well off Australia to our port, operating on the assumption that it had suffered the same fate as all land masses we had encountered. Bearing always in mind that should events prove us happily wrong in this assessment we would, of course, turn back north to explore the southern littorals of the great nation-continent. Barring that unexpected development we would continue to stay well out, soon turn on a N. by N.E. course, pass through the Tasman Sea over Lord Howe Rise and make a final starboard turn which would lead us the last hundred miles into the vast reaches of the southern Pacific where all our hopes lay. Melville, continuing constantly to calculate and recalculate, was able one day to proffer me something precise that could not have been more welcome.

“Captain, I have a piece of good news from the engineering department,” he said.

“I don’t believe it.”

He grinned sheepishly. “This eight-knot speed of ours—well, sir, I figure if we keep to it, by the time we depart Tasmanian waters we will have added two weeks to our fuel reserve as previously calculated under twelve knots.”

We were gathered around the chart table during the midwatch—the four mentioned officers—in the darkness of the chart room, the only light that shining down on the spread-out chart of the region, our heads in darkness. I looked where Melville was.

“Well,” I said. “Well, now.”

“Yes, sir,” Melville said. I could not see his soft smile; I knew it was there.

“So we have six weeks to make our search.” I felt the enormous lift in all of us. Knowing at the same time that we were taking too much hope from this, still feeling that any hopes at all were best seized on. “I don’t know why that should seem so much better than four weeks. But it does.”

“It does that, sir,” Thurlow, his dividers poised in his hands, said.

“We shall certainly keep strictly at eight knots,” I said.

“Every mile at that speed helps.” the engineer said.

“That it does. And we’ll keep her there. So long as these seas hold.” Only they made it possible; rougher waters, we would have to increase speed to keep steerageway. “See to it, Mr. Thurlow.”

“Aye, sir,” he said. “Willingly, Captain.”

Perhaps overanxious, all of us, to grab onto the least improvement in our prospects. Nevertheless, refusing even to consider the danger that we were becoming hope’s fools, that night I turned into my bunk feeling more borne up in spirit than in any time I could recall. I even resumed the reading, that precious nightly thirty-minute pleasure reading, stretching back for years, almost to the beginning of my life on ships, given up of late from the sheer exhaustion that had always reached me by that time when we were making our passage through the dark and the cold. The book was
My Ántonia.
I read with satisfaction, forgetting, as in former times, all problems, all vicissitudes past and future. At the end of the half hour, marking my place, laying the book aside, shutting off the overhead light. I lay awake for a bit, feeling a comfort and a satisfaction in the awareness of the barely moving ship, its diminished sound reaching up to me through her engine room, the fuel that speed was saving us, increasing our Pacific chances; fell asleep. I was next aware of a strong hand shaking me. Unmistakably I knew it as Preston’s. I don’t think he was even aware, or ever would be, of the unnecessarily excessive force he applied to the objective of awakening one as boatswain of the watch; always immediately apologetic, as now, when one indicated the fact, my “It’s all right, Preston. I’m awake.” The instant stopping, withdrawal of the hand, the “Sorry, Captain.”

“What is it, Boats?”

“It’s Bixby, sir. Signalman third.”

“I know Bixby’s rating,” I said irritably. “What about her?”

“Mr. Thurlow”—he would be the OOD—“says you better come, Captain.”

Fear—alarm—arriving out of the exceptional indistinctness of this message, I swung my legs out of my bunk and engaged the reflexive quick routine of an act performed ten thousand times, on a score of seas, of getting on trousers, shoes, shirt, when some officer of the deck had felt it prudent, for any one of countless reasons, to awaken his captain. I looked at my watch. It read 0245.

 *  *  * 

I could just make out first light beginning to appear through the twin ports of my cabin. The doc was there. Girard. Thurlow. They had all been up the night.

“How’s she making out, Doc?” I said. She was in sick bay.

“She’s going to be okay, Captain. Shock mostly.” His eyes were strangely quiet, meditative. “Minor bruises. Put up quite a fight, I’d say.”

I turned to Thurlow. I had picked him to do the questioning of the crew. “Any word?”

“Negative, sir,” Thurlow said. “Half the men, so far. Nothing. We’ll have been through the other half by late morning.”

“Keep at it,” I said. “Whatever it takes . . .” I paused, looked around that circle of officers . . . “We’ll find out who did it.”

“That we will, sir,” Thurlow said grimly. He more than anyone seemed to reflect what was in myself. I had wanted him particularly for the questioning; he would be good at it, ruthless.

They left and I sat awhile in my cabin, doing nothing. Just sitting. I thought about Bixby; an unaffectedness perhaps given her by that Iowa farm where she had grown up. I remembered talking with her that night by the lifeline. The sailor’s uniform seemed but to enhance the unsullied aura of her young being, her body girlish and slim; a special gentleness seeming to come through, later feeling this more seeing her care of the two goats we had picked up, something both comical and strict in it; remembered her hands gently evaluating the lion cubs. Yet a good toughness about her I had felt. During all we had been through she had borne up as well as any, not a whimper, at least none I had seen or heard of; any kept inside. We had talked about how she became a sailor. The Navy was lucky; but nineteen, very young, very intelligent to have made signalman third so early. I remembered how with mock humor she had mentioned as of a great distinction her hometown of Odebolt, Iowa, as being “the popcorn capital of the world.” I had a choice of tears or cold rage; found in myself only the latter.

And so I sat, a long time, listening to the buzz of the bell clock attached to the bulkhead above my desk, listening to time but not reading it; glancing at the gyro-repeater, also placed there but not seeing where it was taking us. I felt that strange stillness of mind such as sometimes, perhaps peculiarly then, comes to one in the face of the unspeakable, the unacceptable. Accompanied now by something cold and savage and of boundless sorrow. How terrible had been the chill in me, hearing of it! It was unlike anything else. Unlike the human beings on the beaches of Amalfi; unlike the animals in the Kenya bush; unlike those hands going overboard in the dark and the cold. One person. It made no sense. But there it was. Those had been purgatories not brought on by ourselves, at least not directly. But there was something beyond that. I suppose deep in me I knew why. Not wanting, not willing, to get into that, even in my innermost soul. Nonetheless knowing there that, the horror of the act sufficient in itself, shipmate to shipmate, that it should be a woman, one of but twenty-seven . . . this vastly deepening it. There came over me a terrible resolve. There was once a legend among men who followed the sea that every ship had a Jonah, or a potential Jonah, the metaphor broadly defined as anyone whose presence aboard might bring extreme harm to a ship, and I had known many an old seaman who believed that. I was not one of them. And yet my resolve seemed as theirs. We had a monster aboard this ship, loose among us. Nothing that had happened aboard the ship since I first took command of her—excepting only Chatham’s leading 109 hands off the ship—had anything like this effect on me, including the myriad travails we had been through. They, after all, were tests for sailors. This was the opposite of that. This hideous act: It seemed to profane those tests, to mock them; to profane fortitude, to mock valor, the courage of ship’s company in surviving them. To mock, with brutal scorn, something even greater: the sailor’s code, stretching back over ancient seas, held inviolate, sacred, in ten thousands of ships; among countless seamen; saying: One protected shipmates as brothers, now sisters too; one did not harm them. To do so was the ultimate defilement of everything a sailor was; that the sea meant.

We waited for Bixby. She herself had been as if the act had deprived her of speech. Two days passed. We made our turn at the fortieth parallel, proceeding due east at our languorous eight knots on the course which would take us off Australia. I think I had made up my mind from the first instant of being told. I knew what I would do. I was waiting for Bixby. But nothing came from her. For the first time a terrible thought struck at me: Perhaps she did not know. We might never know who it was; he might remain among decent men; continue, the act not repeated, to the end to be an accepted part of ship’s company. The thought was unendurable; filled me with revulsion. Never knowing which out of all the faces one saw daily it was, all suspect. I rejected the idea, brutally. But its real possibility made the waiting the more horrible. No one of the four talking to her—the doc, Girard, the Jesuit, myself—at any point thus far had tried to pry the information out of her. All attended only to her care. She had suffered a mild concussion, perhaps a contributory factor to her silence. But one felt it was something beyond that. One day, alone with the doc, I asked viciously, “Was she a virgin?”