The Last Ship (6 page)

Something picked up in me. “Physical ailments? Do we have any other kind? I’m talking of a pressing nature, of course.” We all had had the other kind short of that. I had heard him from time to time use the term “intermittent neuroses.”

He lit another cigarette. It occurred to me that the pack-a-week ration which I would announce tomorrow would hit him harder than anyone aboard. I wished I could make an exception. I could not. But I could not have anything happen to him.

“Not at present.” He waited a beat, then spoke in that measured cadence. “The fact is, I’m out of my depth here. Off soundings. I’m afraid I possess an unfortunate gap in my medical education of never having believed in much of that stuff. I’ve often wondered which, psychiatry or religion, has done more damage. Between them, they about owned it all. I was just thinking up the line. But we shouldn’t fish for trouble, should we? A medical adage.”

I looked directly at him, and heard my voice harden.

“There’s a Navy adage, too, the same: Don’t stir still waters. I like that adage, Doc, medical or naval. Shall we stick with it?”

He was suddenly Navy. “Yes, sir. I’m certainly not trying to stir anything, Skipper.”

Once on a signalman first named Chauncey, threatened with a bile peritonitis that could have killed him if not quickly acted upon, he had performed something called a bilary tract procedure. It’s a difficult enough operation, as I had learned, in the Lahey Clinic but he had done it in a Beaufort 8 gale off the Hebrides. Two of our biggest men, Preston and Brewster, had held the doc’s body steady to the deck while he slid the knife in. Chauncey had been lost since but not from that—overboard in the Barents. I spoke more softly.

“I know you’re not, Doc. About the aspirin. Here’s the word. Starting now, give it to a man only if you’re personally convinced his head will fall off in your lap if you don’t. Then only a couple. Under those conditions, how long will the aspirin last?”

“Seven . . . eight months. Depending on falling heads.”

I glanced again at the list of medical supplies. “I want a daily report on my desk at zero eight hundred of all medicine used the day before. Including aspirin. That plus the binnacle list.”

I waited a moment, made it casual, offhand. “The women. Anything special?”

Nothing of surprise reached his expression. Nothing would. Only that bland look of his, a hardly perceptible shrug of nonchalance, of what-do-you-know.

“Only this. Their health in every category—physical, mental, emotional—continues clearly better than the men’s.”

“How the hell do you account for that?”

He paused. “I don’t understand it myself. Of course these are exceptional women. The Navy saw to that. Especially those sent to sea. But that couldn’t explain it all. It has to be something else.”

He gave that soft grin. I had had a problem separating when the doc was being serious and when he was not until I came to learn that, in one shading or another, he was always being the former.

“Maybe it’s that women can get along without men a damn sight better than men can get along without women. And the fact that they know it. That alone gives them a big edge. In endurance, in whatever you want to call it. They know they’ll win out in the end.”

“Nobody is going to win out on this ship.” I could hear the rather brusque edge in my voice.

“I was not predicting that, sir; only speaking of women in general terms. Home truths.”

I looked into those eyes that, also, told nothing. Yet suddenly I knew full well that he knew it as I did—knew to the last intimacy what I was thinking, and would speak it aloud no more than would I. Neither dared, both feared to do so. We could only dance around it. It may have been right there and then that I first made a distinction. I did it without really thinking of what it meant, its significance, save perhaps the instinctive thought of numbers, the visceral protection in any ship’s captain of what is in short supply.

“About the aspirin,” I said. “Belay the rule for women. Give them what you think best.”

Both of us waited a long moment more, our eyes locked, expectant. I felt I was looking into ancient pools of blue full of knowledge, and of a sudden apprehension that must be given language. But there came only a quiet, almost humorous, “Aye, aye, Skipper.”

II: Afternoon

Finally, I needed Selmon’s reading, my RO. I always did.

I had had chow, then stepped topside. The sun had crossed over and blazed down violently on a silent sea, pale blue merging with a synonymous sky to form a seamless horizon, a single vast and monochromatic universe, unoccupied by so much as a cloud, a bird. I scanned both ways. No sign of Silva to seaward. He must have gone far out in his search but I was not uneasy. He knew the sea, reserved for it the ultimate in respect, and was not the man to test it unduly; knew small boats, and the water lay in glassy unmenacing repose, free of the slightest swell. Neither did the other direction give any sign of Delaney and Thurlow, who remained swallowed up in the island, which sat in sultry virescent silence beyond the glimmering lagoon, seeming a thing of eyes looking at us quite as much as we continued to look at it. I could see off-watch men standing about the decks, turned toward it in gazes of uncertain wariness. It was as though some sort of reluctant spell, attempting to overcome suspicions on both sides and to reach some sort of accommodation, were developing between the ship and the island. I alerted a lookout to tell me of the approach of either of our emissaries to land or sea, then went to my cabin. Melville and Selmon were standing just outside. We went in and I shut the door.

 *  *  * 

“Could it reach here?”

We sat in calm reflection. I spoke to the slightly built, wan-appearing young officer without whose consent we did nothing. Lieutenant (jg) Selmon, I thought. He possessed that Jewishness which is quietly confident of its superiority of intellect, by the same token far too smart to let his knowledge of the fact show through, realizing that to do so throws away half its power. No officer aboard had so ascended in importance.

“It could,” he said thoughtfully. “But I don’t think it will, Captain. I don’t think the winds will bring it. Not with the westerly flow this time of year. We’ve got four months before the winds shift, the northerly currents begin . . .” He hesitated. “If the schedule holds, if something has not happened to throw off that, even . . . By then I calculate most of it will have settled wherever it’s made up its mind to settle.”

The winds, I thought. They now govern everything. I thought of a phrase from Milton: the felon winds.

“Unless it’s added to,” Selmon added judiciously. “That seems so improbable that . . . Wouldn’t you say, sir?”

“I can’t imagine who would do it. But if either of those two unlikelihoods happened—or both . . .”

The Navy taught you to figure out what was least likely to happen, and the worst thing that could, then count on it. He seemed almost to be speaking to himself.

“If there was still some left four months down the line; or if it had been added to; and came the shift of the winds . . .”

He stopped, needing to say no more. I looked at him and said quietly, “Girard and I were doing the great inventory today. I was a tailor at one point. The idea was to alter our Barents clothing, somehow adapt it, to present latitude.”

Selmon permitted himself a soft smile; memory taking him, I imagine, nearly a hundred degrees of parallel north from where the ship now lay at anchor to seas as bleak and fierce as earth held, gales of Beaufort 7 chronic, weatherdeck watches so thickly bundled only eyes showed, waters so appalling a hand overboard—it happened twice with us—would be claimed by the cold even before the sea could take him; from there back to this serene equatorial domain, these pale azures, ruled by the sun, with its own ferocity. The matter hung in the air as fully as if it had been stated. Were we to see the cold again, this time at the other end of latitude? The radiation officer had returned to that thoughtful, fully concentrated expression that was his manner at any proposed course.

“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t think I would. Not just yet. I’d leave Barents clothing as is. Wait and see, I’d say, sir.”

“Wait and see,” I repeated tonelessly.

He said: “If those things happened—or even one of them . . . There would be nothing to do but run before it. Get as far south in latitude as possible. And it might be necessary to go all the way. As conclusive as one can be in these matters, I can’t believe it would ever reach there. Certainly it would be the last to go.”

We had gone over it all, times without number; stopped always by, How did you exist there? I let the silence hold a moment; then turned my head fractionally; spoke to the hardest, coldest fact of all, bringing everything inside oneself to a kind of chill of finality: two months of running time left on the nuclear reactor cores containing the highly enriched uranium fuel which propelled the ship.

“Mr. Melville,” I said. “We can go to Antarctica and back. Or we can go home, all the way, and back. Not both. Or: we can navigate Antarctica there and back; go home; but could not then return. Is all of that correct?”

“Affirmative, sir,” the engineering officer said. “I’ve worked it out practically to the mile, Captain. All figures being calculated on slow-steaming basis. Not above twelve knots.”

I could never have one of these conversations with Melville concerning our low fuel supply, and the unforgiving urgency of hoarding it, without my mind’s flashing helplessly back to that final session with the Russian submarine commander in the Strait of Gibraltar, to our agreement: ourselves to undertake to find a habitable place for both of us, him to go where he believed the nuclear fuel still to be that would free us from the prison that any place we found and settled on was certain otherwise to become. There had been a time when I hardly knew whether to long for his arrival more than anything on earth, the fuel being the greatest gift that could be made us, enabling us to go anywhere without the desperate calculations on which we were even now engaged; or to dread that same arrival for the reason of the awesome complications sure to be attendant on the integration of his ship’s company of 112 men into whatever community we might establish on whatever habitable space we might find, a difficult enough undertaking for ourselves alone; coming down at last on the former, believing we could somehow make it together; the matter long since become academic, his having vanished an almost forgotten time back from the frequencies on which we kept contact, presumably lost at sea in a manner we would never know. All of it seeming such a long shot even at the time that I had withheld the nature of his mission from all my officers save two, lest it distort our every planning. How wise that now seemed! Yet I still found my mind unwillingly admitting the thinnest possibility, catching myself at odd times gazing at the northern horizon to see if that immense low black profile known as the
Pushkin
would appear against it . . . the prospect of such an impossible bounty, a five-year fuel supply, making me for those instants hope’s fool. A road to madness. I turned back to Selmon.

“This is contingency, from your data.” I had to hear it again. “You don’t think we’d be forced out of here?”

“Not by that. Barring those two changes, or perhaps even one of them, negative. In my department I couldn’t imagine better atmosphere than right where we’re presently anchored, Captain.”

I waited again. I thought I heard the distant clatter. “What a pleasant change from your usual reports, Mr. Selmon.”

The j.g. smiled back almost boyishly. “I try to please, sir.”

“I never noticed it. Then, gentlemen,” I said, “let us rest it there for the present.”

Sure enough there was the ritualistic three knocks on the door. “Enter,” I said.

The lookout stood there.

“Silva, Captain. Boat’s coming alongside, sir.”

 *  *  * 

“Captain, the terns were right. Sea birds always are. All I had to do was follow them. That ocean,” he said, “is full of fish—great schools of fish . . .”

His blue Scot’s eyes shone against his bronze Portuguese skin. The exaltation there reflected in myself. A sense of the most immense relief. We stood on the quarterdeck at the top of the accommodation ladder. Just looking at each other. Above the emotion in me I could just hear him going on.

“Cantwell here . . .” He indicated the ship’s sailmaker who had followed him up the ladder from the boat “. . . says he can make casting nets from ship’s lines. We can have the first in three days. Big nets. And when the fuel runs out he can make us sails . . .”

 *  *  * 

Then had come Delaney. On top of Silva, it was almost as if that single ingenuity decided me, its affirmation of our one true strength; the light of hope it lit; a thing so seemingly small but in truth saying everything about the men I had under me.

“Grapnels,” the gunner’s mate said, “sir.”

His eyes filled with fervor.

“Captain, you’d be amazed how much like a harrow they are. Harrowing, sir, that’s about the most important part of farming there is
.
And these grapnels here, we’ve got
fourteen
of them. I and Mr. Thurlow tried this one out.”

Under the hot zenith sunshine we squatted on the fanfail, examining it, Silva there with us. Bits of island earth still clung to its flukes.

“Noisy says he can sharpen these flukes. Make them dig deeper.”

He waited, then exclaimed it again, as a thing of a certain wonder.

“Aye, sir, grapnels.”

It was simply a metal pole ending in a four-pronged anchor; an ancient tool of ships on the seas, little changed in thousands of years, with many and discrete uses; fishing objects—or people—off the bottom of the water; anchoring dories; in the old days of the sea, for holding an enemy ship alongside for hand-to-hand combat. I could not remember that ours had ever seen use, but somewhere in the holds of this ship Delaney had found them. I glanced at Thurlow. The navigator had something of the same look in his eyes, deriving from the excitement and astonishment, and the pure delight, one always feels at a device intended for one thing, or a series of things, being seen, possibly for the first time, by the intelligent mind—in this case, Delaney’s—as having application to altogether another. He gave an affirming nod.