The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  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—i
s 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?”

  He looked at me first with surprise, this not a subject normally on our agenda. Then, comprehending, returned a faint smile.

  “That would seem to be beyond argument, sir. If it came to that, matters could go on with very few men. If nature rather than the Navy had been doing it, she would just about have reversed our numbers of each.”

  This was getting into territory where I did not wish to venture. I waited a moment and then decided to say something that really didn’t need saying. There were a couple of things about Selmon. Ship’s captains adore straight answers and value hugely men who habitually give them. They value also men who keep their mouths shut. He had enough fear of me, I imagine, to take care of that. That was fine. But by nature also he was the last thing from being a peddler of scuttlebutt. Finally, from the beginning there was the recognition that what went on between us behind the closed door of my cabin was to go not a whisper further. In all this I trusted him without question whatever. Nevertheless, given the nature of this newest matter, I decided to say it.

  “Mr. Selmon.”

  “Sir?”

  “You are not to speak of this matter to the crew, any member of it. Do I make myself understood?”

  He looked at me in what seemed a special way, speaking the unspoken.

  “You make yourself understood, Captain.”

  I told the Jesuit I wanted to see him in my cabin the following day, Sunday, immediately after religious services on the fantail.

  7

  The Higher Purpose

  My father, himself a missionary, first taught me, and myself on my own came to believe, that the very best and the very worst men in history have been religious men; the noblest deeds in history performed by the believing; and the vilest. And not just had been: It was still going on. While not about to canonize him, I was prepared, at least thus far, to place my chaplain solidly in the first genus.

  There was a mystery of some magnitude to Thomas Cavendish, S.J. Cavendish had all the right, the elegant chips. Georgetown, the American College in Rome, chancellor to the cardinal of one of the great U.S. archdioceses: facts all, gleaned not from him but from his service record. I could not imagine purlieus where he would not have stood with thoughtless ease. I had sometimes idly speculated why he had chosen to enter a service where he would spend his life ministering to the spiritual requirements of 300 men, most of them not even Catholic, surely few of these ripe subjects for conversion to Holy Mother Church—sailors are the most set of men in their ways; and this on a ship spending a fair amount of her time pitching, rolling, fighting the sea, while standing prepared at an instant’s signal from afar to unleash a power of cataclysmic properties, and himself permitted to have no part whatever in any of these purposes; a supernumerary, some might have said. He seemed the last man on earth to be content with letting the days of his life run out so, his gifts seeming vastly to outmatch the job; also his seeming less a contemplative than a man of action. True, he had become as indelibly a blue-water sailor, in the realest sense, as any hand aboard, making it his business to master matters chaplains ordinarily do not: celestial navigation, aspects of ship-handling and the like. But that sea love which had brought me there—brought many others aboard, Girard for example: I never felt that this irresistible star was the thing that lighted his soul. Why was he here? Why was he aboard this ship? But of all questions that is the one never asked a shipmate, and the Jesuit had never so much as volunteered a scrap, talked even remotely in the direction of an answer. Mystery, it seemed, it must remain.

  The Navy believes in God. The church pennant, blue cross on white field, hoisted during religious services aboard, is the only flag ever to fly above the Stars and Stripes on a man-of-war, as if to proclaim, One thing, and one only, the Lord God above, is superior to the United States Navy. The Navy is ecumenical, but by logistical necessity. Unable to see its way, from a manpower standpoint, to carrying in a single ship’s company a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest, and a Jewish rabbi, the Navy cannily, and with spiritual economy, requires the one chaplain allotted to a ship to be versed in administering the assorted rituals to all faiths. While his ship plows the high seas, a Jewish sailor wearing a black skullcap may find himself seeking Talmudic counsel and solace from a Catholic priest wearing a reverse Roman collar, and, what is more, getting it. But there was something different now, as to the men. While the Jesuit had always conducted services so encompassing that all believers in a Divine Being could participate, normally only Catholics entered his confession box. This had changed dramatically. Of late, a goodly number of Protestants, even two of the four Jews in ship’s company, and a fair number of those professing nothing noticeably of a religious character had discovered this institution. His confession box was crowded. The fact did not escape me; to say it aggrandized his importance was to mention only the beginning of its significance.