The Last Ship (78 page)

 *  *  * 

Our other lives: There was one difference between us. She felt the secrecy, if it was that, necessary, at least for the time being. I chafed at the deception: wanted our rendezvous moved to her own private dwelling, one she had along with the other women amid the trees. Wanted it done outright, everything in the open, ready to handle any problems that might arise, any objection as to our being the only two who were solely each other’s, as opposed to the sharing required of all others, men and women alike. She had a point in that they might not know; therefore let us take time for reflection as to what was best. True, they had seen us appear suddenly that day, entering the settlement at a run, summoned by the GQ klaxon tolling the discovery of the bodies of the three women: At first we thought that had told them all; later came to believe they might have concluded that we had simply been on a reconnoitering of a rather unexplored part of the island, an “outing” such as others constantly took. It was difficult to say: oneself at the center of that kind of emotion that existed between us can be blind as to such observations; still I felt our relationship, if known, was unresented. Whether it was known or not, or resented or not, one had no choice but to continue it. Beyond that I went along, for now; we waited.

But without once discussing it, we knew one thing to an absolute: the stern danger that lay in permitting anything of what was happening between us to enter into that other relationship that had stood so long, worked so well, myself captain, her morale officer and now especially leader of the women. That this presented no real difficulty I think derived from the fact that, the responsibility so deep-rooted in each of us, we could not have lived with ourselves had we let anything impair our duties to ship’s company. We were careful to preserve formalities. Two persons each we had become; living two lives; kept entirely separate, our former roles remaining precisely as before, knowing we must not let that other new life touch the old one. So far it had worked.

 *  *  * 

When she came that day to my cabin by the cliffside, unusual for her to make a special appointment, ordinarily waiting for our regular weekly session, one knew beforehand that some point of reality had been reached—and one had a pretty good idea what it was. Still, nothing could have prepared me for the actual moment. Reporting to me that they had tried everything—every combination, she meant.

“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” she said.

The words in their finality at first inexpressibly poignant; then it was as if a great darkness had settled over us. We sat in silence; a sense of utter desolation filling the air. One looked out over the waters and expected to see the darkness standing down to the earth. The complete and unexpected . . . yes, terror I felt. I must have blocked out its significances; one oddly coming at that moment to stab cruelly at me: that rather joyous enterprise in which ship’s company was putting down on paper all that they knew or remembered; that, for one thing, could be promptly scuttled. A void. One felt one had fallen into a void, its nature while definable simply as the absence of a time frame known as the future yet one felt a failure, or a refusal, of the mind to reach through to any real comprehension of such a thing. One felt an unspeakable numbness; an unbeing. New, unprecedented emotions. Nonexistence reached down and touched us. Her words, breaking into my thoughts, startled me.

“Do you remember what Mr. Selmon once said, Captain?”

I looked at her as one looks for the first time with pity at another. Hope dying so hard. My own words taking on a certain hardness to snap her out of it.

“It doesn’t apply, Lieutenant. The women will have been equally affected with the men.”

“The doc,” she said. “We got to talking. He told me about some research he knew about. He said he and Selmon had discussed it.”

“Research?”

And she told me what it was. My response flat, the decision reflexive, only from the long-ingrained habit always to listen.

“We’ll have the meeting tomorrow,” I said. “At thirteen hundred hours.” I named the officers. “See to it.”

“Aye, sir. Thirteen hundred hours.” She stood up to go. “Oh, by the way, Captain.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve decided to participate in the Arrangement.”

Something happened in me that had never happened before. I just looked at her.

“How long have you been thinking about that?”

“It hasn’t anything to do with us.”

“The hell it hasn’t.”

“Not a goddamned thing. It’s this: I won’t allow any chance to be missed.”

I was angry, shaking almost. Spoke hard.

“I suppose you won’t have need for our weekly business in the cave?”

“What a child you are. I’ll be there next Thursday as usual. For the ‘business,’ as you call it. Suit yourself whether you want to join me.”

She turned and walked out.

 *  *  * 

Present at the meeting in my cliffside cabin: the doc, the Jesuit, Girard, Thurlow.

“As Selmon and I agreed, we know next to nothing on the subject. We of course do know,” the doc said, “one thing. Within limits, different individuals, male or female, are affected differently even by identical doses. But there was a hint—a bare hint in some of the data that was beginning to emerge—of something else. Some of the studies were beginning to suggest that there was a finite chance that the reproductive capacities of women would not be so quickly, or so completely, altered as would those of men. Some very preliminary studies suggested this possibility. Nature and Darwin at work again, Father? Extra protection for the female of the species?”

“Please continue, Doctor,” the Jesuit said crisply.

“For the most part, these investigations were conducted by a man named Rosenblatt—first name Hillel—working at Rockefeller University in New York. I got to know him when I was there—in that way was pretty close myself to what he was up to. Two or three other places in the country on to the same thing, trying to find out. Using guinea pigs and Norway rats, of course. Couldn’t do that sort of thing on human beings. And even so they had reached only a very tentative hypothesis stage. Not nearly enough evidence to support a conclusion. Still . . .”

The Jesuit’s zeal in the matter, large before, something we had become accustomed to, was now perfervid, as if he were a desperate man. Pressing the doc.

“I understand the individual variations. I have more of a problem with such a precise, across-the-board effect—with the women not being equally sterile. They underwent the same exposure.”

“I don’t understand it myself, Father. But then you and I, we are not geneticists, are we? And we have not done the experiments, have we? Rosenblatt and the others were. And they did.”

The doc was not one to bring up a matter he felt had no validity at all—he would have seen that as reflecting on his professional integrity. He gave that familiar bland look of his: It had long seemed to me a kind of disclaimer that yet hid something he was inclined to believe; as though he were covering all his flanks, just in case.

“I do not know but what the women are sterile, the last one of them. I am merely mentioning some of the studies. You have to remember that the body of literature on this subject was like a thimbleful of water to the sea.”

“Yes, yes, Doctor,” the Jesuit said. He was impatient with such metaphors. I think he felt he was being patronized. “Let me get this straight. If your Rosenblatt and the others were right, there would be a possibility that the absence of fertilizations may be traceable entirely to the men—all of them thus far sterile. And that some of the women at least may still be able to reproduce—given fertile men to do it with.”

“That’s it, Father,” the doc said imperviously. As a nonbeliever of any sort in anything religious, I think he took an impudent delight in so addressing the priest. “If Rosenblatt was indeed on to something.”

“But even those studies were inconclusive?” I said, as if reminding.

“Very much so, Skipper,” the doc said. “They were ongoing. Stopped by what stopped everything else. I remember reading Rosenblatt’s last paper on the subject. Hypercautious, as those people always are. But there was something new, a conviction beginning to take hold that he might be on to something. Making clear that his hypothesis might apply only to some women, that the margins of advantage over men in this area might be small but still determinative ones—and flatly stating he had been unable thus far to isolate any reasons for the phenomenon, if existent. Rosenblatt—perhaps a little too much of a philosopher for such a good scientific investigator—apostrophizing, as I mentioned to the chaplain, that it might be Nature at work. Stepping in once more. Still making it very clear—nothing absolutely conclusive. Yet he seemed to be saying . . .”

“So we would still be throwing dice,” I said.

“Perhaps slightly loaded dice, Skipper,” the doc said. “Who knows how many times you would have to throw them . . . And even if there is substance in these conjectures . . . If it were one woman in a thousand that fell under Rosenblatt’s hypothesis, our chances would be remote. If, on the other hand, it were one in—say twenty-one . . .”

I had to have it confirmed, once more. I turned to our new radiation officer.

“The Russian men, Mr. Thurlow?”

He said it flatly. “As to exposure to radiation: no comparison. Far less, sir. We tested the last one of them, as you know. To a certainty. Minimal.”

“We have to try it,” the Jesuit jumped in. “Captain, forty-one of the Russian men, as I understand the
Pushkin
plan, are to stay on the island, become a permanent part of the community?”

“That is correct.”

“So there is no hurry as to them. But fifty-three will be leaving. What is that timing, sir?”

“Five days now.”

“Then I respectfully suggest that the departure of
Pushkin
be delayed . . . what is the hurry for that anyhow? Keep those men here until we find out to a reasonable certainty . . . As to one or more of them; one or more of the women . . .” He turned and addressed himself directly to Lieutenant Girard. “. . . And that for that period of time, only they . . . while they are here, nobody else. Not the American men. Not the Russians who are to remain—we have them for later, if need be.” He waited and added: “As a temporary arrangement. If the women will accept the Russian men.”

One had almost a chilling sense as he spoke, the quick apprehension, the seizing on a plan, something almost ruthless about it; amazed at the meticulousness of his ardor, at the quick precision of his logistics.

“Miss Girard?” I deferred to her.

By now it was the absolute law of the settlement. Anything concerning the women was subject to their veto; if exercised, that ending the matter; no explanations required; all sovereign as to themselves.

“Accept the Russian men? We would welcome them,” she said quietly, as we all looked at her in astonishment. In her tone a certain contempt that stupid men, ourselves, had wasted all this time when the women had already decided the issue; almost as if she had let us run on, and then announced her decision, to make clear who was in charge in these matters.

“Then I’ll speak with the Russian captain,” I said. I could not help adding, looking at her, “With your permission, Lieutenant Girard.”

“You have my permission, sir,” she said. “Please do so at once.”

I need to mention now, for a full understanding of this meeting, the fact that the Jesuit had come to me the day before it with a finding I had asked for after Girard’s report. Throughout he had been monitoring the entire process with a zeal that, at first seeming startling, a man possessed, had by now come to appear wholly natural, as if somehow part of his spiritual domain. (No one, not incidentally, had got along better than the Jesuit with the Russians, he and the Russian captain in particular having become quite friendly. I think they understood each other. On the Jesuit’s part, I had not the slightest doubt, to myself something almost grim in it, this: With the evidence as to the American sailors becoming ever more clear, he saw in the Russians . . . could he have predivined Selmon’s hypothesis? No, it was rather that he was prepared to grab any possibility.) The settlement, we all knew, had been quietly devastated by the failure to achieve pregnancies. The women; the men, as mentioned, curiously almost more so, somehow blaming themselves. What the Jesuit, with his impeccable sources, had to tell me was this: There would be no trouble with the American men as respected the Russian men and the women.

“Our men won’t object to the Russians trying,” he had put it. “They are willing to—not have the women . . . Temporarily of course. As for the women: All they want is babies. That is all they have wanted all along. Whoever can give them that.” He paused a moment, his eyes far away, seeming to combine at once a fervor and a fatalism. “The Russian men—they would seem to be our last chance.”

I had my session with the Russian captain, who acceded promptly to the delay in
Pushkin’
s departure. And so it was that there began in the cottages set prettily among the tall guardsmanlike trees a determination as to whether, in Selmon’s half-cynical phrase, “Submariners will be the new fathers of mankind; if there is to be mankind.”

I
t was a day of a peculiar loveliness, that on which the
Nathan James,
carrying half of ship’s company, cast off at first light for her biweekly run, the ever-sweetness of the island at that hour, its purity of air, the first notes of awakening birds, the island attended all around by the vastness of silent waters, the twin scents fusing . . . all seemed to reach with a deep-giving peace into one’s soul. It was Thurlow’s turn to go and as usual when that was the case, I stood on the cliffside, hearing reach up to me in that hushed universe the long low clangor of her anchor chains moving through the hawsepipes, the sun just making its first appearance over the horizon to create a carmine sea. Presently, the anchors secured, I could see her beginning to make her turn on waters mirroring the full elegance of her lines, pulling away from
Pushkin.
I could see some Russian sailors, each run now with about twenty aboard—the ones who were to remain on the island—learning destroyer skills chiefly under Thurlow’s and Boatswain’s Mate Preston’s direction while the Americans departing on
Pushkin
learned submarine ones. Thurlow on the bridge wing raising his hand, myself lifting mine back to mark farewells of a single day. It tore at my heart to think that I would be losing that fine officer, that rather special friend he had become, to that other vessel at anchor just below me. On the starboard bridge wing, I spotted also Lieutenant Girard, making her first run, simply having been too occupied with the matter of the women to do so previously, coming to me the day before with the routine request that she now be permitted to do so. A necessity really; although her additional duty of combat systems officer relatively nominal now, still her reason for going entirely cogent. “I need to run through the drills with Delaney and the men.” Then a wry smile. “I think I need it anyhow, Captain. An outing, as Preston says. I haven’t been to sea for a while. I can think better out there,” referring I knew to our own problem, to that subtle change that had taken place, though that life went on, the weekly visits to a remote cave: we never mentioned her other life. Continuing as we had, not knowing, not as yet even discussing, how things were going to come out with us. Permission for her to go on the
James
routinely granted by myself.

I watched the ship stand out, perpendicular now to the horizon, quietly, all-confidently, parting the stilled waters, seeming to admit her as an old friend, glad to have her back. It was a beautiful sight to me and one, I realized in a certain wry astonishment, her ship’s captain had never had the privilege of witnessing until just recently; I had always been aboard. I watched until she had disappeared over the horizon, bidding good-bye to her for the dozen hours required by the sun in its infinite precision to make its transit across the sky and to sink once more into the western ocean—at which time I would be standing there again, always somehow excessively glad, almost relieved, to see her safe return; occasionally, in the interim between departure and homecoming, that apprehension, totally without reason or foundation, ridiculous in fact, nothing surely but any ship’s captain’s exorbitant sense of proprietorship in his ship, having seen her vanish over the horizon, that she might not come back.

Before stepping into my cabin I glanced up by habit at the Lookout Tower and could see the normal watch of three hands manning it; the principal lookout, Porterfield, standing at ease by the Big Eyes; Signalman Bixby at the portable radio to handle messages to and from the Farm across the island, a radioman now also always maintained there for anything it might have to say; a messenger, Seaman Garber. All of these precautions, I thought, surely inessential—day after day these watches kept, and of course nothing ever happening, nothing ever appearing on the blue immensity . . . I had recently begun to consider whether the time had come to stand them down—then Billy’s sighting that day always came back to caution me that another ship, not necessarily of friendly intent, might appear on those great spaces of water that surrounded us; we might need every moment we could get. This reminding me of that other massive weaponry not needed for this purpose and which so concerned Thurlow, reminding me further that I had made a particular arrangement to speak tomorrow with the Russian captain concerning the disposal, jettisoning of these, in both ships.

During
James’
s one-day cruise, it was customary for ship and shore to keep in communication and from time to time that morning I stepped into the radio shack, not far from my cabin and manned today by Radioman Parkland, its limited facilities (the principal part of our communications equipment remaining on the ship) including a simple VHF ship-to-shore transmitter rigged specially for messages between the island and the
James,
and had routine conversations with her, the ship reporting the usual things. Today a smooth sea, skies entirely wind-free . . . the ship proceeding through her customary drills. I went about the day’s business. I believe it was about mid-morning that it happened. I have spoken in these pages of that special sense given, it would seem, to ship’s captains in respect to anything pertaining to their ships and their ship’s companies—especially, when that is the case, of something seeming not quite right. This phenomenon—if it is to be called so, though it is not even that to me—is a simple truth of the sea, as familiar to any ship’s captain as the elements of ocean and sky in which his ship moves, as the very deck under his feet. That sense came now. The effect of it is always curiously pacifying, in the meaning of bringing everything quiet and concentrated in oneself, as if one knew from long experience that the time was at hand when all one’s faculties would be required, no space left for the slightest scrap of emotion, space only for utter coolness to allow reason, and only reason, to take charge, in a matter about to be made known, an imminent confrontation. I was aware of myself rising slowly, stepping outside the cabin and going to where I had hidden my key, required for launching the missiles. The key was not there. I took the few steps to the cliffside, looking out to the vast seascape. The horizon blank, the
Nathan James
somewhere beyond it. I returned to my cabin, told the yeoman to find the Russian captain for me, his quarters nearby. They were back quite presently. “Let’s take a walk,” I said to the Russian. We stepped a few paces along the cliffside, stood all alone, out of earshot of all. I told him the bare essentials of the situation; the same dual-key system operative on his own ship, his fully and instantly grasping it; told him further that the three other persons having access to the keys were all aboard
James.

We walked, moving a little rapidly now, to the radio shack nearby and I sat down by Parkland in front of the ship-to-shore transmitter. A clear day for transmission, Thurlow’s entirely distinct voice presently on the other end. Myself making all-certain to keep my own entirely normal, making of routine enquiries.

“The captain speaking, Mr. Thurlow.”

“Aye, sir.”

“How is the run?”

“Everything four-oh, Captain.”

“Fine.” Every shred of emotion, of anything unusual, kept out of my voice, there was still no way in which he was not going to think strange what I would presently have to tell him. There was no help for that.

“Mr. Thurlow, I want you to return to the island.”

“Return to the island, sir?” The echoed phrase coming back to me, surprise to be sure, and as if not certain he had heard correctly.

“Return to the island,” I said again, more sharply. “Do you understand me, Mr. Thurlow? At once.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Understood.”

I waited a moment.

“What is your position, Mr. Thurlow?” and he gave it. I made my second fateful decision.

“And Mr. Thurlow. Go to flank speed immediately. That means you’ll be here in . . .” I calculated quickly. “. . . Just short of an hour.”

“Flank speed?” he questioned again; this time wonderment, an elevated surprise in his voice. Fuel-conscious, we never now brought the ship to such speeds on these runs. It was time to get off.

“Flank speed, Mr. Thurlow.” I spoke in that captain’s tone which said, no more discussion. “Get underway at once.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Return to the island. Flank speed.”

The Russian captain and I stepped back outside, stood a few moments more gazing at the horizon. Thoughts rushing in on me now from every side, now that I had chosen my course of action and executed it; one of these, almost certainly imaginary, a feeling that in Thurlow’s voice there had been a tone of constraint, of not speaking freely, of perhaps not being able to, the tone of a man with a pistol pointed at his head; dismissing that as sheer hallucination.

“Nothing to do but wait,” I said. “We should sight her in . . .” I looked at my watch. “Not much more than a quarter hour . . . fifteen minutes . . .”

All I could think was:
Girard, Thurlow, Delaney.
The Russian captain and I stood like statues, looking out to sea, as the minutes ticked away our eyes straining ever more to the horizon. The repeated looking at my watch; of minutes, of seconds, become eternities. Something stirred in me. I stepped quickly back into the radio shack, told Parkland to raise the ship. I recognized the voice of the OOD, Lieutenant Sedgwick.

“The captain speaking, Mr. Sedgwick. Put Mr. Thurlow on the horn.”

A fraction of a pause. “Sir, Mr. Thurlow is not available at the moment.”

“What do you mean?” I said savagely. “Not available? Put Lieutenant Girard on.”

“Sir, she’s down in stores. I’ll send a messenger right away.”

My voice came cold. “Mr. Sedgwick, listen very carefully. Are you proceeding toward the island?”

The connection went dead.

“Get him back,” I said to Parkland, sitting beside me. She tried; tried again, and still again. Nothing. Then I heard something strange. Not from the transmitter. From another source. I stepped out quickly onto the cliffside.

 *  *  * 

Far and away I could make out the long white wake left by the Tomahawk as it ascended into the pale blue sky of the Pacific, trailing its cone of fire. Then I saw it burst, a puff of smoke, not all that large. I knew it at once as a TLAM-C, armed with a conventional warhead—a Bullpup, 1,000 pounds of high explosives. As I watched—I could not see the ship—I saw another Tomahawk rising heavenward, leaving its signature tail, knowing as its booster rocket dropped off that this one was different. It was a TLAM-N, a Tomahawk carrying a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead, and as it disappeared over the horizon without explosion, I knew that it was unarmed.

I continued to watch the parade of missiles up into the blue. First a conventional Tomahawk benignly destructing itself. Followed by a nuclear one, discarding its rocket, harmlessly vanishing from sight. The sequence continued. Suddenly my vision was obliterated by a white light far, far brighter than any sun. Standing there for a few seconds literally as a blind man, before, sight returning, I saw from that same space a fireball, beginning to expand outward in all directions, and knew it instantly as a nuclear detonation. As I looked, another Tomahawk climbed the sky, following directly behind in the path of the exploded one, it also now bursting and throwing out its blinding light, my head reflexively turning to shield itself. In quick succession I could make out others ascending over that same vertical roadway, each exploding in its fireball to join the others in a vast conflagration of the heavens. Myself now vaguely aware that others of the settlement had come to join us and to watch what was happening high in the skies.

The Tomahawks bursting one after another like roses to form a giant bouquet, this now magnifying in seemingly exponential fashion to occupy half the sky, soon then swallowing up, smothering in its embrace, the sun itself, while leaving the image of its presence shining through, as though the white sun of day had itself been transmogrified into another species of rose deeper, almost bloodlike, in color. A great flocculent white, moving in immense and infinitely languid layers, then beginning to coagulate with the mass as if to form yet another, variegated, dual-colored; the inane thought occurring that though I had launched them in the Barents and had seen their subsequent manifestations halfway around the earth, I had never witnessed the spectacle of their detonations, our practice runs in peacetime having of necessity to be done with conventional warheads. Their immediate effect, as they joined one another in quick succession, was one as much beautiful as awesome, and altogether glorious, as if the heavens had somehow conspired to give man, ironically before annihilating him with what the sight contained, set against their pristine blue, a display the grandest yet seen by him, vast in its dimensions, magnificent in its texture; an uncertain amount of time passing which none could have had the faculty to compute, and neither of us did; then, in yet another transmutation, as we watched, men struck immobile, impotent, glory was gone, beauty was attacked and eradicated, the rose and white beginning to convert into great roiling waves of black, of a violent ugliness, a vile and loathsome deformity, these effectively sealing off the sun as though night were falling much ahead of schedule—I glanced reflexively, mindlessly, at my watch, as if I had made some error in calculating the passage of the day, that surely it must be a half-dozen hours later than I thought; reading the time of 1118 to tell me I had not. Time itself seemed to cease to be a measure of anything. Suddenly by some violent effort, wrenching myself almost convulsively out of my dumbstruckness, activating the cold, icy reflexes of a lifetime of sailor’s response to peril, a ship’s captain’s knowledge instantly brought into play that the last thing to be dwelt on at the moment was why and how, nothing being more dangerous; not to think at all. I ran to the foot of the Lookout Tower and yelled up to the watch on the platform. Porterfield, lookout; Bixby, signalman; Garber, messenger.

“Porterfield, sound the General Alarm. Then glass for Silva. Bixby, raise the Farm detail to come immediately to the settlement.”