Reaching the far end of the dining room, we stood surveying the curious pageantlike forcibleness of the scene, spell-like in its final immobility, its taciturn serenity, its company with their bared teeth joyous yet contemplative in their progressing emaciation, held in a kind of impenetrable, imbecilic beatitude, a splendid carelessness clung to in the face even of the invisible vandals that had attacked their ship and them with such ferocious stealth, the terrible plague that was even now ravaging them; felt, one did, an unreasoned moment of admiration for the manner in which they had met their fate, as if there had been choice; stood, our sailor company, looking at the scene’s insistent formality as at a world of the distantly privileged and elect, but without envy even at their previous lives or any desire for it; stood immensely hushed, feeling ourselves caught up in the great solitude of the living—we seeming more victims of loneliness than this loyally united company whom nothing could now ever separate. Only the plaintive trembling of the Mediterranean sea breeze through the ports troubled the profound stillness.
I turned to Selmon. “It doesn’t make sense.”
He seemed as perplexed as the rest of us, studious, mind working to solve a mystery. Then in tones of deliberation:
“I think they must have been closer to shore, sir, to a blast . . . the ship drifted here . . . Perhaps . . .” His voice trailed off in reflective uncertainty. There was an almost imperceptible shrug. “There’s so much we don’t know. People have never experienced anything remotely like that much radiation in one dose.” His eyes brightened with the possibility of solution. “It could have been a neutron bomb. Kills people. Leaves things alone.”
We weren’t there to solve mysteries, these, as Selmon said, unsolvable anyhow, and inexpressibly unimportant. Besides, I had in mind something that was important. Selmon as well had left the past, the irredeemable, the speculative, to return briskly to the present, where all our duties and allegiance lay. He looked up from his counter meter.
“Twenty minutes, Captain.”
I turned without a word and heard the steps of the others follow me down a passageway. I opened two or three doors to find staterooms emptied, beds turned down for the night with a precise neatness; in one a woman in the universal black and white of maid’s clothing, maid’s bonnet, maid’s white lace apron, seemed to have been in the act of doing so while the diners dined, her figure fallen like a rag doll, hunched, crumpled, face down, on the bed. I opened another and saw a couple in their nightclothes lying in twin beds, for some reason having retired at dinner time. Perhaps they were feeling ill, perhaps the sea had been a trifle rough for landsmen of their age. Perhaps simply they had dined at a first sitting. Only their heads were visible, their bodies otherwise sheeted to the neck. These were both propped up on double pillows, a manner of sleeping favored by some, and perhaps from being clearly elderly were at a stage of decomposition somewhat further along than was the case with any of the diners. From them white sparse hair sprung, like sprouting snow upon the sooty field which in thin and fine layer spread across the white pillows, spread across all. As with joint intention their eyes bulging from concaved sockets seemed to stare directly and with unspeakable outrage at this intruder who had dared burst into their bedroom with not so much as a knock and disturb their sleep. I closed the door, leaving them to resume it, and continued down the passageway, opened another. No one asleep here. Two naked bodies, one astride the other, not elderly at all. On a chair hung, neat and shipshape, the uniform jacket of an officer of the French merchant service—the single stripe, the leanness of dessicating loins of the topside nude figure authenticated his youth. Coition during the dinner hour! When least likely to be disturbed, caught at it. How I admired the French, their unfailing shrewd pragmatism. In all of these I backed out of the doorway and closed the door in quick silence, to shield my men from sights, and went on down the passageway, opening no more doors.
Eating, sleeping, screwing, the things men do, I thought, with a certain unaccountable viciousness, a savage anger at something I knew not what. Fat, dumb, and happy, as they said in the Old Navy. I led the way up the ladder to the bridge. The binnacle light still weakly burned, casting the pilot house in spectral shadows in the oncoming twilight. The form of the steersman was slumped over the helm, which his hands, his whole body seemed rapturously to embrace, glued as if hanging on for life. Around him on the deck lay four bodies additionally in the uniforms of the French merchant marine, appearing simply to have toppled over where they were, two landing by chance pitched forward and face down, two, including the captain with his four sleeve stripes, sprawled on their backs, their officers’ hats surviving on their heads though now seeming markedly too large, just below the brims the quartet of eyes staring lividly up at us in a perpetual astonishment and seeming bigger than men’s eyes could ever be. I heard something start in one of the men behind me, a rasping noise as of a low moaning, a kind of rattling in the throat. I stepped out onto the bridge wing, the men following me.
The world stood in radiant silence. The bright evening star of Venus had appeared to announce the approach of night, other stars less brilliant following in attendance to look down in their benevolence on the hushed sea, amaranthine and glittering in the light of eventide; to look down, too, on lost sailors; not the dead ones—they had found harbor, there was nothing there to console—but on us, the living. I stood in the engulfing stillness, in the peace of sky and sea, looking at our ship standing gray and alone across the near water, lights beginning to flicker on in her as if beckoning us, saying come home. I had already forgotten the dead. They were gone and they were strangers. I had no time or thought even for the horror. I was thinking of my people. I was thinking what else a ship such as this was certain to have on her, in richly bulging storage compartments below where we stood, and how terribly much we could use it—how desperately we might come to need it. Above all, food. This in mind from the moment of boarding, I had sent Selmon and the doc below to search out the food stores and the medications. They now stood before me, waiting.
“Loaded, Captain,” Selmon said. “Chill rooms: sides of beef, lamb, veal, ham, fresh vegetables and fruits—the works. These people planned to eat.” He paused and offered a rare inane reflection. “The French. Excuse me, sir. Food lockers,” he hurried on. “Nearly all the food packaged just like ours: freeze-dried . . .”
“Very well,” I interrupted. Freeze-dried: It was the way nearly all seagoing food now came. Something lifted in me, something almost fiercely voracious.
“What we will do is go back to the ship. Start tomorrow at first light. And loot this thing, stem to stern. Send over quick raiding parties, different men each time to allow for the exposure dose. No hand more than one trip. No one to stay aboard more than . . . What’s the allowance?”
“Thirty minutes, sir. On safety’s side. But sir . . .”
Something was wrong. I glared at him. “Well?”
Nothing, not even his captain, could breach his equanimity or intimidate him in his sovereign field. Nothing even alter the impregnably mensural cadence of his voice. There had been an entire metamorphosis in this officer. From the shy and retiring, virtually invisible officer before it happened, one then with no real duties aboard, he had become, now that we could not make a move without his approval, one wholly self-assured.
“That part would be safe enough, sir—with the men working quickly, no party aboard more than a half hour.” He hesitated, a moment of weighing thought. “But everything aboard this ship is hot, sir, in greater or less degree. The meats: I ran the counter over some of them . . .”
“Then we’ll leave the meats.” I had turned with a certain tension of sternness to the radiation officer, unreasonably irritated, I suppose, that even I, the captain, had to have the j.g.’s permission; could hear the testiness in my voice, overly importunate I knew even as I spoke, “just the sealed food.”
“Sir, I metered them as well. Nothing protecting them but aluminum foil. Alpha and beta particle
s are almost certainly already through those packages. Not terribly high. But it would be a risk. I could not promise what would happen to anyone who ingested their contents.” His voice had taken on the faintest but unmistakable tones of insistence. “Other items: found considerable cigarette stores. Countered them also . . . To smoke one of those cigarettes, it could . . .” He paused there, not wishing to say the word, and no need to. “Even to bring these articles aboard . . . I would have to strongly, fully, recommend against it, sir.”
“The medications?” I snapped the word at the doc. He shrugged, as to higher authority. Selmon spoke.
“Captain, given the extremely high energy levels of a neutron bomb—if that is what it was, and we don’t know otherwise—the medications especially could have been altered in some ways we could not even speculate on. They’re the last thing you’d want to use on anybody already sick.”
With that, of course, there was not the slightest question but that we must not dream of appropriating these stores, of introducing the contamination into our own ship. It would be the worst kind of folly. I cursed myself for a fool for even thinking of it—tempted into avariciousness myself, and if it were for the men, no less inexcusable, considering that possibly to do them such unpredictable harm was no favor. I looked straight at him for a moment, then turned, feeling again what I knew to be an intemperate anger—at the luxury of the dead, at their arrogance, their hubris, their eternal smug and insatiable greed in having taken with them their very stores of food, of medications, useless any longer to themselves, stores which might end up making the difference for us.
“Let’s get the hell off this thing,” I said savagely.
We went below, going down two inside ladders on a route that would take us back to the quarterdeck. I had come to the bottom of the second one when I noticed the sign on a closed door. Communications de Radio. Something made me hesitate. Some impulse pulled me in there.
“Chief, take the men on to the quarterdeck. I’ll be along directly. Mr. Selmon.”
The others proceeded through a watertight door and were gone. The RO standing beside me in silence, I opened the door. By now one found on opening doors what one expected to find, a familiar sight. A body, in this case slumped over the paraphernalia of his watch, wearing a rating’s uniform. A small space embraced in gloom and darkness save for one faint light burning down on the table at which that stilled figure sat. A thought struck at my mind that possibly the radio operator had not been taken at the same moment as had the diners—shielded, perhaps, for an hour or so, maybe longer, by his enclosed, portless space inside the ship as opposed to the admitting ports-open freedom of the dining room. I stepped forward through the shadows—it was no more than a couple of paces—and stood over him. His head had fallen forward and lay bowed on his working table. I looked and saw attached to it a set of earphones which seemed on the point of dropping off due to the diminution of the flesh which held them in place. I followed the curve of the right sleeve of his French merchant marine uniform until I came to, emerging from it, a hand stretched forward, in an advanced state of decay, bone structure beginning to appear through the elongated fingers, yet these still clutching something. A piece of paper; just beyond it on the table, a writing pen. I bent closer and made out a radio communications form, covered with the fine umber dust that we had seen everywhere, enough so that I could not make out whether it was simply a blank form or something otherwise. I leaned quite close and pursing my lips as one does in blowing bubbles directed onto the paper an abrupt stream of air which sent most of the dust flying. Then pried the paper with a gentle force from the skeletal fingers, shook it quite vigorously so that the last particles fell away. I held it under the faltering light and discerned writing. Bending closer, I read a few lines, read a few more—then broke off. My heart stopped still. I felt as though the very hairs on the back of my neck rose. For a moment I fought for my composure. Then turned, striving to control the trembling of the hand that held the paper, back to Selmon. We stepped out and I closed the door. We stood in the passageway, looking speechlessly at each other.
“Mister Selmon, I should like very much to take this paper with me. I don’t plan to eat it.”
He smiled thinly. I held it out to him, concentrating to make my hand steady, and he took it, making no effort to inspect its writing, and ran his counter over it in a silence broken only by the minute emissions of the instrument. He handed it back.
“Low-grade, Captain. One piece of paper. It should do no harm.”
I folded it and placed it in my shirt pocket.
“Mr. Selmon.”
He turned. “Sir?”
“You will say nothing of this paper to anyone. Of its existence or of my possession of it. Is that understood?”
He looked at me, his eyes steady and still. “Understood, sir.”
“Let’s join the others.”
We went aft and made our way to the quarterdeck, where our people stood waiting at the top of the accommodation ladder. Below us the boat with Meyer and Barker waited in turn, the boat hardly bobbing in the water.
“Captain?” the Jesuit said.
“Very well, Father. We’ve got about a minute.”
He had brought his kit. In quick motions he sprinkled holy water over the quarterdeck, meant, by that choice of place, for the beneficence of all and whomsoever the ship carried in her spaces; all crew, all passengers; that crumpled maid; that steersman sprawled over the helm, that captain sprawled on the bridge; those diners one and all; that fornicating couple. Then bowed his head—us with him—and in the thinly starred dusk said a few words of prayer. I recognized them, from long back, from a childhood funeral, no doubt, as the entreaty to the Almighty for the repose of souls. “Come to their assistance, ye Saints of God, meet them, ye Angels of the Lord, receiving their souls, offer them in the sight of the Most High . . . ,” the words falling clean and firm over the ship, over its entombed voyagers, over us, over the stilled sea. We went, hurrying a bit, down the accommodation ladder, into the boat, across the darkening waters—Meyer opened her up without having to be told to do so—and back aboard our safe home. Night was coming on fast. I ordered us underway at once. I somehow had a great passion to get us away from that ship, out to the clean and open sea.
We sighted a few more derelicts of ships scattered across the Mediterranean, nearly all freighters, of sundry registries, drifting aimlessly, another vagabond, another stray, crewless, rudderless things, drifting with a spectral gentleness, a certain careless majesty, wherever wind and wave took them, through the great peace of the sea. In each case we closed the vessel enough to hail her. From none came back to us the voice of a live human being. Always we took a long, hard look at their davits. With some, the boats were all still there, in their cradles, telling us, along with the silence in response to our calls through the hailer, that the ship’s people were still aboard. With others, the davits were lowered, the boats gone, informing us that the crew had had time to abandon ship. In one instance, some of the boats remained in davits, other davits were in lowering-away position and empty. We did not go aboard any of these vessels. We dared not loot them. And we had none of curiosity’s taste. I would allow no more boardings—because of what it did to the crew. It was simply too dangerous. I am not speaking of the danger of radiation infection, sickness—we could avoid that by staying within the limits dictated by Selmon’s instruments. There was another danger almost as great. Horror. I felt the crew could not take any more of that. Every man has his limits of the amount of horror, of moral nausea, he can accommodate. I did not wish to test these limits further. Besides, it would serve no purpose. We continued across the Mediterranean, Gibraltar-bound.
The Last Ship: A Novel Page 26
